The Middle East makes even the non-religious and the non-conspiratorial pause and wonder whether the wrath described by Moses still lingers over this ancient land.
If there is a region of never-ending conflict and turmoil, the Middle East is it. Sitting in Johannesburg, one is forgiven for asking the same question the whole world asks: what is to be done with this place?
The first and most common answer, particularly in Africa, and in South Africa above all, is a simple one: “Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and you resolve the crisis.”
This view holds that Israel is an anomaly that must be removed from the face of the Middle East, and that every conflict in the region traces its roots to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. It is a view shaped by South Africa’s own painful encounter with occupation, racial classification, and dispossession.
Accusations of apartheid and colonialism are the hallmarks of the debate around Israel and Palestine. The governing ANC draws explicit parallels between the Palestinian struggle and the Black majority’s struggle against apartheid, a comparison that resonates deeply in townships and universities.
These parallels are not without basis and should not be dismissed lightly. The Palestinian cause has deployed the language of apartheid and colonialism with considerable political effect, rallying international solidarity and placing Israel under sustained moral and legal scrutiny. But as a diagnosis of the Middle East’s fundamental sickness, reducing the region’s turmoil to a single bilateral conflict is not just insufficient. It is a distortion that blinds us to far more complex realities.
Let us perform a basic political audit of the Middle East. Yemen has an internationally recognised government, yet it has been unable to govern its own capital, Sana’a, which has been controlled by the Houthi rebel movement since 2014. That movement is aligned with Iran, receiving weapons, funding, and military support from Tehran as part of a wider regional contest. The internationally recognised Yemeni government has been fighting for survival from exile in Saudi Arabia, backed by a Saudi-led coalition. None of this originated in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Syria has, over the past decade, been shaped by civil war, foreign intervention, and the collapse of central authority. Iran backed the Assad regime with military advisers, weapons, and financial support, while Saudi Arabia supported opposition groups. Russia intervened to preserve the Assad government, while the United States backed Kurdish forces in the north. The Kurds themselves, spread across Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, have spent decades pressing for a homeland that colonial map-drawers refused them. Again, none of this originated in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Iraq carries the wounds of the 2003 American invasion, which dismantled the state and left a power vacuum that Iran rushed to fill. A Kurdish constituency in the north operates with de facto autonomy, essentially a state without a passport. Meanwhile, Shia militias aligned with Iran and Sunni factions backed by Saudi Arabia have contested Iraqi politics ever since. Lebanon is governed by a fractured confessional system in which Hezbollah, armed, funded, and ideologically guided by Iran, operates as a state within a state.
Across all these cases, two actors recur: Iran and Saudi Arabia. These two powers have been waging a new Middle East Cold War, a contest for regional hegemony that is simultaneously ideological, sectarian, and geopolitical, since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Tehran presents itself as the leader of a “resistance axis” against Western and Israeli influence. Riyadh anchors the opposing axis, seeking to preserve Sunni Arab order and contain Iranian expansion. The battlefields of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon are where this cold war turns hot, with devastating consequences for millions of people who never chose to become pawns in a regional power rivalry.
This is the deeper diagnosis. The Middle East is chronically ill with competing systems of governance and rival hegemons. This pathology predates Israel’s modern founding and would persist even if the Palestinian question were resolved tomorrow.
A South African sitting in Johannesburg might reasonably ask: is it the scramble for oil that drives the region’s conflicts?
The answer is partly, but not in the crude, conspiratorial way often assumed. Oil wealth has created what scholars call the “resource curse”: hydrocarbon revenues enable authoritarian leaders to sustain themselves without accountability, fund enormous militaries, and foment instability in neighbouring states. Saddam Hussein used Iraq’s oil revenues to wage war on Iran and invade Kuwait. Qatar’s petrodollars have given a tiny state the ability to exert influence far beyond its size.
But oil is not the trigger. It is the accelerant. The underlying fires of sectarian rivalry, colonial borders, and governance deficits would exist without it. Yemen, one of the region’s most oil-poor states, is among its most devastated. Norway, a major oil producer with strong institutions, turned its resources into stability. The difference is not oil itself, but the institutions through which oil wealth flows, or fails to flow, into society.
So how should a South African in Johannesburg read the Middle East without reducing it to Israel?
The first step is to resist the temptation of a single villain and a single solution. The Middle East’s crisis is structural, not merely moral. It is the product of colonial cartography, sectarian rivalry weaponised by regional powers, the distorting weight of oil wealth, and decades of foreign intervention by powers whose interests rarely aligned with those of the region’s people.
The second is to take seriously the agency of regional actors such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, who are not merely responding to Israel or the West but pursuing their own hegemonic visions. A region in which rival powers fund proxy armies across multiple countries is not one whose problems begin and end in Gaza.
The third is to apply to the Middle East the same analytical generosity South Africa rightly demands for itself: that a society’s current condition is inseparable from its historical formation. South Africans understand that apartheid’s borders, forced removals, and ethnic classifications did not disappear in 1994. They left structural wounds that politics must still reckon with. The Middle East’s colonial formation left wounds of the same order: borders that divide communities, states that lack popular legitimacy, and political systems built for control rather than consent.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is real, urgent, and morally serious. South Africa is right to insist that Palestinian suffering not be normalised or ignored. But it is one chapter in a much longer story, one that emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, was deepened by British and French colonial design, and has been sustained by the competing ambitions of regional and global powers ever since.
The Middle East cannot be understood through a single conflict because it has never been shaped by a single conflict. Its crises are rooted in history, rival ideologies, competing regional powers, and political systems that continue to struggle for legitimacy. Until that wider reality is recognised, the region will continue to be misunderstood as much as it is unsettled.
