The New Agreement Breaks the Anti-Semitism at the Core of the Middle East’s Dysfunction

Last week’s peace and normalization agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel has rightly been described as one of the most significant events in modern Middle Eastern history. The UAE is not the minor Arab confederacy of bedouin sheikhdoms it once was, but a leader of an entire Sunni Arab bloc, which means that its formal acceptance of Israel paves the road to wider Arab action.

There’s more going on, though, than even that. The agreement is actually the signal of perhaps the single most important transformation of the modern Middle East since the end of the colonial era: it marks the formal beginning of a new regional order. Since the end of that era in the middle of the 20th century, Arabs have been defined by two successive political orders, Arab nationalism and Islamism. Today, many of them are rightfully concluding that they need to break away from those orders and their toxic legacies. And to do that, they are concluding further, they need to break away from the mythology of Palestine that came alongside them.

Let’s jump back in time for a moment. At the eve of the departure of European colonial powers in the years after World War II, Arab revolutionaries were plotting out the foundations of what became in their countries the political reality of the second half of the 20th century. The rising political and social consciousness created by these revolutionary forces, known as Arab nationalism, was a mixture of Arab romanticism, hyper-nationalist European-style fascism, and Eastern Bloc socialism. The Arab nationalists claimed that every inch of land where Arabs are to be found was actually a part of the “great Arab homeland” and of a “single Arab nation with an eternal message,” and they called for a unified Arab polity that would transcend any national borders.