The Middle East has been changing since 1977, but it will return to being Arab

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "We are already changing the Middle East. Syria is no longer the same, Lebanon is no longer the same, Gaza is no longer the same, and Iran, the head of the axis, felt the weight of our power and spoke to Trump about the need to complete the victory."

Netanyahu is already changing the Middle East, and he seeks to complete the change, which raises the possibility of attacking Iran to destroy the nuclear reactor, continuing the war of genocide in Gaza, and starting to annex the West Bank.

But the credit for the beginning of this change is not attributed to him, because the change in the Middle East began in 1977, after the visit of the Egyptian President, at the time, Muhammad Anwar Sadat, to Jerusalem, and the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1981, without resolving the Palestinian issue and at its expense, which is supposed to be the central issue for all Arabs.

The change continued with the consequences of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Wadi Araba Treaty in 1994, the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the “Arab Spring” in 2011, which turned into an autumn and toppled several Arab countries, and finally the Abraham Accords in 2020. We are expected to witness another wave of normalization that includes a number of Arab and Islamic countries.

It is noticeable that the change in the Middle East does not occur in a straight and continuous line over time, but there is an ebb and flow, and there is strong resistance at times and weak at other times, but it is continuous and will remain, because this region is Arab and will remain Arab, and this explains why we are witnessing a move in the opposite direction of normalization as happened when the Lebanese resistance was able to liberate the south in the year 2000, as well as the stumbling of Arab-Israeli normalization efforts after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in the year 2000.

Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State, also failed to achieve the change she called for in the Middle East after the Israeli aggression on Lebanon in 2006.

It is noteworthy that the new Middle East can only be achieved by marginalizing the Palestinian issue and at its expense, as it is no longer the central issue for the Arab regimes, as well as implementing Netanyahu’s goal of achieving regional peace on the basis of “peace for peace,” “security for peace,” and “peace for the economy,” instead of “land for peace,” and on the basis of skipping over the Palestinian issue, where peace is concluded with Arab countries, individually or collectively, without reaching peace or a solution to the Palestinian path, and is accompanied by Israel’s integration into the region and its playing an increasing role towards hegemony.

This helps and encourages the Israeli governments to continue their efforts to liquidate the Palestinian cause and establish “Greater Israel.” Hence, the Arab Peace Initiative, which came without teeth or a plan for implementation, was approved at the Beirut Summit in 2002. It stipulated complete peace in exchange for complete withdrawal, as atonement for the events of September 11, and represented a retreat from the decisions of the Khartoum Summit in 1967, which raised the slogans of “no peace, no recognition, no negotiations” with Israel.

The Abraham Accords represented a new retreat from the Arab Peace Initiative, because they began normalization without an accompanying Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories. They did not encourage Israel to follow the path of peace, but rather continued on the path of war, expansion, and racism.

The creation of a new Middle East cannot be achieved without ignoring the reality of the region as a single Arab region, whose peoples are united by historical, cultural, political, economic and national ties, which requires its fragmentation and division into sects, doctrines and minorities, because if its unity is achieved, this means the birth of a major state that possesses all the elements of the ability to compete with the major states that share interests and influence in the Arab region, and compete for world leadership.

In the context of Western efforts to prevent the unity of the Arab peoples in one state, or even to create a kind of integration and solidarity, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed in 1916, which drew and divided the Arab states, and then the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, to separate the Arabs in Asia from their brothers in Africa, and to play a functional role aimed at keeping the Arab region captive to colonial hegemony through the continuation of dependency, backwardness, fragmentation and poverty.

Despite the Israeli successes achieved in Gaza and Lebanon, especially after the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime, the occupying state, as stated by its Minister of War, Israel Katz, still feels the existing and potential threats. Israel is concerned despite the moderate statements of the new rulers of Damascus, and despite the division of Syria between a number of local, regional and international parties, including Israel, which did not stop at annexing the Golan, but also occupied the summit of Mount Hermon and other areas under the pretext of filling the vacuum, amidst an announcement that it will remain for a period of time, and that it will not withdraw before meeting a number of conditions that ensure that Syria remains weak and divided and accepts normalization, in addition to integrating Israel into the region.

Israel will not be able to achieve its dream of being the central state dominating the region, because there are regional countries competing with it, such as Iran and Turkey, which will find themselves in confrontation with it sooner or later. If Israeli hegemony is achieved, it will not last long, as the Israeli era will not last long, especially since it is based on the rights, interests and aspirations of Arab and non-Arab peoples for freedom, independence, development, justice and democracy. The Arabs will rise after adopting an Arab project that will inevitably come in response to the growing Arab needs.

What exacerbates the matter and brings the Arab giant closer to rising is the arrogance of power and the blindness of national and religious extremism that dominates the right-wing Israeli government ruling in Tel Aviv, which believes that what power cannot achieve can be achieved by more power and that its expansionist ambitions are limitless.

Will the Syrian people forget the humiliation their country was subjected to when Israel took advantage of the moment of weakness it is going through to completely destroy the capabilities of the Syrian army despite the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime? What the occupying state is doing these days will be a pretext for the next Israeli-Syrian war, even if it comes after a while.

Will the Syrian people forget what Israel did by occupying about 300 square kilometers of Syrian territory, despite the new Syrian leader saying that what happened was in the interest of all countries in the region, and that the new regime is not about to conflict with Israel, and despite the fact that he did not condemn Israel for what it did, and was content with sending a memorandum to the United Nations several days after starting to destroy the Syrian army and occupy new parts of Syrian territory? This indicates that the Israeli goal was and still is Syria and keeping it weak and divided, not the collapsed regime.

Will the Israeli government be able to dominate the region for a long time? There is great doubt about that. Will it be able to resolve the conflict and liquidate the Palestinian cause, through annexation, displacement and Judaization, or will the Palestinian people - as they have done for more than a hundred years - continue to stand firm and remain on their land, and keep their cause alive through struggle in all forms until circumstances change and mature so that they can achieve victory? And in order to be able to do that, they must carry out comprehensive change in their incapable and divided political system.

Certainly, the annexation that the Israeli government plans to implement during the years of Donald Trump’s rule is not a viable solution, and if it succeeds, it is not sustainable. It is neither the goal nor the national option at this stage, as some Palestinians and Arabs imagine. Rather, such ideas represent a kind of surrender of another kind, “revolutionary, nationalist, or academic.”

Annexation does not make achieving Palestinian goals easier, because its stability requires direct occupation, expanding the confiscation and colonization of land, displacing Palestinians from all Palestinian communities (the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the 1948 territories), and keeping those who remain in densely populated enclaves, isolated from each other, competing with each other, and under Israeli sovereignty.

Responding to and defeating the Zionist colonial scheme is possible, and could include adopting a discourse of rights instead of a discourse of a two-state solution in the face of the complete Israeli denial and rejection of Palestinian rights, even at their minimum, and of all settlements, in addition to focusing on stopping the genocide, displacement and annexation, providing relief and reconstruction requirements, a reasonable prisoner exchange deal, as well as ending the occupation and embodying independence as a central goal on the path to achieving the rest of the Palestinian goals.

All of the above must be based on and proceed from adherence to the unity of the cause, land and people, and to the historical narrative and the comprehensive radical solution as an ultimate goal, without creating a conflict between it and any gain that can be achieved now or at any stage, even if it takes the form of a temporary solution, provided that its price is not the concession of historical, legal and political rights and the right to continue the resistance until all the goals of the Palestinian people are achieved.

Yes, to changing the adopted Palestinian approaches that contributed to our reaching a dead end, including fighting like what is happening these days in Jenin, despite the differences and variations in the degree of error and danger of this or that approach, and adopting a new comprehensive approach based on a new vision that combines different forms of resistance, and does not create a conflict between what can be achieved in the immediate term and what can be achieved in the long term, and opens the way for change and unity that the Palestinian leadership and factions have not achieved despite the genocide and existential danger that threatens the cause, the people and the land.