Losing generations for fun and profit

One of my many guilty pleasures is watching moderately old Egyptian TV dramas. They are a universe on their own. It is hard to describe, but they are simultaneously poignant, superficial, kitch, classy, delusional, and excessively realistic. You have to see it to believe it. So, last August, I was watching one of my favorites from the early naughts. The show centered on class warfare (as always). The upper class girl runs away from her family and joins with the working class good guys (as is tradition).

In one scene, her mom stands there saying incredulously, "Why do you hate me so much, am I Sharon?"

This hit me in the summer of 2023 as extremely dissonant. Why is this a thing a mom would say to her daughter. It sounds too political, too forced even for an Egyptian soap opera. But I remember watching this show when it was released, and I vaguely recall this sentence not sounding jarring at all back then.

Then it flooded back. My memory has a weird tendency to work through odor. Suddenly, I could smell tear gas. Since signing the camp David accord with Egypt, Israel insisted on having its embassy on a high rise building on the Nile 700 meters away from Cairo University. So, when the second Intifada happened, I also happened to be there, between an angry mob of university students and the Israeli embassy.

I could suddenly remember why the students were so angry. The images of slaughtered Palestinians were seared into all our memories at the time. Yet twenty years were enough for this brand to fade away. In the summer of 2023, I no longer remembered why anyone would insult someone by calling them Sharon.

My generation had been lost for at least a decade, but it was forgetting. The generation of my kids had no idea what Israel is. They did not care for it, but also didn't care to hate it. They had no feelings about Israel. They vaguely understood that one day they tried to take away our land and we took it back. But when my kids asked me if we are OK with them now, I stammered. I honestly did not know. I guess so.

But that was August.

After Israel started responding to Hamas' attack, I expected another generation to be lost. I could see it coming because I've been through it before. Israel will shoot up a NICU or white phosphorous a refugee camp or something. And we will go into the seasonal cycle, the normal monsoon. People will start a boycott campaign that will be partly good, but partly self destructive. Things will taper off, and it will take another decade or two before we rinse and repeat.

But this time feels different. And it's been driving me crazy why.

I thought maybe the magnitude. When people asked Israel "What kinds of atrocities will you commit in Gaza this time around?" Israel answered "Yes!" But the difference isn't quantitative. There is something fundamentally different.

So I thought it maybe because Israel came out of the gate trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza into Egypt. But no, the difference in the generation being lost goes beyond Egypt.

And then I figured it out. The difference this time around is not about Israel. It is about two things: The west, and the Arab Spring. Specifically, this has to do with the Arab Spring happening and failing, then the West trying to recycle it recently; and then the way the west responded to Israel's ethnic cleansing. And it has to be in that order.

The Arab Spring, its failure, and consistently trying to revive it have been seen in two ways in the Arab world. The first is a portion of the population who saw the west as truly principled. They stand for individual freedoms, equality, and the right to expression. Sometimes things will crop up, for example the far right in Europe, but it is easy to gloss over it as part of the process by which the west cleanses itself peacefully. The Ukraine war proved the moral superiority of the west in supporting freedom and principles, and the moral depravity of the global south in taking a more nuanced approach. This gave the west the moral standing to dictate what is and is not acceptable in the Arab world. It allowed the West to piss allover Qatar's World Cup because Qatar had to give the same rights to LGBTQ people that America didn't ten years ago. It allowed the west to dictate to us who we should let speak, what constitutes a peaceful protest, and whether the choices we make are acceptable.

The other way to see all this is that the Arab Spring, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and certain "Standards" are just cudgels. They are used to beat us over the head when and if convenient. When and if convenient you can call him bone saw Bin Salman, and when and if convenient, you can give him a Fox interview.

The West now bans some protests and allows others. It is illegal to say you oppose genocide in some countries. If you oppose apartheid and want everyone in one country to have equal rights, you are hateful. You can get your visa revoked, get sacked out of your university, lose your job, or maybe even go to jail. Europe supports summary executions in the West Bank and suffocating premies in maternity wards in Gaza. Some countries, openly so.

I have no interest in why the west, particularly Europe is doing this. This is their business. This is their guilt. The Germans killed Jews because they were not white enough. They whitened Jews and are now supporting them in ethnically cleansing a new people who are not white enough, because you can't let the holocaust happen again. I have no capacity to approach how this logic works. It requires a different culture and history to understand this.

What I care about is the shock I see in all the millennials in Egypt who saw a Messianic savior in the west. They are facing the west that us older folk always knew was there. It is a bit funny, and there is Schadenfreude in seeing them contorting over this. But I worry about where it ends up.

There are two ways it will go. The first is to realize that the west shall not save thee, and thus we should start loving ourselves and our culture. We don't have to be a copy of them. We can be who we are and be proud of who we are. If someone says we are not democratic, we can laugh at them. If a European makes fun of how little we work in Ramada, we can send them daily work emails in August to see if they reply. We can insist that they respect who we are and leave us alone.

The other way this goes is more Islamic fundamentalism. This is how it's always gone. Killing, shock at hipocrisy, radicalization, then Islamist violence. And the final part of the cycle is a bunch of white people wondering where the violence comes from, which prompts them to do more killing. But here's the thing, we always end up losing in this. We are the ones who mostly get killed and held back. 

I really wish our youths learn the right lesson this time.

What is there to see, between the river and the sea?

When America was attacked on September the 11^th, it waged a righteous war in Afghanistan and a dumb war in Iraq. In both wars, when the US got intelligence on a target, they would trail it for days, picking an opportune moment to hit the target while minimizing civilian loss. These wars are characterized as disastrous failures rife with violations. 

In its current war against Gaza, if Israel gets vague intelligence that a target is hiding in a tunnel in an area, it carpet-bombs the entire neighborhood with armament intended to compact the soil. what happens to everyone in the neighborhood is not a consideration. I am realizing that Israel is not a normal country. To understand what Israel is doing and how we in the Arab world should respond, we must understand Israel from its own perspective.

So, what is Israel? Israel is the Jewish homeland. It started with the realization among European Jewry that Jews need a place to call their own country. Jews had been persecuted for centuries, and when they were not, they were dependent on the goodwill of those around them, which has always been fickle. They needed a place where it was normal and safe to be Jewish.

One common myth among Arabs is that the early Zionists did not necessarily target Palestine for settlement but wanted a home for Jews anywhere. They did consider options in Africa, Russia, and Latin America briefly, but they started with Palestine, continued to think Palestine, and ended in Palestine.

Why? Because Palestine is very important for Jews. Jews had a continuous presence among the other populations of the area for centuries. They also have origins in the ancient kingdoms of Judaea and Israel. 

The Jewish national origin myth is that of a people who were enslaved in Egypt, escaped, ethnically cleansed Canaan, and created a powerful united kingdom. This kingdom then split into a heroic southern kingdom, and an impure northern kingdom. The northern kingdom was broken up, but the southern kingdom held on because it was religiously pure.

The real story is that the Israelites were never in Egypt. They were a native Canaanite confederacy that worshipped a common storm god. There was never a united kingdom. Both the northern and southern kingdoms were “impure”, in that they included all kinds of people. Both were minor princedoms surrounded by equally minor Canaanite, Phoenician, and west Semitic principalities and city states.

This land was never pure and simple, it always included all sorts of ethnicities and religions. But there is no denying Jews have an origin in it, which is why Zionism was always going to go for Palestine.

When Israel was formed, it was on the trailing edge of colonialism. It had a narrow window to ethnically cleanse land, which it mostly managed to do. It then declared itself Jewish and Democratic. Both are critical. If Israel is not Jewish, it is meaningless regarding its original purpose. If it is not democratic, it loses the support of its patrons in the west.

As the Arab world emerged from colonialism, Israel found it very useful to contrast itself with its surroundings. It had to look secular, free, democratic, and in a certain way that nobody speaks but everybody understands, “white”. It had to hide religious Jews who creep out Europeans, put gay pride parades front and center, promote leftist (but not too leftist) ideals, and generally give off the image of a secular place full of vibrant diverse opinion.

Israel created this image, and sold itself as a heroic little white western David in a forest of barbaric brown Goliaths. Things could have settled right there, but Israel was a victim of its success and our failure. In 1967, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai, and the Golan. Suddenly Israel asked itself: why not? I deserve it. I earned it. And it was enabled by the west.

Israel proper is Israel along the 1948 international borders. It has a population of roughly 10 million. About 7.5 million are Jews, 2 million ae Arabs, and the rest are migrant workers.

Above is an area known as Gush Dan. This is simply the Metropolitan area of Tel Aviv. It has a population of about 4.5 million. Most are Jews. Greater Jerusalem has a population of about 1.2 million. Of which around 700,000 are Jews.

The distance between the sea boardwalk in Tel Aviv and the edge of Israel’s easternmost settlement in Jerusalem, Maale Adumim is 62Km. The distance between Rishon Lezion, on the eastern side  of Tel Aviv and the Western reaches of Jerusalem is 37.5Km.

The distance between two satellite cities in Cairo, October 6 and 10^th of Ramadan is 96km. But this is a crazy trip that most people will not make in a lifetime. On the other hand, many people commute daily between New Cairo and 6 October, 60Km apart.

So about 5.2 millions of Israel’s 7.5 million Jews live in what would be considered in many places a single metropolitan area. The rest of the country is as follows: The Galilee, which is mostly Arab, the Negev which is about half Arab, Haifa which is about one third Arab, and the perimeter of the west bank, which is mostly Arab.

Here is another weird distance, the northern edge of Gaza, and the southwestern edge of the west bank are 33Km apart. If a Palestinian from Gaza wants to visit family at the end of these 33 kilometers, they have to cross into Egypt, fly to Jordan, and then enter the west bank from Jordan. The trip will take multiple days and require two entry visas. Once in the West Bank, the dude will probably take a few more days to move another 30Km from the Jordanian border to the eastern edge of the West Bank, 33Km from where he started. Along the way, he will need multiple Israeli passes and will be stopped at countless checkpoints for indeterminate periods.

That's a lot of distortion of the fabric of spacetime, and with one objective: to satisfy Israel's prerequisites about itself, to be democratic and Jewish. But what does that mean? What does Jewish mean? We are always asked to pledge our support for Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. I honestly don’t know what that means. I think people have rights; I do not know if states have the right to exist as something specific.

But if we cut the bullshit, the “Jewish nature” of Israel means that it has a Jewish majority, speaks Hebrew, and has aspects of Jewish religion and culture integrated into laws and daily life. This makes it a safe haven for Jews anywhere should they need it.

But Israel also wants to expand. It feels it needs “lebensraum” sort of speak. The fact that most Jews in Israel essentially live in one city doesn't seem to register in this expansionist philosophy. Jews feel a historical right to all the land from the river to the sea. This is based on a deep connection that some Jews, especially religious ones, feel towards the west bank. The west bank is where ancient Judaea was after all. The west bank also elbows into lake Tiberias, the Jordan river, and the Dead Sea, all resources Israel wants to never give up.

So, between the river and the sea, there are 7.5 million Jews in Israel and the west bank. There are 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, the same number in the west bank, and about 2 million in Israel proper. This is dangerously close to the Jewish population between the river and the sea. Israel cannot allow everyone to be free from the river to the sea if it wants to be democratic and Jewish. If everyone is free, it is not comfortably Jewish. If it is Jewish between the river and the sea, it cannot allow itself to be democratic.

None of this is new. Israel has always known it had only four options. These are: the two-state solution, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the one state solution.

In the early nineties, Israel opted for the two-state solution. This is the solution favored by the Arab world and the west. It is also the safest. It has challenges. Israel will have to contend with an independent Palestine so close to its major (and let’s be real only) population center in Gush Dan. The Palestinians will have to contend with forming a viable state on the tiny resource poor land of the west bank and Gaza. But everyone else was ready to help both sides be successful, and there was hope it could work.

This perhaps died with the assassination of Rabin and was buried by Sharon and Netanyahu. The expansion of Jewish settlements deep in the hill country of the west bank now makes it impossible to have any viable land swap, and Israel will not evacuate these deep settlement blocks. The right wing in Israel set out to kill the two-state solution, and they were successful.

The apartheid solution was Israel’s long-term vision starting with Sharon. In this solution, Israel partitioned its demographic problem so they can deal with it. The theory is the “Arabs” between the river and the sea should not be seen as a monolith. This is against the Israeli propaganda, which promotes Arabs as an amorphous blob, this traditionally allows Israel to rally western support for ethnic cleansing. But Israelis can face reality when it’s to their advantage. “Arabs” between the river and the sea really are:

• The bedwins of the Negev, who Israel managed to recruit. Israel had little interest in taking over all of the resource poor desert, and they were happy to trade some privileges for bedwin allegiance to the Jewish state.

• The Druze of the north, who had to endure centuries of persecution and were more than happy to declare allegiance to the Jewish state. Druze and bedwin soldiers in the Israeli army tend to be among the most ruthless to Palestinian civilians.

• This leaves a more manageable 1.5 million Muslim and Christian Palestinian citizens of Israel who can be contained to segregated communities in the Galilee.

• In the west bank, Palestinians will be strangled by ever shrinking Bantustans and a pass system. This will allow Jewish settlers to gradually takeover all of the resources in the land, making life near impossible for the Palestinians who remain.

So, what is wrench in the gears here? Well, the open-air prison of Gaza with 2.5 million Palestinians. Any equation from the river to the sea is ruined by Gaza. The narrow strip is exploding with the progeny of refugees cleansed from south central Israel during its creation. 

So, Israel decided to withdraw from Gaza. But a Gaza without Israel, even with Hamas, had the possibility of improving. If a de facto independent Palestinian city-state improved, it could inspire uprising in the West Bank. So Gaza could not succeed. Enabling Hamas was instrumental here, since Hamas are not really interested in good governance. But Gaza also had to be cutoff from its resources. And for Gaza, this is the coast and airspace, which Israel completely took control of.

Meanwhile Israel aided by western media pushed a narrative that Egypt is participating in the siege through closing the Rafah crossing. The Rafah crossing processed 200,000 crossings in 2022. Five hundred trucks carrying goods flowed through it every day. So why is the west, Islamists, and Israel claiming it is “closed”?

Because the opening of Rafah that all these people want is an unconditional opening, and open border. This will make Egypt responsible for all the needs of Gaza. Meanwhile Gaza is not allowed to develop because it does not have access to its air and water. This way Israel will rid itself of 2.5 million pests without allowing them to inspire the remainder of the 7 million. Getting Egypt burdened is an added perk.

And for a long time, this complex ad hoc “plan” was working. Israel had a booming advanced economy, the world pretended Israel was a democracy, and Gulf countries ran to normalize with Israel. Life went on.

October 7^th hit Israel’s very definition. Because if Israel is a Jewish state, then it must be the safest place on Earth for Jews. On October 7^th, it became the most dangerous place on Earth for Jews.

Which is why I think Israel has now chosen answer number 3: ethnic cleansing. I think most Israelis now support genociding or chasing away all Palestinians from Gaza and the west bank. And I think the west will not oppose them. But I also think they will fail. Israel is trying to make things so unbearable for the world, that the world will solve its demographic problem for it. If Egypt is not going to take the Palestinians, Canada can, or Fance, or Turkey, or whatever. Israel just wants to keep killing people and destroying things till it feels safe again.

If it takes killing fifty thousand children and ethnically cleansing millions for Israel to be Jewish and democratic, so be it. And then Israel will be a beacon of light in a sea of brown darkness.

Which is why I think we, as Arabs, should hold Israel’s feet to the fire. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are major war crimes. If the west supports it, we should make them say they support it. The two-state solution was destroyed by Israel, we should stop talking about it.

There is only one solution, the one state solution. And we should be very clear about what that means. This means everyone living between the river and the sea gets to live there. Nobody gets thrown in the desert, nobody gets thrown in the sea. Everyone has the same rights. If these rights are many, they are for all. If they are few, they are for all. Jews everywhere in the world should have the right of “return” or refuge in this one state, let us call it Israel. But every Palestinian whose grandparents were kicked out of this land should also be able to go back.

One democratic secular state with equal rights, safety, and freedom for all. Israel’s worst nightmare.