Am I a Mossad agent? I ask because the coincidences have reached a density that even I find unsettling, and in a region where coincidence is never permitted to exist as a category – where every event must be the product of a hidden hand, a Zionist plot, or a Masonic blueprint drawn in a basement beneath the Federal Reserve – I should probably get ahead of the accusation before it arrives.

Yesterday, Monday, I published an article on the Times of Israel Blogs in which I described Ali Larijani strolling through Tehran during the Quds Day rally, taking selfies with President Pezeshkian, dismissing the ongoing bombardment as a sign of “desperation,” and mocking US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with an Epstein jab delivered with the confidence of a man who believed himself untouchable.

I compared the spectacle, in detail, to Saddam Hussein’s final public appearance in Baghdad’s Al-A’zamiyah neighborhood on April 9, 2003 – the waving, the embracing of strangers, the performative invincibility – and noted that the man who walked among adoring crowds was found, eight months later, in a spider hole near Tikrit, blinking at a flashlight. I wrote, in the article’s closing line: “Saddam walked the streets of Baghdad too. The hole in the ground came later.”

Today, Tuesday, Israel announced that Ali Larijani was killed overnight in a targeted airstrike on a hideout apartment in Tehran, alongside his son. Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed the strike. The IDF described Larijani as “the de facto leader” of the Islamic Republic. A senior Israeli official told reporters there was “no chance he survived.” A handwritten note was published on Larijani’s social media accounts – undated, on an unrelated matter – in what appeared to be a failed attempt at proof of life. The man who took selfies on Friday was dead by Tuesday.

Here is the detail that made me pause: I had originally planned to write the article on Sunday night, but decided to postpone it until Monday. Israel, according to its own briefing, had originally planned the strike for Sunday night but postponed it to Monday. I delayed my article by one day. The Mossad delayed its operation by one day. The parallel is meaningless – a statistical artifact, a coincidence so trivial that it deserves no more than a footnote and a wry smile. And yet I know, with the certainty of a man who has spent, at least months, writing about the Middle East for Arab and international audiences, that somewhere in a comment section, on a Telegram channel, or in a group chat, someone is already connecting the dots that do not exist, drawing the lines that lead nowhere, and constructing the architecture of a conspiracy theory that will, by tomorrow, have me receiving intelligence briefings from Tel Aviv.

These are the same people who have spent the past two weeks conducting forensic analysis of every video Netanyahu has posted – counting his fingers (six in one frame, apparently, which proves the footage is AI-generated), tracking the presence and absence of his wedding ring (missing for one second, which proves a likely manipulated or digitally altered clip), magnifying screens in the background (one allegedly displays a 2024 date, which proves pre-recorded), scrutinizing his collar, his hairline, his blink rate, his shadow angle – all in the service of a conclusion they reached before they examined a single frame: that Netanyahu is dead, that every video since February 28 is a deepfake manufactured by Israeli intelligence, and that the war is being prosecuted by a ghost.

They do not want evidence. They want permission – permission to believe that the man orchestrating the destruction of their preferred axis has already been destroyed himself, because accepting that he is alive, healthy, and directing operations from a functioning command center is an admission of impotence too painful to absorb.

This is what I actually want to talk about – not the coincidence, which is trivial, but the reflex, which is civilizational. The Arab and Muslim world’s relationship – alongside large sections of the Western left – with conspiracy is not a marginal pathology confined to the uneducated or the paranoid. It is the dominant epistemological framework through which an entire region processes history, politics, and causality. Nothing happens because of structural forces, institutional incentives, strategic calculations, or the mundane mechanics of power. Everything happens because someone planned it – usually Jewish, usually American, usually operating from a room that no one has ever seen but everyone can describe in detail.

Israel does not possess a competent intelligence service that exploits the incompetence of its adversaries; Israel “controls the world.” Netanyahu did not lobby Trump into a war that served overlapping but distinct American and Israeli strategic interests; Netanyahu “puppeteered” Trump, as though the United States – a $28 trillion economy with 800 military bases across the globe and the largest nuclear arsenal on earth – is a marionette operated by a prime minister whose own country is smaller than New Jersey. The war is not the product of Iranian nuclear ambitions, forty-seven years of proxy destabilization, the massacre of thirty thousand Iranian protesters, Saudi lobbying documented by the Washington Post, and a convergence of American, Israeli, and Gulf strategic interests that aligned in a narrow temporal window; it is a “theater staged by global actors,” a “scripted performance,” a “pre-arranged play” in which the blood is fake and the missiles are props.

Some even dare to use the Happy Merchant – that antisemitic caricature of a hook-nosed, hand-rubbing Jewish man created by a white supremacist in 1992 and now the default visual shorthand across social media for the conspiracy that Jews secretly orchestrate every war, every crisis, and every event the commenter cannot otherwise explain.

This is not analysis, but the abdication of analysis. It is the intellectual equivalent of throwing one’s hands in the air and declaring that since the world is too complicated to understand, it must be secretly simple, governed by an omniscient cabal whose plans never fail and whose victims never bear responsibility for their own choices. Conspiracy thinking is not the product of too much suspicion. It is the product of too little agency – the cognitive surrender of populations that have been governed so poorly, for so long, by systems so opaque, that they have lost the capacity to believe that events have causes rather than authors.

It also flatters those who indulge in it, granting them the comforting illusion of superior insight – the sense that they see what others cannot, that they belong to a select few who have pierced the veil. In this way, it becomes not only an epistemological failure but a psychological refuge, and at times even a subtle form of cognitive warfare, shaping perceptions, reinforcing divisions, and rewarding certainty over understanding.

This does not mean conspiracies never exist. They do. Operation Ajax was a conspiracy. The Gulf of Tonkin was a fabrication. The Iraq WMD dossier was a lie. But conspiracies are rare precisely because they are difficult – they require secrecy among large numbers of people, sustained coordination across bureaucracies with competing interests, and the suppression of leaks in an age of radical information transparency. Conspiracies do not make history. History makes conspiracies – produces them as byproducts of structural pressures, institutional failures, and strategic desperation, not as the master code that explains all events from a single control room. The 1953 coup against Mossadegh was a conspiracy, yes – but it succeeded because Iranian society was already fractured, the bazaaris had turned against the prime minister, the clerical establishment had been co-opted, and British economic strangulation had created the preconditions for popular disillusionment. The conspiracy was the match. The tinder was indigenous.

I wrote about Larijani on Monday. Israel killed him on Monday night. The coincidence proves nothing except that the world is full of coincidences, that wars produce predictable patterns of defiance followed by predictable patterns of elimination, and that a journalist who has spent enough years studying this region can occasionally see the trajectory before the missile confirms it. If that makes me a Mossad agent, then every analyst who has ever predicted an obvious outcome is on the payroll – and the payroll, I assure you, is not nearly as generous as the conspiracy theorists imagine.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)