Time and again, a pressing need to reaffirm the obvious reemerges: Israel is alarming the people of the region, and they should be alarmed, and not only for reasons tied to Palestinian rights and deterring settlement and the occupation of Arab territories. Added to all of that:
First, it is a mighty technological machine equipped with nuclear fangs.
Second, a hysterical security consciousness has taken hold of it, and this consciousness can turn genocidal at any moment.
Third, powerful global actors are committed to "its defense," to say nothing about ensuring its impunity.
Fourth, the social fabrics of our countries are frayed, and the consensus that underpins them is weak, which Israel can exploit to tear us further apart.
Fifth, its current rulers represent all the worst things about nationalism and religious politics, coupled with a crudely colonial inclination from another era to annex land and expel the population.
However, it seems that poor and worn-out ritual incantations about resistance to occupation, liberation, and decolonization, with constant reference to Vietnam and Algeria, cannot address the Israel problem. It is not just that times have changed, the structural differences between the forces involved in the conflict, and that the world changed and its equilibriums have shifted, to say nothing about the lived experience of national liberation, which is not very appealing.
In addition to all of that, the conflict here revolves around a single, small piece of land, and it is being fought over by groups that are highly intertwined geographically and economically. Accordingly, none of the forces can "go back to their country" as the French and Americans had done when they left Algeria and Vietnam and returned to France and the US.
Once we add the technological disparities, we find ourselves in a situation that we could describe, without hyperbole, as without parallel anywhere in the world.
Today, after a wide variety of experiences, both military and political, we are confronting a truth that has never been as obvious as it is today. Technological disparities mean that thinking of violence as a solution to this massive dilemma borders on collective suicide. Once we add the immense American and Western support being provided to Israel, "suicide" becomes too mild a term.
It is worth remembering, here, that even Mohamed Hassanein Heikal himself warned the Arabs against "butting heads with the American bull" in the late 1960s - mind you, Heikal was not in the "cowardly defeatist" camp but Nasser’s spokesperson and a key architect of his policies. It is also worth noting that those who did choose to "butt heads with the bull" at the time quickly found themselves embroiled - and embroiling the region - in civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon, before having to confront an Israeli invasion.
We also know that the history of clashes with the Jewish state led to disaster and weakened the collective consciousness, not to mention its aggravation of tyranny, whether by militias, states, or foreign powers.
What we can infer from this, at least theoretically, is that only a political solution can alleviate and tame our concerns about Israel. That is why drawing Israel into a political battle that leads to a solution has always been pursued by non-radical Arab regimes, and by the Palestine Liberation Organization since the "Ten-Point Program" of the mid-1970s, but especially after 1982.
Here, we are back to square one, where two theories that explain the entire history of the conflict stand out. One is the simple theory of the "Octoberists." It holds that neglect of the Palestinian cause and the abandonment of the Palestinians, who were left to face the occupation and Israel’s arbitrary violence on their own, led to October 7 and make that attack an act of national liberation from occupation.
The second theory is often censored and ignored. It holds that the region has seen no fewer than ten political attempts to resolve the problem, every one of them thwarted by Arab military regimes, with Khomeini's Iran also contributing to the effort starting 1979. These regimes have always found, in the Palestinian question and in the impossibility of resolving it, an alternative that compensates for their loss of legitimacy.
Over this long history of rejecting "half-solutions" and "conspiracies to liquidate the cause," and slandering the "Camp David conspiracy," the "May 17 capitulation," and "Arafat's betrayal," as well as the assassinations of Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian proponents of settlements, two shifts emerged:
On one hand, the cause became increasingly religiously charged, with the notion that the Palestinian struggle should not be "tainted" by politics or political solutions becoming increasingly commonplace. Intellectuals who aren’t worth their salt took on the task of spreading and mainstreaming this message.
On the other hand, there has been a growing sense that a political solution is not possible, creating weariness around this irresolvable question, which the Iranian-Syrian axis has used to veto the sovereignty of smaller and weaker states, and to further fragment their already fragmented social fabrics.
This axis managed, through the terrorism of Hamas, to destroy the Oslo Accords - an effort helped and supported by the Israeli far-right that assassinated Rabin. As a result, the peace camp that a majority of Israelis once identified with has been wiped out, and every Israeli government formed since has sought to take the extremism of its predecessor further and to do more to encourage settlement.
Today, the October 7 operation, which is said to have "put the cause back on the table," can be credited with successfully undermining the political process, maybe even setting it back over 20 years by smashing the "table" altogether and laying the groundwork for a second Nakba that is even more horrific than the first, in addition to validating the narrative of conflict promoted by the Iranian and Syrian regimes.
At the end of the day, we have ended up in a dead end politically and militarily, while the raging bull is growing increasingly incensed.
