Ziad Majed, ‘A new founding moment in the “Middle East”?’

Abstract 

Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the political history of the Middle East can be said to have been marked by five key moments. 

The first is that of European promises, betrayals, and the drawing of maps and borders (1915-1920). The second is the creation of Israel in 1947-1948, the Palestinian Nakba and the forced displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, followed by the first Arab-Israeli war (1948-49) and a series of military coups in Arab countries. The third moment, 1973, is that of the last Arab-Israeli war (in terms of state-to-state actors), the end of Nasserism, the oil boom, and the emergence of political Islam. The fourth moment is that of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, followed by the devastating Iraq-Iran war. It coincided with the beginning of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet army. A jihad that would have many consequences and lead to a series of dramatic events, from the Afghan civil war that followed the defeat of the Soviet occupation, to the September 11 attacks and the "war on terror" declared by President Bush, to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq war. The fifth is the one that began in 2011, when revolutions against dictatorships broke out in many Arab countries. Conflicts, counter-revolutions and foreign military interventions followed, leading to the series of crises that the Middle East is still experiencing today. 

It is very likely that since October 2023 we are living a 6th founding moment, the parameters of which are unclear, based on an Israeli war of annihilation in Gaza, annexation in the West Bank and destruction in Lebanon, with the risk of a wider confrontation with Iran. 

Bio 

Ziad Majed is Associate Professor at the American University of Paris. He coordinates the Middle East Studies program and publishes regularly on Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian question and political transitions in the Arab World.