The West and the Holy Grail of the Middle East

The Americans want a stable Middle East, and to achieve this, they are adopting the best policies capable of destabilizing it. For a long time, they have dreamed of reaching the “Holy Grail,” the one that will bring eternal peace and stability. The Holy Grail is peace through the completion of normalization within the framework of the Abraham Accords, according to the description coined by the leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, in an article he wrote in Haaretz.

The Holy Grail has eluded us so far, and will become even more elusive in the future as radical Judaism flourishes, Lapid predicts.

After four decades of peace with Egypt, Israeli intellectuals are questioning the value of this kind of “cold peace.” The situation between Egypt and Israel has become more dangerous than a cold peace. Israel has recently objected to the military construction carried out by the Egyptian army in Sinai, and has previously described the January 25 revolution as the Egyptian plague.

In the ongoing debate there – about Egyptian military activity in the Sinai Peninsula – Tamir Morag, the diplomatic correspondent for Israel’s Channel 14, commented earlier this month: “…our top leadership should stay awake at night. Right before our eyes, under the cover of the peace agreement, Egypt has built a massive army that relies on American weapons, and all its exercises simulate scenarios of an invasion of Israel […] a powerful navy, and an air force capable of challenging and complicating matters for the Israeli Air Force. This entire military force, which repeatedly violates and undermines the Camp David Accords, is training for one goal: war with Israel.”

One thing is certain, and that is that Israel - the Western fortress - is an entity founded on colonial haste, and that time is making things difficult for it from every side. There is no holy grail in the Middle East, and even the cold peace with the major Arab power is on its way to becoming a dangerous peace, a peace that is training to invade its neighbor, as Channel 14, known for its extremism and proximity to the right-wing establishment, tells us.

Lightness in dealing with the Middle East has become a distinguishing mark in Western policy, which has recently adopted a biblical approach and has come to see the Israeli state as a divine affair, after it was a “Western fortress” as envisioned by Konrad Adenauer, the founder of modern Germany.

To say that the Western approach to the Arab-Palestinian conflict has taken on a biblical dimension is neither a guess nor a hearsay. In June 2001, Bill Clinton was invited to celebrate the launch of How to Fight Modern Warfare, by General Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Commander. It was half a year after Clinton had left the White House, and a full year after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations.

For a full hour, Clinton spoke - for the first time - about what had happened in the negotiations. Arafat, Clinton said, caused the collapse of the negotiations when he made the unforgivable mistake. He questioned the "historical truth" that the Jewish Temple was located there, beneath the Muslim compound consisting of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Western Wall.

For Clinton, this skepticism was intolerable. “I told Arafat,” he told the audience. “I told him, ‘I know the temple is down there.’” In fact, Arafat had heard something far more serious than that. In the account written by Ehud Barak, the leader of the Israeli delegation, of the final hours of the negotiations, Clinton rose up and shouted at Arafat, “The Reverend Solomon told me when I was a kid in New York that the temple is down there under the mosque.” Before leaving the party, Clinton told the audience, “I’m sorry, I messed up that thing in the Middle East,” as Newsweek reported at the time (June 2001).

The entire West, out of biblical-colonial convictions, is working to ruin “that thing” in the Middle East, and Clinton was no exception. The ongoing genocide in Gaza has revealed a Western vision of the conflict that has the biblical story at its center. Even the intellectual West has engaged in this biblical fantasy. It is no longer surprising to see a prominent political thinker like Niall Ferguson, who presents himself as an atheist who sends his children to church, talk about Israel’s “super-successful mission” in Gaza. “That land,” Ferguson says, is a place that the God—whom he does not believe exists—gave to the Jews.

The Middle East is a very complex geopolitical reality, with three competing visions, as Israeli researcher Amos Yadlin argues in his latest article on Foreign Affairs: the vision of the Palestinian resistance (Hamas), the Iranian vision, and the American vision.

It is impossible to find a homogeneous Arab vision of the Middle East, neither its past nor its future. There are contradictory and conflicting fantasies and dreams. However, a complete Arab project, parallel to and similar to the homogeneous projects that look at the region from outside, remains out of reach.

The American vision, in Yadlin's estimation, is based on achieving stability in the Middle East through multiple strategies: creating political opportunities for both Israelis and Palestinians, normalization, and through a defense agreement between Washington and some countries in the region.

The Israeli question has always been one of stability, and all American approaches to the conflict recognize this. Israeli society will ultimately have to move beyond the question of survival to other equally important questions, including the question of integration with the neighborhood.

There is no other example in the world of the state of ostracism and estrangement that the Israeli “state” lives in with all its neighbors. Israel does not respond much to the stability tactics that American policy innovates, and as it moves to the right, Israel’s response to visions and assessments coming from outside the region will become rarer.

In his memoirs, Kissinger said that Israeli officials thanked him too late for his tactics that protected their country during the Arab-Israeli military clash in the 1970s.

The strategic interest of Kissinger's "solutions" was not clear to the Israeli mind at first. Kissinger was more American than Jewish to them, and Israeli-American intimacy had not yet reached the point we see now, where a member of the Security Council sponsors genocide on the air. Even now, at the height of the biblical intimacy between the two countries, there is a wide margin of maneuver through which Israel can advance its aggressive projects, including those that take on a horrific criminal form.

The other two visions, Hamas’s vision and the Iranian axis’ vision, differ and agree. Their point of agreement is in exhausting Israel and cornering it as an intruder and a stranger to the region. Yaldin continues his assessment of what he sees, saying: All three approaches failed and Israel succeeded in imposing its realistic vision. The IDF’s military operations led to a series of successes that ended with the fall of the Syrian regime on the one hand, and the undermining of “the corridor extending from western Iran to the Israeli border, a road that Iran has been building for four decades,” according to Yaldin.

Through its military actions on several fronts, Israel has succeeded in changing the “shape” of the Middle East in a way it did not expect and does not seem to be comfortable with. A new, mysterious shape has been created for the Middle East, which has not yet settled down, and it is impossible to predict what will happen to it in the coming days.

While Israel has succeeded in keeping Iran away from its borders, the Turkish borders are now, for the first time, on the outskirts of the Hebrew state. Israeli writers are discussing the Syrian surprise that made Turkey, with its historical vendetta, border their state. Every movement in the Middle East creates its own contradictions, and every answer to a question is in fact a complication of the question itself.

Until December of last year, 2024, the Syrian revolution had become a story from the distant past. As for the rebels, as they prepared for the military operation, their ambitions did not take them beyond the Aleppo countryside, as Kemal Ozturk, a Turkish journalist close to the Syrian opposition, wrote in an article on Al Jazeera Net.

The ball has rolled, as is usually the case with events in the region, and we are now witnessing a new and mysterious Middle East that is radically different from the one imagined by Shimon Peres, who invented the term “New Middle East” in the 1990s.

But at the end of its battles, it faces new, often more complex facts. The more complicated the issues facing Israel become, the more America promises it the Holy Grail, and that Grail takes on a new form and name each time. "Egypt" - whose army is training to invade Israel, as the Channel 14 correspondent says - was that precious Grail four decades ago.

One of the new facts that Israel has learned since the collapse of the Assad regime is that Iran, which is backed into a corner, as the Jerusalem Post warned, may resort to accelerating its nuclear program as the last bastion after all the others have collapsed. If Iran succeeds in this endeavor, the Israelis will have to emigrate, as a pessimistic report in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper says.

The situation for Israeli security strategy is like a game of Russian dolls, Matryoshka, where each time a player removes one, he finds another one underneath. There is, in fact, a holy grail, easy and imaginable: the Palestinian state. But Israel, and behind it the secularism of the biblical West, has chosen the path of fire.

Nations do not achieve stability through massacres. America has tried that route many times and failed. As a mother, it should have given Israel the lesson it needs. Or at least offered it a kind of “tough love,” as Thomas Friedman advised in The New York Times last year.

*Quoted from Al Jazeera Net