Israel is no longer untouchable — and the world order knows it

The cost of covering a war daily

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Jehad Zafar back to Thought Behind Things on 24 November 2023, framing the conversation as a purely analytical read of geopolitics, war, economics and a changing world order. Before the geopolitics, though, there is a more human question: what does it do to a person to cover a war on a daily basis?

Jehad answers it directly. He had gone home at nine that morning, after a night of editing. The shift to daily uploads is partly demand-driven — events are moving too fast to wait two days for a researched video — and partly a refusal to compromise on verification. “I do not want to compromise on the research angle,” he says. “We have to give people something strong, something verified, something relevant.”

The cost is real. “A person gets lost,” Jehad says. “Relationships start to get compromised. You are not giving time to your sister, to your partner, to your mother.” Muzamil presses on the mental load — his own wife has been actively posting on Palestine and is now reading and watching around the clock — and asks how Jehad copes. The honest answer is that he does not, cleanly. “When a person thinks about how many injustices are happening, we are nothing in front of that.”

Muzamil names the deeper problem. “The reality you used to believe in — you cannot go back to it.” Whatever worldview a person held about how the world worked before COVID, before Afghanistan, before October 7, that worldview is no longer available. The work of reconciliation with the new reality is, by definition, work done in confusion.

Why everything broke at once after COVID

Muzamil sharpens the question. By and large, before COVID, life ran on some kind of established line. After COVID, “it has just been one after the other — unbelievable things we never imagined.” What is actually going on?

Jehad’s read is that the break in 2020 gave people a window for critical thinking, and the dominant pre-pandemic narrative — what he calls a linear “woke culture” with feminist and Me Too movements running — took a hit from the other side. Conservatives, he argues, rose noticeably after COVID. Many people converted in their living rooms after watching what unfolded.

Underneath that, both men land on the same conspiracy-shaped suspicion: a global establishment trying to regain control. Muzamil names it without flinching. “This is the last-ditch effort to try to keep control and keep the old establishment intact. But the world has changed — and even if it does not look apparent, time will prove that a new establishment will rise.”

Jehad picks up the thread by noting that Western leaders now sound identical. “The line spoken by the US, by Canada, by the UK, by the European Union — it is one script. Earlier this was not the case. The UK prime minister had his own line, the EU had its own. Now we are at a point — and sorry to say — they are being put there just to read the script.”

Israel as a panicking child, not a confident state

Later in the discussion, the focus turns to Israel — and the read is unsentimental.

Jehad describes Israel as a state that has always run on the assumption that its godfather is standing behind it. “Israel is a child that, at every turn, says: look, daddy and the US are with me.” That fear of media coverage, of losing global soft corners, is structural; Israel behaves, daily, as if it is fighting for its survival, and the Abraham Accords were an attempt to minimise future threats by neutralising powerful Muslim states from Israel’s perimeter.

Muzamil and Jehad both read the post-October 7 body language as panicked, not commanding. “Look at the faces in their press conferences,” Jehad says of Netanyahu, his defence minister, and his army chief. “There is no peace on their faces. They are completely shaken. And the attacks they are doing — they say, if there is even one Hamas man in a place, we will blow up the entire place. This is irrational. This is a manic state.”

Muzamil draws the comparison to Volodymyr Zelensky in the early days of the Ukraine war — the visibly rattled face of a state that used to project calm. Within living memory, he notes, Israel was complacent, settled. It is not, now.

The strategic reading sits underneath this. Israel’s stated objective, as Muzamil reads it, is simple: push the population of Gaza down into Egypt and across into Jordan. The plan runs into a wall the planners apparently did not price. Egypt’s economy is already wrecked. Jordan’s is taking IMF money. Lebanon’s economy has collapsed. None of these states can absorb a million-plus displaced Palestinians without their own political order coming apart. So Egypt, even with a leadership Jehad describes as having followed a political evolution similar to Pakistan’s, is publicly refusing. Which means the war is going to expand before it contracts.

The Hamas attack broke the invincibility myth

A long stretch of the conversation circles the same insight from different angles: the perception that Israel was untouchable has been broken in public view, and that is irreversible.

The October 7 attack, Jehad argues, did more than its immediate damage. “This Hamas attack blew up the whole narrative. It is one thing to go in and hit them — that is one matter. But what we are seeing now is that Israel has been engaged in a multi-pronged attack, in sync, from different places. And from there, Iran is openly slapping them around. The US cannot give them the protection they need.”

Muzamil traces the credibility damage back further. “The biggest dent on US credibility — we have to go back two years, when we were sitting here, August 2021, when they left Afghanistan.” The image of a superpower being humiliated by men in shalwars who had a whole country to disappear into changed something in how the world reads American might. The Hamas operation, run from a tiny piece of territory, repeated the lesson in a different theatre.

The pushback, both note, is not only military. It is on the streets — London, New York, Paris, Istanbul, Spain — and it is online. “This time the global establishment is not finding it easy to play the game it has always played,” Muzamil says. Jehad gives Elon Musk a share of the credit for that, on free-speech grounds: people are pushing back openly on X in a way they could not before. Western politicians who call for a ceasefire are being removed from cabinets. Even Piers Morgan, Jehad notes, has flipped, tweeting against Israel after the refugee camp strike. “Who can defend this?”

Iran as the centre of gravity

The conversation then widens out to the proxies, and the question of who is actually orchestrating the response.

Most observers, Muzamil notes, look at Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon as separate phenomena. He flips the frame. The stated Iranian proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis — are visibly operating in a synchronised way for the first time. He points to Hezbollah systematically targeting Israeli surveillance infrastructure in the north before any ground operation, a textbook pre-operation move. He points to the rapid southward redeployment of around twenty thousand Israeli troops after the original Hamas breach exposed how thin the northern consolidation had been.

“This level of centralised coordination has historically never happened,” Muzamil says. “In 1967, oil money had not yet come in. The Middle East had not strengthened itself. Wars were fought, but each actor was acting alone. Times have changed radically.”

Jehad reinforces the point on Iran specifically. “Iran is diplomatically very active in this crisis. They are exerting power. They have a relevance at a level Pakistan does not have.” He cites the backdoor meetings with the US establishment around the UN session three days prior, the ties with militant groups, and the suspected role in challenging Israel from multiple directions, even as Tehran officially denies it. “If you connect the dots — it is very clear.”

Muzamil adds the moment that signalled the regional re-wiring most cleanly. On the day of the Hamas attack, “the first call Mohammed bin Salman made was to the Iranian president, Raisi.” A Saudi Arabia that had been about to normalise with Israel placed its first call to Tehran. That, he argues, is the telltale sign of a shift.

Two press conferences, two world orders

Muzamil offers the image that holds the whole conversation together. On the day Joe Biden was in Israel giving his “we stand with you” press conference, the Belt and Road conference was running in Beijing. A video circulated: a door opens, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin walk through it to glorious music, into a hall holding representatives of one hundred and forty countries, announcing a hundred billion dollars in development. “On one side, a genocide is happening. On the other side, development is being announced.”

That split-screen is the frame he uses to widen the discussion to Ray Dalio’s thesis on the rise and fall of empires. The argument: empires that rest on a global reserve currency — the Dutch, the British, now the American — go to war as their power declines, because they cannot maintain it any other way. Sanctions on Chinese chip companies, rare-earth controls, the Ukraine war, the prop-up of Israel — all of it, Muzamil argues, is the same fight. “A global hegemon, an imperialist power in the shape of America, cannot bear that a China-led order could become a counterweight.” He is careful to add that he is not predicting Chinese supremacy. “A multipolar world is what we are heading towards.”

The receipts Muzamil reads off the table are concrete. Venezuela sanctions were lifted two weeks before the Gaza war began, because the US needs its oil. Syria’s regime change failed after twelve years; Bashar al-Assad’s foreign minister was just welcomed in Saudi Arabia. Ukraine, despite being next to Europe and inside the NATO hub, is a clear defeat. “Wherever the old establishments have tried to forcefully hold their power, they have been failing.”

Pakistan’s two establishments

Halfway through, the lens turns to Pakistan. Muzamil reads the 2022 political rupture as a fight between two establishments interpreting the world order differently. One had concluded that the world was going multipolar and Pakistan needed to become neutral and self-driven. The other had learned from history that America runs the world and Pakistan should align accordingly. Jehad’s quick gloss: “Boomers.”

The second establishment took over. And the policy turn is visible in every direction at once. “Pakistan’s policy with respect to Ukraine, to Afghanistan, to Israel, to Iran, to China — everything has changed,” Jehad says. The Foreign Office statement on Palestine no longer says Israel is committing oppression — historically Pakistan’s line — it says Pakistan stands with Palestinians. The shift in narrative, the shift in policy, are quiet but real.

Muzamil’s worry is timing. Joe Biden’s approval rating is, as Jehad puts it bluntly, pathetic. The counter-narrative inside America is strong. Trump’s “make America great again” wing argues for ending the foreign wars, supporting American manufacturers, bringing money home. If that wing returns to power, Pakistan’s bet on the current Washington establishment will need to be realigned all over again.

Jehad presses the cultural read on top of it. “Look at LUMS — these are not poor kids, these are rich kids, and they are this angry. I challenge you, go to Punjab University’s Mass Comm department. Go to FC College. See what the public will do to you.” The anti-Western sentiment is no longer a fringe-left or fringe-religious phenomenon; it is sitting inside the elite university campuses.

Historically Pakistan jumped into wars — this time it cannot

Jehad reminds Muzamil of the older Pakistani habit. “Pakistan jumped into wars and took advantage and took money.” A good-looking economy with a strong growth rate was actually dollars coming in, two telecom companies arriving, four TV channels launching, a motorway being built. People said: these guys are good.

This time the situation is different. The old establishment relied on deals — political manoeuvring that always pulled some game out of the bag. Today there is a temporary sense of stability — the dollar has steadied, petrol prices have come down — and the public’s anger has paused while everyone waits to see which deal lands and what money comes. But the conditions underneath are not good. If oil escalates, if Iran issues a threat through the Strait of Hormuz the way Arab states issued the 1973 oil embargo, the Pakistani economy goes out of control. And the package — the deal — does not come.

Muzamil’s reading of what Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have collectively achieved is sharp. “By essentially killing themselves, they have brought the Palestinian cause back to life for the next fifty years.”

The new multipolar plumbing

Toward the end, Jehad sketches the operational mechanics of the new order. Russia uses Wagner, its proxies in Ukraine, its push into African states — Niger, Burkina Faso — where the simple instruction has been: get the French out. China is the trading partner, the investor, the peace broker between Riyadh and Tehran. Iran is the militant lever. Together, he argues, they are squeezing the US from multiple sides. China is putting Europe into recession via the Russian energy disruption; Europe is so trapped it cannot think. Macron has gone to Beijing to try to negotiate a European role in Africa. The EU’s trade with China overtook its trade with the US back in 2019.

Muzamil ends on the strategic divergence. “America has spent ten trillion dollars on wars. China has spent that money on investment. The strategies are different.” And the response — de-dollarisation, BRICS expansion, central banks adding the Chinese yuan to their reserves — is the predictable consequence of weaponised sanctions. “When the world saw that the US could freeze the assets of countries holding dollars, kick them off SWIFT, the push for an alternative became inevitable. Iran has shown the world you can survive sanctions and live with dignity.”

The caretaker problem

Muzamil and Jehad close on Pakistan’s most immediate constraint: who is doing the foreign-policy work at this moment.

Jehad is blunt. “Your prime minister, Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar — he is irrelevant. The Western world prefers talking to an elected person, not a selected one. Not a caretaker. The Europeans see this too. They know the current setup has no real mandate.”

Muzamil agrees. Respect, in international diplomacy, attaches to elected leaders with a popular mandate behind them — someone who can make a decision and stick to it. A caretaker’s mandate is constitutional: get the elections done, regulate small matters in the system. It is not to give university lectures or run public diplomacy.

He closes the conversation at the one-hour-eleven-minute mark with his summary. The thing most Pakistanis are missing, he says, is that a global shift is under way. “It can begin to explain a lot of what is happening in Pakistan. And it can begin to predict a lot of what might happen in Pakistan.” Jehad agrees: if you analyse with depth, the dots connect.

By the end of the conversation, the disclaimer Muzamil opened with has held. Neither host nor guest has declared who is good and who is bad. They have tried to read interests, thought processes, and the structural pressures that come from a hegemony in late-stage decline. Whether the read is right, time will settle. What is no longer in doubt, on the evidence of October 7 and the response to it, is that the old map has lost its authority.