An Eye on the Event

For the first time, China is throwing its full international political weight behind Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, in order to set the stage for American-Iranian negotiations capable of producing a workable solution on the basis of a ceasefire — not an end to the war, as Iran had demanded. The effort appears to have succeeded, with Islamabad beginning yesterday to host both delegations in the same hotel. This shift in the mediation initiative reflects Beijing's capacity to exert direct influence over Iranian decision-making, and at the same time reveals the convergence of its strategic position with that of the four countries around a shared objective: ending the war without toppling the regime in Tehran and without allowing violence to spiral toward extremities that no actor would be able to control. Without the Chinese counterweight, however, the four countries would be unable to secure Iran's presence at the negotiating table or to provide the guarantees necessary for its success. This observation points in turn to the nature of the balances prevailing in the Middle East among the regional powers — Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey — balances that are neither decisive nor sufficiently structured to generate a Middle Eastern solution independent of Washington first, and then of China, Russia and the European Union. This is precisely what might be described as “geopolitical fluidity”: a configuration that allows the field to produce new facts bearing on the regional and international equation as a whole, and that also permits an adjustment of the priorities that Washington, as the dominant pole, intends to assert, Washington, which has projected its military power from the Far East into the region in order to preserve a status it is not prepared to relinquish, even at the cost of an open-ended war. The Tail Wagging the Dog In an interview with CNN on 3 April, Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal described the conflict as “Netanyahu’s war,” designed, in his view, to divert attention from the Israeli Prime Minister’s domestic conduct in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, before invoking the image of the tail wagging the dog to suggest that it is Netanyahu who has dragged the American president into this battle, and not the reverse. The metaphor is harsh, and it points to a deep dysfunction within the American political establishment, for such a situation runs counter to the logic one would expect of a state like the United States when it wages war in the Middle East, that heart of the old world now said to be new. After the remarks of the seasoned Saudi prince, long versed in security and political affairs, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement to the New York Times on 8 April described Netanyahu as “a skilled salesman, adept at evasion,” who had “deceived the administration once again” by dangling the prospect of regime change in Tehran rather than a strategy of containment. At the same time, the Israeli press revealed that the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon’s senior commanders had not endorsed Netanyahu’s assessments or the Mossad’s reports, which led to the well-known resignations and dismissals, and further heightened the political confusion increasingly visible in presidential statements. It was thus that the White House’s definitive policy ended up entrusting the conduct of the negotiations in Karachi to Vice President J.D. Vance, the very man known for his principled opposition to the war. One can therefore readily understand that Prince Turki al-Faisal should have sounded this political alarm, seeking to draw attention to the gravity of what was unfolding in Washington and to the singular role Netanyahu had arrogated to himself. He was also sending a firm signal regarding the steadfastness of the Kingdom’s official orientations, which had not in the least abandoned its strategy of producing a solution grounded in a balance of interests, in response to Netanyahu’s hegemonic ambitions over the region. Now that Netanyahu has been sidelined by Trump, it is worth tracing this shift in priorities at the top of the American hierarchy back, first and foremost, to the personality of President Trump, then to the distribution of powers within the American political system, and finally to the balance of forces driving this state through its vast political, military and security institutions — which makes political decision-making the complex product of internal balances at every level. It is in this way that the question of negotiations was settled by a return to the policy of containing the Iranian regime. The Insolence of an Ambassador It was from Kuwait City that the Iranian ambassador there, Mohammad Toutounji, made himself known to the wider public through his statement to AFP on 7 April, calling for every possible effort “to avert the catastrophe,” on the grounds that Tehran would respond to external threats with measures affecting “the security and stability of the Gulf states.” This rhetoric echoes the insolence of the same ambassador who, in Beirut, had never been accredited and had nonetheless refused to leave the country, despite the formal decision of the Lebanese authorities. This is a well-established practice in Iran’s militia diplomacy, consisting in covering the supreme leadership’s retreat from its initial maximum positions while maintaining a dual language — one directed at the American administration, another at the Iranian people and the peoples of the region. The documents submitted to the White House revealed an unofficial face kept carefully out of sight. Had Tehran truly held firm and refused to meet the essential demands set out in the American document, the United States Vice President would not have traveled to meet the speaker of the Iranian parliament, especially given that the war has exhausted the regime’s overall capacities, leaving it with only a portion of its missile and drone stockpile, along with a few million loyalists capable of fighting the Iranian people whenever they take to the streets in protest. Black Wednesday The mediators’ success dealt a stinging blow to Netanyahu, now sidelined by Trump, who decided in accordance with American interests first and foremost, without even consulting his Israeli interlocutor this time, merely informing him after the fact. It is this precise moment that I believe pushed the Israeli leadership to unleash its fury on the city of Beirut, venting its political frustration in a criminal day partaking of the “war of extermination in Gaza.” Without the Lebanese state’s position, the Israeli leadership at its three levels — political, military and security — would have sought to shift the war from its previous mode to the Gaza model of extermination. This is why the fate of the negotiations in Pakistan, whether they succeed or fail, matters less for Lebanon than the success of its endeavor to separate its existential cause from the “arenas” dossier, as Tehran invariably prefers to frame it. What is at stake now is the battle of direct negotiations with Israel for Lebanon’s salvation and deliverance, through a comprehensive vision of what the Lebanese state must be and of how to end this war on the basis of a victory for sovereignty and a guarantee of security for the people and a dignified life. When that day comes, we will be able to say that the inaugural address and the ministerial statement served as the midwife that brought the new Republic into the world, as its people wish it to be and are prepared to accept it.

The resolution on the partition of Palestine, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 29 November 1947 and known as Resolution 181, brought the State of Israel into existence over a territory of fifteen thousand square kilometres, whose population did not then exceed half a million settlers. The same document called for the creation of an Arab state on eleven thousand square kilometres, at a time when the Palestinian people numbered one million four hundred thousand inhabitants. The resolution further provided for the placing of Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international trusteeship. The Arab and Palestinian rejection of this partition triggered the outbreak of the war over Palestine, with consequences that proved catastrophic: Israel was thus able to occupy 78% of the land and compel some seven hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants to leave. Of those who fled, the ones who made their way to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon accounted for no more than half that number, the other half settling in the camps of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In other words, more than a million Palestinians never left their land, despite their internal displacement. The paradox lies in the fact that collective consciousness nonetheless came to treat them as a refugee people, owing largely to the Jordanian nationality law and the Israeli naturalisation law. As for the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian administration issued refugee identity cards to the populations of Gaza’s own towns and cities, people who had never left their soil, thereby transforming them, in their turn, into refugees. Truce Lebanon received some one hundred thousand Palestinians, to whom were added roughly as many Lebanese who had been residing in Palestine and now returned home. A portion of these still appears in the statistics of UNRWA, which had defined a refugee as any person who had resided in Palestine before the Nakba. But when the Palestinian refugees learned of the armistice agreements concluded between Israel on the one hand and Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon on the other, they understood that the military defeat had been formally enshrined, as had the new Israeli reality, in spite of every hollow slogan that continued to be brandished. Once life had been somewhat stabilised in the camps and in certain villages and towns, reflection on destiny and on the future began to assert itself. A decade and some years elapsed since the Nakba in what certain elites described as a period of drift and loss of direction. In the nineteen-fifties, individuals attempted to return to their homeland by their own means, while others formed armed groups of which some succeeded in their operations and others failed, with most eventually being absorbed into Arab armies for purposes of military reconnaissance. The majority of refugees, however, accepted the authority of the host state and submitted to its laws, particularly in Syria and Egypt, where the Palestinian cause was instrumentalised to shore up the legitimacy of the regimes themselves. In Lebanon, the situation differed markedly, as the authorities treated the refugees as a special case entrusted to the management of the security services, applying laws of isolation, restricting freedom of movement, prohibiting all construction, even the building of a simple private lavatory for a family, and subjecting individuals to brutal security interference in their daily lives, under the pretext of containing the spread of Nasserist, Baathist and other nationalist currents among the generation of the Nakba. The Cairo Agreement It was not misery alone that drove the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to take up arms. The role played by Egypt and Syria after the humiliating defeat of June 1967 had a decisive influence in supplying weapons, providing military training and opening up routes of access to the fronts surrounding Israel, foremost among them the south of Lebanon. When the crisis of dual power erupted in Jordan, pitting the Palestinian revolution against the Hashemite throne during the events of September 1970, President Gamal Abdel Nasser played the role of the fedayyin’s saviour by securing their withdrawal from Amman, launching the rallying call that “the resistance exists to endure,” which meant, in other terms, that the official Arab regimes continued to need it. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, completed this formula for his part by declaring that “the resistance exists to endure and to prevail.” This explains the role Nasser played in producing the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which responded to the persistent need of the official Arab order to maintain an armed resistance operating from the frontline states, a situation that continued until the October War of 1973. In a belated Palestinian critical reading of this pivotal episode in Lebanon’s contemporary history, the text of the apology addressed to the Lebanese people, known as the “Declaration of Palestine in Lebanon,” stated in particular: “…But fairness demands that we acknowledge that the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, by its human, political and military scale, weighed heavily upon this fraternal country and imposed upon it burdens that exceeded its strength and its capacity to endure… to the point of inflicting upon its state, its economy, its social fabric and its formula of coexistence deep wounds that are no longer hidden from anyone. It is equally fair to say that Palestinian involvement in Lebanon, as it unfolded, and particularly during the wars of 1975 to 1982, was in its entirety almost the product of compulsion, driven by internal and external circumstances akin to force majeure.” This revision was not merely a moral exercise; it flowed from a profound evolution and a genuine turning point in Palestinian political thought, one that had been successively nourished by the declaration of independence of the State of Palestine at the National Council convened in Algiers in 1988, which anchored the Palestinian peace project within the broader framework of the Arab peace project, and then by the conclusion of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the subsequent formation of the Palestinian National Authority. All of this, combined with the restoration of Palestinian-Lebanese relations in 2005 following the end of Syrian tutelage, led the new Palestinian policy to define itself henceforth in the logic of statehood rather than revolution. The Palestinian apology thus acquired its political and moral weight, and its credibility in practice before it was expressed in words, as the following passage attests: “…Opening the door to revision, and helping ourselves all to purify our memory… we take the initiative, for our part, of apologising for any harm we have caused to beloved Lebanon, wittingly or unwittingly, and this apology is unconditional, without awaiting any apology in return.” — 7 January 2008 The Lebanese Parliament’s decision to abrogate the Cairo Agreement in 1987, for its part, was less rooted in a logic of rebuilding the Lebanese state on the basis of a weapons monopoly than it reflected the struggle waged by the Assad regime against the PLO leadership for control and dominance over the camps, Lebanon serving once again as the theatre of that confrontation in the wake of the Palestinian withdrawal of 1982. (The war of the camps, the war of the dissidents., the events of eastern Sidon, etc.) One can therefore conclude now with clarity that when the current administration, through its inaugural address and its government programme, took the decision to concentrate arms in the hands of the state, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was simultaneously launching, through its embassy in Beirut, its political and practical initiative to implement that very decision. What took place in the camps last year regarding the handover of heavy and medium weapons bears witness to the credibility of Palestinian policy in building a relationship of trust with Lebanese legitimacy, a relationship founded on respect for the Lebanese national interest and on the commitment not to undermine it, within the framework of resolving the accumulated problems of the Palestinian refugee community, understood as forming part of the Lebanese challenges that must be addressed through a new perspective, without causing further harm to the country. A Word of Honour The occupation of the Holy Places in Palestine had painful repercussions for believers, who found themselves barred from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In this spirit, the Holy See multiplied its initiatives, most notably through the papal visits to Palestine over the past two decades, thereby joining analogous initiatives emanating from Al-Azhar, from Marrakech, from Abu Dhabi, and from local endeavours in Lebanon, both official and civil in character. Most of these initiatives shared two fundamental affirmations. The first held that Palestine constitutes the land and the geography of the Christian message; the second proclaimed that Lebanese Christianity had embodied, in this region, civilisational, cultural and human dialogue, remaining thereby the most luminous beacon of the Christian presence in the East. If the emigration of Christians represents a major challenge for the entire Levant, it is an even greater one for Lebanon and Palestine, where the Christian presence continues to shrink under the effects of an Israeli occupation that seeks to see a Palestine emptied of that presence. From 13% that it once represented, it has today fallen to below 2%, through systematic policies designed to exclude the Christian role in resistance to the occupation. In these blessed days of Lent and Easter, on 29 April 2008, a large Palestinian delegation comprising leaders from Ramallah, headed by the Ambassador of Palestine to Lebanon and accompanied by virtually all the local leadership, made its way to the patriarchal seat at Bkerké, presenting a document issued by the Palestinian leadership and entitled “A Word of Honour and a Pledge of Faithfulness to Our Christian Brothers in Lebanon,” whose terms read as follows: “We, Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, regard ourselves, we in Palestine as you in Lebanon, as an authentic part of an Arab majority called upon to play today, as it has in the recent past, a pioneering role in a general renaissance, to spread the message of peace, love, progress and openness… And in expressing our choices and our orientations in this generous country, through a sincere and candid revision, we address to you this word of honour and pledge ourselves, to ourselves as to you: “First: to respect fully your Lebanese and Levantine particularity, and to stand at your side in warding off any danger that may threaten beloved Lebanon as an independent entity and a sovereign state. “Second: to resist any attempt to resolve the problem of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon at the expense of this country, or outside the provisions of international legality, foremost among which is the right of return as enshrined in Resolution 194. “Third: to work towards the healing of souls and the purification of memory, and to strengthen the spirit of reconciliation, so that your homeland Lebanon and our homeland Palestine may remain a source of spiritual radiance and a platform of civilisational and cultural expression, as they have been throughout the ages. “Such is the word of honour and the pledge of faithfulness that we hope to seal with deeds worthy of God and of our national conscience.” Signed: the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the Lebanese Republic This initiative, among others, has carved a new channel for reconciliation and the purification of memory. On the political level, what can be affirmed today is that the current Lebanese government, in the framework of its decisions aimed at concentrating arms in the hands of the state, has entrusted the “Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee,” tasked with addressing the affairs of the refugee community, with the preparation of a preliminary policy document entitled “The Lebanese National Plan for the Governance of Palestinian Camps in Lebanon.” It is the first of its kind at the level of the Lebanese state, with the objective of bringing the camps out of the sphere of security management and placing them under the protection of the state, of extending its sovereignty over all its territory, of proceeding with the withdrawal of Palestinian arms from the camps, and of ensuring a dignified life for the refugees until the moment of their return. One may say, finally, that the future carries within it the promise of transcending the past.

My grandmother Aïcha came into the world in the last decade of the nineteenth century, at the very moment the global Zionist movement was taking shape. Her first two sons were born before the Great War and during it; after the armistice came her daughter and her youngest boy. A year before the defeat of June 1967, she could be found every morning at the saraya of Sidon, happy to have obtained from the International Red Cross authorisation to visit her eldest son Tawfiq, who had become Israeli without ever having left Acre. That authorisation was not enough on its own. For that exceptional event in a life like hers to become possible, she also needed to produce an invitation letter from her daughter Maryam the Jordanian, settled in Nablus in the West Bank under Hashemite sovereignty. But that family visit request was worthless to the Lebanese General Security without a special transit permit she had obtained from her son, a refugee in Damascus, where he had found work and shelter and finally settled. When Aïcha, in her seventh decade, received at last the final piece of the dossier, she said it called for a celebration. She packed her small bag for the journey from Sidon to Damascus, then Amman, then Nablus, to arrive before the appointed hour. On the day of the meeting, she set out from Nablus towards East Jerusalem with Maryam and all the family members who could join them, a short journey, this time without a permit. She prayed first at Al-Aqsa, then made her way with her family to the barbed wire on the western edge of the city, where she met her son and his family from morning until midday, without crossing the separation point. As evening fell, she returned unhurriedly to Nablus. She still had two days to spend in Amman at the home of my aunt’s sons, to hold her grandchildren, then a few days in Damascus where most of her scattered family had gathered, before returning to Sidon where her youngest son lived, working in Beirut at a paper factory on the Nahr corniche, in what had become East Beirut. He died there when a shell fell on the factory, the paper burned, and he was gone. But the old woman did not mourn him, for she had preceded him in her farewell to the journey of hardship, in her own bed, far from any civil war. “The Arabs of the Interior” This name designates the Palestinians who, for various reasons, did not leave their towns and villages when these became Israeli, at the moment of the declaration of independence on 15 May 1948, which we call the Nakba. The line of demarcation my grandmother had reached bears the name of the Green Line, and I have never understood why it was called green. Men like my uncle Tawfiq came to be known as “Arabs of the interior” (Arab al-Dakhil), or “Arabs behind the Green Line”, while David Ben Gurion’s government referred to them as the “Arabs of Israel”, at the very hour that Voice of the Arabs radio and Damascus Radio called them “Arabs of the occupied lands”. Subsequent Israeli governments then renamed these populations according to their religious or ethnic affiliations, speaking of “Druze of Israel”, “Bedouin of Israel”, “Muslims”, “Christians of Israel”, “Circassians of Israel”, or, in a more technocratic register, “the minorities in Israel”. Every one of these denominations, whatever form it took, proceeded from the same logic of erasure and denial of Palestinian identity. For these men and women were the indigenous people, those who had not left their land for a single moment, yet whom Ben Gurion’s government forced into internal displacement once the Palestine war had ended and the State of Israel consolidated itself through armistice agreements with the neighbouring states. It proved an embarrassing discovery for the new authorities, who found themselves administering some 156,000 original inhabitants of the land within their young democracy. When the Israeli army seized major cities, it drove out their inhabitants by force — in Jaffa, some 71,000 people fled or were expelled before approximately 400 residents were gathered into the Al-Ajami neighbourhood; in Haifa, 75,000 people were expelled by land and sea, and some 3,200 remaining residents concentrated in the Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood. The pattern repeated itself across cities, towns and villages. This was what led the Prime Minister to issue directives designating the Palestinians who had remained in place as a fifth column, a security threat to the nascent state and a demographic bomb to be neutralised. The government ordered them placed under military rule, at the army’s discretion, pursuant to the British Emergency Regulations of 1946. On this period, Dr Yaïr Baumel sheds valuable light in a lecture entitled “Motivations and Constraints of the Military Government Policy”. The Israeli authorities, he writes, adopted, in the first decade of military government, a policy of transfer towards Arab citizens, which reached its peak with the Kafr Qasim massacre on 29 October 1956 [...]. It was only in the following decade that the policy of the Hebrew state changed course, when it became clear that transfer was no longer realistic or viable [...] and that the encirclement of Arab citizens and their marginalisation began [...] as a threat to the security of the state.¹ He adds that the first Israeli Prime Minister ordered the Hebrew calendar to appear only on the identity cards of Jewish citizens, so as to identify Arab citizens visually²; that Arabs were excluded from the planning of projects affecting their own lives and that the formation of Arab capital was deliberately obstructed³; and that the attempt by the head of the Kafr Yasif local council, Yanni Yanni, to establish an association of heads of Arab local authorities in the early 1960s was blocked.⁴ The Recruitment of the Druze The Druze community in Palestine was living through a disastrous economic situation, marked by deep poverty, in the years following the proclamation of the State of Israel. The Israeli government saw in this an opening and exerted sustained pressure to compel the community to deal with it, using it as a lever in its relations with the Druze of Syria and Lebanon. It was by working through the Israeli archives that Professor Qays Firro exposed these mechanisms, in papers presented at the same study day in Nazareth. He establishes there that Defence Minister Moshe Dayan summoned the Druze leaders in 1954, in the town of Nesher, and proposed military service to them as an economic opportunity capable of lifting them out of their crisis.⁵ The invitation extended equally to the Circassian community. To prevent any real integration within the Israeli army, the “Minorities Unit” was created, its strength never exceeding a few hundred men. Revealingly, this unit fell under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rather than the Ministry of Defence. For Professor Qays, there was no doubt that it was a unit of propagandistic and political purpose, designed to sever the community from its roots, its Arabness and its Palestinian identity, by subjecting it and closing off every path of return. At the same time, the nationalist movement Al-Ard was hunted down until its eradication, and the journalists and activists who had continued working individually after the Nakba found themselves progressively silenced. The policy of containment, fragmentation and forced submission followed its methodical course. The End of Military Rule For two decades, Israeli governments pursued the total exclusion of the Palestinian minority from the apparatuses and institutions of the state. Israeli nationality had certainly been granted, but it remained emptied of its substance, as these populations continued in practice to be subject to the supervision of the police and intelligence services. To prevent them from constituting themselves as an indigenous national group with rights, they were dispersed and divided, secondary communal identities nurtured and antagonisms between religious, confessional, tribal and family components stoked, in order to shatter any collective trust. Restrictions on freedom of movement and property were imposed on them, as well as internal displacements from their lands and homes to places assigned by the police and intelligence services. This state of affairs lasted until the June 1967 war, in which the Israeli army seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai and the Golan Heights. This new expansion made government through emergency law redundant, and the exceptional legislation was repealed at the end of 1968, bringing military rule to an end. The condition of the Palestinians of the interior then entered a new phase. Recognised henceforth as citizens, they benefited from a renewed legal status opening to them the right to vote and to stand for election, access to the labour market across its various sectors, and public services in education, health and social security. In economic and social terms, the change was real and significant compared to the preceding decade. The income gap between Palestinians and Jews has not, however, been bridged to this day. Infrastructure in Palestinian cities, towns and villages suffers from persistent underdevelopment, and the restrictions weighing on urban expansion remain severe. From this evolution new challenges arose for the Palestinian minority, tied to land, demography, education and employment, as well as deeper questions about identity and belonging, with Israeli nationality imposed on those who constitute the indigenous people of the country. A portion of them has settled the matter by fully assuming that nationality, but the majority continues to regard itself as an integral part of the Palestinian people, while simultaneously being citizens of a state that occupies another portion of that same people. These contradictions have produced elites capable of rigorous and modern thinking on questions that others prefer to evade. Organised Crime Armed gangs proliferate in the cities of Lod, Ramle, Nazareth and Umm al-Fahm, recruiting unemployed young men and exploiting conditions of marginalisation, despair and hopelessness. In 2024, the number of victims of these criminal organisations reached 235 dead, the majority of them young. In 2025, the toll worsened to 252, and investigations managed to identify those responsible in fewer than 15 per cent of cases. The Israeli security services found themselves accused, according to the version one accepts, either of tolerating the phenomenon or of deliberately sustaining it by disengaging from any serious effort at investigation. Popular anger within Palestinian society reached a critical threshold and spilled over into mass demonstrations in the cities and villages that had lost their sons. This protest movement transformed, the previous year, into pressure on Palestinian political forces to present a unified front at the elections for the twenty-fifth Knesset. That pressure succeeded in forcing an agreement on what came to be called the “Joint List”, which brought together the Arab Movement for Change led by Dr Ahmad al-Tibi, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality led by Ayman Odeh, the National Democratic Assembly led by Sami Abu Shehadeh, and the United Arab List of Islamists led by Mansour Abbas. The alliance did not hold: the lists stood separately and won only 10 seats against a previous tally of 15, recording their most bruising defeat in the Knesset. Meanwhile, organised crime continued its advance, claiming 66 victims in three months, among them four women and three teenagers. The Palestinians of Israel thus reaped the bitter fruits of their political divisions. The Islamist bloc of Mansour Abbas had chosen to ally itself with the Zionist and religious parties and to participate in governments; the communist left bloc pursued its line of opposition and demands; the National Democratic Assembly had made the struggle against “Israelisation” its banner; and the Arab Movement for Change remained primarily oriented towards supporting its brothers in the West Bank and Gaza. The Islamist bloc’s singular decision to align with the Israeli right does not, however, exempt the three secular blocs from their responsibility for this failure. Their inability to unite amplified losses in seats and deepened the political and social marginalisation of an already fragile minority, powerless before the structural challenges that run through it and unable to stem organised crime that is sustained, invisibly, by a benevolence of state. Notes 1, 2, 3, 4 — Mada website: https://www.madarcenter.org/ 5 — Same source.

It Was Called Palestine In the aftermath of the First World War, and pursuant to the decisions of the San Remo Conference of April 1920, a new geopolitical entity was proclaimed in the Middle East under the name of the State of Palestine, constituted of the sanjaks of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre according to the administrative division of the defeated Ottoman Empire, with the addition of the Transjordanian Badiya. The constitution of the State of Palestine was signed on 10 August 1922, and the population census was likewise completed on 23 October of the same year. The League of Nations, designated guardian of human civilization and guarantor of its flourishing, had issued a document specifying the conditions imposed on Great Britain, the mandatory power over the State of Palestine, the mandate being due to enter into force on 29 September 1923 and to expire on 15 May 1948. In order to resolve the question of the sanjak of Acre, which extended northward to the south of the vilayet of Beirut, a border demarcation was established between the French and British mandatory authorities, and the two parties concluded the Paulet-Newcombe Agreement on 23 December 1920, defining what we know today as the Lebanese-Palestinian border, which became the Lebanese-Israeli border upon the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine at the expiry of the mandate on 15 May 1948 and the proclamation of the independence of the State of Israel. As for mandatory Palestine, whose recognized government was placed under the presidency of the British High Commissioner, the Colonial Office judged it necessary to separate the Transjordanian Badiya, with a surface area of 90,000 km², and to create an emirate with autonomous administration, two years after its annexation to the State of Palestine, entrusting it to Emir Abdullah ibn Hussein, one of the sons of the leader of the Great Arab Revolt. This emirate in turn transformed, under the British mandate, into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The separation of the Transjordanian emirate responded, in the view of certain historians, to a British necessity: to facilitate Zionist immigration to Palestine stretching between the river and the sea and to foster the emergence of the 'national home for the Jewish people,' as phrased in the declaration of British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917. In mandatory Palestine, the labour market developed and the country experienced accelerated economic growth; Jerusalem established itself in its rank as the second capital after Cairo, while the port of Haifa took the lead among the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. The various spheres of political, social and cultural life flourished; parties, associations and chambers of commerce were formed, part of the agricultural sector adopted modern production methods, and the labour market expanded to meet the needs of the British armies that had made Palestine their operational centre for the administration of their colonies. In this context, three consulates were opened in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa to meet the needs of the Lebanese community and its remarkable presence, whose numbers reached some one hundred thousand residents, most of whom returned to their homeland during the Nakba. Added to these were Saudi, Iraqi and Syrian communities of comparable size, until the hour of the end of the British mandate over Palestine, the hour that marked the birth of the State of Israel, following the defeat of the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. These armies had mobilized some 25,000 soldiers, in addition to the Arab Liberation Army whose ranks counted three thousand volunteers under the command of the Lebanese officer Fawzi al-Qawuqji, while the armed Zionist movements had succeeded in building a more modern army that began the fighting with an effective strength of 30,000 soldiers, rapidly brought by field recruitment to some 115,000 men in the space of a year. The battle was thus decided on the basis of Israeli quantitative and qualitative superiority, while the Arab armies remained positioned in the rear, far behind the partition lines approved by the United Nations. What Happened in Jericho? Jericho, the land that witnessed the birth of the first human settlement aspiring to sedentariness, construction and production, thirteen thousand years ago, in the Neolithic era. It is there that the concepts of society and city began to form, in their embryonic state, before appearing in their full maturity in the Sumerian civilization. The Canaanites built it, the Babylonians inhabited it, the Romans passed through it, and it finally came to rest with the Palestinian Arabs. Jericho, city of warmth in the depths of winter, beside the Dead Sea that sinks four hundred meters below the level of the Mediterranean, where the baptismal waters descending from Mount Hermon find their rest — it is a symphony of history, geography and humanity, in all the dimensions of its singular uniqueness. It was there, in Jericho, that the Palestine war came to an end, a part of the cities and territories remaining under the control of the Jordanian army commanded by the British general Glubb Pasha. It was there that a congress was held, in several stages, gathering Palestinian notables in order to acclaim King Abdullah ibn Hussein as sovereign over all Palestinian territories and to proclaim the union of all Palestine with the Transjordanian emirate. That was the first Arab union of the modern era! Thus the Transjordanian emirate transformed into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose capital was Amman and not East Jerusalem. At the beginning of 1949, the law of Jordanization of the Palestinians was promulgated to deprive all Palestinian passport holders of the rights of Jordanian citizenship. By this measure, the Palestinian territories west of the river took the name 'West Bank,' the country being thus named after the river and not after its people. At the conclusion of the first armistice agreements with Israel on 12 December 1949, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon took part in the negotiations, while the president of the State of Palestine in exile in Cairo, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and his Prime Minister Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi were prevented from representing the Palestinian people, despite the Arab League's recognition of the All-Palestine Government that had emerged from the National Council convened in Gaza on 30 September 1948. Thus General Glubb Pasha prevailed, the Palestinian president failed, and Palestine became either Israel or Jordan. It Came to Be Called Palestine The first decade following the Nakba was devoted to the reconstruction of the refugee communities in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip and in the diaspora, as well as in what the language of that era designated as the 'cordon' countries — Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The condition of Palestinians in the West Bank likewise changed: the designation of their institutions shifted from Palestinian chambers of commerce to Jordanian chambers of commerce, and this change spread to associations, clubs and newspapers — every sign bearing the name of Palestine was converted to Jordan. There was henceforth a king, a crown, a state and an army, but without the word Palestine. The Jordanian king being protected by the British Crown and American goodwill, the minds of the Palestinian Nakba generation turned toward the leader of the Egyptian revolution — or coup d'état — Gamal Abdel Nasser, to the point of believing they saw his image in the moon. Other minds rallied under the banner of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath, little matter whether the allegiance was to Damascus or Baghdad. In the context of the conflict between the 'Arab reactionary right' and the 'progressive national forces,' a Palestinian majority aligned itself with the nationalist and leftist currents contemporary to that era. Within this climate, at the dawn of the second decade of the Nakba, the interests of the Nasserist leadership in its confrontation with Arab reaction — Saudi Arabia and Jordan — converged with Palestinian longing and the passion for the recovery of Palestine. This is what came to pass at the Arab Summit of 1964, where a political entity was proclaimed under the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to which an organized army was attached, the Palestine Liberation Army, with the Egyptian command over the Ain Jalut Brigade, the Syrian command over the Yarmouk Brigade, the Iraqi command over the Qadisiyya Brigade, and the Jordanian command over the Badr Forces Brigade. From this point began the march of the contemporary Palestinian entity, which embraced several nationalist and leftist currents, but rested in its essence on the Fatah movement as the central current, tracing an independent path from the Arab capitals and characterized by conservatism, moderation, alliance and confrontation when necessary. Between Two Wars Between the humiliating defeat of the Arab armies in the war of 5 June 1967 and the October War of 1973, the war of the crossing of the Suez Canal, an urgent need was imposed on the Arab leaderships: to allow Palestinian organizations to 'light fires in Israel's environment,' in the phrase of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. The left Ba'athist leadership in Damascus outbid the Egyptian leader by demanding a war of 'prolonged popular liberation,' while the Ba'ath leaders in Iraq displayed an arrogance and condescension that General Hafez al-Assad was incapable of bearing. Thus was summoned the Palestinian armed struggle, emanating from a people eager to fight for its homeland, its identity and its political future, and it was to this rhythm that the march toward the recovery of Palestine on the political map was undertaken, whatever the cost. The cost was truly heavy in blood, destruction and battles: the confrontation with Israel did not constitute its only dimension, despite the wish of the ordinary Palestinian; each time the interests of any Arab state entered into collision with the Palestinian armed project, the results proved harmful to all, as was the case in Jordan and Lebanon: if the Jordanian regime succeeded in three years of conflict in putting an end to the armed Palestinian presence on its territory, the Lebanese regime experienced a different course at the moment of the signing of the Cairo Agreement in 1969, whereby the Lebanese state relinquished its sovereignty over a part of its territory, whether in the South or in the refugee camps. And so, as soon as the October War ended, Lebanon and all its inhabitants, Palestinians included, found themselves caught in the catastrophic consequences engendered by the Arab-Israeli negotiations under the banner of 'peace' — but this is another subject. As for the journey of recovering Palestinian national identity, it was concluded only with the decision of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to disengage from the West Bank and to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative. The Organization thus obtained official Jordanian recognition, without however receiving the Arab West Bank — until the Oslo Accords of 1992, in the wake of the revolution of the Intifada of Stones. Judea and Samaria When Sunni political Islam — Hamas — launched its war against the Oslo Accords, it advanced no slogan relating to national identity or to the future of the Palestinian human being. Hamas made the Al-Aqsa Mosque the compass toward which it directed its military and political operations, as well as the point of popular polarization, and the central mission, broad and undefined, was to 'liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque'; nothing fortuitous there: Hamas crowned it with the operation of 7 October, through which the commanders of the Qassam Brigades wanted, according to their own statements, to achieve this goal or die in its pursuit. The 'Al-Aqsa Flood' operation is a model of hardline religious thought, and of the most radical extremism in converting the course of the national liberation struggle into a course of Islamic-Jewish religious conflict. It is the very path followed by contemporary Israeli extremism against the backdrop of religious Zionism. I consider that both peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, are victims of the intersection of a terrorism of religious extremism that exchanges services and feeds each other on both sides: an intellectual, political and cultural terrorism that uses violence and ever more violence, in the service of a conflict whose only outcome is the destruction of societies from within. This result appeared rapidly in the Palestinian case, and manifests in the Israeli case at a slower pace, but with striking clarity. The example is that the first measure taken by the Israeli government was to substitute for the name of Palestinian territories enshrined in international law at the demarcation of the Oslo Accords at the United Nations the biblical name 'Judea and Samaria.' Just as Hamas had abolished the national and secular definition of the conflict, leading once again to the erasure of Palestine and the return to the term 'Judea and Samaria.' Since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, 44% of the surface area of Palestinian territories in the West Bank has been annexed and Judaized; 90,000 dunams have been confiscated under the name of state property, while the occupation army has seized 27% of the lands as military zones; the number of settlers has tripled; nearly all Bedouin encampments and their villages in the communal lands and the Jordan Valley have been razed — not to mention the siege of cities, the destruction of three camps through 1,900 armed attacks, the destruction of 1,022 residential, agricultural and industrial installations, the issuance of demolition orders for 1,167 buildings, and finally the arrest of 11,000 citizens, the killing of 835 people and 6,450 wounded, men, women and children. Such is the balance, to date, of the intersection of two extremisms on Palestinian territories, territories that lost their name, recovered it, and now face renewed dispossession. It was called Palestine, it came to be called Palestine, but they now want to make it Judea and Samaria.

Gaza Is the Future The AI-generated image for the “Gaza Riviera” project captures, in all its seductive beauty, the real-estate imagination of President Trump and his son-in-law Kushner. It stretches across 365 square kilometres of golden sands lapped by the warm waves of the Mediterranean, under a climate that the wealthy of colder countries can only dream of. From this image, only the landowners are missing — people who have no place in the scene to come, not even as cleaning staff or construction workers, much like the recently freed dark-skinned slaves who built and maintained Washington with their muscles and sweat at the time of its founding, and who make up the majority of its population to this day. The people of Gaza, however, were not merely erased from the image: they were also denied a ceasefire, with the dead and wounded now averaging dozens daily — a rate deemed acceptable by the standards of a war of extermination!!! The war is therefore considered over in President Trump’s view, and what the Netanyahu government is doing is simply what circumstances demand — nothing more, nothing less. It warrants no classification, no name, save that of “clean-up operations”?!! The founders of Washington deserve some recognition, then: emancipators of slaves and employers of the poor in building the world’s seat of decision-making. They were, it must be said, considerably more humane and civilised than their contemporary heirs. But if we leave Washington for “Jerusalem-Al-Quds”, we may find a different image, generated this time from the texts of the Torah. A broad swathe of politicians and ministers — with hardline rabbis at their forefront — is demanding that the Netanyahu government expel the population of Gaza to wherever they can be sent, tolerating the presence of no more than a hundred thousand “elect” carefully screened for their service value. Not as dark-skinned slaves, but as “beasts of burden” — in the terminology of the Torah — creatures the Lord assigned to serve the Children of Israel returning from their wandering to the Promised Land. In truth I say unto you: as Palestinians, we did not know that God had created us for this purpose, or that our mission on earth was to serve them!! Had we known… we would have refused His will. The story of “Gaza Is the Future” is not new. It was born during Trump’s first term, when his son-in-law Kushner — by his own account — read every plan that had failed to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the ones that had been sleeping in the drawers of the White House. He concluded that he could distill a workable plan, which he duly announced under the name of the “deal of the century” — an economic approach designed to bring prosperity to the Palestinians, far from the headache of politics… He proposed that the Gaza Strip serve as the geographic foundation of the solution, to which all West Bank cities would be linked, with the exception of East Jerusalem, which Trump had annexed to Israel — a move that delighted Netanyahu and his circle. The aim was to spare the settlers their daily friction with the non-Jews — the “goyim” — and to grant them two-thirds of the West Bank as a reward for their patience with the indigenous population. But the matter had another dimension, which Kushner found in the plans of Obama’s second term: the project had previously been called the “Islamic State of Palestine” and had been the subject of negotiations with the international leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, with Hamas, and with Egypt’s elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since its coup against Palestinian legitimacy in 2007, was to be tasked with promoting this “Islamic State of Palestine” — one that would recognise the “Jewish character” of the State of Israel, Netanyahu’s cherished slogan at the time — enabling him to contemplate expelling all non-Jewish holders of Israeli nationality. The Achilles’ heel of the plan, however, lay in the proposal to expand the Strip’s territory at the expense of the Sinai desert, in compensation for the annexation of two-thirds of the West Bank. This set the Egyptian deep state in motion in its struggle against the elected president, until he was brought down. It was likely against this backdrop that Kushner set about stripping his proposal of any ideological dimension, settling for purely economic content and renaming the project the “deal of the century” — promising prosperity for all in the Middle East!!? There are questions that seem simple, almost naive, that nonetheless demand an answer. How can one override the right to private property and strip it of protection — the very cornerstone of the United States Constitution?!! How can one dismiss the right to political self-determination of a people that numbers fifteen million souls this year, half living in their homeland and half in the diaspora?!! What remains of America’s founding legacy at the moment the United Nations was established?!! — especially when its Secretary-General and his teams find themselves in the daily crosshairs of Trump and Netanyahu!!? And who deserves the peace prize, Donald Trump or António Guterres!!? The Peace Council This body was established under Security Council Resolution 2803, with the aim of ending the war of extermination in Gaza and administering the Strip during a transitional period of undefined duration — one whose length depends entirely on the understanding between Washington and Tel Aviv. The Council had announced its tasks: monitoring the ceasefire agreement, supporting peace and security in the Strip through a provisional international force, and mobilising financial commitments for reconstruction and humanitarian aid. Since the Council included no Palestinian figure whatsoever, the compromises reached to break this deadlock called for the formation of an administrative committee of Palestinian technocrats, endowed with executive powers under the Council’s authority, so that a link could be established with the Gazan population — the legitimate Palestinian Authority having been sidelined from its natural role under the Israeli veto. When the American president sought to expand the Peace Council’s mandate beyond the terms of the UN resolution, intending to make it a broader mechanism for peace in the region and the world — a mechanism that would transcend the framework of the United Nations, its rules and its laws — the European Union and a number of Arab and Islamic states voiced their objection, insisting on the imperative of respecting international law, Palestinian representation, and the need to anchor any plan to a comprehensive political solution aimed at establishing the Palestinian state. In the same vein, Beijing expressed its reservations, while Moscow emphasised the need for balance, the preservation of UN legitimacy, and the securing of an active Palestinian role in managing the transitional period. All of this led to a renewed role for the Palestinian Authority in managing the Rafah crossing, under the partnership agreement concluded with the European Union in 2005. The Peace Council also found no solution for providing an internal police force in the Strip other than returning to the internationally recognised Palestinian police apparatus. It was within this context — which the Netanyahu government acknowledged only under duress from American, Arab, and international pressure — that the Peace Council was able to hold its first meeting in Washington in mid-February. The outcome included the mobilisation of approximately seventeen billion dollars, the preparation of a reconstruction plan for the Strip, confirmation of the Palestinian administrative committee’s role in the recovery plan, consolidation of the ceasefire, and the initiation of the transition to the second phase of Trump’s plan — a plan divided into twenty stages. But where do things stand today? Amid the din of the war with Iran, no one is paying much attention to what is happening in the Gaza Strip, where Netanyahu managed to block the transition to the second phase of the peace plan on the pretext that Hamas must first surrender its weapons — without disclosing the agreement reached in Doha and announced by President Trump, according to which Hamas had been permitted to continue governing Gaza and to retain its weapons until the international force arrived?!! Meanwhile, the occupation army is expanding its presence in the yellow buffer zone, which now covers more than half the Strip’s area, and conducting daily military operations that push Palestinians toward the sea, dividing the Strip vertically from north to south along the axis of Salah al-Din Street — with a lower population density east of the road and a considerably higher one to the west. As long as the international peacekeeping force continues to face legal difficulties in terms of its definition and mandate — and its formation remains delayed at the time of writing — the Israeli government is maintaining the pace of its military operations to reshape the Gaza Strip’s landscape in a way that suits its long-term security interests. This situation has reduced the members of the Palestinian administrative committee to doing nothing but sitting in their offices, thinking of resignation: the committee’s provisional headquarters is in the Egyptian city of El-Arish, and Israel has barred its members — as well as its lead official, engineer Ali Shaath — from entering the Gaza Strip. Israel has likewise conditioned the entry of aid trucks on a reduction in their numbers and a restriction on their contents, through unrelenting pressure that results in a scarcity of free food supplies and a ban on new tents — even as 90% of those currently in use are worn to shreds. This is compounded by the prohibition on heavy machinery needed to clear rubble from the streets — a deliberate effort to obstruct the search for the bodies of more than ten thousand people missing beneath the ruins. To date, no announcement has been made regarding an Israeli withdrawal schedule from the Strip. What is happening instead is that the occupation army is systematically severing every link between the administrative committee and the Gazan population — as a number of those involved in the process have publicly stated. What is happening on the ground is the transformation of the Gaza Strip into an Israeli buffer zone, where life for Gazans in “peacetime” proves harsher and more humiliating than it was under the war of extermination. All the while, Hamas is being domesticated and an agreement reached with its leaders over their role in the coming phase — allowing its military-security-administrative apparatus to continue governing the western part of the Strip, which houses three-quarters of Gazans — pending settlements to come whose nature no one can predict if the matter is left to Washington and Tel Aviv. At the same time, the Netanyahu government reaffirms its demand to expel Gazans to the Sinai desert and its refusal to allow the Strip to recover its population density — treating the Palestinian as a human mass with no identity, no will, and no right to self-determination. The very fact that the Palestinian remains in their land has become an existential obsession for the State of Israel. Thus, the operation of 7 October detonated the deepest of fears — those that call for the elimination of the other, rather than the search for peace with the other. The hatred between the two peoples has never reached the intensity it has today. It has taken on a pathological dimension that is difficult to treat or overcome in any foreseeable future.

What you are reading here is not one more article on a cause that the world believes it already knows. It is an attempt to understand — to understand how a people that has carried its dream for decades continues to carry it, on a land that has never fallen silent and never will. This text is the introduction to a multi-part study on the Palestinian situation, in its historical, political, and human ramifications. Because what is unfolding cannot be reduced to a headline. And because silence, too, is a stance. As you prepare your breakfast, think of others (Do not forget the pigeon’s food). As you conduct your wars, think of others (Do not forget those who seek peace). As you return home, to your home, think of others (Do not forget the people of the camps). These are the words the poet Mahmoud Darwish spoke at the close of the last century — after his return to his homeland under the Declaration of Principles on interim self-government arrangements in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, as a consequence of the Six-Day War, as Israel calls it, or the war of the "Naksa," as the Arabs named it. The poet had declared neither his approval nor his opposition to the Oslo Accords of 1993. He had chosen instead to resign from his eminent seat on the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization — the highest recognized political authority — as though he wished to take the measure of things in his own poetic way, on a terrain from which he had long been absent. Yet the poet was soon to express his astonishment and wonder at what he saw: the unceasing popular celebrations among the people of Gaza and the West Bank as they welcomed the returning exiles; the veneration of the accord's maker and architect, the emblematic Yasser Arafat; and the overflowing joy at the deep and sweeping transformation the agreement had brought to the daily lives of ordinary people — their sense that freedom was approaching, that peace was within reach, above all when the Israeli army withdrew first from the major cities and the direct grip of occupation was lifted from five million Palestinians after more than a quarter century. But the decisive scene was the overwhelming popular mandate — the vote of the vast majority in favor of President Arafat in the first elections ever held on Palestinian soil in 1996. And returning to our finely sensitive poet, who had become one of the pillars of the new era, commanding an elite and popular consensus that President Yasser Arafat himself had never enjoyed, one might venture to say that his profound intuition regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — with all its intractable problems — had made him keenly aware of its fragility, and had kept alive in him the premonition of its collapse, ever since Israeli extremism had drawn its pistol and murdered Yitzhak Rabin at the height of his glory, at the very moment he was being crowned as "king." And the forces of extremism had also brought down, through the ballot box, the seasoned Shimon Peres. At the same time, Palestinian extremism was whetting its daggers and unleashing its suicidal energy to blow up "the accord of treachery," as the parties of the "resistance and rejection" axis call it. And today they celebrate their "victory" over the peace process, with not a thought for what has befallen the people of the tents in Gaza, or the inhabitants of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The poet's intuition proved right when he urged everyone to think of others. But the extremists on both sides are indifferent to this call. Terrorism Whatever the intentions when thinking of the other — whether brother, friend, adversary, or enemy — and whatever the aspiration, be it coexistence, compromise, reconciliation, or simply living together, the peacemaker must first contend with extremism within his own environment before he can engage with the other. In this context, I call for abandoning the term "terrorism," which has come to carry meanings far beyond its technical and linguistic definition. It has become a political epithet hurled about by terrorists themselves, a ready-made charge wielded by states and politicians and slapped, at times, on their most balanced and moderate adversaries and enemies. Our most telling example is the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas! I therefore believe that "national supremacism" among great powers, "religious fanaticism," and "political extremism" are terms far more objective in their denotation and description of what humanity endures than the word "terrorism." Building on what was said in the first section, one may say that its moral dimension raises challenges of an altogether different order — challenges that belong to the very core of contemporary political theory, which expresses the international order of the post-World War II era. That era witnessed an exceptional ascent in the fields of science and technology, the human and social sciences, and the production of the most refined legislation across many domains. Yet we also witnessed massacres and slaughter, from the Vietnam War to the war of extermination in the Gaza Strip, as defined by the International Court of Justice. We have also seen ethnic cleansing, from the Balkans and Myanmar to Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as forced displacement from Syria, Sudan, and other countries. And if we single out the wars waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, it is precisely because they were launched for no other purpose than to uproot terrorism and eliminate terrorists! The outcome? Negotiation with those very terrorists. And the only tangible achievement: the destruction of states, homelands, and peoples. Now that the war of extermination against the people of Gaza has been halted by decree of the master of the White House — while the firing has not ceased for a single moment to this day, and operations aimed at displacing millions of Palestinians from their land have not relented — this reality demands a new analysis, which may be summarized as follows: 1. The geography of historic Palestine and its people constitutes a living, ongoing case study, revealing the utter incapacity of international law and its relevant conventions to secure the most basic rights of life — water, food, medicine — let alone to provide a simple tent... a tent, nothing more! Who can believe this is happening in an age of civilization and human values?! 2. What is unfolding — this slow extermination without heavy artillery — is in fact a comprehensive test of the credibility of the concepts that Western governments have exported to us with a measure of condescension and a measure of contempt. 3. The function of the White House's ceasefire decree is to protect the international political order and its mechanisms of operation as seen through the American lens, and to prevent the erosion of Israel's standing, as Trump himself declared. And in order to protect the Israeli government, he graciously extended to the Palestinians the gift of halting the war of extermination, while permitting the war of attrition to continue. Thus has modernity, in its most splendid guises — through artificial intelligence and by its means as well — enabled the production of genocide, whose effects continue unabated, as the Israeli government has not retreated from its declared objectives of ethnic cleansing, annexation of lands, and the political crushing of the Palestinian political entity and its historical social fabric. All of this emanates from a modern state sponsored by the largest secular democracy on the planet — and yet, with remarkable ease, modernity may be discarded and a return made to biblical myth to demonstrate that the purpose of all this is the fulfillment of the "divine promise," as the American ambassador to Israel declared. He did not, however, tell us whether this biblical promise was written before the Big Bang, after it, or at the precise moment of its occurrence! The October 7 Attack The suicidal attack of October 7 triggered a state of collective hysteria across Israeli society — from the apex of the political hierarchy, through the military, all the way to the settlers. The Israeli mind could not absorb this sudden collapse of the military and security barriers deployed along the Gaza Strip's border — and above all, the failure of the high-tech electronic fence to sound an early warning! It is well known that this pivotal event brought about a deep and qualitative transformation in the nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations at every level. Nothing remained as it was. Rage, hatred, and the direct drive to destroy the other exploded with full force. Such became the equation between the two parties — and the world witnessed it, filmed and documented, on screens everywhere. On the Palestinian side, only a small fraction of the elites condemned the Hamas attack, for the vast majority of ordinary people saw in it a natural act of retaliation against the brutality and torment inflicted by the Israeli occupation army. Others viewed it as a confrontation between the Jewish religious extremism practiced by the Israeli government and the Islamic religious extremism practiced by the Hamas movement. In this debate, I find it illuminating to shed light on the visit paid by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during the Biden administration, to Ramallah and his meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas — a visit in which he quickly pressed Abbas to condemn and denounce the attack and classify it as terrorism… But President Abbas replied in a sharp tone and a loud voice: "You are the ones who created the Hamas movement, and you are the ones who brought it to power in the Gaza Strip… The responsibility lies with you, and do not ask anything of me." After that episode, American and Israeli media began to speak of the Authority's corruption, the need for change, the old age and incapacity of the Palestinian administration — culminating in the delegitimization of its political standing, without pausing before the truth that reveals how the peace-building process between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples had ground to a halt ever since Netanyahu's team seized power in Israel on the ruins of the Rabin-Peres government at the end of the last century. And because American administrations, in the wake of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, succeeded in nothing but expanding the use of violence that negates justice and entrenches domination by force — all while calling it a "peace process" — we are today harvesting the fruits of policies of accommodation and exploitation of political Islam, in both its Sunni and Shia dimensions, as evidenced by the renewed outbreak of violence under new-yet-old headings that signal the redrawing of the map of the Greater Middle East. And we do not know when the war will lay down its burdens after the liquidation of the ruling elite in Iran, for the matter is not who governs Iran but who steers the world from the White House.