Most of all in the Gaza Strip, but also in Lebanon and Syria, the options have been narrowed down to two, both of which could be named after the two men behind them, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. It is either the American “applying pressure” or the Israeli “being pressured,” per the ubiquitous epithets of the moment.
This erosion of choices primarily concerns the Islamist forces in Gaza that launched the attack of October 7, 2023, and their allies who waged the “support war” from Lebanon. It seems that both, for countless reasons, managed to drive their societies and their states - where there is one - to the same destination: a place of diminishing and vanishing options.
On top of that, the emerging approach to dealing with groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as measures taken by Arab states, European countries, and even far away as Australia, suggest that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis have dragged radical political Islam of all shades down with them; in all their wings and wherever they may be, Islamists have fewer and fewer options.
There may indeed be considerable daylight between Trump and Netanyahu, as some believe based on their dispute following Israel’s strike on Qatar and anticipating another potential rift over Syria. Or, on the contrary, they could be collaborating and coordinating closely, as others believe, pointing to the two men’s stance on Lebanon and the setbacks of the process in Gaza.
Regardless of everything else, however, the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria find themselves faced with two choices: Trump the “imperialist” or Netanyahu the “Zionist.” This binary was imposed by these countries’ total lack of alternative options and effective leverage.
The Europeans, the Chinese, and the Russians are all, to considerably varying degrees, not willing nor able to provide a third option, while the cards in the hands of the Levant Arab countries continue to diminish amid their failure to militarily and technologically compete with Israel. This chasm has precipitated, and continues to precipitate, the expansion of occupied territories in the Levant, to say nothing about the Jewish state's growing foothold within these societies.
This state of affairs, which could be summed up in the binary of “Trump or Netanyahu” - or rather “Trump, or else you’ll get Netanyahu” - is an extremely bitter pill to swallow, especially for the radicals who had never imagined they would ever reach the point of hashing out the tiny details in search of incremental benefits. It is apparent that the current situation should lay the foundations for judging the era of radical politics - defined by irresponsible hubris in addressing the Palestinian cause, solutions for it, and the means for achieving this solution - in its entirety.
A few decades ago, in an era when the radical camp’s ideological composition was very different, the debate was polarized between the theory that Arab unity must precede the liberation of Palestine and another which argued that the liberation of Palestine must precede the establishment of Arab unity. This debate soon opened the door to another: Should Palestine be liberated through conventional warfare waged by regular Arab armies, a “long term people’s war,” or guerrilla warfare? There was always someone there to move the “Hanoi of the Arabs” from one city to another, establishing it in Amman before establishing it in Beirut.
And when questions regarding alliances with foreign powers were raised, the Soviet Union would loom as the only actor that could be relied on, only for it to disappear altogether soon after. There were also always those who pinned their hopes on Maoist China, claiming that it alone would join us to the very end.
Those behind these lavish and self-assured slogans were extremely hostile to any grounded and modest narrative premised on an accurate assessment of the situation that suggests a course of action that reflects viable potential objectives. The only explanation for such rhetoric or action was a desire to grant treacherous concessions to Israeli Zionism and American imperialism.
Indeed, the radicals did not spare Gamal Abdel Nasser himself after he had accepted Resolution 242 and, after that, the Rogers Plan. As for Anwar al-Sadat, he was the target of vitriolic attacks that began when he expelled the Soviet advisers from Egypt in the summer of 1972, culminated with the Camp David Accords, and continue to this day. Amin Gemayel, for his part, has been on the receiving end of similar insults since signing the May 17, 1983, Agreement.
Building on different ideological premises and utilizing different means, the Islamists perpetuated, relying on Iran’s strength, revived unhinged radicalism in what could be called a “corrective” vision better suited to deranged behavior, more confident in the choices available to it and of the frailty of Israel’s alliance with the US. Accordingly, they concluded that more of the same - of what had brought defeat - was the remedy, and so they launched the October 7 attack and the “support war” that left them, and us, with the choice of either Trump or Netanyahu.
Having fallen so far from perceived - or dreamed - heights, and with the Levant becoming a floating object to which the laws of gravity do not apply, prudence urges stringent reassessments of this radical discourse and the history of radicalism in our region, especially if, in the end, the view that there is absolutely no difference between Trump and Netanyahu is vindicated.
