America fuelled the fire in the Middle East

Let me be clear: Iran is governed by a brutal theocratic regime for which I have no sympathy, although I do feel for the millions of Iranians who live under its rule and who must endure the punishing effects of US sanctions. Some of that regime's actions—e.g., its support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine—are highly objectionable.

But are its efforts to smuggle small arms and other weapons to the West Bank (or Gaza, for that matter), especially heinous? And is its decision to respond to Israel's recent attack on its consulate—killing two Iranian generals in the process—even remotely surprising?

Belligerent occupation

According to the Geneva Conventions, a population living under "belligerent occupation" has the right to resist the occupying force.

Given that Israel has controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, colonised these lands with more than 700,000 illegal settlers, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the process, there is little doubt that this is a "belligerent occupation."

Acts of resistance are still subject to the laws of war, of course, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups violate them when they attack Israeli civilians. But resisting the occupation is legitimate, and helping a beleaguered population do so is not necessarily wrong, even if Iran has done this for its own reasons and not from a deep commitment to the Palestinian cause.

Similarly, Iran's decision to retaliate after Israel bombed its consulate and killed two Iranian generals is hardly evidence of innate aggressiveness, especially given that Tehran has repeatedly signalled that it had no desire to widen the war.

Indeed, its retaliation was conducted in a way that gave Israel considerable warning and seems to have been designed to signal that Tehran did not want to escalate further. As US and Israeli officials typically say when they use force, Iran is simply trying to "restore deterrence."

Read more: Shadow war no more: How will the new Iran-Israel power dynamic affect the region?

Let's not forget that the United States has been "flooding" the Middle East with weaponry for decades. It provides Israel with billions of dollars of sophisticated military equipment every year, along with repeated assurances that US support is unconditional.

That support hasn't wavered as Israel has bombed and starved the civilian population in Gaza, and it wasn't affected when Israel greeted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's recent visit by announcing the largest confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank since 1993.

Washington didn't blink when Israel bombed Iran's consulate, even as it was condemning Ecuador's recent assault on the Mexican Embassy in Quito.

Instead, top Pentagon officials headed for Jerusalem in a show of support, and President Joe Biden made a point of emphasising that his commitment to Israel remains "ironclad."

Abuse of power

Is it any wonder that Israeli officials believe they can ignore advice from the United States?

States with unchecked power tend to abuse it, and Israel is no exception. Because Israel is vastly stronger than its Palestinian subjects—and more capable than Iran, too, for that matter—it can act with impunity against them, and it typically does.

Decades of generous and unconditional US support have enabled Israel to do whatever it wants, which has contributed to its politics as well as its behavior toward the Palestinians becoming increasingly extreme over time.

Only on those rare occasions when Palestinians were able to mobilise effective resistance—as they did during the First Intifada (1987-1993)—were Israeli leaders such as former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin forced to acknowledge the need to compromise and attempt to make peace.

Unfortunately, because Israel was so strong, the Palestinians so weak, and US mediators so one-sided in Israel's favour, none of Rabin's successors were willing to offer the Palestinians a deal they could accept.

If you're still upset that Iran has been smuggling weapons into the West Bank, ask yourself how you'd feel if the situation was reversed. Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six-Day War in 1967, leading millions of Israelis to flee.

Imagine that the victorious Arab states subsequently decided to permit Palestinians to exercise a "right of return" and establish a state of their own in some or all of Israel/Palestine.

Suppose further that a million or so Israeli Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to a narrow enclave such as the Gaza Strip. Then, imagine that a group of former Irgun fighters and other Jewish hard-liners organised a resistance movement, gained control of the enclave, and refused to recognise the new Palestinian state.

Moreover, they proceeded to obtain backing from sympathetic supporters around the world and began smuggling weapons into the enclave, which they used to attack nearby settlements and towns in the recently founded Palestinian state. And then suppose that the Palestinian state responded by blockading and bombing the enclave, causing thousands of civilian deaths.

Given these circumstances, which side do you think the US government would support? Indeed, would the United States have ever allowed a situation like this to emerge? The answers are obvious, and they speak volumes to the one-sided way in which the United States approaches this conflict.

More harm than good

The tragic irony here is that the individuals and organisations in the United States that have been the most ardent in shielding Israel from criticism and pushing one administration after another to back Israel, no matter what it does, have, in fact, done enormous damage to the country that they were trying to help.

Consider where the "special relationship" has led over the past 50 years. The two-state solution has failed, and the question of the Palestinians' future remains unresolved, in large part because the lobby made it impossible for US presidents to put meaningful pressure on Israel.

Read more: AIPAC contends with an increasingly critical American left

Israel's ill-advised invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (part of a foolish scheme to consolidate Israeli control of the West Bank) led to the emergence of Hezbollah, which now threatens Israel from the north.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials tried to weaken the Palestinian Authority and block progress toward a two-state solution by covertly backing Hamas, thereby contributing to the tragedy of 7 October.

Israel's internal politics are more polarised than the United States' (which is saying something), and its actions in Gaza, which most groups in the lobby defend at every turn, are helping turn it into a pariah state. Support among younger Americans—including many Jews—is cratering.

And this unhappy situation has allowed Iran to champion the Palestinian cause, get closer to having a nuclear weapon, and thwart US efforts to isolate it.

If the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies were capable of self-reflection, they'd be mortified by what they have helped Israel do to itself.

By contrast, those of us who have criticised some of Israel's actions—only to be falsely smeared as antisemites, Jew-haters, or worse—were, in fact, recommending policies that would have been better for the United States and Israel alike.

Had our advice been followed, Israel would be safer today, tens of thousands of Palestinians would still be alive, Iran would be farther from having the bomb, the Middle East would almost certainly be more tranquil, and the United States' reputation as a principled defender of human rights and a rules-based order would still be intact.

Finally, there would be little reason for Iran to smuggle weapons to the West Bank if these lands were part of a viable Palestinian state and less reason for Iran's leaders to contemplate whether they might be more secure if they possessed their own nuclear deterrent.

But until there's a more fundamental shift in US policy toward the Middle East, those hopeful possibilities will remain out of reach, and the errors that got us here are likely to be repeated.