Editor’s Note: This essay was originally written before The Abrahamic Metacritique had fully taken shape. Though more plainly told, the story it reveals remains deeply relevant. Readers will recognize in it the early framework of ideas that later essays would ignite with greater force.
What is the relationship between the symbolic construct of “Palestine” and the rise of modern jihadism in the late twentieth century? Modern Jihadism is often portrayed as a theological eruption—a ghost from a pre-modern past returning to haunt the West, the return of the repressed. In this telling, the conflict over Palestine is merely one of many theaters for an ancient religious war, and Jihad is the timeless engine of Arab rage against Israel.
This essay argues, through the reexamination of the story of Bin Laden and 9/11, for a radical inversion of that narrative. It asserts that global Jihadism, as it emerged in the late 20th century, is not the cause of hopeless radicalism, but its most violent consequence. It is a modern political pathology, one that appropriated the language and symbols of Islam but drew its ideological fuel, its singular obsession, and its very coherence from the secular liberatory crucible of the Palestinian cause. Jihadism, far from being a resurgence of some repressed Islamic past, is a phenomenon conditioned—almost entirely—by the mythos of the Palestinian Cause.
The relationship has been perceived upside down. The common wisdom insists that Arabs fight for Palestine because of Jihad. The truth is the inverse: modern Jihadism was born because of Palestine.
Moreover, this essay, as the reader will see, is meant to serve as a warning about today and the monsters of the future that are likely being bred.
In February 1998, the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi published a declaration of war against the U.S. in the form of an Islamic legal ruling, or fatwa, by a new enigmatic entity called the World Islamic Front titled Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. Four individuals signed the statement. Two of the four Afghanistan-based men were well-known among Islamic and security circles: the 40-year-old Saudi exile Osama Bin Laden and the fugitive Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri. Even though none of the four men was a trained Islamic jurist, their war declaration was announced in the form of the Islamic legal ruling that “to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim.” With the rationale of “in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip,” and ends with calling “on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.” Three years later, the group, later to be known as al-Qaeda, executed the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, hijacking commercial airplanes and flying them into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon building just outside of Washington, D.C.
The authors did not present their fatwa as an act of unprovoked aggression. They framed it as a defensive response to what they described as an ongoing war waged by the United States against the Muslim world. The document centered on three core grievances—termed “crimes and sins” that constituted “a clear declaration of war on Allah”—which, in their view, compelled a violent defense.
The fatwa outlined these grievances as follows:
First, the American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula:
“For over seven years, the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula… turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples… The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.”
Second, the humanitarian crisis in Iraq resulting from sanctions and military action:
“…despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of these people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.”
Third, the ultimate purpose behind American aggression was to serve Israel:
“if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan, into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.”
These three grievances, while appearing as a disjointed tirade, are not random. Their specific formulation and sequence reveal a coherent worldview shaped by the historical moment in which it was conceived. Crucially, the fatwa presents these points not as opinions, but as “three facts that are known to everyone“. On this, Bin Laden was largely correct: these were not fringe beliefs. They reflected a prevailing narrative that had taken root across the Middle East and in any corner of the globe penetrated by the ideology of the international left .
To understand this consensus, one must first examine the immediate context behind the fatwa’s most severe charge: that “the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres.”
The authors here were, almost definitely, referring to the American-Iraqi crisis of 1998, which culminated in the American bombardment of Iraq in December of the same year. The crisis, which lasted for nearly a year, started when Iraq denied access to U.N. WMD inspectors in 1997 and failed to comply with the U.N. Security Council’s resolutions and the U.N. inspection program, UNSCOM. As a matter of fact, only a week before the declaration was published, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met Iraqi Foreign Minister Saeed al-Sahaf and French President Jacques Chirac in Paris, seeking to push for a resolution but failed to do so. Already for several years before 1998, the International Left, still hysterically reacting to the fall of the USSR, had made the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iraq the imperialist crime of the century. For several years, the international and Arab press, media outlets, journals, and academic output were filled with dystopian stories of how the U.S. is systematically and intentionally denying Iraqis access to food and destroying their water supply to ensure their starvation and death. U.N. institutions, entirely staffed by Third World intellectuals, issued reports with fantastical data and outdid even the propaganda of Saddam Hussein. Hussein had claimed that sanctions killed over 500,000 children, a number described a decade later in an investigation by the British Medical Journal of Global Health as “a massive fraud,” while U.N. agencies claimed the number was over a million children.
In this atmosphere of psychotic anti-American hysteria, especially in the French and the Arab intellectual circles, which are nearly monolithic on the left, the crisis of 1998 exacerbated the paranoia filling press and media coverage with apocalyptic warnings of the coming genocide and the end of humanity at the hands of American barbarism, established truths since the day of Sartre. At one point, the European and the Arab press hysterically claimed that the Clinton administration was planning to use the atomic bomb against Iraq, promising an unprecedented volume of human casualties. On their part, Arab states, which hosted U.S. troops, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, initially committed themselves to denying the U.S. military the use of local bases for the purpose of air strikes against Iraq, but ultimately they acquiesced.
It was this political and intellectual climate that gave the fatwa’s “facts” their force. The declaration’s core assertions—of American aggression from the Arabian Peninsula, of a million Iraqis killed by sanctions, and of an impending plan to “annihilate what is left of this people”—were not considered fringe theories. For Bin Laden, as for many Arabs and Europeans, these were established truths, part of a universal consensus that “no one argues today about.” This narrative was sustained by the media, amplified by intellectuals and academics, and legitimized by diplomats and international institutions, until it inevitably found its way into Friday sermons. (Reminds you of something today?)
This context reveals a crucial insight: Bin Laden and his followers were not the originators of this worldview, but its consumers. Their ideology was not a radical break from the mainstream opinion of “everyone,” but a violent conclusion drawn from its prevailing assumptions. The decision to publish the declaration in a widely circulated newspaper, such as al-Quds al-Arabi, rather than in a clandestine jihadi pamphlet, underscores this point. They were not preaching to a secluded cult; they were joining a public conversation, addressing a world they believed already shared their foundational truths.
It is this final grievance, however, that gives the document its ideological cohesion. It reframes the conflict not as a simple struggle between Islam and disbelief, but as a historical drama centered on Palestine. This point establishes the grand meta-narrative that organizes all other claims into a single, coherent story. The structure and wording are revealing, pointing to the intellectual world of the authors.
Interestingly, their point starts with an implicative or a factual conditional sentence, which holds that if one fact is true, then certainly so is another, as if to state a universal statement or a certain law of nature. The conditional clause “if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic,” treated as an established and widely known fact, implies the main clause “then the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.” The argumentative nature of such a statement is conspicuous and suggests that the Palestine connection, made into the first cause of the historical drama, needed to be established through the other “facts that are known to everyone,” which means that the authors were building on the ongoing public conversation of which the readers of al-Quds al-Arabi were familiar. The “religious and economic” aims of the Americans used as the first fact most likely refer to the accusation of American hatred for Muslims and Arabs and American oil interests in the Middle East, which have been staples of Arab and international leftist political literature since the 1950s. The authors are making the point that if this widely known fact is true, then so is the fact that the American wars in the Middle East aimed at serving Israel. Moreover, the American grand plan and “eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state,” as well as “Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan,” referred to as facts in no need of substantiation, are made explicitly “to guarantee Israel’s survival.”
It is indeed a mystery that the predominant place of Palestine, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in Bin Laden’s ideology did not receive much attention in trying to understand the man who launched international jihadism. Yet, two reasons come to mind for such negligence: First, al-Qaeda’s single-minded obsession with terrorism against the U.S. and the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda never carried out any terrorist operations against Israel. Second, the Israeli and American Jewish fear of affirming that the worst terrorist attacks against Americans in U.S. history were indeed committed because of the U.S. support for Israel, especially since anti-Israel activists constantly insist on this point to disincentivize the American public from supporting Israel.
Thus, and despite its clear modern, yet messianic, anti-imperialism, al-Qaeda becomes a theocratic villain, returning from pre-modern times to declare war against the collective imaginative of Western civilization despite the clear absence of such a term in al-Qaeda literature compared to how much they explicitly mention America, Jews, the Zionists, and Israel. Thus, leftist intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, who openly recognized al-Qaeda actions as anti-imperialism in the Third Worldist tradition, were often dismissed as intellectual lunatics despite the fact that their conceptions were closer to how al-Qaeda and its supporters perceived themselves than many were willing to admit.
The obsession of Bin Laden with Palestine and Israel did not start in 1998, but could serve as one of the unifying threads of man’s life and thoughts. While such an obsession can in no way be solely attributed to Bin Laden’s Palestinian jihadi mentor Abdullah Azzam, since it’s shared by millions of other Arabs who have never heard of the man, the link between jihad, anti-imperialism, and Israel, however, should be. Azzam (1941-1989) was born in modern-day Jenin in the British Mandate of Palestine. In the mid-1950s, Azzam joined the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and studied Islamic law in Syria. After 1967 and the rise of the Arab New Left organized around Arafat’s Armed Struggle, Azzam participated in the PLO’s militant activities against Israel until the PLO was eventually expelled from Jordan. Afterward, Azzam moved to Egypt, and there he got acquainted with the writings of the godfather of Islamic romanticism, Sayyed Qutub, after which he was inspired to dissolve his career as a national liberation guerrilla fighter in a new conception of anti-imperialist jihad.
In the late 1970s, Azzam moved to Saudi Arabia, where he was hired as a professor at King Abdul Aziz University in the coastal city of Jeddah. There, a young Osama Bin Laden, an heir of a Saudi billionaire and construction tycoon, enrolled in one of Azzam’s classes. Yet, according to later statements by Bin Laden, Azzam didn’t cause his political awakening, but it was the American airlift that ensured the Israeli victory over Egypt in 1973 that did so. Regardless, both Bin Laden and Azzam relocated to Peshawar in 1980 to participate in CIA-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad and worked together closely. To both men and many others, Palestine and the struggle against Zionism as the Muslim historical drama of the epoch was the founding stone of their worldview, a worldview which was originally established by Arab Nationalists and Marxists and on which a generation of Arabs was nursed. Even while engaged in a war against the Soviets and receiving American support, Arab jihadists maintained a fixation on Palestine and Israel. Azzam’s treatise Defence of Muslim Lands: The First Obligation After Faith, written at the height of anti-Soviet jihad in 1983, is an example of such single-minded fixation. In the treatise, Azzam asserts that despite fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, “whoever can, from among the Arabs, fight jihad in Palestine, then he must start there. And, if he is not capable, then he must set out for Afghanistan. For the rest of the Muslims, I believe they should start their jihad in Afghanistan. It is our opinion that we should begin with Afghanistan before Palestine, not because Afghanistan is more important than Palestine, not at all; Palestine is the foremost Islamic problem.”
In almost all his subsequent writings and speeches, Bin Laden shared the primacy of the liberation of Palestine as the definitive feature of jihad. In 1986 in Afghanistan, he wrote in a family document that Palestine is “the reason we started our jihad,” and it was in the same document that Bin Laden mentioned for the first time his true innovation in the world of jihadism to address the Palestinian Cause: “we ought to strike inside America.” In 1989, following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Azzam and both of his sons were killed by rival Egyptian jihadists, and Bin Laden was invited to relocate to Sudan by the Islamist regime of Hassan al-Turabi. After a sojourn in Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden eventually relocated to Sudan, where he, post-USSR, started to build and conceive of his international jihadist project of liberating Palestine by striking the U.S.
To understand the development of Bin Laden’s idea, we need to look no further than to his first pronouncement intended for a wider audience: his open letter to the Chief Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Bin Baz, accusing him of the “grand betrayal” of Palestine for supporting the Oslo Accords. The letter was published in December 1994 by Bin Laden’s London-based Reform and Advice Committee and denounced Bin Baz for his endorsement of peace with the Jews. Bin Laden wrote to Bin Baz, “You are not just satisfied with making the land of the Two Holy Mosques open to the Jewish and Crusader occupation forces, but you are bringing third of the Two Holy Mosques [al-Aqsa mosque] into calamity by legitimizing the instruments of surrender that the traitor and cowardlyArab tyrants sign with the Jews.” He continued declaring, “the legitimate duty towards Palestine and our oppressed Palestinian brothers and the men, women and children, who are unable to find a solution, is jihad for the sake of God and inciting the nation to do so until Palestine is liberated.”
Bin Laden’s opposition to the Oslo Accords was not some unique, obstinate position of narrow-minded, zealous men but was widely shared by the most progressive Arab and non-Arab social and intellectual forces who considered Arafat to be betraying the Palestinian Cause. In the U.S., progressive intellectual Edward Said, an atheist on all accounts, staunchly opposed the peace process, which, like Bin Laden, he saw as a capitulation to Zionism by the Palestinians. Inside the PLO, the Oslo Accords were a polarizing event that turned many against Arafat and his advisors. In the Middle East, most Arab intellectuals, loyal to the paradigms of the Nasserist and Ba’athist maximalist demands of the eradication of Israel, were also opposed to the accords. The point is that the opposition to Oslo was, in a sense, just like Bin Laden’s often-sighted “facts known to everyone” was a universal truth in certain circles.
Surveying Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s literature and pronouncements, one can not help but notice that their arguments consistently followed the practice of resting on two evidentiary pillars: a perceived universal consensus over facts that require no proof and an Islamic scriptural justification of al-Qaeda’s suggested path of response to such facts. The former is what made al-Qaeda universally anti-imperialistic in the Third Worldist liberationist tradition, the way Chomsky and other Western radical intellectuals perceived it. The latter is what made it Islamic. Together, these two pillars produced al-Qaeda’s brand of international jihad.
A clear example of such a practice can be seen in Bin Laden’s sermon, which was broadcast on al-Jazeera on December 26, 2001. Bin Laden said, “What is happening in Palestine today is extremely clear and something about which all of humanity since Adam can agree…. One issue in which people agree, even if they themselves have been the victims of oppression and hostility, is that you cannot kill innocent children. The deliberate killing of innocent children in Palestine today is the ugliest, most oppressive, and hostile act and something that threatens all of humanity.” The passage is indeed a hyperbole of fanaticism, yet the emphasis on the extreme consensus is meaningful, and so is the interesting appeal to an idea of humanity, not God of his laws, that is abstract enough that it exists yet concrete enough that Israel commits crimes against. This consensus of humanity and the crimes of Israel often come together in Bin Laden’s pronouncements, like “the whole world witnessed Israeli soldiers killing Muhammad al-Durreh and many others like him.”
Ten weeks prior to the previous sermon, on October 7, 2001, the day on which Operation Enduring Freedom started, Bin Laden had released an earlier recorded message in which he made a public oath for jihad against the U.S.: “I swear by God Almighty, who raised the heavens without effort, that neither American nor anyone who lives there will enjoy safety until safety becomes a reality for us living in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad.” This Oath, qasam in Arabic, then became a referential point featured frequently in jihadist material. In December 2019, when Saudi Air Force pilot Mohammed al-Shamrani shot to death several U.S. seamen at the naval base in Florida, he left behind a message repeating Bin Laden’s Oath and promising that the U.S. “will not enjoy safety before we experience it as a reality in Palestine and U.S. forces withdraw from our lands.”
A year after 9/11, the American and Western public has been dedicating much intellectual and public energy to answering the bewildering question of “Why do they hate us?” And it would not be an exaggeration to say that every single Western public intellectual tried to answer such a question. In October 2002, Bin Laden decided to provide his own answer to the question in his now-infamous Letter to the Americans: “Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. You attacked us in Palestine… the Jews occupied it for more than 50 years, years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction, and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes… the people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites… the blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally avenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone…. [our] governments have surrendered to the Jews and handed them most of Palestine…to regain Palestine… You are the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind… the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense… You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”
The speech is a remarkable amalgamation of themes and motifs from East and West that, for Bin Laden, seemed to weave a comprehensive worldview. In it, the themes and symbols of the international left, such as civilizational angst, anti-imperialist self-righteousness, universalist pathos, capitalism-phobia, and climate apocalypticism, blend harmoniously with 19th-century European quackeries such as “pure Arabs” and “original Semites,” brought to the Middle East through Arab Nationalism, as well as the religious linguistic medium of Islam. But if Bin Laden’s long response could be summarized in one word, it would undoubtedly be Palestine, not a place, but a symbol carrying the content of the undoing of Jewish Israel, which represents all the evils of the American capitalist empire. Almost every accusation and every grievance, with the exception of environmentalism, ultimately revolved around American support for the existence of Israel. If one removes its more religious utterances, the response could have been written by any secular Arab intellectual, and indeed, it is typical of Arab secular intellectual output for most of the 20th century. If one removes the brazen antisemitism, it could have been written by an intellectual from the European left or one of the experts of the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council.
But does the mere amalgamation of symbols and slogans suffice to form a cohesive world ideology? The answer from our recent history is a decisive yes. Al-Qaeda didn’t just thrive under Bin Laden but inspired the development of a whole new universe of 21st-century international Jihadism. But to maintain that such a worldview is essentially a senseless aggregate and deny its cohesion as a story would be a major error. Any intellectually serious examination of Bin Laden’s mind would reveal that his foggy understanding of the world, which became the basis of the modern jihadist ideology, had the structural traces and faint stamp of several times processed European revolutionary ideologies built on the 19th-century philosophy of History.
Bin Laden, like countless other Arabs, acquired such a structure of the mind from growing up in Arab societies downstream from the total transformation that the ideologies of Arab Nationalism and Arab Marxism brought to their culture and way of thinking. The clearest expression of this could be found in Bin Laden’s speech broadcast on al-Jazeera on January 4, 2004, in which he tried to situate himself and his enterprise in an epic universal history of a dialectical conflict between the West and the East, deeply rooted in history centuries before the religion of Islam came to be.
The stamp of Arab Nationalism is most visible in the simple fact that Bin Laden’s universal history of the perennial dialectical struggle between the protagonists of history, the infidel West and the faithful East, is entirely centered around the Levant, the birthplace of the Hegelian ideology of Arab Nationalism. Moreover, Bin Laden’s point of departure, just like Arab Nationalism’s, was the presumed perennial Arab identity of the inhabitants of the Levant centuries before the Arab Islamic conquests, which merely “returned” these lands to their “Arab character.” The original loss of such a character happened due to the Western invasions and proto-forms of the medieval Crusades, which took place many centuries before the birth of Muhammad, presumably in the Hellenistic and later Roman conquest of the Levant. The 8th-century Islamic Arab conquests of the Levant were then wars of “national liberation” from the Western yoke, which returned the Levant and its inhabitants to the bosom of their Arab Islam. This epoch of great liberation is then dialectically followed by an epoch of Muslim Arab defeat and Crusader Western victory in the Middle Ages, then another epoch of Muslim greatness, and ultimately leading up to the modern epoch in which the colonialist Crusaders conspired with the Jews to steal Palestine and once again attempt to destroy the geographic heart of Islam. Bin Laden then presents himself and his enterprise of global jihad as the epoch’s Muslim response in the form of a new wave of Muslim liberation wars, led by himself and modeled after the first liberation wars initiated by the Prophet Muhammad.
This epic historical narrative, mistaken by many eminent scholars of the Middle East and Islam, such as Bernard Lewis, to be some organic Muslim reading of history, is nothing but a modern construction of mid-century Levant-based Arab Nationalist intellectuals on the European tradition of Hegelian Romantic Nationalism. The catastrophic political and cultural success of Arab Nationalism canonized and standardized this general view in history all over the Arab populations of the Middle East through newly built public education systems, school textbooks, rewritten religious history, media and film production, and massive propaganda. Bin Laden and his compatriots were nothing but a product of such societies.
While the fixation on Palestine and the destruction of Israel can be explained by the Levantine origins of Arab Nationalism, which passed down into modern Islamism and Jihadism, it still can’t explain why anti-Zionism became the existential singularity of all such ideologies. Meaning, it doesn’t seem to explain why it is not considered a conflict among many conflicts, but the conflict above all conflicts, or as Bin Laden termed it, “the reason of our Jihad.” Why did many populations fixate on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs rather than between Pakistan and India? Why don’t brutal Muslim civil wars cause the same response? To attempt to answer this question, we should perhaps seek it, not in the muddled utterances of Bin Laden but in the clearer expositions of trained intellectuals in the Hegelian traditions that have come to dominate humanity’s thought for nearly two centuries.
In 1965, border clashes between India and Pakistan resulted in the outbreak of the second major war between the two countries. The war brought in the involvement of the two superpowers and became an important theater of the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans. Yet, the war did not draw in international solidarity or global outcries, Muslim, leftist, or otherwise. “We published nothing on the [India-Pakistan] subject in MONTHLY REVIEW, editorially or otherwise, and no reader complained of the omission,” wrote Paul Sweezy, one of the most prominent American Marxists and the founding editor of the Monthly Review, America’s most popular Marxist publication, in his October 1967 editorial. He continued, “Last June, a war lasting a few days took place between Israel and its Arab neighbors, countries with a combined population far less than that of Pakistan alone. For compelling editorial reasons—the fact that the July-August issue had been planned long in advance and the urgency of analyzing the summer’s black uprisings in the September issue—we have, up to now, published nothing on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Already, many readers have complained, and we are taking this first opportunity to deal with the subject. In future issues, we hope to include further material.”
Sweezy then proceeds with trying to explain this disparity of status and treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, despite the fact that it pales in comparison to many other global tragedies. He explains that “the criterion of importance which we try to apply in deciding what should and what should not go into M.R. derives from what we conceive to be the decisive struggle of our historical epoch, that between the industrialized metropolises of world capitalism on the one hand and the underdeveloped and exploited periphery on the other. By this standard, it did not, and still does not, seem to us that the Pakistani-Indian war was of great significance.” However, “the Israeli-Arab conflict is very different. The Arab world taken as a whole is the field of operation par excellence of Western oil imperialism, the most profitable and probably the most ruthless form of capitalist imperialism.”
Sweezy’s editorial then proceeds to explain why the Arab struggle against Israel is a universal mission of “the decisive struggle of our historical epoch” and provide a geopolitical analysis that deserves to be quoted at some length:
“The explanation for this, I believe, is simply that [Western] imperialism and Israel, each for its own reasons, are committed to the maintenance of a weak and divided Arab world. In both cases, the basis of this commitment is clear. A strong and United Arab nation—a realistic prospect in terms of language, religion, and general historical background—would sooner or later, and probably sooner, nationalize the oil fields and use the revenue derived from the sale of oil as a basis for a real economic development program rather than as the source from which to support corrupt oligarchies and pay fabulous profits to giant foreign corporations. Such a development would be as beneficial to the Arab masses as it would be disastrous to the international oil cartel… Arab hostility to Israel is of the same kind and as natural as black hostility to the white settler states in Africa.
If this analysis is sound, the conclusion can hardly be avoided that Israel and the imperialist powers are de facto allies against, not Arabs in general (the imperialists love Arabs who “know their place”), but against the forces in the Arab world which aim to unify, strengthen, and develop the Arab nation. And it seems elementary to me that all progressives, radicals, anti-imperialists everywhere must be wholeheartedly on the side of these forces–the forces of revolutionary Arab Nationalism.”
This understanding of Israel as the heart of the Western imperialist strategy of world domination and the Middle East as its most important position is identical in content and conclusion, if not in theoretical jargon, to Bin Laden’s and to countless Islamist, secular, and nationalist Arab intellectuals. It was also the official Marxist analysis of the conflict adopted by the USSR, globalized through the massive network of Soviet propaganda, and remains widely disseminated through American universities’ social science departments.
The proliferation of this worldview of Israel as the claws of imperialism ensuring Western domination over the Third World/Arabs/Muslims among Marxist, nationalist, and Islamist intellectuals is the origin of Bin Laden’s often repeated appeal to consensus and to “facts known to everyone.” Another clearer exposition of this could be heard in a 2023 al-Jazeera interview with Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian professor of Islamic studies who used to teach in the United States before he was deported to Turkey over terrorism charges. Al-Arian concisely summarized the current version of this mainstream understanding of the conflict against Zionism. He reiterated that Israel’s main function in the Middle East works as a forward base of international capitalism/Western hegemony/American imperialism to prevent Arab societies from developing their democratic potential, condemning the Middle East to a life of despotism, dehumanization, tyranny, and lack of human rights, which facilitated Western control of the region. The presence of Israel acts as a political and economic spoiler, ensuring the region is constantly in a state of conflict, a lack of cooperation, under-development, and militancy that produces endemic instability that justifies the rule of unaccountable dictators. The unaccountable dictators act as agents of extraction, cooperating with Israel to maintain the status quo and helping the U.S. to extract strategic and economic concessions and resources from the region. This power structure, maintained by the triad of imperialism, Zionism, and oil-funded Arab reaction, is then presented to everyone as a natural order that requires realism in opposing any democratic beginnings in the Middle East.
The symbols might change. For al-Arian, the epochal plot against the Middle East by Zionism and imperialism may aim at preventing the fulfillment of democracy. For Bin Laden, it aimed to prevent the fulfillment of Islam. For Sweezy, it aimed at preventing Arab development and socialism. Yet, in the words of Bin Laden, “everyone agrees” on the “facts” of the historical drama, the conspiracy, the oppression, and the victimhood, as well as the general intellectual structure that gives them their meaning. This narrative is now so globally entrenched that even American liberal intellectuals, who are generally not known for their intellectual rigor or philosophical education, have come to adopt an American version of it. When the Abraham Accords were signed, the same argument, modified for the American liberal audience, was made by Shadi Hamid and Peter Beinart, who denounced the Abraham Accords as an agreement to authoritarianism and went on to blame Israel for the absence of democracy in the Middle East.
It is this very analytically sophisticated frame that results in the absolute criminalization of Zionism and Israel, not merely as a powerful, inconsiderate party in a territorial conflict but as a historical criminal on a universalist scale. By virtue of breathing every day, Israelis help cause the misery of hundreds of millions in Algeria, Cairo, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Arab and American professors, such as al-Arian, would say as much. American liberal and progressive professors would try to obscure the fact that this is the logical conclusion of what they believe. Bin Laden was merely a man with means who decided to take this view of the world and of history in its most simplistic form that reached the Arab street after it had been filtered several times down from lofty university intellectuals through mass propaganda to its ultimate conclusion. al-Qaeda’s ideology, and much of jihadism, was, and indeed as many Western leftist intellectuals asserted, an anti-imperialist socially rooted popular response to the conditions of the Middle East. What these intellectuals missed was that these conditions included their own very intellectual perception of the world and of reality, which originated with the Western left and came to dominate Arab and Muslim culture. This doesn’t just account for Bin Laden’s ideology but also for the wide appeal his ideology had in Arab countries and the anti-imperialist sympathies of leftist intellectuals.
Afterword
The same informational conditions that once surrounded Iraq and Palestine in the 1990s, and then in the early 2000s, are being reproduced today around the war in Gaza. This time, the saturation is total. Every media outlet, every platform, every algorithm is now flooded with apocalyptic declarations of genocide, images of death, and narratives of cosmic grievance; many are nothing but direct ritual incitement. But what matters most is not what we see, but what we don’t. We must not forget that every now is the formative moment of a generation still invisible to us. What they absorb today as moral consensus, they may one day inherit as destiny. The future will belong, in part, to those who respond to this moment’s propaganda with a theology of vengeance. It has happened before. It is already happening again.
