The Middle East without Israel: A Counterfactual Analysis from a Geopolitical Perspective

Faced with the endless discussions that portray Israel as the main source of instability in the Middle East, there is a need to pose a different question. This text emerges from that impulse: an analytical dystopia that seeks to test that premise.

PART 1 — Historical Foundations and the Myth of “Automatic Peace”

The hypothesis of a Middle East without the State of Israel is often based on an apparently logical intuition: if one of the region’s most visible conflicts were to disappear, the system as a whole would tend toward stability. However, this assumption rests on an oversimplification of both history and the political structure of the Middle East. A more rigorous analysis suggests that regional conflict not only predates the creation of Israel but originates in deeper historical processes whose influence remains decisive today.

The fundamental turning point lies in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire exercised relatively flexible control over a vast diversity of peoples, religions, and social structures in the Middle East. While not free from tensions, this system provided a relatively stable political framework that allowed multiple identities to coexist under a common imperial authority.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire did not lead to an organic transition toward consolidated nation-states, but rather to a process of territorial reconfiguration driven by external powers. The United Kingdom and France, in particular, played a central role in this geopolitical redesign, prioritizing their strategic interests over local realities. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement exemplifies this logic: it established colonial spheres of influence without adequately considering the distribution of ethnic, religious, and tribal groups.

The result was the creation of states whose borders did not correspond to pre-existing political identities. In many cases, communities with deep historical differences were incorporated into the same state structures, while others........

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