Image Source: מפה מדינית של המזרח התיכון – Public Domain

Over the past four decades, there have been at least three tectonic shifts in the geopolitics of the Middle East, often referred to as efforts at “changing the map” of the Middle East. In 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in order to destroy the threat of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. In 2003, the Bush administration created the lie that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” in order to invade Iraq. Most recently, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu stated explicitly that he would use military force to “change the map” of the Middle East as part of his campaign to annihilate Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The map of the Middle East has not changed, but hundreds of thousands of innocent Arabs have been killed.

In every case, the “day after” was far different and far more threatening than anything that Sharon, Bush, or Netanyahu promised. Military campaigns and occupations that were supposed to last months turned into years. In the cases of Lebanon and Iraq, Israeli and American occupations lasted decades, and after two decades in Iraq there are still several thousand U.S. military troops in vulnerable positions there. The U.S. invasion of Iraq allowed Iran to become the chief outside influence in Baghdad, marking a huge strategic setback for the United States. As for Gaza, Netanyahu promised to make the Strip uninhabitable, and there is no reason to believe at this point that it will ever be habitable for Palestinians.

Ariel Sharon devised a secret plan in 1982 for taking the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut, which he didn’t share with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had a nervous breakdown in the wake of the initial invasion and the war crimes that were committed at two refugee camps—Sabra and Shatila. The operation was planned to........

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