This is how the Middle East will always surprise them.

Nothing is stable in the Middle East. Every attempt to re-engineer it to make it look new and acceptable runs up against the fact that its past must first be redressed. The Arab-Israeli conflict is at the top of the bill, followed by Arab unity, and behind them a web of immensely complex social and political issues, all of which are part of the open past.

The ideological projects that have emerged in the Middle East over the past century have all been, from the far right to the left, transnational, unitary, rejecting the project of the nation-state that came at the expense of the “unity of the nation.” The Middle East’s past is heavy and complex, a fact that makes “stability” an unstable event.

The Middle East is so interconnected that a cold in Cairo can trigger a fever in Sanaa. A vast nation with one language, one religion, and one history, it was suicidally divided a century ago.

This fragmentation left a deep wound in the narcissism of Arab society, which was proud of its civilized history and its moral system. As soon as the signs of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire appeared, the major colonial powers at the time arose to ponder a dangerous question: What would peace and politics in the world look like if the Arabs, who had one language, succeeded in forming a central state extending from Lebanon along the Mediterranean to Morocco overlooking the Atlantic Ocean?

Psychologically disturbed teenager Mark Sykes, then in his thirties, stood before the British leaders and drew a line from Kirkuk to Acre, saying it was an almost empty country, so let's divide it this way.

Nothing has settled since then, the Middle Eastern reality that emerged as a result of World War I remains an empty and unstable reality.

After September 11, 2001, the Americans embraced the idea that dictatorship was the main generator of violence and terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Thomas Friedman wrote a famous article in which he argued that there was not a single Indian prisoner in Guantanamo, where 35,000 were held, even though India had the largest Muslim population in the world.

In his estimation, and this idea had become mainstream, Indian democracy provided open platforms for political and cultural expression, and people dispensed with secret organizations and violent activities.

The Arab Spring of 2011 opened the door to a stable Middle East, and the Western world remained wary. Obama did not comment on the Tunisian event until the day before Ben Ali’s departure. Israel received the Arab Spring differently, with the Washington Post (February 2012) quoting an Israeli official as saying, “Some people in the West compare what is happening in Egypt to what happened in Europe in 1989. We see it as a scene similar to Tehran in 1979.”

There is much evidence that the Israeli vision of democracy in the Middle East has found its place within the Western vision, a vision that will be reflected in an important article by Thomas Friedman (New York Times, November 27, 2011) on Israel and the Arab Spring, which goes on to consider Israel “the biggest loser” from that Arab awakening.

Israeli military intelligence has given the Arab Spring an ambiguous name, “ Taltala ,” a Hebrew word meaning “tremor,” and has referred to it at various levels as the “Egyptian plague,” in a somewhat biblical context. When it comes to the Middle East, the Israeli imagination, both political and security, becomes a Western imagination.

The UN report ignored the historical and international context in which Middle Eastern societies were shaped over two centuries, Halliday argues. Dependence on the West, the creation of authoritarian states, and rentier economies all molded Middle Eastern societies into dependent and unstable entities.

Ironically, Halliday sees that the only state in the Middle East that has a religious name is Israel, which is referred to as the only modern democratic entity. Modern Israel has refused to classify itself as a republic or a monarchy, maintaining its fluid state as a “Hebrew city,” a fluidity that Halliday says is required by the appearance of the “Jewish Messiah” at the end of time. Everything in the Middle East seems fluid, material, complex, and unstable.

Let’s look at the Middle East one week before October 7, 2023. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat on a stage in Washington with Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, and they talked about the Middle East. “The Middle East is calmer today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan said.

“There are still challenges, like the tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Sullivan said, to sound realistic. But, he added, “the amount of time I have to spend on crises and conflicts in the Middle East today, compared to any of my predecessors, has decreased dramatically.” Simple tensions, as the American strategic mind imagined them, suddenly shook the entire planet. A butterfly flapping its wings in the middle of nowhere, in a place far removed from any influence on what was happening in the world.

The complexities of the Middle East cannot be trivialized or trivialized. Trump did just that with his “Deal of the Century.” Trump, who did not know that Ukraine was next to Russia, as his aides admitted, entrusted the Middle East’s knot, the Palestinian issue, to a teenage entrepreneur.

The young teenager, Jared Kushner, prepared a draft deal of about 180 pages, ignoring the concept of an independent state, Jerusalem, refugees, and a series of demographic complications. Instead, he presented an investment offer in the Palestinian Authority areas of $ 50 billion. It goes without saying what the outcome of that project will be.

The inhabitants of this unstable East are required to recognize a state that insists on saying that it is biologically and culturally a European entity, and refuses to define its geographical borders. All Western arrangements regarding the Islamic East, from the Balfour Declaration to October 7, have been poor in imagination and knowledge at the same time.

The belief that the Middle East was the “great exception”—that is, the suspension of international norms and laws when it came to its political realities, such as the Israeli dilemma—contributed to making the exception the rule.

I do not know whether the idea occurred to Bin Laden when he gave his organization the name "Al-Qaeda". In his letter to America in November 2002, Bin Laden spoke about the reasons that led him to declare war on America, at the heart of which was excluding Israel from the international justice system.

Last year, 2023, The Guardian was forced to remove bin Laden’s letter from its website after it was widely circulated on social media. The Western mind cannot accept that there are external causes for instability in the Middle East, and that “traditional values” cannot explain everything.

The Middle East remains in the Western imagination—politically and culturally—a land that is inwardly, genetically and culturally infected. A place where people will cut your head off if they don’t like the way you look, as the theme song to the first Disney version of Aladdin (1993) went before it had to be changed.

The UN report, 2002, did not go far from that song. Its reference to “traditional values” that obstruct modernity is an indirect reference to peoples on the margins of civilization, barbarians or savages, who might cut off a man’s head if they did not like the features of his face.

As for the Trumpian deal of the century, there is nothing in its 180 pages to indicate that its authors took the Middle East, its people, history and culture, seriously.

(Al Jazeera Net)