Washington — The Middle East is on the brink. Just days after a massive missile attack on Israel, Iran is threatening more strikes. Israel, already battling Iranian-backed militias on two fronts, is vowing retaliation. The U.S. has deployed thousands of troops to the region.
While no one is expecting all-out war, fears of a broader conflict are rising, keeping the region and the world on edge.
How did we get here and what happens next? To understand the current crisis, some historical perspective is in order.
The roots of the conflict
The current confrontation may be between Iran and Israel, but it is part of a much older conflict in the region, with its roots going back to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.
While historians trace the conflict’s origins even further back, the creation of Israel catalyzed a conflict that still reverberates across the region.
Israel emerged from a 1947 U.N. plan to partition then British-controlled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under U.N. administration.
The Jewish minority, promised 56% of the land, accepted the plan, but the Arab majority opposed it. And when Israel declared independence the following year, Arab armies from Egypt to Jordan attacked.
But Arab hopes of stopping Israel were dashed. Months of fighting led to Israeli victory, enabling it to further expand its control of Palestine. In an historically resonant episode known as “nakbah,” or catastrophe, some 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, fleeing to Gaza, the West Bank and several Arab countries.
An armistice restored peace but the larger conflict remained unresolved. In the decades that followed, the Arabs and Israelis engaged in period clashes and fought three major wars — in 1956, 1967 and 1973.
The 1967 Six-Day War changed the region’s map. Israel occupied the remaining Arab territories, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, deepening the conflict and leading to decades of fraught negotiations over their status.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War began with Egypt and Syria launching a surprise attack on Israel to recover lost territories, drawing in the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite early Arab advances, Israel scored another victory, but the conflict’s dynamics were left unaltered.
Changing character of the conflict
The Yom Kippur War marked the last battlefield confrontation between Israeli and Arab armies. In 1979, Egypt became the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel, followed by Jordan in the 1990s and other Arab states followed in recent years through the Abraham Accords negotiated by the former Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the nature of the conflict changed. As historian Eugene Rogan has noted, what was once primarily an Israeli-Arab conflict has evolved into more of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Palestinian groups based in Lebanon, primarily the Palestinian Liberation Organization, staged frequent attacks on Israel, prompting Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The PLO was expelled from the country, but tensions flared up in the West Bank and Gaza, sparking the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in 1987. Hamas, an Islamist militant group, emerged out of the uprising.
The first intifada culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords between PLO and Israel. A second intifada broke out in 2000 following the collapse of Camp David peace talks, lasting until 2005 when Israel withdrew from Gaza. Since 2006, Hamas has ruled Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority has governed the West Bank, its influence shrinking in the face of frequent Israeli raids and settler violence.
Iran’s regional ambitions
Meanwhile, Iran, led by Islamist clerics since 1979, emerged as Israel’s biggest foe, supporting Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxies as part of a so-called “axis of resistance” designed to counter U.S. and Israeli influence in the region.
Except for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, members of the network — armed, trained and funded by the foreign arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — are all Shiite. While sharing Iran’s ideological goals, each pursues its own interests and maintains a degree of autonomy.
Hezbollah, which emerged in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and operates as something of a “state within a state,” is considered the “crown jewel” of the proxy network.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah have been deeply in politics, with Hezbollah boasting 13 members in Lebanon’s parliament.
Nevertheless, in 1997, the U.S. State Department designated both Hezbollah and Hamas as foreign terrorist organizations. Many other countries also label them as terrorist groups, although some apply the designation only to their military wings.
Houthi insurgents, another Iranian proxy locked in a decade-long civil war in Yemen, have engaged in missile and drone attacks against U.S. ships and Israel. Washington relisted the Houthis as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group in January of this year.
Other proxy groups were recruited from outside the region. In Syria, Iran’s Quds Force — a branch of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — operates the Fatemiyoun, a group made up of Afghan refugees, and the Zainebiyoun brigade, made up of Pakistani refugees.
James Jeffrey, chair of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center in Washington, holds that a turning point in Iran’s drive for regional influence came after al-Qaida’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. With the U.S. diplomatic and military position in the region weakened, an increasingly bold Iran expanded its influence into four Arab states — Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon — plus Gaza.
October 7
All that changed last October 7 when Hamas launched a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign residents and taking hostage more than 200 others. It was the deadliest attack in Israel’s 75-year history.
Hamas had crossed a red line. In response, Israel launched a devastating military campaign in Gaza that has so far left more than 40,000 Palestinians dead and nearly 100,000 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, leading to charges of genocide that Israel denies.
But Israel didn’t stop there. Under incessant fire from Hezbollah and Houthi rebels as well as some militias in Iraq, Israel began taking the fight to its enemies, targeting Iranian proxies across the region.
In April, it bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing a top Quds Force commander who served as a liaison between Iran and Hezbollah.
In July, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas political bureau, was killed in a suspected Israeli bombing in Tehran.
Then last month Israel ratcheted up its campaign against Hezbollah.
First, thousands of hand-held pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah exploded across Lebanon and Syria in two separate attacks, killing dozens and injuring thousands.
Then, a massive bombing of a Hezbollah hub south of Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top leaders.
With Hamas and Hezbollah reeling and Iran seen reluctant to take on Israel, the tide seemed to have turned in Israel’s favor.
What’s next?
Then came Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday, just hours after Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon. Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles towards Israel and warned of “crushing” attacks if Israel responded. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran had made “a big mistake” and would pay a price.
What comes next is anyone’s guess. How Israel responds to the latest Iranian attack and how Iran in turn responds to that will offer clues.
A narrowly targeted Israeli attack, like the one in April, could end the exchange. On the other hand, a larger response could trigger a tit for tat, potentially leading to a shooting war.
Israel’s stated goal in Lebanon is to push Hezbollah away from the border region so that displaced Israelis can return to their homes.
But experts say Israel seems to have a larger goal of neutralizing Hezbollah and other proxies in the region. If Israel succeeds in that, it could enhance its security. But as long as the conflict at the heart of the current crisis — the Palestinian quest for statehood — remains unresolved, peace will be elusive, some experts say.
“This is a mowing the lawn operation, which is Israel’s tactic and it has worked so far except that it doesn’t bring peace,” said Joshua Landis, professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oklahoma.
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