We had to wait for the results, foreign names and all. The race was run in the Middle East, and its headline was Eisenkot. "The situation in the region" hung on three Likud seats, or four for Netanyahu, or three for Sa'ar.
The way we waited for Israel's election, the world and ourselves, was comical. The whole world felt personally invested in the outcome: fear for the fate of a man who has ruled Israel for two and a half decades, at the hands of a politician whose name no one knew, Eisenkot. In Israel, crises always turn on a margin of three or four votes. In the lands of steadfastness, the rule is the same every time: 99.999 percent. And who was the man the world hoped would end Netanyahu's long tenure?
What can the Arab vote in Israel do? It can tip the scales for Eisenkot. Were the matter not so serious and so dangerous, it would all seem truly surreal. The Middle East, from end to end, is full of non-Arab names, fighting over Arab land. The most important is Qalibaf. As for the rest, in the lands of confrontation and steadfastness, every new arrival brings his novelty, and every arsenal its own steel.
The Middle East has opened up to itself so far that it nearly swallowed East and West together. Everyone looks for salvation in someone else's ballot box. Donald Trump seeks Netanyahu's blessing, and is openly given his support, and the ballot boxes of Washington and Tel Aviv blur together. The situation is the same, however it changes.
This patch of earth used to be called "the region." Our region, that is: our East. Now, from one end of it to the other, we see names we don't know how to pronounce, or what they mean. Likud, or Qalibaf, or the Abraham Lincoln. "Here come the non-Arabs," Sheikh Subhi al-Saleh used to tell his students. And now we must learn where they are headed, which government will be formed, and what Mr. Eisenkot's tastes might be.
From Israel's front, from the fronts of Iran and America, from every direction: here come the non-Arabs, as the late, ever-exasperated sheikh used to say.
