Middle East Press On: Peace, Israel, Rabin Assassination, Political Violence: New Age Islam's Selection, 3 November 2025
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
3 November 2025
Only International Force Can Maintain Peace In Israel
30 Years Since The Rabin Assassination: What Kind Of Country Does Israel Want To Be?
Ireland’s Anti-Israel President: Connolly's Victory Shows Where The Public Leans
Stop And Breathe, Israel: Political Discourse Has Fallen Apart. It's Unacceptable
From Rabin To Tomer-Yerushalmi: Israel Hasn’t Learned From Political Violence
The Illusion Of A “New Middle East”: History’s Echo In A Multipolar Age
Palestine Exception, American Exceptionalism: Two Sides Of The Same Bloody Coin
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Only International Force Can Maintain Peace In Israel
By Hakki Öcal
NOV 03, 2025
I certainly hope that no country would refuse to be an international peace force in Gaza if asked by the signatories of the 20-item Cairo peace plan, as suggested by King Abdullah of Jordan. His grand-daddy told the Zionists during the partition of Palestine between the Jews and Muslims that they should not bother to demarcate lands for Muslims because he would have them if the Western shores of the river were given to Transjordan.
The grand-dad, Abdullah bin Hussein, was then the emir of Transjordan, a British protectorate, and later the king of an independent Jordan. As a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the rulers of the area after the Ottoman sovereignty ended in 1918, Abdullah I annexed a major part of the West Bank. This was the largest region marked to be part of the Muslim part of Palestine. Draining away the population of this land gave the Zionists, the British and the U.S. a major argument that “a two-state solution was not necessary.”
Now the current Abdullah of Jordan seems to be looking for ways to leave Israel (read, the Zionists) alone in whatever it is doing by evading the responsibility to create peace and safeguard it. I hope against hope that not only Türkiye, but all the neighboring Arab countries and Muslim and non-Muslim countries like Türkiye, Pakistan, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Australia, Malaysia, Canada and France are willing to be part of that force, and soon. The king of Jordan wants to know the mandate of the security forces inside Gaza. He hopes it is not peace-enforcing, because he thinks nobody will want to touch that. Somebody creates the peace and then his highness will help to keep it. He said in an exclusive interview for the BBC: “Peacekeeping is that you're sitting there supporting the local police force; Jordan and Egypt are willing to ... If we're running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that's not a situation that any country would like to get involved in.”
“Speak for yourself,” I’d say if the person who argues like that were a friend of mine (God forbid). It is not only cowardice and chicken-heartedness, but also a betrayal of trust. If Hamas is going to disarm itself and immobilize its fighters, the Gazan people need protection against the Zionist forces who are waiting in the wings to finish the ethnic-cleansing of Palestine they started in 1947.
U.S. President Donald Trump knows his peace plan cannot and would not create and maintain peace in Gaza. That is why the Trump administration is working to establish that multinational security force for Gaza. Despite the Israeli violations of the cease-fire, the Gazan people began returning to what was once their home. Israeli occupation forces began withdrawing from half of the occupied areas of the strip. But they keep their tanks, cannons and troops stationed on the skirts of the residential areas.
U.S. officials know how fragile the existing situation is; they are holding conversations with the countries involved about establishing that international force and deploying it almost immediately. The breakdown in the cease-fire last week proved the importance of the International Stabilization Force (ISF). Israel keeps refusing to begin the second phase of Trump’s plan, which requires the deployment of the ISF. The U.S. officials say they are afraid that Israel is going to attack anytime now to prevent the deployment of the ISF.
The U.S. Central Command has been talking to Egypt and Türkiye about helping Palestinians create a new police force. Türkiye has already expressed its willingness to participate. The Turkish Ministry of Defense recently announced that Ankara, a key partner in the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, is advancing efforts to establish an international peacekeeping force in Gaza. Turkish authorities reiterated that the second phase of the cease-fire agreement includes a further withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from Gaza. According to the document signed by the presidents of the U.S., Egypt and Türkiye in Cairo, the second phase also requires the creation of a transitional administration to be named the Peace Council.
But as usual in all matters involved with Israel and the U.S., the tail wags the dog. It cannot be “America First” if the other party is Israel. If it is theft of land, genocide and ethnic cleansing by Israel, then so be it. However, Hamas or any other political party sworn to protect the people who voted for it cannot leave its people to the mercy of a group of armed Zionists who not only stole their lands but also, for the last 80 years, committed all the war crimes known to humanity.
The whole world (except Germany) knows that Israel is going to restart the ethnic cleansing with any pretense it finds to end this cease-fire. Israel already violated the cease-fire more than 50 times, killing 47 Palestinians, wounding 160 others and arresting several innocent civilians. Israeli occupation forces blamed Hamas for breaching the agreement, of course, without any proof other than Trump’s endorsement.
Since the cease-fire took effect, the Israeli army has pulled out from most parts of Gaza City, except for the Shejaya neighborhood and parts of the al-Tuffah and Zeitoun areas. Trump simply observes the situation without forcing Israel to obey the conditions he accepted on its behalf. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes any Turkish military presence in Gaza, but it is doubtful if Trump pushes his buddy “to agree and to behave” about Türkiye’s participation in the ISF. An “unnamed” U.S. official said recently, “The Turks were very helpful in getting the Gaza deal, and Netanyahu's bashing Türkiye has been very counterproductive,” according to Arutz Sheva, Israel’s national news organization.
Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye told the U.S. that Hamas could agree to the deployment of the ISF. But the U.S. diplomats know very well that without the Turks, Hamas would not agree to the deployment of the ISF conducting missions inside Gaza. As the “king” of Jordan is afraid of, this is not sitting down with Palestinians and teaching them a couple of police routines; it is a job to enforce peace on two sides, one of them is known not wanting any of it.
As attested in the dairies of David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Zionist Jewish army that started the ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the indigenous Muslim peasants and townspeople of Palestine had welcomed the European Jewish immigrants, shared their food and never assumed that armed Zionists would occupy their homes, dispossess and expel them to Lebanon and Jordan.
Thanks to Abdullah I, the emir of Transjordan, they would lose a country to Zionists but find a roof over their heads. His grandson seems willing to leave them to the mercy of them altogether.
https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/only-international-force-can-maintain-peace-in-israel
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30 Years Since The Rabin Assassination: What Kind Of Country Does Israel Want To Be?
By Ofek Meir
November 3, 2025
“Great is the pain, and great is the shame – and which of the two is greater, say, O Man.” – H. N. Bialik.
Today marks 30 years since the assassination of prime minister and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin.
A day that once symbolized the peak of a fierce debate over Israel’s path carries an even deeper and more painful meaning this year in the shadow of the Israel-Hamas War, a war that wounded the very heart of Israeli society on many levels.
This year, more than ever, Rabin Memorial Day is an invitation to a meaningful educational conversation about our collective responsibility, as a society and as an educational community, to shape our character, to heal, and to take responsibility for Israel’s future.
Jewish tradition teaches us to distinguish between disputes for the sake of Heaven and those that are not. It argues that disagreement isn’t an obstacle but the very basis for life and growth, so long as we uphold respect, attentiveness, and humanity.
The sayings, “These and those are the words of the living God” and “There are 70 faces to the Torah,” are not only interpretive principles; they are the foundations of a culture of tolerance, pluralism, and love of humankind.
Especially in this era, when public discourse is saturated with fear, pain, and, at times, even hatred, we are called to return to these fundamentals and make the school community a space for mending, hope, and honest, brave human communication.
Importance of education
Education is fundamentally political, defined not by trivial power struggles, but by its deeper purpose: nurturing citizens capable of critical thought, ethical action, and moral responsibility. Our central mission is to help students navigate their world, pose challenging questions, take principled and courageous stands, and discover meaning in their existence.
Even today, 30 years after the assassination, we must remember that a humanistic education that avoids difficult questions forfeits its very soul. We must not shy away from addressing moral, social, and civic issues; we must talk about ethics, democracy, human rights, equality, and justice. Taking a clear stand against exclusion, racism, and violence is not only a right; it is a moral and educational duty.
Yitzhak Rabin's message at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony holds immense relevance today. His definition of the ultimate safeguard for human life remains a vital call to action: “There is only one radical means of sanctifying human life: not armored plating, not tanks, not planes, or concrete fortresses. The one radical solution is peace. Peace safeguards the lives of those who fight for it, and it preserves the lives of civilians.”
These are not merely political statements; they express a profound moral vision that the ultimate purpose of our shared existence is to protect our humanity, even in times of war.
"What kind of country do we wish to be?"
The Israel-Hamas War shook us all, revealing both the fragility of our existence and the immense resilience, solidarity, and compassion that emerged from Israeli civil society at its finest. Amid the pain, a fundamental question arises anew: What kind of country do we wish to be?
And within our schools: What kind of graduates do we seek to nurture?
Our education system bears the enormous responsibility of shaping a generation capable of disagreement without hatred, holding to truth without harming others, and believing that our diversity is itself a source of life and blessing.
Rabin expressed this spirit of human dignity and national pride in his address after the Six Day War, when he served as IDF chief of staff:
“It is the right of the people of Israel to live their lives in their state, in peace and security, as a free and independent nation... a people who rise to the occasion in times of crisis, prevailing over every enemy through their moral, spiritual, and emotional strength.”
The true strength of a nation lies not only in its power but in its spirit and moral integrity. As the prophet Zechariah taught: “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit,’ said the Lord of Hosts.” (Zechariah 4:6)
Hope, peace, and shared responsibility
In Rabin’s final speech, delivered just before he was assassinated, he declared:
“Violence erodes the basis of Israeli democracy. It must be condemned, denounced, and isolated. This is not the way of the State of Israel.”
At this moment, three decades later, with Israeli society once more facing the abyss, our duty is to continue educating for dialogue, mutual listening, shared responsibility, hope, and peace. This mission is rooted in the profound conviction that every human being is created in the image of God, making education the truest instrument for repairing the world (tikkun olam).
May the people of Israel forever cherish the memory of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, of blessed memory. May God remember the soul of Yitzhak, son of Rosa and Nehemiah Rabin, leader, soldier, statesman, and dreamer, who was tragically torn from the world of action and vision by the bullets of one of our own.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872443
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Ireland’s Anti-Israel President: Connolly's Victory Shows Where The Public Leans
By Neville Teller
November 3, 2025
Last Sunday, the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly for Catherine Connolly as their new president. Receiving 63% of first-preference votes, she broke a record in Irish presidential election history and won a landslide victory.
Connolly, a left-wing politician with a history of pro-Palestinian advocacy and anti-Israel invective, is one of Europe’s most outspoken critics of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. She has labelled Israel “a terrorist state,” asserted that “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza,” and has pledged to “stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people as long as I have breath in my body.”
In speeches before her election, she condemned Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a war crime, but criticized the Irish government and EU institutions for “standing idly by” and failing to enforce the Genocide Convention against Israel. She called for sanctions.
Approving the recent recognition of Palestinian statehood by a clutch of governments, she disagreed with those who insisted that Hamas should be excluded from the future governance of Gaza. She said it is “not for” foreign leaders like UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to dictate who governs Palestinians, maintaining that “Hamas is part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” having been “democratically elected.”
Her stance on Gaza, Hamas, and Israel featured prominently during her presidential campaign. It led, inevitably, to strong opposition from Jewish and pro-Israel voices. Even some political allies distanced themselves from her comments.
Irish support for Palestinians
Those opposing her views clearly had only a minimal effect on the result of the election. What Connolly’s overwhelming victory clearly demonstrates is the immensely strong pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel current in Irish public opinion.
For decades, the Irish people and their leaders have appeared fixated on the notion that the situation, in what was once Mandate Palestine, is a sort of reiteration of their own struggle for independence.
Most Irish politicians and commentators seem blind to the historic and inextricable connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and the fact that on July 24, 1922, the Council of the League of Nations voted unanimously in favor of establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Nor that on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to divide Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. In short, that Israel’s legitimacy is solidly grounded in international law.
The majority of Irish opinion regards the Palestinian Arabs as a Middle East version of themselves, struggling against ruthless colonialist settlers – the English in their case, Israel as regards the Palestinians.
Their own unhappy history bolsters their myopic and misguided view of the situation, devoid as it is of any empathy with the centuries of persecution suffered by the Jewish people, the consequent rise of Zionism, and the UN-endorsed establishment of Israel after 2,000 years of the Jewish people’s stateless exile.
``Recognition of PLO
Ireland recognized the State of Israel shortly after its creation in 1948, but was cautious in establishing formal diplomatic relations. It allowed Israel to open an embassy in Dublin only in 1993 – and was the last EU member to do so.
On the other hand, Ireland was the first EU country to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization officially. It did so in 1980, ignoring the indisputable fact that by then the PLO and its affiliates were deeply mired in horrific acts of terror across the world, including airline hijackings, hostage killings, and the Munich Olympics massacre. In 1980, the PLO conducted cross-border attacks from Jordan, bombings, and assaults on civilian targets in Israel and the West Bank.
This may have registered less of an impact in Ireland than elsewhere, because by 1980, terrorism already had been a norm on the Irish political scene for some 20 years.
In 1920, longstanding religious, political, and cultural differences in Ireland between the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority, living mostly in its six northeastern counties, led to the Government of Ireland Act, which partitioned the island. In 1949, the south became an independent republic, while Northern Ireland remained part of the UK.
Civil rights movements in Northern Ireland in the 1960s sought equal rights for Catholics. They were met with a violent backlash from Protestant groups loyal to Britain, and harsh policing by the Protestant-dominated government. The old Irish Republican Army (IRA) split apart, producing the Provisional IRA, which adopted armed struggle as a means to defend Catholic communities and force the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland.
IRA and PLO connections
There are documented connections between the IRA (and its Provisional offshoot) and Palestinian terrorist organizations, particularly the PLO. The IRA and PLO established contact in the late 1960s, with IRA members reportedly receiving training alongside Palestinian militants in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
The PLO provided the Irish militants with expertise in guerrilla tactics, explosives, and urban terrorism strategies, later put to use when the Provisional IRA spread its terrorist activities to mainland Britain.
The Provisional IRA’s campaign of bombings, assassinations, and guerrilla warfare peaked during the 1970s and early 1980s. This was the height of “The Troubles,” as violence spread between republicans, loyalists, and British forces, leading to hundreds of deaths.
Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, active in both parts of Ireland, has for decades expressed support for the Palestinian cause, and Irish-Palestinian solidarity is regularly invoked in public discourse across Ireland.
Nevertheless, as the conflict gradually subsided in the 1990s due to exhaustion on all sides, the Sinn Féin party dedicated itself to pursuing Irish unity through negotiation. Effective British counterterrorism and declining public support for violence culminated, after many months of painstaking discussion, in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which established power-sharing in Northern Ireland and effectively ended the armed campaign.
It has often been suggested that this Republican-Loyalist détente should act as a template for resolving the perennial Israel-Palestine dispute. However, there is a crucial difference: in Northern Ireland, neither side aimed to utterly eliminate the other, in contrast to Fatah and Hamas, which have historically sought to annihilate Israel.
If the Trump peace plan, which all sides have nominally accepted, manages to bypass that obstacle, a pathway to a permanent resolution of the dispute may yet emerge.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872442
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Stop And Breathe, Israel: Political Discourse Has Fallen Apart. It's Unacceptable
By Zvika Klein
November 2, 2025
Open X/Twitter on a night like this, and you can feel the poison in real time. That is our unfortunate Israeli reality. A family sits and tries to breathe, while our social media feeds are fueled by metaphorical gasoline.
Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was found Sunday night after hours of searching in Tel Aviv. I will not be discussing the allegations or timelines tonight.
It would be insensitive on a night like this and would also miss the point. For context only: she is the IDF’s very recent former chief lawyer, the Military Advocate General who has sat at the center of our hardest arguments since October 7.
If the allegations about her conduct are true, it is a very serious incident for the military justice system and for public trust. That can be investigated properly. But even if a public servant is suspected of wrongdoing, did her family do anything wrong? Did her children? Her spouse? Probably not. Yet Israel’s political anger keeps crossing the garden gate.
Many have said that part of what pushed Ron Dermer to step down as strategic affairs minister was the drumbeat outside his home, at times with rhetoric aimed at him and his family. Did they do anything wrong? Of course not.
Those demonstrations did not stop even after Dermer led the negotiations that brought the remaining live hostages home and the bodies of most of the others. Both Dermer and Tomer-Yerushalmi chose public service when they could have made far more in the private sector. Their families have paid a price. So have the families of many others.
Obviously, I’m not comparing the two when it comes to their actions. I’m not aware of any criminal allegations against Dermer. In fact, he is a true civil servant, without any ego or need to prove that what he thinks is right is, in fact, so.
Making mistakes
Look at a small sample of what Sunday produced on X. Shikma Bressler posted, and then deleted, the following: “Those who incited against [Yitzhak] Rabin now control the police. Under this disgusting pressure, the army’s chief prosecutor made a mistake. Make no mistake, it is the same ideology that led to Rabin’s assassination that pushed the chief prosecutor to death. May her memory be a blessing.”
Walla then reported that the police commissioner instructed aides to examine opening an investigation into Bressler on suspicion of incitement and obstruction of justice following the post.
Tech activist Moshe Radman Abutbul wrote, before it was known that Tomer-Yerushalmi was alive and well: “I pray this did not really happen and that she is alive, but what we can already say is this: among sane, normal people, there is such a thing as conscience and morality. In Israel’s government, with its 2,000-plus murdered and its 80 ministers and MKs, there is none. Tonight, each and every one should do serious soul-searching.”
MK Naama Lazimi blasted the police response from the same direction: “A police commissioner who decides on a night like this to investigate Shikma Bressler and not others is a political commissioner, a yes man who has lost his way. A fully political police. The dictatorship will not pass. Hand out jobs to all the cronies, and we will rise, struggle, and win. There is no other option.”
And Likud Spokesperson Guy Levy demanded: “The attorney-general must be arrested and taken into interrogation tonight.”
This is what passes for debate while a family sits and tries to catch its breath.
I will not pretend this is limited to one camp. Over the last two to three years, the battlefield has shifted from city squares to suburban streets and school gates, and the language has become increasingly harsh.
Think about Minister Amichai Chikli’s children stepping off their school bus to find a sticker waiting for them, “Chikli, you are not welcome here,” next to a banner calling their father “the minister of abandoning the hostages.”
Think about nights outside Dermer’s home with chants like “forty-eight hostages, zero achievements.” The message is political, but the setting is personal. Very personal.
Think about a residential street in Modi’in where tires burned outside Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s building and neighbors found the entryway blocked by drums and vuvuzelas.
Think about the Tel Aviv block where Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara lives, briefly turned into a call and response across a police line, “Gali, the people are with you,” answered by, “No one elected you, go home now.”
Think about a Saturday at the gate to Shikma Bressler’s moshav in the Jezreel Valley, where activists promised she would “feel what it is when they block your roads,” because the strategy was to move the fight to the home front.
Think about a court opinion in cases around protests at MK Simcha Rothman’s home that had to say something so simple: Do not film minors. His children. If a judge has to write that, the red line is already behind us.
An internal world war three
How can it be that we have become so divided just a bit more than two years after October 7?
How can it be that October 6, 2023, has become the norm for our conversations, two political camps shouting at each other without addressing facts and details?
This is frightening. This is bad. I have written before about the war between our two political camps and their leadership. The left, secular, and center will do anything possible to prove that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the father of all evil, that he thinks only of himself and his political survival, not ours.
The other side tries to show that the Left is no longer Zionist, that Gali Baharav-Miara and the president of the Supreme Court want to take over Israel by running a deep state.
Let me tell you. There is a bit of truth on both sides. But I do not care, because this is not the way human beings should behave. This is not the way Judaism teaches us to manage our conflicts.
While these prominent Israelis fight an internal world war three, people along the way are hurt. Politicians, judges, government officials, journalists, and most importantly, the families of these individuals.
Now, imagine what is going through the families of those who have been in the public sphere for the past two years. Imagine the messages, the threats, the looks in the supermarket, the quiet at school pickup, the small humiliations that pile into dread. What kind of daily life is that?
I would never, in my wildest dreams, incite against a public figure in the ways we have seen recently. Believe me, I have a lot to say. But did anyone’s children do anything wrong? Of course not. Those who choose the public arena know they will be criticized and fought against. As long as it is civil, respectful, and does not violate people’s privacy and safety, it can be acceptable. Where we are now is not acceptable, not one bit.
We need to denounce violence and incitement. We need to try to contain our emotions or take our frustrations out in other ways.
We live in a pressure cooker in Israel in 2025. It is tense and hectic. Only months ago, we were still running into bomb shelters, fighting on seven fronts.
Take a moment to breathe
Nerves are shredded. There is no excuse. Whatsoever. Stop. Everyone. Take a moment to breathe.
If we want good people, quality leaders, we cannot treat them like garbage, even when we fiercely disagree. We need to try to believe in our institutions. It is not easy. I know. But if we do not, if there is anarchy, if we continue hating each other and fighting like children, then, God forbid, a different version of October 7 may repeat itself very soon.
Tomer-Yerushalmi was found. That is the headline. The subhead needs to be ours. We will argue as citizens, not as mobs. We will keep our protests public. We will keep children out of it. Only then will there be a country worth arguing about tomorrow.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872501
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From Rabin To Tomer-Yerushalmi: Israel Hasn’t Learned From Political Violence
By David Brinn
November 2, 2025
In the days and weeks after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the level of discourse in the country was almost civil. The complete shock that a Jewish Israeli could pick up a gun and murder the leader of the Jewish state froze people in their tracks.
There was talk of conciliation, of lowering the flames, of putting a lid on the culture of incitement that had risen hand in hand with the momentum toward the Oslo-era two-state solution, of how something like this must never be allowed to happen again.
Of course, it was short-lived. The Left collectively began to blame the Right for Yigal Amir’s act, and the Right continued to rail against efforts to engage the Palestinian Authority, accusing its advocates of being traitors.
But, in the ensuing years, as the issues have evolved and the shouted words revised and refined, whenever the trajectory appears to be heading toward political violence, someone will bring up Rabin’s assassination and, for a moment, tensions go back to a simmering level.
So, instead, we’ve learned to conduct personal attacks and character assassinations against those we oppose. We trespass on their lives by holding protests outside their homes, whether it be Yifat Tomer-Yerusalmi, Yariv Levin, or Ron Dermer.
This time, the results of those assaults could have been deadly.
We have learned nothing
Thirty years later, the tools of incitement may have been altered, but they have the same effect as bullets in the back.
The incitement against Tomer-Yerushalmi proves that in 30 years, we have learned nothing.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872499
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The Illusion Of A “New Middle East”: History’s Echo In A Multipolar Age
by Eko Ernada
November 2, 2025
Every few decades, the phrase “New Middle East” resurfaces like a mirage on the political horizon — shimmering, promising, and always just out of reach.
It has been invoked by imperial officials, Cold War strategists and modern technocrats alike. The language changes — from “modernisation” to “stability,” from “peace process” to “normalisation” — yet the promise remains the same: that the region can be redesigned into order.
But history is not so easily redrawn. As Marc Lynch argued in his recent Foreign Affairs essay, “The Fantasy of a New Middle East” (October 2025), this illusion persists because it flatters those who believe they can manage the region’s destiny. The fantasy lies not in the desire for peace, but in the conviction that peace can be imposed without justice — that the Middle East can be stabilised from above while its people are silenced below.
Illusions of order: From Sykes–Picot to Silicon Wadi
The dream of remaking the Middle East is older than its modern borders. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, Britain and France divided its lands under the Sykes–Picot Agreement, drawing lines across deserts and tribes as if geography were a board game. They promised civilisation and order but delivered dependency and dislocation.
The states they created — Iraq, Syria, Jordan — were less nations than experiments in external control. Beneath the veneer of modernity, revolt simmered.
The Iraqi uprisings of 1920, the Syrian Revolt of 1925 and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 all testified to a single truth: that maps drawn for others’ interests cannot hold a people’s loyalty.
When the European empires faded, the United States inherited the same mission under a different banner: development, security and peace. Washington’s post-war architecture — alliances, aid and bases — sought to contain communism and protect oil routes. Yet every attempt to engineer stability produced resistance.
Nasser’s Egypt championed pan-Arab nationalism, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 dismantled decades of American strategy, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq unleashed chaos rather than democracy. Even the Arab Spring of 2011, that brief eruption of civic hope, ended in a new cycle of repression and intervention.
Each failure followed a familiar pattern: external powers mistook control for stability. The fantasy survived because it was useful. It turned the Middle East into a problem to be managed — a space of eternal crisis requiring foreign expertise. Today’s rhetoric of “normalisation,” “integration” and “digital corridors” is only the latest variation on this theme. The “New Middle East” imagined by Washington and Tel Aviv promises prosperity without politics, investment without accountability and modernity without memory.
Lynch reminds us that this is not just a political fantasy but an epistemic one. The Middle East has long been produced as an object of knowledge rather than a subject of history. From colonial ethnographies to contemporary think-tank reports, knowledge itself has been a form of power. Edward Said named this process Orientalism: defining the region to control it. The same logic now persists in data analytics, surveillance systems, and algorithmic narratives that frame the region as perpetually unstable — a patient forever in need of Western diagnosis.
Yet the region has never stopped answering back. Nasser’s Cairo, Khomeini’s Tehran and even the Gulf monarchies’ new pragmatic diplomacy all represent forms of agency that defy the imposed script. And Palestine, the unresolved moral epicentre, continues to expose the emptiness of every model of “peace” that tolerates occupation.
The present multipolar moment — where the United States, China, Russia, and regional powers compete — has not ended the fantasy; it has multiplied it.
But autonomy without solidarity risks becoming another illusion: sovereignty that masks inequality, and pragmatism that conceals complicity.
Beyond the mirage: Rethinking power, memory and justice
What Lynch ultimately exposes is not a failure of policy, but of memory. Every “new” Middle East has collapsed because it refused to confront the historical foundations of instability: colonial borders, economic dependency, authoritarianism and dispossession. These are not relics of the past; they are living structures embedded in today’s alliances and wars.
The rhetoric of “normalisation” echoes earlier colonial projects of “pacification.” Then, as now, the promise of development was offered in exchange for obedience.
The difference is technological: drones and data have replaced mandates and marines. The Middle East has again become a laboratory — no longer of empire but of algorithmic control — where digital infrastructures are the new tools of dominance. The instruments have changed, but the gaze remains the same.
Breaking this cycle demands more than diplomacy; it requires historical humility. The region’s true strength has always come from below: from anti-colonial movements, social solidarities and cultural resilience. Its history is not a string of failures but a continuum of refusals — proof that imposed stability can never extinguish the desire for self-definition.
Justice, not normalisation, has always been the only durable foundation for peace. Gaza stands today as the ultimate indictment of the fantasy: the claim that a region can be reimagined while its core injustice is ignored. As long as occupation and inequality persist, every vision of a “New Middle East” will crumble on contact with reality.
Scholars and policymakers alike must unlearn the habit of treating the Middle East as a problem to be solved. It is not merely a theatre of conflict but a living archive of civilisation, memory and imagination. Its contradictions are not pathologies to be corrected but expressions of historical depth.
The illusion of a “New Middle East” comforts those who believe history can be engineered. But as the bombs fall on Gaza and summits convene in its shadow,
the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore: no peace survives that is built on erasure.
The region does not need reinvention; it needs recognition. To understand the Middle East anew — in its own voice and on its own terms — would be a far greater act of modernity than any fantasy of control. For over a century, outside powers have sought to shape the region’s future. Perhaps it is time for the region to design its own.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251102-the-illusion-of-a-new-middle-east-historys-echo-in-a-multipolar-age/
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Palestine Exception, American Exceptionalism: Two sides of the Same Bloody Coin
By Benay Blend
November 2, 2025
Directed by Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth, Palestine Exception serves as the most recent documentary exploring the wave of crackdown from college administrators, the media, police and politicians who oppose calls for a ceasefire and divestment from corporations that do business with “Israel.”
On May 1st, 2025, the US House passed legislation defining criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, thus codifying in legal terms what many call the “Palestine Exception” to free speech.
Zionist attacks on the solidarity movement also hinder organizing around the Palestinian cause, as well as the exclusion of various study programs from the college curriculum.
To its credit, the film places October 7 and beyond in historical context, going back to the Nakba as a logical starting point to discuss the Zionist goal of severing Palestinians from their land.
It also looks back to the beginnings of McCarthyism in 1947, an anti-Communist crusade that cast a wide net for what were considered “un-American” activities of the day. These proceedings that resulted in destruction of many lives and careers set a precedent for the current rounding up of anyone deemed pro-Palestinian.
None of this is new. Years ago, the Dean of my department told me that several students had complained that it appeared their teacher hated America, so he suggested that I put a more positive spin on my lectures. At that point in the chronology, we had reached the Vietnam War, a catastrophe that seemed impossible to frame as an example of American Exceptionalism, so perhaps best to totally exclude, along with manifest destiny, slavery, sweatshops and everything else that belied America as the best country in the world.
Much earlier, on March 14, 2005, the late historian Howard Zinn delivered a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pointing out the ways that “The Myth of American Exceptionalism” impacted its dealings with problems at home as well as with the rest of the world.
Scholars who buy into this myth must expunge all negativity that detracts from the preferred trajectory of uninterrupted progress towards a perfect state. Thus, America’s origin story must leave out the extermination of Native people, slavery in the American South, along with any other ugly truths that undermine the glorious course of American history.
For Israel, too, there is an origin story that totally erases the indigenous Palestinians from the land. In this version, there was no Nakba, no ethnic cleansing, nothing that detracts from the account of a landless people who deserved a land.
Indeed, as Ramzy Baroud explains, the Zionist project has always sought to “erase Palestinian history, identity and presence. It framed Palestinians as a people without history, a land without a people, and their resistance as mere acts of ‘terrorism’” (“The Long War for Meaning,” New Internationalist, November-December 2025, Issue 558).
The current confrontation, Baroud contends, is the culmination of a 77-year-old “struggle over whose narrative defines reality – whether the Zionist project’s claim to legitimacy can overwrite the lived history and rights of the Palestinian people, or whether Palestinian steadfastness will assert its own meaning against erasure” (“The Long War for Meaning,” New Internationalist, November-December 2025, Issue 558).
There are thus crossovers between the two narratives that continue to this day. American Exceptionalism omits all fault lines in the country’s history; Palestine Exception allows no criticism of Israel, particularly if it implicates the US as complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
Given several years ago, Zinn’s talk at MIT unknowingly predicted much of what is happening today.
“What this idea of special American dispensation in the world, what it leads to is an abrogation of all sorts of responsibilities to the human race, to everybody else in the world,” Zinn explained. “And it means that the United States is exempt from these responsibilities.”
This history does not get taught in schools. For example, there is the history of American expansionism, particularly overseas. Zinn contends that textbooks have substituted “something called diplomatic history,” because “if they learn the history of the massacres and invasions that accompanied American expansion in the world, they could not possibly believe the president of the United States when he gets up before the nation and says, ‘We’re going into this country for liberty and democracy.’”
“This misuse of histories continues to be perpetuated by our political leaders, and not really caught or criticized by that part of the American culture which is supposed to check up on and criticize what the government does,” Zinn concluded. “That is the press, the media.”
In the realm of education, media, and the press, Palestine Exception mirrors American Exceptionalism, another rather ugly facet of American history when the country that once fought a war against fascism now funds a government committing genocide, allegedly in self-defense.
While these facts do not get taught in classrooms or reported by mainstream news, opposition to “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza has inspired large rallies and campus protests around the world. These gatherings, along with alternative-media accounts, are filling in where assaults on classroom curriculum and journalism have left a void.
Clearly, there are other ways to provide political education outside of classroom walls. Baltimore-based founder of Education Through Reading, Erica Caines, explains how her project “breaks down systemic barriers to education, offering avenues for self-expression, critical thinking, community engagement, and self-determination.”
Invited to attend the Second International Meeting of Theoretical Publications of Left Parties and Movements in Cuba, Caines used the opportunity to promote transnational communal exchange between Africans in the Americas and those on the African continent.
“Ultimately, literacy campaigns and initiatives promoting grounded representation are not only about providing access to books and education but also about empowering African youth to become agents of change in their communities and beyond,” Caines explains. “By gaining a deeper understanding of heritage, creating connections across borders, and promoting critical consciousness,” she concludes, “taking Liberation Through Reading beyond the US has been but one aspect of a foundation for a more inclusive and equitable world where all voices are heard and valued.”
In “Reject Anti-Intellectualism,” Caines speaks to the need for political education aimed also at adults. Spearheaded by “prominent leftists and prominent progressive figures,” the drive to undermine the importance of study assumes that “reading does not tackle one’s immediate needs under the primary contradiction of imperialism.”
“When 54% of US adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, the aggressive anti-intellectualism increasingly growing online and spilling over should be cause for alarm,” Caines contends.
Collective political education and organizing become particularly important during periods when the government is cracking down not just on courses relevant to Palestinian liberation, but also any curriculum that provides tools “to comprehend and verbalize the causes of (colonial) conditions that (collective) reading and organization helps [the colonized] better understand and fight to win.” Political education helps to fill that void, thus affording the means to obtain immediate needs through self-determination and communal organizing.
In Gaza, too, literacy has been seen as an important facet in the struggle against colonial powers. As Ramzy Baroud explains, Palestinian society has poured energy into the educational sector in the Strip, seeing it as a “crucial tool for liberation and self-determination. Early footage shows classrooms being held in tents and open spaces, a testament to this community’s tenacious pursuit of knowledge.”
Opposed to negotiating with the colonist entity, the late Ghassan Kanafani assumed instead the role of the “combatant writer,” what Tahrir Hamdi describes as resistance through “political organization and armed struggle, poetry, art, science and the resilient olive trees that dot the Palestinian landscape” (“Between the Sword and the Neck,” New Internationalist, December 2025, Issue 558, p. 34).
According to Baroud, the entity’s “war on the Palestinian thinker” will fail, partly for reasons that Kanafani penned many years ago.
“Ideas are not tied to specific individuals, and resilience and resistance are a culture, not a job title,” Baroud explains. “Gaza shall once more emerge,” he predicts, “not only as the culturally thriving place it has always been, but as the cornerstone of a new liberation discourse that is set to inspire the globe regarding the power of intellect to stand firm, to fight for what is right, and to live with purpose for a higher cause.”
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/palestine-exception-american-exceptionalism-two-sides-of-the-same-bloody-coin/
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