Peace plan a profound blow to Iran's eliminationist ideology
National Post, 12 October 2025
The Arab world is split between those who accept Israel and those who want to destroy it. We are witnessing the defeat of the latter
As the Israel-Hamas war comes to an end, or the possibility of an end, or at least a ceasefire, the prospects for peace are better understood by looking at how it began — or, specifically, when it began.
The Hamas massacres and mass hostage-taking took place on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. In 1973, six years after Israel soundly defeated its Arab neighbours in the Six Day War, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the holiest day of the Jewish year. The Yom Kippur War marked a decisive and diverging moment in Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the existence of the State of Israel.
The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was opposed, in principle and with military force, by Israel’s Arab neighbours. Israel won that war, but the consensus in the Arab world remained that Israel was a foreign imposition by the world’s former imperial power, Britain, and new imperial power, the United States.
As colonial governance gave way to independent states after the Second World War, a pan-Arab nationalism grew in the Middle East, led above all by Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt from 1954 to 1970. It was a sense of Arab identity and mastery over their own lands that drove hostility toward Israel.
Nasser and his Arab allies went to war in June 1967, but Israel won an even more complete victory than in 1948, seizing east Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Defeated — and worse, humiliated — the Arab League met in Khartoum in September 1967 and was defiant, issuing its “Three Nos” — no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.
Arab nationalist hostility toward Israel had one last military gasp. After Nasser’s death in 1970, his successor, Anwar Sadat, launched the Yom Kippur War. In 1973 — and again in 2023 — Israel was caught literally off-guard. Initially, it looked as though Egypt and Syria might reverse their losses in 1967 and perhaps deal a devastating blow to Israel’s continued existence. But Israel recovered and won the war.
Then everything changed. Sadat concluded that pan-Arab attempts to eliminate Israel had not only failed, but were mistaken. He travelled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset. He reversed Khartoum: yes to peace with Israel, yes to recognition, yes to negotiations. In 1979, he made peace with Israel at Camp David, and the Sinai was returned to Egypt.
Egypt’s peace signalled that the Arab world was abandoning its eliminationist policy toward Israel. Yet the eliminationist view found a new home in Islamist extremism. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution took Iran dramatically in that direction. Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinated Sadat in 1981 for making peace with Israel.
For more than 50 years, Israel’s neighbours have diverged. Good relations have grown with friendly, or at least not hostile, Arab nations, while threats have increased from Iran and its proxies on Israel’s border, including Hamas. For a long while, Saudi Arabia was supportive of the Islamist eliminationist cause.
When Saudi Arabia changed course, ceasing funding for jihadism at home and abroad, it made possible the great foreign policy triumph of the Trump-Netanyahu alliance, the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw several Arab states recognize Israel. Arab nationalism, it came to pass, could accommodate Israel’s existence. Not so with Islamist extremism, which became the locus of eliminationism.
Hamas is part of the latter. Its cause is the destruction of Israel, not the welfare of Palestinians. Thus the October 7 attacks on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. If Arab countries would no longer take the fight to Israel, that cause would be taken over by an Islamist arc from Tehran to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which made war on Israel on Oct. 8, 2023.
Israel has smashed Hezbollah, pulverized Gaza and launched attacks on Iran’s nuclear program — all with the tacit, and sometimes active, support of the principal Arab powers, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are more than content to see the capacities of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood degraded.
In 2025, then, Israel has Arab friends and weakened Islamist enemies. That set the stage for U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which enjoys wide support among Arab leaders, including the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
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