From Sykes-Picot to Gaza, Israel redraws borders to impose regional hegemony

"Israel is attacking everybody", Tom Barrack declared in an interview this week, naming Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia, and noting that Israel's recent strike on Qatar was also "not good".

The Trump administration's ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, who dismissed peace as "an illusion" and described borders as the "currency of a negotiation", has made headlines recently for his blunt remarks on Israel’s wars and Washington’s close alignment with them.

Just weeks earlier, he said: "In Israel's mind, these lines that were created by Sykes-Picot are meaningless," adding that the Israelis "will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want to protect... their borders".

Strip the provocation from the phrasing, and what remains is a blunt assessment: since 7 October 2023, the Zionist regime has pursued a hegemonic strategy beyond the old colonial cartography.

Since late 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal serving as Israel's prime minister, has formalised a "day-after" doctrine that conditions the end of his genocidal war in Gaza on total Israeli domination. That war has been escalated into successive campaigns across the region, in an attempt to annihilate all its enemies and redraw maps for a new Middle East.

Before flying to meet Donald Trump in early February for the first time since the latter's inauguration this year, Netanyahu said on the tarmac of Ben-Gurion Airport: "Our decisions have redrawn the map... and, working with Trump, we can redraw it even further."

More than a century after Sykes-Picot divided the Arab world, Israel is pursuing its own hegemonic project, subordinating borders to domination and expansion. Backed by Washington, this strategy relies on fragmenting states and exploiting divisions to secure regional control.

Redrawing maps

In early 2024, Netanyahu circulated his first official post-war framework.

The Zionist regime would maintain total control over all Palestinian territories and dismantle Unrwa, as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and across much of the West Bank, particularly Area C, in violation of international law and the Oslo Accords.

By July 2024, Netanyahu declared during another visit to Washington that "for the foreseeable future, we must retain overriding security control [in Gaza]."

Through much of 2024-25, the Israeli government acted accordingly. By seizing the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border in violation of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, it sought to expand its buffer zone.

The Zionist regime would maintain total control over all Palestinian territories and dismantle Unrwa, as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and across the West Bank

Officials stated that the policy would persist even after any truce, while simultaneously advocating expulsion and forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza.

After reaching a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah in November 2024, Israel announced that it would remain in five strategic locations in southern Lebanon to expand its buffer zone in the north. It has since violated that ceasefire thousands of times.

Within days of the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in December 2024, the Israelis invaded Syria and seized more than 600 sq km of new Syrian territory - over half the area of the Golan Heights that it has occupied since 1967.

Following this invasion, Defence Minister Israel Katz declared that the Israeli military "is prepared to stay in Syria for an unlimited amount of time" and that it will "hold the security area in Hermon and make sure that all the security zone in southern Syria is demilitarised and clear of weapons and threats".

Since then, Netanyahu has confirmed that Israel plans to occupy the territory permanently, explicitly stating: "Israel will continue to hold onto [the Golan], cause it to blossom, and settle in it."

Israel has also established at least six military bases in the demilitarised buffer zone, with Netanyahu claiming that the 1974 agreement delineating it is no longer valid because it was made with the former Assad government.

Old strategies

If Barrack's soundbite felt familiar, it is because versions of this strategic posture predate 7 October and even Oslo.

In 1982, Oded Yinon, then a former senior official in Israel's foreign ministry, published "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s" in a journal of the World Zionist Organization. The infamous "Yinon Plan" soon became the ideological blueprint for Israel's hegemonic designs in the Middle East.

The plan envisioned a regional order built not on the colonial Sykes-Picot borders, but on fragmented and sectarian polities surrounding the Zionist state - in essence, a call for the dissolution of the entire order.

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Yinon proposed dividing Lebanon into five provinces, presenting it as a precedent for the rest of the Arab world. He envisaged Syria and Iraq being fragmented into ethnic or religious cantons as Israel's primary targets in the east.

On the western front, he argued for breaking Egypt into distinct geographical regions, predicting that if it were to splinter, countries such as Libya and Sudan would not survive in their present form.

This overarching plan does not capture the full polemical tone of the document, but it conveys its essence: Israeli hegemony through the political weakening and balkanisation of the Arab world.

A decade later, Bernard Lewis, the academic icon of Zionist strategists, offered a similar outlook.

In 1992, shortly after the Cold War, he sketched two paths for the region: either a single Arab regional hegemony - a scenario the US would have to prevent, as it had done against Iraq's Saddam Hussein - or a breakup of regional states in a process Lewis coined "Lebanonisation".

He argued that many Middle Eastern countries were recent artificial constructions, characterised by weak social cohesion and a lack of common identity. If a state's central authority collapsed, he wrote, it would splinter into sects, tribes, regions and parties. Later that year, he expanded this thesis in Foreign Affairs under the title "Rethinking the Middle East".

Within a decade, several neoconservative disciples of Lewis, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, would play leading roles in breaking up Iraq and devastating the region during the George W Bush administration.

They made no secret of the fact that such policies were pursued primarily for the benefit of the Zionist regime.

Periphery doctrine

Well before Yinon, David Ben-Gurion's periphery doctrine sought alliances with non-Arab states and minorities on the Arab world's edges, such as pre-1979 Iran, pre-AKP Turkey, and Ethiopia. It also relied on sub-state actors like the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Sudan People's Liberation Army in southern Sudan, and the Maronites in Lebanon.

From the late 1950s onward, the policy materialised in discreet ties with Iraqi Kurds and, in Lebanon, coordination with Christian militias that culminated in Israel's 1982 invasion.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stated the minority logic bluntly in 1980 when he said: "If the Christian minority in Lebanon is attacked...Israel will not remain passive."

More than four decades later, the Zionist regime has frequently attacked Syria under the pretext of protecting its Druze minority.

In his attempt to justify bombing Syria's military assets and seizing more land, Netanyahu cynically appealed to the Syrian Druze community two months ago, claiming that Israel was "acting to save [their] Druze brothers and to eliminate the gangs of the regime".

In Syria, as well as in Iraq, the past two decades of foreign-induced policies - pursuing regime change, instigating chaos, triggering civil wars, and encouraging de facto cantons - echo parts of Yinon's map.

The result has been Kurdish autonomous areas, Druze and Alawite zones, and battered Sunni and Shia strongholds.

Five months after Sudan's partition in July 2011, South Sudan President Salva Kiir said during his first official visit to the Zionist state: "Without you, we would not have been established."

'Security' borders

Across the Israeli political spectrum, leaders have repeatedly framed borders as security imperatives, not inviolable international lines.

During the 1975 Sinai disengagement plan - later incorporated in the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt - Israeli leaders insisted on making the Sinai a buffer zone. Then Defence Minister Shimon Peres said Israel needed "buffer zones and [an] Egyptian civilian-administered area".

Barrack's 'meaningless lines' are less about erasing borders on paper than about subordinating them to Israel's pursuit of regional hegemony

Within days of the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Begin admitted the real reason behind the military assault when he informed Israel's parliament, the Knesset: "As soon as the Israeli army establishes a secure 25-mile zone north of the Israeli frontier, our work will have been done."

Similarly, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset in October 1995 - even after Oslo - that "the security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term".

Three decades later, Netanyahu updated the formula for Gaza when he said in 2024: "We must retain overriding security control [there] for the foreseeable future."

These declarations, across decades of expansionist operations and destabilising policies, give Barrack's remark historical depth.

If Sykes-Picot traced straight lines across the regional map, successive Israeli leaders have sketched curves of control - annexations, corridors, valleys, belts, buffer zones - defined by coveted territories, surveillance, access, and the ability to strike without restraint.

Barrack's "meaningless lines" are less about erasing borders on paper than about subordinating them to Israel's pursuit of regional hegemony.

Border shock

After the 7 October 2023 surprise attack, the Zionist regime's sacrosanct doctrine of "defensible borders" was shaken.

In July 2024, Netanyahu carried the same menacing message to the US Congress. The Congressional Research Service summarised it crisply, noting that Netanyahu had "insisted that Israel have full security control of 'all territory west of the Jordan River,' and 'overriding security control' in Gaza for the foreseeable future."

On the ground, the Zionist army's creation and expansion of a security zone in northern Gaza, and the enforcement of so-called "humanitarian" relocation areas such as al-Mawasi, further illustrate how borders are being reconfigured as kill zones, corridors and gated conduits rather than classic state borderlines.

Indeed, the Yinon Plan had long offered the maximalist framework, while Israel's response to 7 October supplied a genocidal pretext.

For nearly two years, as it slaughters and displaces populations, the Zionist regime has openly pursued its expansionist agenda, unconstrained by international law or diplomacy and reliant on unconditional US support.

On this course, Israel has exercised military freedom of action, instigated the weakening and fragmentation of bordering states, and cultivated minority and periphery ties to undercut Arab and Muslim majorities.

Hence, Barrack's description of Sykes-Picot as "meaningless lines" underscores Israel's hegemonic logic as it arrogantly and recklessly pursues political, military and territorial dominance, or "overriding control".

Potential fallout

There are serious implications for US policy in the region when Israel is given the freedom to pursue its project of regional hegemony. If Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Egyptian-Gaza border is allowed, friction with Washington's regional partners will intensify.

It will also complicate Egypt's security and diplomatic role, a political price the US will ultimately pay with Cairo and Gulf capitals it depends on to stabilise the region and safeguard its own interests.

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If Gaza remains under the current Israeli genocidal policy and military control, while settlements and annexation continue in the West Bank, the US will be at odds with much of the world - underwriting and protecting a settler-colonial, apartheid-like project, not leading a path toward a political settlement.

This endeavour will certainly complicate US efforts towards normalisation with Saudi Arabia and other regional states. As Israel escalates its onslaught in the Palestinian territories and sustains clashes in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and possibly Iran - as well as sporadic strikes in Tunisia and Qatar - Washington will not only lose leverage in the region but also see its security and economic interests threatened.

The more Washington expends resources backing Israel, the less capacity it has to contain or confront global rivals such as China and Russia.

Any serious challenge to Israeli hegemony must demand the restoration of rights across the communities and states it has transgressed, and affirm the legitimacy of resistance as the primary means of struggle.

It must also be driven by regional actors, not dependent on alliances or entanglements with outside powers, especially the US, Israel's chief enabler.

Since the onslaught of genocide in Gaza, the world has awakened to the righteousness of the Palestinian cause. The Zionist narrative has been debunked and its hasbara operations exposed.

International institutions such as the UN General Assembly, the ICJ and the ICC have condemned Israel's hegemonic policies and genocidal conduct, while reasserting Palestinian rights, including the inalienable right of return. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have likewise issued reports denouncing Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and across the region.

Restoring those rights is not only a legal imperative rooted in self-determination, equal protection and the right of return, but also the strategic prerequisite for any durable regional order. Without the full restitution of land, life and liberty - including an end to occupation, siege, displacement and apartheid-like practices - instability will remain the region's default.

Resistance, grounded in international law and centred on popular, political, legal and civic mobilisation, is therefore the indispensable tool to check Israeli hegemony. It shifts costs, disrupts impunity and compels accountability.

Beyond Sykes-Picot

Recently, in a rare candid moment, Netanyahu told a journalist in Hebrew that he is on a "historic and spiritual mission" and "very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel". His declaration captured the driving ideology behind Israel's wars, from the occupied Palestinian territories to Lebanon and Syria.

Before that, Barrack's observation spread because it gave voice to a long-standing plan already set in motion: for Israel's leadership, internationally recognised borders are "meaningless" lines to be violated at will, while the only borders it upholds are those that trace its expansionist vision of Greater Israel and serve its Zionist grand strategy.

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Whether this serves US interests depends on ends and timeframes.

If the goal is short-term management by propping up regimes, blocking ceasefires, and reducing the crisis to aid corridors, then the current US policy will only further erode what little remains of its credibility and deepen instability, while writing unlimited cheques.

But if the goal is a durable regional order, then Washington must confront a partner whose hegemonic strategy is built on fragmentation, belligerent force and condescension - and decide how much of that it is willing to bankroll and shield.

For the peoples of the region, the answer is not to resurrect Sykes-Picot but to transcend it - building a post-Sykes-Picot order grounded in sovereignty and independence, where unity is the basis of strength, and where corridors carry aid and trade rather than tanks.

Only an order that rejects Israel's redrawn map of domination can defend land and liberty, achieve justice for Palestine, and secure stability for the region.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.