Over the past ten days, West Asia has been engulfed in a conflict whose consequences are already rippling far beyond the battlefields. After the United States and Israel launched a joint air assault on targets inside Iran, Tehran responded by declaring not only Israeli territory but also American military bases legitimate targets for retaliation.

Those bases are scattered across the Arab states of the Persian Gulf—installed decades ago, now woven into the region’s political geography. During the twelve-day exchange between Iran and Israel, they functioned as a quiet nervous system: gathering intelligence, feeding radar data, supporting what some analysts have called Operation Midnight Hammer. In the fog of war, it is no longer unreasonable to suggest these facilities played a supporting role in strikes against a neighbouring country. And if that is true, then Iran’s retaliation—reaching into the airspace of Arab states—was not an escalation but a consequence.

The question here is not about who holds the moral high ground, rather what happens when a powerful state, unable to bear the full cost of a war it started, decides to manufacture the conditions for a wider one?

The question here is not about who holds the moral high ground, rather what happens when a powerful state, unable to bear the full cost of a war it started, decides to manufacture the conditions for a wider one?

That question leads directly to the concept of false flag operations. For Israel’s security establishment, these are not a theoretical abstraction. They are a documented tool of statecraft, used in moments when overt action seemed too costly or too controversial. Consider Operation Susannah, better known as the Lavon Affair. In 1954, Israeli military intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to plant small incendiary devices in cinemas, libraries, and American cultural centers in Cairo and Alexandria. The goal was to create enough chaos and anti-Western sentiment to damage Egypt’s relations with the United States and Britain, preserving Israel’s strategic position. The operation unraveled when the perpetrators were caught, triggering a political crisis in Israel that toppled the government. The affair is remembered as a scandal, but it also proved something else: that the logic of provocation has deep roots. When direct confrontation carries too high a price, there is always the temptation to make someone else fight your war.

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Today, that temptation may be resurfacing. In the two months before the current escalation, as speculation about an Israeli strike on Iran intensified, regional powers pushed back. Arab states and Turkey warned of the economic and political devastation a wider war would bring. They offered mediation. They tried to keep channels open between Tehran and Washington. They did not want this war. Israel and its American allies framed the conflict differently: as unavoidable, necessary, a precondition for long-term security. But now that the war is here, the costs are mounting. Iran’s missile barrages have fallen largely on Israeli territory. The burden of retaliation, so far, has been Israel’s to bear alone. That is not sustainable, and it is not, from Israel’s perspective, desirable.

If the war is to achieve its stated aims, others must share the load. Arab states hosting American bases must be drawn in more deeply. NATO members must be provoked into shedding their caution. Turkey, Azerbaijan, Cyprus—countries on the periphery—must be given a reason to choose sides. The question, then, becomes a practical one: How do you make them choose? You manufacture a reason.

Consider the trajectory of the last ten days. There have been multiple attacks on American military assets and economic interests across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran has claimed some of them as legitimate military actions. But in a region this volatile, attribution is never clean. Now imagine an attack on a NATO base in Turkey, carried out under ambiguous circumstances. Or a bombing in a civilian area, using Iranian-style drones, that cannot be clearly traced. Or the sudden exposure of a Mossad network in Saudi Arabia—exactly the kind of report that surfaced recently, and that some observers have read as a potential signal. In each scenario, the immediate effect is the same: a government that wanted to stay out of the war finds itself under immense pressure to respond. If Iranian weapons appear to have struck Turkish soil, NATO’s mutual defence clause could be triggered. If an Arab state uncovers an Iranian-linked cell on its territory, its options narrow. The war, in short, expands—not because anyone voted for it, but because the evidence, however murky, demands it.

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This is the deeper danger of the current moment. A state that cannot absorb the costs of a war alone has every incentive to spread them.

And in a region saturated with weapons, grievances, and competing intelligence services, manufacturing a crisis is not difficult.

And in a region saturated with weapons, grievances, and competing intelligence services, manufacturing a crisis is not difficult.

It simply requires patience, precision, and a willingness to let others burn. The historical lesson of the Lavon Affair is not that false flags always fail. It is that they are always tempting. When direct confrontation is too expensive, provocation becomes a rational choice. And when provocation succeeds, the war that follows is not the one anyone planned—but it is the one someone wanted.

For now, Arab governments have responded to the violence on their territory with restraint. They have condemned the strikes, but they have not retaliated. They have signaled, quietly, that they do not wish to be drawn in. That stance is an obstacle to Israel’s strategic goals. And in the logic of false flags, obstacles are meant to be removed. What does this mean for the days ahead? It means the risk of attacks in civilian spaces, of ambiguous bombings, of weapons that look Iranian but may not be—all of this is likely to increase. National intelligence agencies, already stretched thin, will struggle to separate genuine threats from staged ones. And in that confusion, the space for escalation widens. The question is not whether false flag operations are possible. History says they are. The question is whether, in the chaos of an ongoing war, anyone will be able to tell the difference between an accident and a design—before it is too late.

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