What, in truth, has changed in our region from Camp David until today? The question seems simple, yet the answer exposes the core of our dilemma. The Zionist project has never abandoned its first language. All that was said about a “peace process,” a “two-state solution,” and “constructive engagement” was, at best, diplomatic cover or a time-buying manoeuvre hiding fixed axioms of a strategic mind that believes force is the only language the region understands, and that politics is conducted not at a round table but from the barrel of a gun.
Arab leaders know this well. They understand that Tel Aviv does not act by the formula of “land for peace,” and that it has treated the “two-state solution” only as a public-relations tool—postponing obligations while entrenching new facts on the ground.
Yet a large segment of the Arab order continued to gamble on verbal reassurances, on American mediation, and on “red lines” that had no real-world existence.
Thus we slid, step by step, from a peace conditioned on withdrawal, to a peace without conditions, and then to a peace implicitly understood as submission to the arrangements of power.
From this vantage point, the arc stretching from Gaza to Doha is not a chain of isolated events. It is a test of how we read reality. In the Israeli imagination, the map has widened to treat the region’s states as open vital space—malleable whenever the moment allows.
Whoever has not grasped this shift has not understood Israel’s nature today: right is measured by the range of its aircraft and missiles. Whoever can restrain it should do so; whoever cannot must adapt.
If some still dismiss this language as a passing moral deviation by an ultra-hardline government that may change, a return to the writings of the founders and to the canon of Zionist ideology reveals something deeper.
It is a rigid structural vision that elevates the idea of “Jewish exceptionalism” above politics. From Ze’ev Jabotinsky, with his “Iron Wall” doctrine that embeds overwhelming force to strip Arabs of hope in confronting the Zionist project; to David Ben-Gurion, who saw acceptance of partition as a temporary tactic on the road to full acquisition; from Rabbi Tzvi Kook and his disciples, who forged religious Zionism into a comprehensive ideology that sacralises a mythical “Land of Israel” and treats settlement and the military uniform as a divine calling; to the generation of Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir, reared on the idea that the “Biblical land,” from the Nile to the Euphrates, is both historical right and inevitable destiny for the Jewish state.
These expansionist visions are no longer confined to books and synagogues; they have become policy on the ground, compounded by military, technological, and political superiority, and by exploiting the region’s fragility.
Netanyahu now declares, without caution, his commitment to the vision of “Greater Israel,” speaking of widening “security depth” to encompass vast geographies on the edges of the Levant and the Maghreb under the pretext of pre-empting unending threats. The context resurrects the Nazi notion of Lebensraum and the theory of breaking states into micro-entities, reviving schemes to fragment the region into “tribes and emirates” as set out by Oded Yinon, recycling the idea of Jordan as an “alternative homeland,” taming Egypt by weakening its army, and subsuming it into the narrative of a “New Middle East” required for Israel’s security to breathe.
To understand this constancy in Zionist behaviour, we must look to the intellectual architecture that feeds it. The project reshaped modern Jewish self-conception around three premises: the land is an indivisible historical right; Israel stands above law; and the Jewish collective is sacred, perpetually threatened, and thus requires pre-emptive protection.
At home, the Torah is invoked as a tool of mobilisation; abroad, the political language is secular and supple. Behind both lies a knowledge-media machine working for the long term—from classroom to campus, cinema to press, party platform to rabbinic sermon.
In execution, Israel applies a graduated strategy of eroding taboos and crossing red lines: it tests the ceiling before the next step; if no commensurate response follows, yesterday’s breach becomes today’s norm.
What is unfolding in Gaza is a stark example: killing has become an administrative procedure, displacement a logistical option, and siege-and-starvation a calibrated instrument of pressure.
In the West Bank, annexation, land-grabs, and Judaization advance in steady increments, while the legacy of the Zionist rabbi Meir Kahane is summoned—his hellish prescription to blow up Al-Aqsa and be rid of all Palestinians as an obstacle to the “purity” of the Jewish state.
In Syria and Lebanon, the front is managed by constant blackmail: repeated strikes dressed in the self-bestowed legality of “roving deterrence.” The same method shapes engagements with Iran and Yemen, reaching even to strikes on Tunisia and Qatar. These are calculated steps that gradually exceed red lines to entrench a rule of “violation without cost,” turning each breach into banal routine through long-breath management.
Add to this a view of the region as endlessly divisible along sectarian and ethnic seams whenever it serves the engineering of hegemony. Here the Zionist project meets American hegemonic designs in a functional union. Expansionist Zionism could not translate into material reality without enabling conditions—foremost among them the United States.
What the entity does today is not merely self-driven; it is the execution of an American strategy to control West Asia, to counter other power blocs. Washington seeks to grip natural resources (oil and gas) and tighten control over maritime chokepoints. Israel’s actions serve this strategy while sparing the U.S. direct confrontation with China, Russia, or regional powers.
American hegemony is a system for administering surplus power to keep the region usable. In it, Israel is more than an ally: a fixed aircraft carrier on land, an instrument to apply pressure whenever Washington wishes to adjust a regime’s behaviour or extort a decision—through a policy of “justification and management”: selective sanctions, conditional armaments, routine vetoes, instruments of economic, security, and military dependency, and “historic” agreements that enforce unequal integration while marginalising the core conflict. The “creative chaos” that shredded Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Yemen demonised any resistance, independence, or flicker of revival.
Yet this architecture does not operate in a vacuum. It needs an Arab environment open to penetration. The harsh mirror of 7 October and its aftermath exposed how feeble the Arab-Islamic body’s immunity has become, and how Israel functions like a germ that learns to coexist, draw energy, and recycle crises to its agenda.
Despite growing global sympathy for the Palestinian right, that momentum did not crystallise into an Arab or Islamic strategy. Humanitarian rhetoric—divorced from instruments of power—prevailed. At times, the victim was blamed; resistance was besieged in the media; and some even extended economic lifelines to the occupation—some, directly or indirectly, military ones—as if history began on 7 October, ignoring seven decades of conquest, replacement, and ethnic cleansing. Thus a moment that could have translated into Arab-Islamic decisions raising the cost of aggression was lost, and global momentum did not become tangible political gain.
Today Gaza stands as a stone in the gears of this fragmentation project. Despite an unbearable price, it has shown that the Zionist project is not an inescapable fate.
As Israel crushes Gaza, it sends a deterrent message to the region: either accept it as absolute master, or face total ruin. The danger is that subjugating Gaza would put the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Palestinians inside 1948 in the crosshairs of “final resolution,” while encouraging Israel to push its borders north and east, perhaps even to stoke civil wars and split large states such as Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. The risk does not spare Turkey and Iran.
Some say we should bet on time—that the Zionist project is fragile and liable to swift collapse from within. This is mistaken. Israel’s power is real and multi-dimensional: technical and military superiority; diplomatic flexibility abroad combined with ideological rigidity at home; a web of functional interdependence with the West, especially the U.S.; and a high capacity for long-term management.
But none of this makes Israel a historical inevitability that cannot be resisted. Its point of weakness is internal contradiction: a settler-colonial expansion out of its historical context, anchored in a theology that refuses compromise, a state that wants to be normal yet exceptional. The first line of defence against it is not recourse to international law alone, but the building of a counter-force that redefines the cost of aggression and restores initiative against the Zionist threat.
To build that force, we must first acknowledge a deep structural malaise in the Arab environment. The modern Arab state inherited from colonialism an overgrown bureaucracy at society’s expense, sidelining citizens from politics and decision-making; it failed to create a modern education system beyond rote learning that stifles critical thought. Jurists failed to transcend religious stagnation that reduced fiqh to ritual without an ethic of civilisation. Societies lost historical consciousness and sank into false awareness that recycles defeat as inevitable fate.
Add to that sectarianism, ethnic chauvinism, visceral politics; the crises of media and religious-political discourse; and the residues of the Arab Spring, which relegated the central cause to the margins. Development stalled; the nation-state was drained; repression became policy; oppositions failed to mature, to change, or to offer credible alternatives.
At the wider level, an Arab crisis of trust deepened—fresh iterations born of the Spring and its impact on Arab-Arab and Arab-Islamic relations. From the wounds of Iraq to Syria, from mutual suspicion with Iran and Turkey to border sensitivities between neighbours, a doctrine of “no one takes risks with an exposed back” has ossified into general paralysis.
Some regimes built their doctrine on hostility to any unifying idea, treating the notion of an Arab-Islamic world—home to the majority of two billion Muslims, most of them poor—as a threat to their interests and influence. Under the banner of fighting “political Islam,” they entrenched the primacy of the nation-state against the project of the Ummah.
All this made Israel’s task easier—controlling the stage and profiting from divisions until its project ripens—requiring no extraordinary genius to penetrate the Levant and the Maghreb.
If one sentence could reset our political mind and place a finger on the tumour before prescribing the cure, it would be this: the primary contradiction in this region is not with “political Islam,” nor with “sectarian differences,” nor with “ideological excess.” It is with the settler-colonial, expansionist Zionist project that has grounded itself in force and redrawn maps.
Second: the United States is not a neutral arbiter, mediator, or guarantor, but the organic patron of this project—the political, security, and economic umbrella for its functional expansion. Betting on an American safety net to prevent collapse is a strategic illusion.
Third: reliance on “Abrahamic” arrangements, sold as a shortcut to peace, is nothing but the engineering of asymmetric submission—postponing rather than resolving the core conflict.
Exiting this circle of paralysis cannot be achieved by moral denunciation alone, nor by appeals to international law exhausted by exceptions. It demands a response commensurate with the challenge. Here the British historian Arnold Toynbee’s “challenge and response” is apt: when nations face great dangers and the balance of power is against them, they return to their civilisational reserves to rouse their capacity to respond.
That response, in our case, must form a counter-matrix to the triangle the martyred thinker Fathi Shaqaqi summarised: fragmentation, dependency, and Israel.
- Fragmentation leaves each state alone before the Zionist project and its consequences.
- Dependency chokes decision-making and kills any chance of revival or independence.
- Israel exploits both to harvest the “legality” of facts on the ground.
The response rests on the opposite triangle:
- Functional unity that neutralises secondary contradictions and invests in the Arab-Islamic Ummah’s shared history and civilisation against an existential threat;
- Independence that frees politics and decision-making, founds self-driven revival, invests in people and civilisation, and tilts the balance of power;
- Mobilisation of capacities into a genuine project of comprehensive confrontation with the Zionist enterprise—moving from reaction to initiative.
This yields a practical conclusion: no renaissance project is possible without recognising that Zionism threatens not only Palestine but the region as a historical, cultural, and political whole. Not because Israel merely possesses a strong army, but because it is a trans-regional functional project that re-engineers the region and monetises its divisions—redefining borders and meanings whenever internal susceptibility appears.
Just as citizenship cannot be built without a unifying narrative that binds society and rallies energies, a regional project cannot stand without acknowledging an “Arab nation” in the broad cultural-historical sense—one that makes room for non-Arabs, especially Turkey and Iran, by virtue of geography, faith, history, and shared culture, and that underwrites regional cooperation and collective security.
No project succeeds while denying the grand commonalities that forged this geography over centuries. Without that unifying idea, our states will remain scattered islands, consumed by local contradictions while others draw tomorrow’s maps.
To avoid erecting supra-national legitimacy atop suffocating national legitimacy, this project demands a comprehensive awakening within each state—across education and research, media, religious and political discourse—grounded in recognition of Zionism as an existential threat. It must marshal society’s and the state’s resources against it by freeing youth potential and reforming the social contract. A regime that fails to face an existential threat, and does not express its people’s will to break hegemony, will remain illegitimate and liable to collapse at the first test.
No regime that fights its own people should expect victory abroad. Despotism and corruption are the most effective allies of the project we face.
Sectarianism, tribalism, and clan politics will remain time-bombs unless minorities are reassured and equality is entrenched within a national crucible that rallies around a renaissance project transcending secondary rifts. Only a just state can turn diversity into strength—and such a state is not created by decree but by opening political space and tying legitimacy to the ballot box and the competence of public service.
Regionally, lamenting institutions like the Arab League or the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation is not enough. They must be re-founded from committees of ritual condemnation into decision-making platforms—reviving the Arab Joint Defence Pact and expanding it to include regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, and even Pakistan.
In parallel, ambiguity around military power must end. Those who wish to avoid war must prepare for it; those who want true peace must build a deterrent balance that makes war the adversary’s least attractive option. What is required is a rational regional defence doctrine: treating security as a shared responsibility, not an isolated national affair; declaring clear rules of engagement; diversifying arms sources to reduce dependency; ensuring the sovereignty “off-switch” is not held in a distant capital; and localising defence industries under civilian governance that prevents corruption and links spending to measurable aims.
On the wider geopolitical canvas, the region cannot remain merely a theatre for great-power rivalry. The way out is not dependency on a Western or Eastern bloc, but to become—realistically, not romantically—a historical, political, economic, and military bloc in our own right, one that recognises the depth of the Arab cultural-linguistic bond and its Turkish and Iranian extensions.
In a world where roles are being reallocated among Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow, there is no room for those without cards of power. Arabs, Turks, and Iranians possess energy, maritime gateways, vast markets, and young human capital.
What is needed is a leap in education, research, and think-tanks that craft policy; step-by-step creation of eased customs corridors, a shared energy market, a sovereign cross-border development fund, and a technology planning council to localise knowledge rather than importing it forever.
At this junction, two examples show how catastrophe can be turned into opportunity: the European Union, which forged a renaissance after confronting Nazism, and China, which rose from a century of humiliation to an indispensable global actor.
We are neither of these, yet we are not outside history’s laws. Challenge produces a nation when the will to respond exists. As Malek Bennabi argued: Man, soil, and time charged by an animating idea—do not become civilisation unless carried by a people that believes in renaissance as a non-negotiable choice.
None of this can stand while some Arab and Muslim states insist on maintaining diplomatic, commercial, economic, security, or military ties with the Israeli entity—or with companies that support it.
Nor can the “challenge-and-response” matrix be completed without re-recognising resistance as national liberation movements whose natural, international, and human law guarantees the right to resist occupation—indeed to support them openly and without hesitation—as the first line of defence for the Arab-Islamic depth and a pillar of broader deterrence, not as local phenomena to be demonised; while binding this recognition to a charter of rules of engagement that protects civilians decisively.
As we build this project, we must not neglect the global public. The evolving international consciousness around Palestine is an opportunity to be seized wisely. Popular anger in Western capitals, the rising number of Jewish voices critical of Zionism, and the crumbling image of Israel’s “moral exception” in major media are indicators that wider international alliances are possible.
This is not a call to rely on others, but to present our cause with clear legal and moral arguments and with a rational political voice that neither bargains away the truth nor justifies the unjustifiable. We must restore the victim’s name and face through records, stories, and platforms; learn to speak effectively to Western student movements, to Jews critical of the Zionist project, and even to Christian Zionists in the United States—whose support is grounded in a politico-theological narrative—by showing the cost of that support to American interests themselves, while building smart bridges with social and economic blocs that do not share that theology but have swallowed its media narrative.
Some may say: lofty words in the face of a harsh reality. True—but the alternative is silence that legitimises collapse. We stand at a fateful juncture: either repair the political mind and internal fractures, or let the Zionist project complete its architecture of fragmentation.
We have tried neutrality, betting on outsiders, and investing in division. All led us here.
The opportunity has not vanished, but time is closing. Gaza proves that subjugation is not destiny. Despite the yawning gap in power, resistance has disoriented Israel, exposing deep structural fissures within its society, army, and security apparatus. Yet the absence of an effective regional hinterland turned a partial victory into prolonged attrition, giving Israel extra time to chase its goals.
Israel is, yes, at a moment of historic superiority, but also at a moment of unprecedented moral exposure since its founding. The power it wields will not shield it from slow erosion if faced by an internally cohesive Arab environment, regionally coordinated and intelligent in managing global ties.
What we have learned is enough to begin moving from managing defeat to managing transformation. Otherwise, we will gift the Zionist project the very time it needs and risk bequeathing future generations a defeat that will curse us. Nothing is harsher on history than a nation that knew but did not act; nothing is truer at the hour of trial than a nation that turns knowledge into decision, will, and measurable steps—whose state says: we have finally begun to knock on the walls of the tank.
