Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Tanya Goudsouzian
In 2020, Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi published The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, arguing that Zionist aspirations to rule historic Palestine served as an instrument of British and American imperialism and amounted to a century-long war on the Palestinian people. As of 2026, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues. But the United States and Israel are also engaged in another war that has already spanned nearly half a century and may yet run for decades to come.
It may be easy to view the US-Israel war against Iran as a sudden watershed moment, but, in reality, this conflict is merely the latest chapter in a struggle that has unfolded for nearly 50 years. The sectarian, ideological and geopolitical currents driving the tensions were set in motion 47 years ago. Like the French and Russian revolutions before it, the 1979 Iranian Revolution – described by French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault as ‘the most modern and most insane’ – irrevocably altered global dynamics and challenged assumptions about modernity. Today’s drone wars and its ripple effects are not the final act but the latest turn in a figurative ‘Fifty Years War’, whose underlying political and ideological contests will continue long after the missiles stop flying. Indeed, the current crisis risks exacerbating pre-existing grievances and leaving them unresolved; it threatens to turn the US-Iran antagonism into a century-long confrontation akin to the conflict in Palestine that began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
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