Set Your Mind Free About The Middle East
You’re looking at a 1963 photo of the poets Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qassem listen to the novelist Tawfik Fayyad, pipe in mouth, read from his novel, The Deformed.
They used to taunt the “plucky, little King.” King Hussein of Jordan, that is. He warned so many times of an explosion if Palestinian grievance is not seriously addressed, his pronouncements became a running joke, especially among those who loved him in Western and Israeli circles.
It was perhaps the vagueness of the Jordanian monarch’s ominous forecasts more than their frequency that left the skeptics unimpressed. Explosion of what magnitude and for whom, they might have asked him? After all, the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy is riddled with explosions of one kind or another. Israeli conquests, occupations, massacres, bombing campaigns, pogroms, sieges, settler violence, would all fall easily under “explosion.” So would the blowback. The stubborn persistence of resistance itself, whatever label you attach to it, is a form of explosion.
Yet, you couldn’t convince the doubters that at the end of this miserable path is hell itself––for Israel no less than the Palestinians. Because every new fait accompli, however ugly or shocking, quickly settled into a seemingly comfortable old one, and life just ticked along, specifically for the mighty. Over the course of decades, Israel appeared to amass all the material rewards of its transgressions and suffer no tangible repercussions––none anyway that truly threatened its status or gains or edge. Or future! Short of a blowup of truly catastrophic proportions, the common wisdom that Israel’s insulations were airtight and the region’s tolerance for loss and humiliation was bottomless seemed to mock the dire predictions.
If you had to put a face to this piece of fake wisdom, you couldn’t possibly do better than those of Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.
But we human beings are like that, aren’t we? Unless explosions are in the moment, appalling to the conscience, frightening to the mind, crushing to the heart, perilous to the order of things, or any combination thereof, the general impression is that their damage is small enough to be contained and shooed out of any consequential conversation.
Until of course the earthquake itself, when it becomes stark clear that all the outbursts were actually broadcasting the impending calamity. Then it’s a wipe out, first and foremost of the received wisdom that lulled reason, gave false comfort to silly delusions, and enabled the seismic implosion.
October 7!
It’s a marker in history now. Life before October 7 and after it. Give the common wisdom that anchored your perspectives about the Arab-Palestinian-Israeli story a little shove and see how long before it begins to crater.
Start with the fundamental piece that underwrote Israel’s narrative and progressively dominated the West’s political imagination about the region since 1948. On one side stood the Jewish state, a nation of heroic survivors of extermination, feisty, nimble, wily, democratic, thriving, brimming with ambition and strategic in achieving it. On the other stood the barbarians: murderous Palestinians and Arab regimes: autocratic, ruthless, blinkered, full of unfathomable hatred for the Jewish state, inept, bombastic in promise, feeble in delivery, presiding over hapless, backward peoples.
Every minor or major Israeli offense that fills its thick catalogue of crimes, including the current genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank, has hidden behind this apparently impregnable line of defense.
I could do better than the visages of Daniella Weiss, the so-called mother of the Israeli settlement movement and Itamar Ben Gvir, a convicted felon and the current Minister of Internal Security, in giving expression to this collapsing narrative. I could, for example, include Israeli soldiers singing and dancing to the sounds of slaughter in Gaza, the litany of genocidal pronouncements by every other Israeli official, settlers spitting on Christian tourists in Jerusalem and burning ancient Palestinian olive groves in the West Bank. Variations on these, though, have historically littered the airwaves and front pages but have done little more than poke holes in the Jewish state’s armor.
Israel actually boasts a face today that betrays its character, its beliefs, and its trajectory: Weiss and Ben Gvir’s.
In an interview recently, Peter Harling, one of the Middle East’s most astute analysts, eloquently contextualized Israel’s absurd measure of itself after October 7:
Israel also has a clear intention to make 2 million Gazans somehow disappear, while denying accusations of genocide. It is going through an extremely destructive moment of hubris, in which all sorts of fantasies are coming out: Israel will end the Palestinian question, bomb all resistance into oblivion, finish off the so-called Axis of Resistance, break Syria apart, push millions into Jordan, normalize with the Gulf and Lebanon, reshape the region, rewrite history, you name it. Most importantly, it won’t concede anything, will get away with it all, and can achieve these results without so much as a plan…
More than a policy as such, Israel today presents us instead with a dangerous imaginary, which has tragic consequences on the ground.
Whichever way it attempts to weave it, this “dangerous imaginary” is essentially Israel’s new storyline post-October 7: a rogue state proposing endless war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, even more colonization and subjugation, all imposed perpetually by sheer military force. You couldn’t possibly hawk this narrative with the steepest discount, even to your relatives and dear friends. Because, in the end, how do you sell death as a way of life?
To this momentous conversation, the official West is yet again Johnny-come-lately. Alas, the West has always been late to the party, when it comes to Israel-Palestine. But notice Western governments finally break their silence, however faintly, over Israel’s waywardness. They do so not because they suddenly have a moral awakening about its war crimes but because complicity is proving very costly.
The Jewish state feels so very awkward in this emerging moment––one which, paradoxically, it helped usher in. It must be very frustrating for the Israeli government to be more the casualty than the reaper of the latest regional windfalls. An utterly fractured Levant, a defeated Hezbollah, a new leader in Damascus desperate for talks, a retreating Iran with tentacles cut and defenses down, as anxious about internal yearnings for change as it is about external threats. Flatlands bar Erdogan’s Turkey. For Israel to tower so over the neighborhood and yet fail to sell allies on its vision of the new Middle East must be truly bewildering.
That President Trump himself would be the first to decline Israel’s invitation, opting instead for a rising Gulf pitching business deals and political calm is notable but perhaps not surprising. That he would find a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear file much easier, in the aftermath of Israel’s devastations in the Levant, is a paradox like no other in a region teeming with them.
By neutralizing Syria and Hezbollah, Iran’s two main regional cards, and exposing Iran’s vulnerabilities, Israel effectively localized the nuclear file and denied itself the veto card to a roster of direct and indirect negotiating parties, American, Iranian, Turkish, European, and Gulfie, all keen to avoid the one scenario Netanyahu is desperately peddling: war!
It’s a restless region, ours. Dizzyingly so. Anything can change on a dime. And probably most of it will. It’s interesting that we, in the Middle East, have caught on. Except for Israel.
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On Another Note