Israel's Expansionist Wars Catalyze Unintended Regional Solidarity, Undermining US-Brokered Normalization Architecture
Original framing: “There’s a ‘New Middle East’, but not the one Israel planned” — Al Jazeera
Palestinian indigenous knowledge centers sumud — a praxis of rootedness that transforms displacement into political generation. The Great March of Return (2018-2019) embodied this: refugees marching toward ancestral lands not as 'protest' but as re-enactment of return. Bedouin tribal diplomacy in the Naqab/Negev and Sinai offers pre-state models of cross-border solidarity that prefigure current Egyptian-Jordanian-Palestinian coordination. The source framing treats Palestinian agency as reactive; indigenous epistemology reveals it as constitutive — the 'New Middle East' is being midwifed by Palestinian refusal to disappear.
Israel's expansionist wars have triggered a civilizational-scale balancing coalition — what Ibn Khaldun would recognize as asabiyyah forged at the crossroads of Eshu's irony.
The 'New Middle East' is not a diplomatic arrangement but an emergent property of Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) meeting Iranian revolutionary theology, Turkish neo-Ottoman ambition, and Arab street rage, all catalyzed by the Dahiyeh Doctrine's strategic blindness. Netanyahu, the architect of 'managing the conflict,' has instead unmanaged it: the Abraham Accords' bypass of Palestine produced October 7; the Dahiyeh Doctrine's application to Gaza produced the Turkish-Iranian-Saudi convergence; the 'Iron Wall' became a mirror. The only exit is a regional Helsinki process that treats Palestinian self-determination as the region's Westphalian founding moment — not a concession, but the structural condition for any stable order. The trickster has spoken: the wall built to exclude has become the scaffold for a new inclusion.