In today’s world, it appears that the overwhelming majority of the so-called political leaders and their long- suffering subjects are collectively incapable of getting anything into rational perspective. From the democracies of the West to the hellish miseries of assorted dictatorships, autocracies as well as outright tyrannies, uneducated or ill-prepared public wannabes are filled with inordinate amounts of hatred fueled jealousy toward their existing conditions. Their no or uncreative solutions are the violent overthrow of the present with the unfeasible tribal perfectionism of the future, in which the sanctity of boundless egotism will surely destroy any, even remotely acceptable sanity. Hence, the thus engineered future will be incomparably worse than the already existing present.
Accordingly, the visceral reaction to the October 7th terrorism of Hamas has been twofold. On the one hand, an all consuming rage against the mindless barbarism of the Jew-Hating Muslim zealots has shocked the conscience of every decent person. However, on the other hand, there have been individuals as well as a sizable number of collectives that have identified with the joyous celebration of Hamas’ inhumanity as the proper response to “imperialism,” “colonialism,” “oppression,” “apartheid,” “racism” and even “genocide,” allegedly having perpetrated in saecula saeculorum by the Jews in general as well as the state of Israel in particular.
Meanwhile, the drums of further escalations are growing louder. The emotionally overcharged tensions have highlighted two related and disturbing trends in the greater Middle East and beyond. The first is the unstoppable spread of jihadist terrorism since the takeover of Iran by the ultra fundamentalist Shi’a clergy and the rapidly escalating warlike rhetoric of the Chinese and Russian leaders Presidents Xi and Putin against the West in general. The second alarming trend is the rising violence against the status quo because the ruling governments are losing popular support for their failure to bring the destructive jihadist terror down. These trends, combined with the paradoxical state of political instabilities in the region, all contribute to the enduring weakness of initiating reforms amid the prevailing conditions.
To add ideological insult to irrational injury, those who call themselves Palestinians are suffering from the twin diseases of the culture of self-absorbed victimhood as well as the destructive pseudo-religion of Islamism (not to be confused with Islam). The essence of the former is that the establishment of the state of Israel made the Arab inhabitants of this territory morally superior to everybody because Jewish oppression is the exclusive cause for their sufferings. The second narrative declares that the source of their enduring backwardness and the resulting lack of progress stem not from their failure to emulate the more developed West but is the result of the ungodly deviation from Islam as it was practiced in the seventh century. To the tragic misfortune of these misguided persons, these ideological cum religious pseudo-realities have become intellectual prisons of permanent victimhood that have prevented the overwhelming majority of these Arabs from moving toward the freedom of a better future.
The inability to transcend this self-constructed catastrophic sense of victimhood has unfortunately met the Soviet and later the Chinese anti-Western narratives, according to which, the road to progress for these Arabs is to embrace the Marxist interpretation of decolonization coupled with Re-Islamization. These mindless, ineffective and unproductive going round in circles, in turn, have culminated in the gradual decay of the Arab character by defining the losers of the 1948 Israeli-Arab War a “Nation of Victims of Western Apartheid and Colonialism.” Finally, to place the clowns’ crown on the top of all these pseudo-realities, the equally misguided Western academia perceived the emerging militant Islamism as a morally superior political movement to White Colonialism. With the ample financial support of the oil rich “brotherly” states, the self-defeating feelings of situational entitlement have grown into limitlessly militant and immoral exploits. In this manner, absolute adherence to one’s victim position excludes the ability to compromise and sympathize with the rest of humanity.
The Jewish Exodus from the Pharaohs’ Egypt could be a proper intellectual guide to the present situation in what has been called for centuries the “Holy Land.” The biblical “Forty Years” of secluded wandering in the Sinai desert was a time of reflection on the rejected past and in-depth meditation on what should replace it. Accordingly, the Jews concluded that making victimhood the existential foundation of any society or state does not serve the individual or the community well. In order to grow and progress, individuals and communities need to have a motivating positive ethos, instead of a self-pitying glorification of bottomless misery.
Clearly, the solution for the prolonged Arab problem in Gaza, the West Bank and in the countless refugee camps across the region is not the falsely nurtured “Two State” quandary. In this sense, President Biden’s foreign policy in the Middle East has partially been wrong. Equally, President Carter’s parochialism, President Clinton’s naiveté, President Bush’s inexperience, President Obama’s duplicity, all contributed to the nonsensical “triumph of hope over history” myth. Now, surrendering to the fanaticism of clueless terrorists is self-defeating too. Moreover, Mahmoud Abbas is an incompetent administrator and a delusional liar who is totally unfit to lead a state. Indeed, his most recent statements on Jews and the Holocaust make him universally a laughing stock.
The real solution is the path shown by the Abraham Accord and its diplomatic developments. There is no alternative for the gradual normalization of relations with Israel. Concerning Gaza and the West Bank, the 1967 status quo ante must be restored with realistic factual corrections, subject to bilateral negotiations. The former must go back to the Arab Republic of Egypt and the latter to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Jerusalem will remain the capital of the State of Israel with its eastern district reverting to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.