For all the attention now fixed on Iran, Lebanon, and the widening arc of regional instability, the strategic center of gravity in the Middle East remains exactly where it has been since October 2023: Gaza. It is the one arena that neither policymakers nor publics want to look at directly, yet it is the arena that will likely determine whether any diplomatic, political, or security architecture in the region can be stabilized. Gaza is the strategic center of gravity precisely because it is the psychological one. Its power to paralyze diplomacy, drain legitimacy, and fuel regional instability flows directly from what it represents in the minds of publics and leaders across the Muslim world and increasingly in the West. The uncomfortable truth is that nothing meaningful is likely to move on the peace front — whether between Israel, the US and Iran, or between Israel and the Arab world — until Gaza is addressed not as an afterthought, but as the foundation of regional peace.

Today, that foundation is shattered. Gaza is still rubble. Hamas remains armed and entrenched. The Board of Peace — the very mechanism designed to manage reconstruction and governance — is not only essentially unfunded, it has been effectively paralyzed by the Iran war it was supposed to outlast. And the United States, Israel’s partner, is politically and strategically distracted by a conflict that fewer than one in four Americans believes was worth fighting. The result is a region drifting toward escalation while the one place that could anchor a sustainable future remains neglected.

A War That Reordered Priorities

While Israelis see the Iran war as a shared existential fight, Americans increasingly view it as an unnecessary conflict that is going badly and costing the country dearly. An Ipsos/Reuters survey released April 14, 2026 — conducted after the ceasefire and after President Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” — found that only 24 percent of Americans believe the war has been worth its costs and benefits. Just 35 percent approved of the military strikes at all, a number that has remained essentially flat across a full month of polling. That the United States has committed tens of billions of dollars and significant military assets to a conflict that fewer than one in four Americans believes was worthwhile is itself a measure of how thoroughly the Iran war has distorted American strategic priorities — and how little bandwidth remains for Gaza.

This is not a marginal political problem. It is a structural one. The United States cannot sustain major overseas operations without public support, and the American public has signaled clearly that it has no appetite for another long Middle East conflict. The Iraq experience — marked by corruption, waste, and the absence of a coherent counterinsurgency doctrine — created a generational ceiling on US tolerance for large deployments. Gaza reinforced that ceiling. Iran understands this strategic vulnerability. The American public overwhelmingly perceives the Middle East primarily through the lens of Gaza. Israelis are still operating under the misconception that they can simply move forward while Gaza remains the region’s fractured faultline.

The financial cost of that miscalculation is now quantifiable — and the contrast with........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)