From Holy Land to Proxy Wars: The Real Story Behind Israel and Iran
In Nairobi, you learn the word Palestine before you fully understand where it is on a map. It arrives early — in Friday sermons, in the language of protest, in the particular anger of uncles who talk about land and who decides who belongs on it. I grew up hearing it as a moral reference point before it was ever a geography lesson. And yet, for all the passion it generates here — across Kenya, across Africa, across the Muslim world and beyond — very few people can trace the actual roots of what they feel so strongly about. This article is an attempt to do that. Not to take sides. To take you back to where the sides were formed.
A Piece of Land That Belongs to God — Depending on Who You Ask
At the centre of everything is a piece of land that sits at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe. For Jewish people, it is the ancestral homeland — the land promised to them by God in their scriptures. Jerusalem, its defining city, is where their ancient temple once stood. For Muslims, Jerusalem carries equal spiritual weight. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is one of the holiest sites in Islam, and Islamic tradition holds that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven from that very spot. Christians trace their own defining history through the same geography. For centuries, all three communities lived in and around this land. Shared geography, though, has never guaranteed shared peace. Empires rose and fell over it. Treaties carved and recarved it. This is why the conflict today is not reducible to politics alone. At its foundation is religion, identity, and two peoples' competing claim to the same earth.
1948: A State Is Born, a People Are Scattered
To understand how this became a modern war, you need 1948. The world had just emerged from World War II having witnessed the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jewish people by Nazi Germany. Jewish communities everywhere pushed harder than ever for a state of their own. A movement called Zionism had been making this case for decades, arguing for the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the historical land of Israel. In 1948, with strong Western backing, the modern state of Israel was declared.
But people were already living on that land. Palestinians — Muslims and Christians who had been there for generations — were displaced. Around 700,000 of them fled or were forced from their homes in what they call the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning "the catastrophe." Arab nations surrounding Israel immediately went to war against the new state. Israel won, and expanded its territory. That outcome entrenched a dispute that no political process has fully resolved in the seven decades since.
For any African reading this, the shape of that story is not unfamiliar. Land taken in the name of a larger political project, with the people on it treated as a complication rather than the point. We have our own names for that experience on this continent. The Nakba is Palestine's name for it. The anguish is recognisable even across the distance.
The Coup That America Does Not Teach in Its Schools
At this point, Iran and Israel were not enemies. Under Iran's monarchy, the two countries maintained quiet, functional relations. Then came 1953, and a decision in Washington that would shape the next seventy years of Middle Eastern history.
An Iranian leader named Mohammad Mossadegh had done something that made Western governments very uncomfortable. He nationalised Iran's oil industry, declaring that it belonged to the Iranian people rather than foreign companies. It was the same logic that would drive nationalisation movements across Africa a decade later. The Western response was swift: the United States and Britain sponsored a coup that removed him from power and installed a king of their choosing, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, known as the Shah.
He ruled for 26 years. He was friendly to America. He maintained warm relations with Israel. And he used a feared secret police to silence all domestic opposition. When Iranians eventually rose up against him, they were not only overthrowing a king. They were settling a score with every foreign hand that had helped keep him in power — and Israel, as the Shah's ally, was part of that accounting.
Mossadegh wanted to keep Iran's oil for Iranians. The West removed him for it. That decision is still producing consequences today.
The Revolution That Changed the Map Without Moving a Border
The revolution that came in 1979 was not spontaneous. It was decades of accumulated anger finding a single exit point. A religious scholar named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been channelling that anger for years — exiled from Iran but never silenced, his speeches recorded on cassette tapes and smuggled back to the people. In 1979, mass protests forced the Shah out of the country. Khomeini returned and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This was not a simple transfer of power. Iran's entire political identity changed overnight. The new government declared itself the defender of Muslims worldwide, with Palestine at the top of that agenda. Khomeini labelled America the "Great Satan" and described Israel as an illegitimate presence in the Muslim world. A country that had been a non-hostile neighbour became Iran's primary ideological enemy. The shift was total, and it was deliberate.
The Proxy Architecture: Fighting a War Without Fighting a War
What followed was not a conventional war fought across shared borders. Think of it this way: imagine a wealthy patron who never shows up to the confrontation himself, but quietly funds, trains, and supplies the fighters who do. He maintains distance. He retains deniability. But his fingerprints are on every operation. That is the architecture Iran built.
Iran funded, armed, and trained organisations that would carry its strategic objectives against Israel on its behalf. Hezbollah, built with direct Iranian support in Lebanon in the early 1980s, became the most formidable of these. It fought several wars against Israel and maintained a continuous armed presence on Israel's northern border for decades. Iran also backed Hamas in Gaza, supplying weapons and financing. More recently, it extended support to the Houthis in Yemen, who launched drone and missile attacks toward Israeli territory.
Iran calls this network the Axis of Resistance — groups standing against occupation and foreign interference. Israel and the West classify them as armed extensions of a state committed to Israel's destruction. Both framings are sincerely held. Neither is going away.
The Nuclear Question: The Risk That Makes Everything Else Secondary
Running alongside all of this is Iran's nuclear programme, which is arguably the single most consequential fault line in the entire conflict. Iran insists it is developing nuclear technology for civilian energy. Israel and the United States have consistently maintained that this is a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
In 2015, a landmark international agreement called the JCPOA — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — placed strict limits on Iran's nuclear activity in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. It was the closest the parties had come to a managed, negotiated arrangement. In 2018, the United States under President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement unilaterally. Iran responded by accelerating uranium enrichment beyond the agreed limits. The window that diplomacy had opened closed quickly, and has not reopened since.
For Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran is not an abstract geopolitical scenario. It is treated as an existential threat, and has driven Israeli military calculations for the better part of four decades. That framing explains decisions that would otherwise seem disproportionate.
2024: The Covert War Steps Into the Open
For years, Israel prosecuted this conflict through methods designed to remain just below the threshold of open war. Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated. Sophisticated cyberattacks disrupted Iran's facilities. Iranian-linked military positions in Syria were struck repeatedly. Iran retaliated through its proxies. The arrangement held an unspoken logic: both sides inflicted real damage while maintaining the fiction that they were not directly at war.
That fiction ended in April 2024. An Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus killed several senior commanders of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran responded with something it had never done before — a direct, large-scale attack on Israeli soil, launching over 300 drones and missiles. Israel struck Iranian territory in return. The covert conflict that had operated in shadows for decades became open, visible, and acknowledged by both parties within the span of a single week.
The line that had held for forty years was crossed in both directions. What that means for what comes next, nobody has yet been able to say with confidence.
Why This Matters to Those of Us Watching From Africa
Kenya's formal diplomatic position on Palestine has historically aligned with the broader African Union consensus — supporting Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution, while maintaining working relations with Israel. It is a careful balance, the kind that small and medium powers navigate when larger powers are fighting over the terms of everything.
But the conflict does not stay at the level of diplomacy. Across Kenya — across East Africa — communities feel this personally. For Kenyan Muslims, Al-Aqsa is not a political symbol. It is a sacred site. The images that arrive on phones every week are not distant news. They are a wound that keeps reopening. That emotional reality shapes how the conflict is understood here in ways that no policy brief fully captures.
There is also a harder, older recognition available to anyone on this continent willing to sit with it. Africa knows what it means to have your land decided by other people's wars, your borders drawn by hands that were not yours, your displacement treated as an unfortunate consequence of someone else's political project. The specific histories are not identical. But the grammar of dispossession is not unfamiliar here. That is not a political statement. It is a statement about memory, and about why some wounds travel further than others.
Understanding what is happening in the Middle East does not require you to abandon your own position. But it does require more than the version of the story that arrives pre-packaged in outrage. This is the fuller version. You can decide what to do with it.
Where It Stands
There is no resolution at the end of this article because there is no resolution in reality. The displacement of 1948 remains a defining grievance for Palestinians and a foundational origin story for Israelis, and those two readings do not converge. The revolution of 1979 still governs Iran's foreign policy. The proxy networks are still operational. The nuclear programme is still running. The JCPOA has not been revived in any binding form. What began as a religious and colonial question over a piece of land has expanded across seven decades into a regional cold war that, in 2024, demonstrated it can go fully and openly hot.
I write this from a continent that has its own unfinished arguments about land, legitimacy, and who gets to decide. That position does not give me an answer to what is happening between Israel and Iran. But it makes the question impossible to look away from — and it makes me distrust anyone, on any side, who thinks the answer is simple.
History will not end this conflict. But you cannot begin to understand it without knowing the history.
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