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When I was a 14-year-old jihadist wannabe in Cairo in 2003, I didn’t care about Egyptian politics, Arabs, Hosni Mubarak, regional powers, Arab monarchy, Arab republicanism, capitalism, or any of the issues that animate worldly observers of Middle East politics. I cared about one thing and one thing alone: Palestine. All I needed to hear was the word “Palestine” in order to pledge my immediate unconditional loyalty to whoever was speaking. Few words—none, really—were fused with the fascinations, aspirations, emotions, longings, and mystical forces that the term “Palestine” summoned in me. Palestine was never merely a disputed geographical territory; it was a claim to the absolute fulfillment of the Islamic political vision, an eternal moral truth, secularized in Arab nationalism and sanctified in Islamism. Palestine meant el-helm el-Arabi (the Arab dream), the tajj ‘alras (the crown on top [of Arab-ness]), and the beating heart of Islam. To evoke Palestine was to evoke Islamic brotherhood and Arab honor, for it was a reservoir of identity and a proof of faith. Palestine was the fulfillment of a state of spiritual purity of the Muslim individual and the whole body of Islam. The Arab will to Palestine was a Nietzschean will to power. It was the epistemological glue of the disparate components making up Arab political consciousness.
And I wasn’t alone. To the political and religious Arab minds of the 20th century, the idea of Palestine was everything. The dream of Arab nationalism, which had come to represent Arab-ness itself, and the cult of Islamism, which posed as the religion of Islam, both chose Palestine as their primary cause. This essentially consecrated Palestine as the psychological bond between Arab identity and Islam.
Much has changed in the past decade, however, and we are now entering the age of a post-Palestine Middle East. And as the region moves on to its post-Palestine reality, the world will move on to post-Islamism, and Islam itself will exert an ever-smaller influence over international politics. For the ideological forces that once caused terror in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Amman, Beirut, Cairo, London, Madrid, and New York are slowly shrinking in history’s rearview mirror.
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