As it turns out, in this Alan Dean Foster novel I’m reading now, Drowning World, two aliens races are living side by side on a planet. One race is native to it. They are trying to drive the other race off the planet, and are getting weapons and tech support from a more advanced alien race wishing to keep the Commonwealth from gaining benefits from that planet. The native species attacks their neighbors by surprise.
That’s as far as I got last night, as I read this while watching news of the Israel-Hamas war.
Weird.