The term ‘zero distance’ became famous after it was used by Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza to illustrate the strength and courage of Palestinian resistance in the face of Israeli tanks. Zero distance itself involved a strategy deployed by the fighters of engaging the IOF from less than 50 meters away, making it difficult for heavy weaponry to be used against them. Transforming into a metaphor symbolizing Palestinian resistance, it encompasses two aspects: The first is the confrontation between Palestinian bodies and the Israeli military machine, supported and financed by the USA and Europe, the Arab regimes that are complicit with Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the war that is decimating Gaza and, more broadly, a large part of the Middle East (West Bank, South Lebanon, Syrian Golan). The second relates to the valiant courage of the “zero distance” resistance fighters who, in challenging the most powerful army in the world from zero distance created an empowering narrative capable of reminding us that the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination is inalienable. In this article, I will discuss the strategic issues at stake in this Western-Israeli war in the Arab region and its various drivers, while attempting to situate this war in the long history that has shaken the region since the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century. I will particularly focus on the lessons of two key political moments that triggered a radical rupture in the collective political imagination—the moment of the Arab revolutions, and the moment of 7 October 2023—analyzing what they can tell us about the obstacles to resistance in the face of this new project of Greater Israel or Greater Middle East.
In a hunting society, you cannot only hunt once
During his inauguration speech on 2 January 2025, Trump, a self-proclaimed leader of civilizational renewal, calls on Americans to act ‘with the courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization’. In a particularly eloquent passage—he explicitly reminds us that the founding political model of the USA based on exploitative predatory conquest: ‘The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close.”1 For his part, Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister, declared in Paris: ’The Palestinian people are an invention of less than a hundred years. Do they have a history, a culture? No, they don’t’, and his lectern shows a map including not only occupied Palestine, like the one presented to the UN by Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the territory of present-day Jordan and part of Syria.2
During his trial for corruption, Benjamin Netanyahu recalled the historic turning point represented by the capture of Mount Hermon, asserting: ‘Something tectonic happened here, an earthquake that did not happen in the hundred years that followed’. In a similar vein, as early as 2014, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the ‘Islamic State’3 claimed the same desire to ‘erase the colonial borders of the Sykes-Picot agreements’ and to Balkanize the region.4 Mount Hermon, which is strategically located, dominates the Syrian Hauran plain, less than 50 kilometres from the Syrian capital. It also provides Israel with water resources and enables it to secure the Jordan River and Lake Tiberias.5 Even Saudi Arabia, despite being one of Israel’s main allies, has criticized an operation that ‘sabotages’ Syria’s chances of recovering its ‘territorial integrity’. An annexation that ‘confirms Israel’s continued violation of the rules of international law’, according to the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the same time, the Israeli Prime Minister, who did not hesitate to take credit for the fall of Bashar Al Assad, carried out more than 500 strikes and destroyed 80% of the Syrian arsenal to ensure that the new power remains in a weak position in the context of the strategic recomposition of the region. Israel will now fight to ensure that Syria remains fragmented and powerless, unable to pose a significant challenge to Israel’s regional ambitions.
Thus, the recent developments in the region, the genocidal war in Palestine and Lebanon, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, are interlinked elements that have contributed to unleashing the predatory and expansionist appetite of the Israeli right-wing government—reviving the dream of Jabotinsky to see the Zionist project become a great regional power, intimidating its neighbors and monopolizing their resources. All this reminds us that in a society where you hunt, you cannot only hunt once—you have to hunt continuously. In this respect, capitalism is not very different from hunting. As Samir Amin, and other Marxist thinkers remind us: ‘Colonialism is not an event, it is a structure’. Capitalist nations must constantly oscillate between, on the one hand, civilizing themselves and allowing the maintenance of ‘legal accumulation’ that allows them to avoid the looting, plundering, slavery and genocide that produced their accumulated wealth, and, on the other hand, constantly finding spaces within or outside their borders where the law of the jungle takes precedence over the rule of law in order to plunder, enslave and steal again. It is clear that the savage imperialism of Trump and Netanyahu, cloaked in a messianic rhetoric that divides humanity (human and human-animals) into two categories, seems to have a single strategy: that of looting and plundering not only outside its borders but also within the borders of its own nation-states, with an unprecedented rise of fascism in all Western countries.6
This imperialism has always manifested itself in the global south and especially in the Arab region through necro-politics. There are lives worth living and others that can be destroyed at any moment. Hillary Clinton’s famous comment on the assassination of Gaddafi, ‘We came, we saw, he died’, sums up the logic of imperialism and the death it imposes on Arab countries. The perpetual war in Palestine, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere is not only a means of maintaining the global capitalist order but is proving to be vital for maintaining Western hegemony in the region. The Libyans and the Arab peoples understand Clinton’s phrase to mean:
The Americans came, saw us and killed us to keep themselves alive.
We should also remember the words of Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton, who said of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths (especially children and vulnerable people) as a result of the embargo: ‘We think the price is worth it’. A “quasi-genocidal price for the population”, because it is in fact an enterprise of dehumanising entire populations, which can therefore be condemned to mass death. Today, the race to share the limited wealth of the planet and the genocide in Palestine and the Congo show that this is an era of plunder and genocide without any safety net. Within this configuration, Israel has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in maintaining Western imperial interests—particularly those of the United States—in the Middle East. It has played this role, of course, alongside the oil-rich Arab Gulf monarchies, led by Saudi Arabia.
From Sykes-Picot to the Arab revolutions: A history of counter-revolutions
The new world order proclaimed by Trump, whose catchphrases are predation and genocide, is characterized by the supremacy of the USA and the centrality of NATO. Of course, other players, especially secondary imperialisms such as post-Soviet Russia, France and the UK, also play their part, but they did not lay the foundations of the world order that has prevailed throughout this period. The only way to maintain American hegemony is to fragment everything everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe (former Yugoslavia) and the Arab world. The U.S. and its allies have not only divided the three countries (Iraq, Egypt and Syria) that had powerful armies that threatened Israel and American hegemony in the region,7 but they continue to fight against the slightest aspiration to national sovereignty. In the Arab world, to understand the ongoing process of fragmentation, we must go back to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between the British and the French, and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, both signed in defiance of the people. The agreement formalized the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the partition of the Arab provinces. As a result, national borders in Arab countries did not reflect the aspirations for emancipation of its people, but rather the distribution of influence, wealth and energy resources among the European colonial powers in the region.8 This history gives rise to ‘fierce’ states—to use the term of political scientist Nazih Ayubi9–characterized by the importance of security measures, the maintenance of strong links between the army, economic clans and political power, and a relative disconnection from local social and economic forces. These states suffer from the inherent distortion of their formation, namely the lack of a founding narrative capable of providing them with the historical legitimacy necessary for the penetration of society. The regular and instrumental recourse to ideologies such as Arab nationalism or political Islamism is evidence of these difficulties. To remain in power, political elites have pursued economic policies based on a rentier logic. This is not only the case in oil-producing countries. In fact, most states have favored increased consumption to the detriment of development policies that are necessary to diversify the economy, but which run the risk of creating actors that compete with the ruling elite. These regimes and elites of the “provincial states”, whose fragility is structural, naturally need an external protector, whom they do not hesitate to manipulate in return.
By calling for ‘the fall of the regime’, the Arab revolutions not only caused an implosion of the internal social contract between the elites and the local populations but also shattered the neocolonial pact between the Arab states and their Western allies. The shared aspiration is essentially the same everywhere: the reconstruction of a state free of its original distortions which, while breaking with the authoritarian and clientelist legacy, must show itself capable of redistributing wealth and guaranteeing the political and economic emancipation of the peoples of the region.10 However, the only approach proposed by international institutions is to twin the ‘promotion of democracy’ with neoliberal economic prescriptions. Although this recipe is not new, it is in line with the rhetoric adopted by U.S. President George W. Bush in his speech of 11 September 2002 (commemorating the attacks of 11 September 2001 and legitimizing the war in Iraq): ‘We seek peace exactly where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced by the hope for democracy, free market and free trade”. Such rhetoric is essentially aimed at exploiting the superficial support for ‘democracy’ in order to deepen economic liberalization throughout the region. This support, of course, does not exclude the West’s continued support to all regimes that serve its interests and the elimination of those that resist it. Did we not witness a full support to the autocratic regime of Egypt and the blocking of the democratic process in the Palestinian Autonomous Territories after the decisive victory of Hamas in the legislative elections of 25 January 2006?
Thus, over the past decade, we have witnessed two forms of counter-revolution in Arab countries: one based on direct military intervention, as in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Palestine, and the other based on debt and neo-liberal reforms sold under the rubric of ‘democratic transition’. The agenda of this liberal democracy aimed to sideline the demand for economic and political sovereignty at the heart of the Arab revolutions. Thus, while the fall of Bashar’s regime is mainly attributed to the Syrian revolutionary movement, the accession to power of Joulani—a former member of al-Qaeda and Daesh—who was transformed into a great democrat thanks to a British communications agency–11 crystallizes the meeting of two counter-revolutionary dynamics rooted in the history of Western interference in the region. The first dynamic is that of external interference through the regime of economic sanctions, which has greatly weakened the Syrian regime on the one hand12 and, on the other, that of direct Western military intervention through Israel (a major Non-NATO ally) and Turkey (NATO member), to counter the Russian-Iranian presence on other hand.
As national sovereignty, as demanded by the Arab revolutions, reconnects with the movements for self-determination and national liberation that prevailed in left-wing circles in the early 20th century, the last decade has shown us that the realization of peoples’ aspirations for social justice requires a redefinition of the nation-state and its liberation from the neo-colonial pact between local elites and their Western imitators. It also shows us that no political regime, democratic or authoritarian, is viable for long if the elites are disconnected from the aspirations of the people. This also means that while the national framework remains central to thinking about issues of sovereignty or democracy, it is not sufficient because the last decade and the perpetual war waged in the region by Israel, the U.S. and their Western allies force us to think of nation-states in the Arab region as interdependent political and economic entities that share—beyond a language, culture and collective history—not only a particular configuration of economic and political relations but, more importantly, a common destiny.
Normalization or genocide, two paths to disappearance?
The historical cycle opened by the Toufan Al-Aqsa operation reminds us that the war between Israel and the peoples of the region is still at the heart of this quest for national liberation. Threatened by the attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel has decided, with the active support of the West and in particular the U.S., to turn this threat into an opportunity and to go on the offensive to pursue the project of remaking the Middle East or the Greater Israel project. The Israeli government and Trump are launching an accelerated process of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Israeli regime has just announced a new military operation, ‘Iron Wall’, in Jenin, in the north of the West Bank. The name of the operation is not a coincidence. The Iron Wall is the seminal work of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the founding fathers of Zionism. This work is the ideological force behind Netanyahu’s vision. Jabotinsky writes:
There can be no voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine… The native population, civilized or not, has always stubbornly resisted the colonists.
Israel is not going to withdraw from South Lebanon either. The same applies to Syria, where the Zionist army has taken the initiative to destroy the Syrian military capabilities after the collapse of the previous regime, to seize new areas of its territory and to officially encourage separatist tendencies to tear the country apart and to push its people into conflicts and struggles. Iran, which is in Israel’s target zone, is aware of this reality and its leaders emphasize that their country is prepared for such an eventuality. Turkey has also been targeted by the Israeli expansionist project by playing the Kurdish separatism card, mentioned by more than one Israeli official, and the days will show how it will deal with this issue. Yemen, for its part, is in direct conflict with the Zionist entity and it is inevitable that this conflict will intensify. The question is how the other states in the region will deal with the Israeli expansionist project. Will Egypt and Jordan accept the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza? Will Saudi Arabia accept an Israeli-led regional order? The choice now facing all the countries in the region is between normalization and genocide. What is on the table today is no longer the classic normalization of trade and economic relations and cooperation in various fields, but total submission to the Zionist entity. Genocide or normalization, the plan is to eliminate any notion of a people in the region and turn it into a free market of goods and identities. Genocide or normalization are two options in the same plan to eliminate any quest for dignity and sovereignty in the region.
In October 1993, Edward Said wrote in his prescient article ‘Oslo: The Day After’:13 ‘In reality, Israel, with its well-developed institutions, close relations with the U.S. and aggressive economy, will economically integrate the [occupied] territories and keep them in a state of permanent dependency. And then Israel will turn to the wider Arab world, using the political benefits of the Palestinian agreement as a springboard to enter the Arab markets, which it will also exploit and probably dominate”. Here we are!
In this regard, it should be recalled that since the 1990s, the United States (and its European allies) have resorted to various mechanisms aimed at promoting Israel’s economic integration into the wider Middle East. One of these was the deepening of economic reforms—an opening to foreign investment and trade flows that quickly spread throughout the region. In this context, the United States proposed a series of economic initiatives aimed at linking the Israeli and Arab markets to each other and then to the U.S. economy. The Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ), low-wage manufacturing zones established in Jordan and Egypt in the late 1990s, are an example of this.14 With the Abraham Accords, five Arab countries now have official diplomatic relations with Israel. These countries represent about 40% of the Arab world’s population and are among the region’s major political and economic powers.15 Thec of this region will enable the U.S. to establish its hegemony and counter the Chinese New Silk Road project. But one crucial question remains: when will Saudi Arabia join this club? All the signs are that this is Trump’s number one objective.
In the Maghreb, Morocco’s normalization agreement with Israel, signed on 22 December 2020, has only exacerbated the contradictions blocking the Maghreb economic integration project.16 In Tunisia, while unofficial normalization accelerated with Ben Ali following the Oslo Accords, official normalization remains ‘a crime of high treason’ in the words of President Kais Said.17 It is to be feared that with the arrival of Trump, the pressure for the normalization of Tunisia and Algeria with Israel will accelerate.18 Moreover, the increase in tensions between Algeria and Morocco over the Western Sahara and between France and Algeria can only serve as a warning of the uncertain future of the Maghreb, which is also suffering from the Israeli-U.S. expansionist project in other ways. What is certain, however, is that those most directly affected, the peoples targeted by the monstrosity and brutality of the U.S.-Israeli machine of destruction, will resist with all their might the project of mutilating and subjugating the region. The Arab revolutions, which have suffered various forms of counter-revolution of unprecedented brutality, must be seen in the long term as a phase in a long cycle of anti-colonial struggles, and the Palestinians are showing us the main enemy at the cost of their blood. This is why the Palestinian resistance is an essential element of political change in the Arab world, a region that is today the most socially polarized, economically unequal and war-torn in the world. Conversely, this is why the struggle for Palestine is inextricably linked to the successes and failures of other progressive social struggles in the region.
And yet, they still resist
The historical cycle inaugurated by Operation Toufan Al-Aqsa, apart from its ability to demonstrate the challenges of liberation and national sovereignty for all the peoples of the Arab region, has revealed some truths that can no longer be ignored:
First, Israel, which for decades wrapped itself in the tatters of democratic sanctity, is now exposed—a state of unrelenting brutality, marked by colonial violence and, in particular, genocide and ethnic cleansing. A state whose existence depends entirely on the support of Europe and the United States, which is suffocating the Arab world, destroying its future before it can express itself. Its narrative of legitimacy is collapsing under the weight of its own violence, its claim to a high moral ground is eroding. The cycle opened by Toufan Al-Aqsa, while blocking the normalization project with Saudi Arabia, deconstructs all the narratives that invite us to come to terms with Israeli colonization as a “fait accompli”. Zero Distance sets the record straight by recalling the colonial and brutal reality of the Zionist colonialist project, a genocidal project supported by large sections of Israeli society.19 The challenge throughout the entire region remains the resistance against all forms of colonization: war, debt, intellectual hegemony.
Second, the cycle opened by the Toufan Al-Aqsa operation has signalled once and for all the collapse of the moral superiority of the West, which had already been greatly weakened in the past. The way in which Western fascism and Israeli impunity feed off each other is clear.20 The slogan “Kill the Arabs” chanted by the Israelis and taken up by the fascists in the West was a reminder that all the institutions created by the United States after the Second World War are incapable of saving the lives of the Arabs at home and all over the World.
Third, the expansionist and messianic colonizing project led by Trump and Netanyahu once again reveals the fragility of international law as a means of regulating conflicts and wars.21 Moreover, the liberal framework of international law alone cannot take into account the issues of national liberation of the peoples of the region. The Palestinian question cannot be reduced to a question of massive human rights violations by Israel and the continuous violations of international law suffered by the Palestinians for almost eight decades. It is first and foremost a colonial fact and a quest for self-determination by the Palestinian people that goes beyond the framework established by the post-World War II institutions, largely exploited by the NATO countries. Similarly, reducing the aspirations of the Arab peoples to a question of individual or public freedoms, framed by the language of law and/or liberal democratic transition, is problematic because there is no viable democracy in an area of ruin without sovereignty, where populations suffer multiple forms of subjugation.22
Finally, the means of resistance are not just the product of the actors’ ingenuity but are largely determined by the material context of the balance of power. Western foreign intervention in the Arab world, whether in the form of direct war or neo-liberal reforms, is a regular reminder that the question of national liberation remains unresolved in Arab countries. Despite the formal independence of some countries, economic imperialism is the other side of colonialism and genocide, aimed at the final abolition of all national sovereignty and individual and collective dignity. Far from any binary opposition between liberal democracy and autocratic regimes, the Arab revolutions and the Palestinian resistance show us once again that Western interference accommodates all regimes that serve its interests and eliminates those that resist it. Did we not witness the blocking of the democratic process in the Palestinian Autonomous Territories by the United States and the European Union after the decisive victory of Hamas in the legislative elections of 25 January 2006?23 The last decade therefore invites us to put “popular national sovereignty” back at the Centre of the political and economic alternatives to be identified, in order to support the various waves of social and popular struggles that are resisting, as best they can, the steamroller of Israeli-U.S. fragmentation.
Conclusion
The fall of the Syrian regime and the Arab revolutions, as well as the cycle opened by 7 October, offer a poignant reflection on the fragility of alliances and the challenges posed to the struggles for national sovereignty in the Arab world. As Israel pursues its expansionist project and strategy of ethnic cleansing, it is essential that it learn from history, namely how colonization can paradoxically consolidate the foundations of unexpected resistance.24
The collapse of the Assad regime and the weakening of the Axis of Resistance not only mark the end of an era, but also prefigure the genesis of an uncertain future. The perpetual war in the region is not over and Palestine remains a decisive compass, highlighting the moral, tactical and strategic contradictions of the regional and imperialist powers. The cycle opened by Toufan Al-Aqsa has not only revealed truths and evidence that can no longer be ignored, but above all it has rekindled the debate on the future by raising several questions:
How can we navigate through the maze of competing ambitions, ideological divisions and regional and imperialist interventions that are vying with each other in their ingenuity to shape the fate of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and the region as a whole? Will Syria, like Libya, Iraq and so many other countries before it, become a battlefield of endless divisions? Will the Palestinians, as the beautiful images of the return of the Gazans to the north suggest, continue to resist any plan of ethnic cleansing and inspire other struggles in the region? Will the Arab regimes continue to ignore the relentless quest for national sovereignty of their populations, pretending to forget that normalization, as envisaged by the Greater Middle East project, will sooner or later simply mean their disappearance? The answers remain unclear, but the issues at stake are clear: the map of power is rapidly being redrawn, and, within the margins of this upheaval, new uncertain but dynamic possibilities are being offered by different forms of resistance.
The cycle that began after the Toufan Al-Aqsa operation is far from over and the war between the Arabs and the Israeli-U.S. axis has not yet ended. The slogans ‘Free Tunisia and its capital Jerusalem’ or ‘Palestine is a national cause’ carried by the Egyptians and Moroccans not only embody the organic link between the peoples of the region but also show that all the Arab countries are suffering the fate of the Palestinians, who are asking them to rework their strategies of resistance.
The strategies of resistance consist, first of all, in putting an end once and for all to the weak negotiations and the lame compromises; and in clearly identifying the central threat: that of the expansionist project of Greater Israel. It is a question of adopting the attitude of radical refusal shown by the various forms of resistance in the Arab world; an attitude of radical rupture, the only one capable of guaranteeing the individual and collective dignity of the peoples of the region at “zero distance” from the Israeli destruction machine.
Notes:
3. Luizard, P. J. (2017). Le piège Daech: l’État islamique ou le retour de l’histoire. La Découverte.
6. Hage, Ghassan. Is racism an environmental threat?. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
7. https://www.contretemps.eu/signification-anti-imperialisme-entretien-tariq-ali/
8. Corm, G. (2007). Le Proche-Orient éclaté: 1956-2007. Gallimard.
9. Nazih N. Ayubi (1991), Over-stating the Arab State. Politics and society in the Middle East, Londres, I.B. Tauris.
10. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/national-sovereignty-for-arab-countries-a-utopia/
12. cesice.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
13. https://ujfp.org/oslo-le-jour-dapres-edward-said/
14. https://www.chroniquepalestine.com/pourquoi-lutte-pour-palestine-est-lutte-contre-imperialisme-us/
19. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/02/netanyahu-gaza-palestinians-war-israeli-society/
20. https://www.chroniquepalestine.com/genocid-gaza-a-revele-fascisme-israelien-et-occidental/