Israel and the New Eastern Question

The current events and the multi-dimensional wars unleashed by the “Al-Aqsa Flood” raise the need, beyond the current rebuke and glorification, for a comprehensive reassessment of what we should call the new or renewed Eastern Question from its roots. By roots here, we do not mean its past and beginnings, but rather the foundations upon which the modern Levant was built, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. It is clear to anyone who looks at the issue impartially that among these foundations is the transformation of Palestine into a state for the Jews alone, the displacement of its indigenous inhabitants, or their extermination, if possible, and the refusal to recognize them as a people, and then, beyond that, the adoption by the major Western countries of this state and its annexation to their Middle Eastern strategies in the face of the growing aspirations of the peoples of the region for greater independence and sovereignty over their borders, resources, and destiny.

This is what we mean by the Israeli question, which arose in reaction to anti-Semitism or hostility towards Jews in Europe, and at the same time, inspired by the experience of the European nation-state of the nineteenth century, with its racism and colonial expansionist tendencies, which produced the two major world wars of the last century. Anyone who looks back at history and the behavior of the Zionist organizations that took it upon themselves to lead this project will clearly see that the war of extermination of the Palestinian people did not begin on October 7 (2023), but rather from the beginning of the response to the Palestinian revolutions in the face of creeping settlement, with the full support of the British Mandate Authority.

Therefore, we will not be able to understand what is happening in the region, especially the consequences of the Palestinian issue and the wars that have taken place since the declaration of the Jewish state project, unless we look at this issue, of which the Palestinian issue was only one of the most tragic results and symptoms, but not the only one. We will see that this approach is what helps us analyze the dynamics that govern this larger conflict to settle the Israeli state, secure it and operate it at the level of neighboring countries and the regional system together, and the stakes that it entails, then the options available to the Palestinians and Arabs in confronting this project and its repercussions on the regional conflict in general, the Arab-Arab and Arab-Iranian conflict in particular.

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In short, Israel embodied the colonial solution to the Jewish question that had preoccupied Europe for centuries. Europe, and later the United States, could not have found a more effective means to consolidate its control and influence, and confirm its permanent presence in one of the most sensitive and important regions of the world from both geopolitical and geostrategic perspectives, than to break the will of its peoples and subjugate them. The colonial solution to the Jewish question meant that Europe, instead of overcoming anti-Semitism and working to integrate the Jews into their original societies as equal citizens, saw the establishment of a state of their own in Palestine as an ideal solution, as on the one hand it would free it from the anti-Semitism complex, and on the other hand it would transform the Jews from enemies into allies and a dagger in the heart of the Arab-Islamic region, which the most prominent Western thinkers saw as the historical opponent of “Western civilization.”

Thus, Israel, whether as a result of its racist national composition or its existential or structural connection to it, has become the most effective weapon in the hands of the West to suppress (and deter) the societies and peoples of the Middle East who aspire to break the shackles of colonial dependency and control and fly with its own wings. The more Israel succeeds in breaking the will of these peoples, the more important it becomes in the eyes of Western countries, and the more willing these countries are to provide it with all means of military and technical superiority and to identify with it. This provides the United States and its allies with an ideal tool to hold the strings of the game in the Middle East and impose their agenda there.

This strategic role assigned to Israel since its establishment is what explains its continuous and steady slide towards the far right, then towards the apartheid option that no Jewish democrat denies or ignores anymore, and it explains why power in the last settlement colonies in modern history went to the far right of the Zionist regime, and Netanyahu's leadership for nearly 30 consecutive years, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and with him all the peace initiatives and compromises, has been consecrated, and made it an exceptional state to which international laws, charters and legislation do not apply. This is what was expressed by its throwing all the resolutions of the United Nations to the wall and annexing the occupied territories to other countries and Judaizing them. This is what is confirmed today by raising the slogan of "absolute victory" and its counterpart "final decision", which calls for changing the maps of the region and Israel imposing its agenda on the peoples of the region and emasculating and dwarfing its neighbors from the major countries from Egypt to Iran and Turkey.

In this great and ongoing war for Israeli hegemony, and before it the American, which constitutes the real and most prominent history of the modern Middle East, the Arab countries lost many military battles, starting with the war of 1949, then 1956, then 1967 and 1973, and Egypt, the largest country in the Arab group, was forced to sign the Camp David Accords of 1978, and announced that there would be no war with Israel in the future. This is what actually happened because the Arab countries that protested Egypt's unilateral peace were unable to take any military initiative, and returned to join Egypt's unilateral peace, and cooperated with it to find a political settlement that the countries of the international group confirmed by their overwhelming majority, based on the establishment of a Palestinian state on a small part of what remained of Palestine. But what happened was, simply, the acceleration of the settlement policy in the West Bank.

To cover up their failure and withdrawal from the confrontation, the Arab governments developed an argument that turned the prevailing discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict upside down, stating that the essence and origin of the conflict was and still is the deprivation of the Palestinian people of a homeland or state of their own, and that what the Arabs were seeking, in their previous confrontation with Israel, did not go beyond helping the Palestinian people to regain their rights, and that the Arabs did what they could to support them, but they did not succeed, and that they must attend to their own national or local affairs.

This argument is reinforced by the announcement of the death of ideology and the necessity of returning to realism. The era of Arab nationalism, which has proven its failure, has ended. Every country must and must defend its "national" interests. All we can and must do is help the Palestinians defend their cause. When the Israeli issue becomes a Palestinian issue only, and not an issue of the fate of the Arabs and the Arab region as the Arabs viewed it before, working with them (the Palestinians) or alongside them and supporting them or not becomes a moral issue, not a political or strategic issue. Commitment to it does not go beyond the realm of human solidarity, just as is the case with other peoples and countries of the world that are in solidarity with them. In this context, successive waves of normalization with Israel came, starting with Egypt's Camp David and the Abraham Accords in 2020, passing through Jordan and Sudan.

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The collapse of the Arab defense and its surrender to the option of free normalization was a priceless opportunity for the emergence of the Iranian regime and the solution of its difficult external and internal problems together. In adopting the Palestinian cause, the new regime killed more than one bird with one stone. It reunited Iranian public opinion around a mythical program that makes the Iranian nation the leader of the struggle against the heavy Western hegemony in the region and its Israeli tool after the failure of nationalism or the Arab nation. It resolved the conflict raging within the ranks of the Iranian popular revolution in favor of the religious and nationalist right-wing movements by presenting an inspiring mythical program to re-establish the "caliphate" or Islamic imamate, and build an agenda for Iranian regional hegemony, which covers up its inability to formulate a social and political project, which it does not have the means to think about, nor the will to work for.

On the same occasion, he created a legitimate political, religious and moral justification for attacking Arab countries, penetrating their borders and taking their place in defending the Islamic world, the rights of the Palestinians and liberating their people from the hateful tyrannical regimes. Thus, he positioned himself and the agenda of Iranian Islamic hegemony in opposition to the project of regional Israeli hegemony, thus attracting the enthusiasm of broad sectors of the Iranian people and the Arab and Islamic peoples. This is the history of the Iranian issue that arose in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Arab alliance, and in response to the Israeli issue.

It is clear that accepting the fait accompli and the free official and practical normalization with Tel Aviv, as the agent of the US administration in the Middle East, did not open the gate of peace in the region or preserve the national interests of the Arab countries, which believed that retreating from their ambitions to form an Arab framework for strategic and political action would ease the burden of confrontation on them, and perhaps change Israel's expansionist and aggressive tendencies. However, it turned it into a prey devoid of sovereignty and will, and fueled, more than ever, the conflict over it and around it. The initiative in this came from Tehran, which found in the vacuum of Arab power and its collapse an outlet to test its weapons with the West and confront it on the Arab stage and at the expense of the Arabs themselves. It is waging war against Israel and the West on Arab land, with Arab hands and Arab money as well.

In this struggle for regional hegemony, Tehran, its followers, and Israel have not spared any of the religious, sectarian, nationalist, or racist mobilization cards. They have succeeded in turning the Palestinian cause, for which the Arabs have fought and sacrificed for decades, and which has become the most sacred and just cause in the eyes of their public and broad sectors of the international community, into a Trojan horse to penetrate Arab countries and highlight the negligence, corruption, and attachment of their governments to private interests, and to justify their aggression against them. In other words, abandoning Palestine, which is the other side of accepting Israel’s peace and free normalization with it, has not brought any peace to the Arabs, but has worked on the contrary to destabilize all their countries and destroy many of them in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen after Palestine, and the coming is greater.

Thus, the escape from confronting Israel created an additional bogeyman no less dangerous than Israel, and did not contribute, as the optimists saw it, to urging the Arab ruling elites to develop their social and political systems and invest more in improving the living conditions of their people. Rather, it created, alongside the Israeli monster, an Iranian ogre, which many Arabs today see as a more terrifying danger than its Israeli rival. It was natural and expected of an Iranian regime that was born under siege and controlled, due to its inability to formulate any national program for human, economic and social development, to seek legitimacy in policies of hegemony and expand its sphere of influence and control, and then to invest in proxy wars against other governments and against the West, which is besieging it by pressuring its main Israeli base in the Arab East. Just as the West used the Arab regimes and Iraq in the first phase to break the back of Iranian revolutionary policy, it will use the Iranian national spirit of revenge to abort the efforts of all the Arab countries in the region to advance and develop, and to disrupt any potential opportunities for cooperation between them, and to constitute a source of threat to its control or to its main base of influence in Israel. Just as the policy of igniting the Arab-Iranian war and its fueling by Israel and the West pushed Tehran to race to develop military industries, it forced the Arab countries, and the Gulf countries in particular, to spend heavily on armament and draw closer to the Western countries until the Arab Levant became the largest market for importing weapons in the world.

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What I want us to conclude from this is that we realize that issues of peace, war, and the struggle for hegemony and maintaining sovereignty or even the minimum level of independence of decision-making cannot be divided and confined to narrow borders and resolved within national frameworks, regardless of the strength of the countries, let alone when these countries are dependent, weak, and dilapidated. A serious policy cannot be based on the fact that each country lives alone, does not look beyond its borders, and has no interest in interfering in what is happening around it, as international relations are the source of the strength and weakness of countries.

A state, any state, is not built in a vacuum, self-sufficient, and does not live in peace if it withdraws into itself, just as a branch does not live cut off from a tree. Every state is a party to a regional system of interacting states that influence and are influenced by each other, and it is itself part of an interconnected international system as well. There is no state outside a geopolitical framework that guarantees security and encourages cooperation, and there is no stability, economic, political and democratic development for any state without peace and cooperation in the regional and international frameworks. Without that, the state finds itself at risk, just as is the case today in many of our Arab countries.

In our region, peace, stability and development cannot be achieved without establishing the foundations of a regional order based on clear principles, mutual recognition, laws, rights and duties that bind members. Accepting Israel’s exceptional status that places it above any law or political or moral consideration and allows it to act according to its own will without taking into account the interests of others, the rights of other states and their sovereignty, not only undermines the regional order and prevents its establishment, but also undermines the legitimacy of all the states belonging to it, and does not give them a chance to catch their breath and plan for any future, and deprives any people of enjoying an authority that represents them and expresses their will.

Regardless of our religious beliefs, ideologies, desires or aspirations, no regional system or state will be stable without its parties submitting to principles, commitments, traditions and procedures of trust and understanding imposed equally on all states. Any exception in this regard, as is the case with Israel, undermines this regional structure. One “thug” in the neighborhood is enough to spread panic, chaos and the spirit of human community collapse.

If the special nature of the Israeli state, the reasons for its formation, its internal contradictions, its ideology, its external connections, and the tasks assigned to it in return for its absolute support from the West do not allow it to transform into a normal state subject to laws, dealing with treaties, and respecting principles and commitments with any party in the region, then there will be no chance to build such a system. The ongoing war of destruction and genocide in Gaza for more than a year, and the support of its Western sponsors, aim only to confirm its exceptional status and its right to impose its own law, i.e. bullying, killing, expansion, and invasion on all countries, and to force everyone to work on its agenda of regional hegemony.

The war that has been going on for more than a year, and has gone beyond the borders of Gaza and Palestine, has proven that the West, which is betting on its mediation and efforts in Arab capitals, has no interest in a peaceful and pacific Israel, nor in demarcating its final borders. It is the West that originally conceived and created it and continues to provide it with all the factors of strength and military, technical and intelligence superiority, so that it can be the iron beast that works to terrorize the Arabs and destabilize them to ensure their submission and surrender to the fait accompli. If Israel had accepted the demarcation of its borders and concluded peace with the Arabs, even on its terms, it would have lost its function and ability to shake and destabilize the region, as its makers expect of it and as needed to confirm its freedom from any restrictions towards its neighbors.