Far from Western eyes, a rich and complex debate is underway about the Islamic theological and historical meaning of Israel’s recent military successes. To those for whom Israel’s destruction is everything - the measure of Islamic dignity and the precondition for Islam’s restoration to its rightful place in history - lamentations such as this one feel pretty on point. I hesitate to comment further on this. Because these kinds of ideologues won’t listen to me. And that’s probably for the best. I mean, what have I got to tell them? That we will not go quietly into that good night? That they waste their blood and treasure on this dark and destructive path? That they’re going to have to find another path out of their weakness? Why would they listen? Or, in a more helpful vein, should I reveal the sources of our great power, sources they’ve spent a century refusing to acknowledge via the simple expedient of explaining each failure to destroy us as a function of an extremely well-timed rescue by a long line of inexplicably devoted imperial patrons? I seriously doubt they’re going to want to hear that we’re actually strong because we’re mostly the grandchildren of refugees. That they had us over a barrel when we thought we were safe and that withdrawal would make us safer; that then, in literally hundreds of suicide bombings and tens of thousands of rocket attacks usually from places we’d recently vacated, they convinced us otherwise. That it is they, ironically, who made us so resilient. Or that we are strong because we have free politics and free markets and a competent and innovative economy. That they should try these things; they really work. And we’d never have outclassed them in military and intelligence capabilities without these features. How much of the God-given talent and potential of the Arabs and Persians and other great peoples of this region is wasted by petty, controlling tyrannies? Should I reveal these dark mysteries that underlie our inexplicable power? Should I tell them, in other words, that they’re full of it, that all this self-pitying self-glorification is childishness, that we are weakened by safety, not by danger, and they, in turn, are weakened, not strengthened, by their vaunted devotion to pious tyrants and redemptionist ideologies? Or, you know, should we leave these ideologues in peace to write whining lamentations about lost honor and endless paeans to the grit and glory of clinging to the same old genocidal and self-destructive path that is the only one they are willing to imagine? https://bird.makeup/@sayedammar_/1872804372876316866
See Tweet