Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including most recently On the Contrary (2025), a study of the lives and literature of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Lababidi’s acclaimed collection, Palestine Wail, is available from Daraja Press.
Call me naïve, but I once trusted that peace was still desired in the Middle East. I believed Israeli leaders sought an end to Palestinian resistance out of existential fear—not imperial ambition. I trusted the United States, imperfect though it may be, to prevent further bloodshed, to safeguard international law, and to exercise the kind of wisdom born of restraint and prior, painful mistakes in the region.
Now, nearly two years since the horrors of Oct. 7 and what followed it, and just weeks after a 12-day war between Israel and Iran, those beliefs lie in ashes. What began with targeted strikes in Syria and Iraq spiraled into open conflict after the April 2024 assassination of a senior Iranian commander in Damascus. The confrontation that followed made clear this was no accident. The strategy has been deliberate: Extermination, ethnic cleansing and regional destabilization all advanced with American brawn, technological superiority and frighteningly brutish global influence.
In the 12-day conflict that unfolded in late May, Israel claimed scant casualties, twenty-eight, compared to Iran's hundreds, perhaps thousands—including civilians. Yet this disparity does not indicate victory. Rather, only tragedy abounds amid the ruins in both countries. The sobering failure of diplomacy emanates from these supposed victories heaped in the blood of innocent lives now lost.
The crescendo arrived when the United States, under a president who once campaigned on restraint, launched Operation Midnight Hammer: 14 bunker buster bombs dropped from ten B-2 stealth bombers on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Executed without congressional mandate or public debate, the strikes smashed underground centrifuges and deep infrastructure. In turn, Iran retaliated with missile strikes against U.S. Central Command in Qatar. The truce that followed feels less like a genuine peace than a region stunned into silence, as if too breathless to respond.
The silence is not reassuring. It is filled with dread and the murmurs of a deeply unsettled region. Questions echo from Tehran to Washington, from Beirut to Tel Aviv and throughout the halls of the United Nations. While Israel and the United States quickly claimed victory, the numbers behind the war suggest a superficial deterrence.
Israel struck. Iran faltered.
Yet Iran's nuclear ambitions remain opaque and unresolved. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that it is unable to determine the full extent of the damage, and Iranian leaders have denied inspectors access. Inside Iran, the regime appears weakened but more defiant, and its citizens more resentful that Western powers would target all of Iran than fearful of the current regime or what may come next. A shopkeeper in Tehran hides his son from conscription. A family in Isfahan awaits news in the dark. On the streets, uncertainty gathers like dust.
Meanwhile, China moves swiftly to claim the spoils: discounted oil, reconstruction deals and a stronger geopolitical foothold. Iran's pivot east, once gradual, now accelerates. Beijing positions itself not only as a beneficiary of Iran's isolation but as an alternative model to Western interventionism.
Europe, on the other hand, finds itself suspended in contradiction, issuing statements of concern even as its silence abets the erosion of international norms. The Gulf states, cautious and calculating, quietly fortify their positions while gauging how long the center can hold.
But for the world's presumed leading state, the projection of strength may present the opposite—the next step in its gradual fall from grace. President Donald Trump authorized strikes on a sovereign country without a declaration, no legislative consultation and no public reckoning. As an afterthought, Congress received a whisper, not a word. Article I of the Constitution lies dormant at best.
The War Powers Resolution, conceived for precisely this moment, has been cast aside like an old myth—one of many casualties of America's so-called "War on Terror." American soldiers, spared immediate harm, continue to serve in silence. Yet the tension of their station and the public's fatigue with endless wars remains fragile and unresolved.
Questions echo from Tehran to Washington, from Beirut to Tel Aviv, and throughout the halls of the United Nations. While Israel and the United States quickly claimed victory, the numbers behind the war suggest a superficial deterrence.
- : Yahia Lababidi
Trump, while claiming restraint, boasts of decisive action one moment and offers to meet Iranian officials the next. If brute force becomes the default response to nuclear anxiety, we will find ourselves governed not by laws but by instinct and escalation. The media's fleeting focus does little to question this erosion. Headlines fade. The implications remain as accountability rapidly becomes an afterthought in the name of short-term political calculations in the supposed preeminent city on a hill.
Beyond America, a region long awash in conflict reels once more. Iranian civilians endure sanctions and repression even as foreign bombs fall upon them. In Haifa, a mother stockpiles iodine pills. In Gaza, there is no stockpile—only the sky. In Isfahan, families bury the dead while calculating how to survive the next strike. On July 14, 72 more were killed in Gaza. These numbers offer no closure, only the reminder that the region's deeper wounds remain exposed.
Talks on a US-Iran nuclear deal, which could offer the key to a calmer region, have withered. The United Nations issues statements that vanish into the wind. Regional powers like Turkey, Egypt and Qatar posture as mediators, but lack traction. The global south observes warily, taking notes rather than sides, understanding the world as it is—one of wilderness, ungoverned by any factor but power.
In rushing to destroy, the United States, Israel and Iran have deafened themselves to their unraveling. The region does not pause to heal. It mutters under its breath, plotting revival, revenge and resistance. Gaza still smolders. Lebanon teeters. Syria, Yemen and Iraq remain unmade amid seemingly unbridgeable ethnic and political divisions.
This silence is not the balm of calm—only the accumulation of resentments and the sediment of grief. In boardrooms and bunkers, the old norms rot from within. International law no longer restrains the powerful. The Strait of Hormuz trembles at the mention of mines. Oil traders treat the crisis like a passing storm, with high volatility one day discounting the cost of blood the next. Sanctions persist, deepening suffering while doing little to deter governments from committing injustices.
In this silence lies our collective unraveling. The unspoken truth now emerges. The United States is no longer a reluctant participant in the region's destruction. It is a co-architect of its disorder. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government shapes the American war strategy as the tip of the spear. A commander-in-chief who once spoke of limits now unleashes force without reflection.
If the leaders in Washington and Tel Aviv believe that bombs can purchase obedience, they have misread the grammar of history. Violence may cow a people for a season, but it does not give shape to order. It does not mend what has been broken. It cannot build what it destroys.
Our duty is to disrupt this logic with clarity. To insist that toothless ceasefires are not peace. That constitutional restraint is not a relic of the past. That justice must not be dismissed as idealism. That peace must be built in law, dignity and mutual recognition—not in silence and under rubble.
