If wars and disasters shake ideas and convictions, how has no proposal that goes beyond immediate policy been put forward as this war rages on? The Levant is disintegrating, to say nothing about the exceptional suffering the Israelis are inflicting upon the Palestinians, or its humiliation of Syria and Lebanon and the losses it has inflicted upon them.
This state of affairs vehemently commands us to shift from the prevailing silence that is only intermittently broken by bursts of recycled old rhetoric, toward a discourse that reexamines and tries to come out with a divergent interpretation of the region and its conflicts, supplanting it with proposals liable to shock familiar convictions. All the more so when no one in the region remains convinced by the proposition of wars and resistance movements that had been the region’s traditional responses to defeats and challenges.
"Genocide,crimes against humanity,war crimes," as well as hostile actions and threats, are no longer confined to a single violent struggle. This struggle, which triggered the most recent war, might be the most acrimonious and conspicuous of the region’s violent struggles, but it is nonetheless inseparable from the others.
Our region’s history of collective crimes begins over a century ago; we come across it reading the history of Iraq’s Kurds, Assyrians, Shiites, and at later stages, its Sunnis and Yazidis, as well as that of the Sunnis and Alawites in Syria, the Armenians and Kurds of Türkiye, and the Bahais of Iran, in addition to the shrinking trajectory of the region’s Christian population and the near extinction of its Jewish communities. For this reason, it is crucial that we see regional issues beyond the conflict with Israel, and that we not treat this conflict, with all of its horrors, as a unique pursuit of population replacement.
It might be conceptually sound, and more practically useful, to incorporate this conflict, or what remains of it, into the broader canvas of communal struggles our region is brimming with and that have all but destroyed it. We now see the Levant, with its states and societies, shifting to a higher stage of fragmentation that offers Israel a share of the region’s politics and a say on its fate. For example, the Israelis now boast that they are ready to "defend" the Druze and Kurds of Syria, after having historically voiced similar positions regarding the Christians of Lebanon, the Kurds of Iraq, and others.
Amid a resurgence of talk about sects and ethnicities, and their historical suffering and the number of victims each of them has lost, our conflicts compel us to seek comprehensive regional solutions grounded in the profound unity of its problems.
As for those who reject this approach and insist on the uniqueness of the aforementioned conflict, they have focused their efforts on turning it into a singular cause and a transcendent creed, after having stood in the way of any political resolution for decades. To reinforce this notion of its uniqueness, Israel’s founding was linked to settler-colonial projects at a time when settler colonialism was abating.
Although a crime is a crime, whether committed by colonialists or by our "benevolent people," the uniqueness theorists present another testament to their profound proclivity for not resolving the issue. This approach, even when this is not stated openly, implicitly advocates eliminating Israel because it is a colonial project, a remnant of a perverse and unnatural phenomenon that has been rooted out. This idea might have its roots in the old slogan of "liberating Palestine" that, if it were in the currency of blood, would cost hundreds of thousands of lives in what would clearly constitute a terrible genocide.
Besides, the settler colonial label isn’t a perfect fit. Yes, there were arrivals of foreigners, and expelling and displacing most of the local population in 1948, but that does not mean these actions were linked to a settler project like those that, in the nineteenth century, fueled occupation and displacement. What we have here are individuals and communities fleeing persecution in Europe, led by a socialist and secular faction that saw transforming them from victims to oppressors as the solution to their plight.
They both fought the British and courted them, exactly like the Palestinians. When the 1947 Partition Plan was announced and Israel was declared a state in 1948, the Soviet Union had been among their foremost supporters and arms suppliers - the nation of "anti-imperialism" at the time. As for the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (it is translated to the "Balfour Promise" in Arabic to give it a conspiratorial connotation), it was announced because Britain sought to garner the support of European Jews during WW1.
Two years earlier, McMahon and Sharif Hussein had been writing one another to a similar end: Britain "promised" the Arabs an independent state after the war in exchange for their revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The difference, however, is that one of the "promised" parties managed to turn that promise into material reality and the other could not.
Moreover, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews - Eastern Jews who immigrated from Arab and Muslim countries - now constitute a majority of the Jewish population in the Jewish state. Once we add that a fifth of the population are Palestinian Arabs, talk of Israel being a colonial entity that is "alien to the region" begins to sound rather strange.
For generations now, Jewish Israelis have had no homeland but Israel. Their national language, Hebrew, is not the national language of any other country. These simple facts show how little understanding there is of the Jewish state, whose residents Hassan Nasrallah claimed would quickly leave because they are only loosely attached to it.
We live in a region where some parts want to "liberate" it from other parts. Experience and reality alike probably urge us to adopt a mindset that leads to a debate of the region as a whole that unpacks all of its issues - to a conversation that allows all its peoples and communities, including of course the Palestinians and the Israelis, to live in peace.
