In early December 2025, the U.S. Special Envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, made a striking comment in an interview with Sky News Arabia. He stated that “Israel can’t keep confronting 2 billion Islamic people and this antisemitism that’s blowing all over the world.”
While the remark seemed in the moment like a mere political comment, it carries in my estimation a deeply sensitive shift in how the conflict in the Middle East is being interpreted.
It moves away from approaches based on politics, geography, and security. It steers instead toward a broad religious description that defines the conflict as an ideological clash between two faiths, one of which is interpreted by some of its followers as a proponent of world Jihad. This type of framing, if it takes root, transfers the dispute from a framework of a manageable disagreement into the realm of religious wars that recognize no borders or compromises.
The core problem is that this rhetoric takes the conflict outside its political context. When Israel with its known size and borders is placed in confrontation with two billion Muslims, the scene becomes more akin to summoning old religious narratives than to a contemporary debate about a state, its borders, and its sovereignty.
Herein lies the danger of the statement. It awakens the deep historical memory of the ideological conflicts that have swept the region for centuries. It injects a new spirit into them, making any chance for understanding more fragile.
This aligns with the role played by several regional powers. These powers have found in the religious and ideological dimension an effective tool for expanding their influence in the Fertile Crescent. They have reinterpreted the Arab Palestinian-Israeli conflict through ideological narratives that grant them greater ability to mobilize and justify intervention. Whenever signs of calm appear, these powers or their proxies move to raise tensions. The continuation of the conflict serves regional influence projects more than it serves the Palestinian Arabs themselves.
The conflict has already moved beyond politics. Actors such as Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas have deliberately framed it as a religious confrontation, not out of faith but murderous ideology. The real divide is not Islam versus the West, but political Islam versus modern statehood. While those Islamist movements weaponize selective religious texts to justify perpetual conflict, states like the United Arab Emirates approach Islam as a civilizational framework compatible with pluralism, sovereignty, and coexistence.
In this overlap between politics and religion, any discourse that pumps an ideological dimension into the conflict becomes a gain for these powers and a loss for the chances of stability.
What makes the picture more complex is that the effects of this type of rhetoric are not confined to the region. The West itself possesses a long collective memory regarding the Middle East, formed through the Crusades and inherited theological narratives. Therefore, any discourse that portrays the conflict as a religious war automatically re-animates this memory. It opens the door for the West to become an active party, whether through public opinion, decision makers, or extremist currents that see the Middle East as an arena to test their ideas.
In this context, the narratives of both the far right and the radical left become active. Each views the conflict from a religious or philosophical angle that facilitates the reproduction of a sharper “us versus them” dynamic.
This global dimension becomes even clearer when we place Barrack’s statement side by side and compare it with the speech given by Israeli President Isaac Herzog days earlier at Yeshiva University in New York. There, he warned of a rising wave of hatred targeting Jews in the West. Herzog pointed to institutional antisemitism, attempts to overturn the facts of the Holocaust and distort its meaning, the spread of conspiracy theories from the far right and the radical left, the growth of hatred against Jews on social media platforms, and the emergence of forms of moral bankruptcy hiding behind the banner of social justice. All these, he noted, are witnessing a worrying rise recently.
Herzog added that “Jews are always the first, but never the last, to be demonized, targeted, ‘other-ized’,” warning that waves of hatred change their battle cries but preserve their historical essence.
This link between the old and the new reveals that the problem is not confined to Middle Eastern events. It extends to a global environment that reproduces deep rooted patterns of hatred, turning any escalating religious rhetoric into additional fuel for polarization within the West itself.
In this link between the rhetoric of Barrack and Herzog, the full picture comes into focus. The issue is not about Israel alone. It is about a global system of ideological tensions that feeds on any discourse reframing the Middle East conflict as a comprehensive religious confrontation.
On the other hand, the existence of the state of Israel remains an important element in the regional balance equation. Despite differing attitudes toward it, Israel remains a state based on clear political structures and a capacity for stable decision making, in a region where many states have eroded under the weight of conflicts or internal divisions. However, rhetoric that portrays it in a religious confrontation with the Muslim world serves neither its stability nor the region’s. It re-frames Israel from a state to an ideological symbol, a context historically more susceptible to interpretation and mobilization than any political space.
It is important to note that statements like those of Ambassador Tom Barrack are not only read in the media. They are discussed in decision-making rooms as indicators of thinking trends, and perhaps as a basis for developing future policies. This is what makes such rhetoric extremely dangerous. It may become a new lens for understanding the conflict, redrawing it in the minds of the public and policymakers as a religious war rather than a political dispute.
If this shift occurs, the region may enter a completely different phase, one where the language of ideology escalates at the expense of the calculus of interests, and where chances for settlement recede in favor of historical narratives that outstrip state borders.
All in all, the real question becomes: does this rhetoric serve the future and stability of the region?
From my viewpoint, preventing the conflict from sliding into a religious war is the greatest challenge facing the Middle East today. Keeping the dispute within its manageable political boundaries is the only thing that allows for building realistic paths to understanding.
If it is left to be reframed as a conflict between two or more religions, the region and the world may enter a new cycle of confrontations whose cost and confines cannot be predicted.
Dr. Salem AlKetbi is a UAE political analyst and former Federal National Council candidate
