History did not begin on October 7, 2023. All those with the Palestinian cause at heart like to make a reminder of this to counter a dominant narrative that makes it the alpha and omega of everything that happened during this terrible year, establishing a misleading and simplistic parallel with the September 11 attacks.
October 7 is an ignominy. 1,177 people were killed, including a large majority of civilians and about ten children. Hundreds were taken hostage. Cases of rape, mutilations, tying up, and desecration of corpses were also reported. Never had so many Jews been killed in a single day since the Holocaust. The Arab world should have realized the horror of this and condemned it massively rather than celebrate or deny it. But as horrifying as it is, whatever the calculations of Hamas and Iran, the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation did not come out of nowhere.
It is the result of the dispossession of a people, the denial of their most basic rights, the deprivation of their freedom, and their dehumanization. To consider that massacring civilians would make Palestinians' daily lives more acceptable is an aberration. But to think those same Palestinians would accept dying in silence because no one is interested in their fate anymore is madness, which many ended up believing.
A year later, no lesson has been learned. The systematic destruction of Gaza, which some experts classify as genocide, the total impunity that Israel enjoys, the tens of thousands of deaths, including thousands of children, and the explicitly racist rhetoric of Jewish supremacists will undoubtedly lead, in a few years or decades, to other October 7s. Because this vicious cycle of violence will never end as long as Israel and its allies pretend not to understand what the creation of the state of Israel symbolized and engendered in the Arab world and, especially, as long as a respectable Palestinian state has not been created.
In this logic, one might consider that the Gaza war marks the beginning of a new phase – more violent and more fanatical – of a conflict over seven decades old, whose main issue remains the colonization of the West Bank. We believe that this war is much more than that. It is the mirror of a world dying before our eyes. It is a major turning point in contemporary history that will have significant repercussions not only in the region but also in the West and, to a lesser extent, in what is casually referred to as the "Global South".
The Gaza war does not have the same strategic importance as the one that has been tearing Ukraine apart for over two years. Whether or not Israel defeats Hamas will not disrupt global balances. But it has an unmatched symbolic power compared to all other conflicts. Everyone projects their own perspective onto it and, by extension, their own worldview – the North vs. South conflict, the last colonial conflict, the war of religions, or even civilizations, the war against jihadist terrorism – so much so that no other conflict has such a capacity to tear societies apart from within, even if they are thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers apart.
This symbolic superpower is compounded by a major strategic issue due to the instrumentalization of the cause by Iran and its allies in the region.
Only a few months ago, it was seriously arguable that this war did not constitute a geopolitical turning point. No Arab country that has normalized relations with Israel has questioned these agreements, and the Iran-Israel standoff had come out of the shadows but remained contained. The situation is entirely different today, with the considerable weakening of Hezbollah, the expansion of the war in Lebanon, and the possibility of a direct conflict between Israel and Iran.
The crushing of the Iranian axis, which endangers the entire legacy of Khomeiniism at a time when the Islamic Republic is also wobbling internally, is a major event that can lead to a profound reconfiguration of the Middle East comparable to what resulted from the year 1979. The Israeli-Saudi normalization, another potential strategic turning point, is, for its part, again conditioned on the creation of a Palestinian state.
Beyond these geopolitical developments, beyond the staggering tolls in terms of deaths and destruction – which are in continuity with all the tragedies the region has known over the past two decades, from Iraq to Yemen via Libya, Sudan, and of course Syria – it is on another level that the Gaza war will have the most disastrous consequences.
It has awakened, fueled, or sparked a fire in the minds of tens or hundreds of millions of people. It has radicalized minds throughout the region and beyond. It has erased all nuances, killed any possibility of dialogue, and created a vast chasm between the Arab world and the West, and even within Western societies. The Israeli has become the Jew again, and the Palestinian the Arab. Anti-Semitism has exploded, and the dehumanization of Arabs has reached its peak. Anger, revenge, resentment, and hatred have taken precedence over everything else, so much so that this conflict has never been discussed more but with so little perspective or political project.
The Gaza war marks the end of an illusion: that of a Western desire, sometimes sincere, to build an international order based on something other than the law of the strongest. It is the last nail in the coffin of a liberal order, contested by many global or regional powers, of which the West wanted to be the guardian. From Iraq to Gaza via Syria, this order has never been so trampled by those who claim it as in our region. The result is unequivocal: it is now in tatters, like the Arab world.
