Which East do we want?

The culmination of Netanyahu's goals for the current Israeli war on Gaza and Lebanon is the creation of a "New Middle East." One hundred and eight years ago, Netanyahu's predecessors, Sykes and Picot, created for us a "Middle East" that was new at the time, divided the Arab world, laid the foundations for the establishment of "Israel," and created the Arab "national" state as a requirement for that, where the process of that renewal was completed in 1948 with its actual establishment.

But what we believed that the establishment of Israel was the culmination of the process of “renewing” the region or its completion, turned out to us later to be nothing more than “cutting the ribbon” for a process of endless renewal. Since the moment of its establishment, Israel began to change the geostrategic and demographic map of the region, occupying more Palestinian and Arab lands, reaching its peak in 1967. It doubled its efforts to displace the Palestinians and “bring” Jews in their place, and began an intensive process of “normalization” with the Arab “national” states.

Despite all that has happened, talk (and efforts) about creating a new Middle East have not stopped, since Bernard Lewis began doing so in the 1970s, through Shimon Peres and his book “The New Middle East” in 1992, Condoleezza Rice in 2006, and up to Netanyahu these days.

It is obvious that the West and Israel (imperialism and Zionism) are the most keen, urgent and aware of the importance of the continuous "renewal" of the Middle East. They are the ones who "use" it the most, misuse it the most, and burden it beyond its capacity. They are the ones whose goals are closely linked to this process of renewal, its continuity and permanence, to ensure easier and more effective "use". Renewal in the case of the Middle East is linked to use, nothing more.

What does it mean to renew the Middle East?

Talk about the new Middle East has been associated with the West and Israel. A quick look at the words, studies and actions associated with this indicates (in the West) a keenness to deepen the region’s dependence on the West. In Israel, it means seeking further expansion, the need to “enlarge” the small state, as President Trump stated, and increasing Israel’s influence and dominance in the region. Talk about renewing the Middle East has been accompanied by all of Israel’s wars that aimed to weaken and exhaust the Arabs and push them towards choosing normalization, which only meant more weakness and dependency.

Israeli officials make no effort to hide their goals of expanding Israel’s “borders” and embodying its leadership in the region. Before Netanyahu’s recent announcement that he was seeking to change the map of the Middle East, Shimon Peres had said explicitly that “the Arabs have experienced Egypt’s leadership of the region for half a century, so let them experience Israel’s leadership.”

The "New Middle East" in the minds of its owners means a new geography, a new demography, new international relations, new policies, new assumptions, a new prevailing culture, and new educational curricula. It is a reordering of the region in which Israel is the only candidate for expansion, while the existing Arab states are divided, new states emerge, peoples or parts of them are transferred (displaced) from one place to another, the cultural and ethnic composition of some peoples is tampered with, and efforts are made to change their awareness of themselves, of Israel, of each other, of their history, beliefs, values, and symbols. All this in order for Israel to dominate the scene, and to be considered the center of the region, the link between its relations, and its gateway to the world. In short, it is the actual inauguration of the Israeli "empire" in the region.

Here I find it necessary to recall a statement I wrote four years ago in the introduction to my book “Liberating the East… Towards an Eastern Cultural Empire,” which is… “The intellectuals and youth of the region’s peoples still have plenty of time to work on creating the supposed (Eastern) ‘empire,’ especially if these people realize, and most of them certainly do, that if they do not do so, Israel will work—and is already working—to establish its empire in the region, one that will further marginalize and marginalize its peoples.”

Arabs and the "New Middle East".

Although the "New Middle East" project is linked to the weakening of the Arabs and the tearing apart of their countries, they are the least concerned about it in the region. The official Arab world as a whole seems to either ignore the issue or identify with it. It is clear that no Arab is confronting this project except for two "forces" from outside the "state": what remains of the Arab nationalist intellectual elite, which rejects it by adhering to the current situation, which is in fact the older version of the Middle East that was new (Sykes-Picot), or the "resistance" forces in some countries, which are the only ones who confront it and stand in its face.

After the erosion of the Arab nationalist project after 1967, which occurred primarily as a result of the Israeli imperialist move to create a “new Middle East,” no Arab project emerged that thought about the future of the region and dealt with it as a single regional unit, which caused the “nation” to lose most, if not all, of its elements of immunity.

After Nasser, the Arab world no longer had leadership and it does not seem that it will in the foreseeable future. Ironically, the countries that claim leadership in the Arab world now were never nationalists, but rather were major contributors to the frustration of the true Arab national project through their “alliance” with imperialism and Zionism.

The Arab world, due to its “national” state and its consequences, its “modern” elites and their orientations, and their relationship with imperialism and Zionism, has entered a state of clinical death. Indeed, the term “the Arab world” has become a subject of controversy, and the issue of Arab national security is no longer raised. Indeed, there is no longer anything that justifies raising it after the doors of normalization with Israel were opened wide, and the “Arabs” have become part of the Zionist situation.

As for the "national" Arab state, which, to say the least, arose in an "ambiguous" state and in an anti-nation context following Sykes-Picot, it adopted isolation from its sister states as a "doctrine" and disavowed "positive" participation in any national liberation cause, including the Palestinian cause, considering it an unjustified "burden" or, at best, unrelated to it. Then it took a clear and declared turn towards the "enemy", the exception here being some during the Nasserite period.

The influence of the petrodollar, which emerged directly after the defeat of the nationalist project in 1967, was decisive in drawing a one-way path for the “national” state towards imperialism, through its role in eliminating the national bourgeoisie in the Arab state, and keeping the comprador and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie represented by the state’s administrative apparatuses to lead the state.

With the absence of the national bourgeoisie, or at least its weakening, the components of the true national state have ended, and the existing state can no longer be an incubator for any national renaissance project. It has contributed to marginalizing collective identities, obscured the concept of national security, and played a decisive role in negatively influencing its elites, especially the cultural elite, in their position on colonialism and Zionism and their projects in the region.

As for the elites, mainly composed of the army and intellectuals (the military and civilian intelligentsia), the petrodollar has contributed directly, or through the "national" state, to taking them to a place opposite to the natural place they should be in. The army, which should be a symbol of the unity of the "nation", its independence and sovereignty and the guardian of its national security, has become part of the comprador in the form of its direct and "exciting" relationship with the West and with Israel before and after normalization. The only thing that makes it different from the commercial comprador is its reliance on "bullying" in its relations with the market and with the people, instead of the "trickery" that the civilian comprador relies on.

As for the civil intellectuals, a large percentage of whom were not immune to the influence of the petrodollar and the state, some of them went to theorize about the "state" and its priority and isolation, and to "trivialize" any unifying action that thinks about "gathering" the elements of power, and it reached the point of seeking to whitewash the "enemy's" record by blaming themselves for the consequences of "bad" behavior, and they found themselves in the end arriving where they had to arrive, which is promoting normalization and engaging in it. Perhaps it has never happened in history that an elite has been "convinced" of its "enemy" as some Arab elites have done and are doing these days.

It is also important here to point out the great “service” that a group of modernist intellectuals provided to the Western Zionist project and the new Middle East, mostly unintentionally and indirectly. In the midst of these people carrying out their “revolutionary” work against the “reactionary” culture, of which they classify “religion” as one of its most important elements, they came closer to the “state” (the hostage and the mortgaged), and contributed to the dismantling of society through their “chastity” in dealing with “Islam,” which they considered an “incubator” of backwardness, and thus facilitated its presentation to imperialism and Zionism to use it against the “nation” in the form of ISIS sometimes and an Abrahamic project at other times.

Iran.. Another Project for a Different East

We do not need to struggle to acknowledge that Iran (and its allies) is the “main” force standing in the way of the Zionist imperialist version of the New Middle East project, not only because it has a different vision of the region’s future, but because it is the only one that has a complete project that opposes it.

The Iranian project is based on two issues that Khomeini established since the beginning of the Islamic Revolution: the inevitability of liberating Palestine, considering Israel a strange "cancerous tumor" in the region, and the necessity of withdrawing all foreign forces, fleets and bases from the region and leaving them to their owners to determine the form of their presence and their mutual relations. He considers Israel and foreign bases a direct threat to Iranian national security. Therefore, we must understand that Iran's abandonment, or more precisely the abandonment of (the Islamic Revolution in Iran) of Palestine is an abandonment of its own project before it is an ideological or moral position in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

It is especially important for the Arab political and cultural elites to know that the Iranian project rests on two "pillars": the state and the revolution. These two pillars are not contradictory, but they are not completely identical. The West, in its orientations towards Iran, assumes the existence of a gap between the state and the revolution, which it seeks to deepen and thereby overthrow the revolution. It is betting, through the siege and pressure on Iran, on inciting the state against the revolution, and showing that what the Iranian people and state are suffering is due to its "irresponsible" behavior. It considers that "riding" the state of the revolution is the best way for it to engage in its project for the new Middle East.

From the above, we can judge the Iranian project as an Eastern liberation project, Eastern in the sense that it is not designed to position itself within the interests of any of the major powers, especially the United States. It is a completely Iranian project. It is a liberation project in the sense that its declared goals are summarized in "purifying" the region (the East) or (West Asia) from all foreign powers present in it and controlling its fate. This is it, simply, and the matter does not require going far into the "alleys" of ideology and the "conspiracies" of history.

Arabs.. between two projects

It has become clear that the Arabs, both official and unofficial, do not have any project or even any special vision for the future of the region (the East), and they are basically, and based on the above, not in a position that allows them to think about any such project, neither now nor in the foreseeable future. Therefore, their role is limited, at best, to choosing how to position themselves with what is presented before them, although this is also questionable because they most likely do not have the freedom of choice, and they go humiliated to where the influential powers want them to go.

We are faced with two projects to reshape the future of the region, and no third: the American-Israeli New Middle East project, and the Iranian project. We are also faced with official Arabs who are complying without hesitation to engage in the first project, despite some of them realizing its direct danger to them and their regimes. And elites (primarily intellectuals), some of whom are indifferent on the pretext that they see no difference between the two projects, and some of whom pray to God to preserve the old (existing), and the rest are those who found in the opposite project what could form the basis for a different renewal.

If we exclude the official side, with which there is no point in discussing, since it has “instinctively” decided its position alongside the new (Zionist) Middle East, the most dangerous among the elites are those who are entrenched in their opinion that there is no difference between the two projects, since they know that there is no third project, nor is there any possibility of its existence, and in doing so they are promoting the first (Zionist) project out of “concern” for the self and for “independence and sovereignty.”

This does not mean that no one has the right to express "observations" or "reservations" about the "Iranian" project, but the rational approach to these reservations is not to put it on par with the Zionist project, but rather to appreciate it as a liberation project for the region and work to "develop" it through interaction and dialogue between all concerned parties so that it becomes a more comprehensive and radical "Eastern" project that invests in the energies of the "nation", as its peoples aspire with all their ethnicities and cultures (Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Amazighs, etc.) and in accordance with their interests in liberation, independence, sovereignty, and real development. Once again, if the peoples of the East do not unite to make their "East" according to their size, then Israel is ready to make for them and for them the "New Middle East" that is always renewable according to the Israeli size.