Whilst my feelings are aligned and equally disaheartend, I am surprised that people are surprised. As you say the Arab-Jew problem is perennial. But the new causes of tension have taken on added complexity, with Russia and China assisting Iran’s agitations.
Nothing has changed since Iraq - Afghanistan in that:
1. Battle for resources: Iraqi oil. Plus Afghan lithium & rare earth minerals (the biggest source in the world for Electric Vehicles, along with Chile, US and China)
2. Oil and gas distribution pipelines to Europe / Mediterranean and to the East in China
3. Military supply and access lines fornIran through to Hamas and Hezbollah
4. Iraq and Afghanistan, like Palestinians, Yemen and Lebanon, have Shia-Muslim supporting elites running them as Shia-muslim sympathetic countries for Iran, to help Iran’s Revolutionary Guard achieve it’s geo-political triple objective of: eliminating Israel and its people off the map, getting rid of Western influence in fhe region, and imposing/exporting the vicious, hard, fundamentalist Shia-Muslim form of Islamism onto moderate Sunni muslim countries
5. Influencing global shipping lanes via Suez and Straights of Hormuz, and thus global inflation
The only difference in this decade is that China and Russia are providing military, financial and political influence to it, as it suits their long term strategic agenda of also removing Western influence in the region, and grabbing the oil and minerals for themselves at knock-down, off-market prices.
Radio 5 callers just see “another war” and humanitarian issues, which is reasonable. They cannot seem to see the big picture, or are willfully ignoring it as it is a hard pill to swallow. Many simplistic or well-meaning people don’t want to believe that national political actors can be so cold, strategic, calculating and ruthless, and arguably inhumane.
The Middle East has been a geo-political chessboard for several centuries now. If people can switch on their awareness to this they will form
a more realistic assessment of how messy it is, and likely always will be.