Normalization. Middle Nation Podcast:(E22)

Assalamu alaikum. Everyone. This is Shaheed Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation podcast. This is episode number 22.

Alright. Let's talk about normalization, frankly, from a perspective of objective realpolitik. Let's talk about how countries signing strategic treaties with Israel could be understood as beneficial. Now, objectively speaking, the policy of nonrecognition of Israel and passive hostility has not achieved anything useful for the last seventy five years. That's undeniable.

The restrained disapproval of the Arab and Muslim world has not negatively impacted Israel in any way whatsoever. In fact, it has only allowed the Israelis to continuously claim to the world that they are under a constant existential threat, eking out their survival in a hostile region surrounded by enemies who want to drive them into the sea. This line of propaganda has been immensely profitable for Israel. If the Arab and Muslim world wanted to be hostile towards Israel, then they needed to be actively hostile, not just mute and disgruntled about its existence. But nobody had the will or the commitment to sustain active hostility for any length of time, nor did they have the will and commitment to face the consequences of doing so.

It is what it is. Look. Israel has many weaknesses and vulnerabilities. That's a fact. But today, military capability is not one of those weaknesses.

We will not defeat them in this way, and it is a mistake to be drawn into that sort of conflict. It's a rigged game, and we shouldn't play it. I have always maintained that it is wrong to expect the Palestinians to confront the Israelis militarily. That's exactly what the Zionists want. It's exactly what they provoke and exactly what they depend on to rationalize their brutality.

It's a bad strategy, period. It was a good strategy at a certain point in history, but that moment has passed. But here's the thing, the demographic realities in the region make Israel utterly unviable. The fact of the matter is there are frankly not enough Jews in the world to sustain Israel as a Jewish state. The Jews are so far behind the Palestinians in birth rates that they can simply never catch up.

There are only about 14,000,000 Jews in the world, and they're expected to only add about 2,000,000 more to that over the next thirty years. By then, the Palestinian population will double. The two state solution that we have all accepted as the only possible solution is actually the only way that the Israelis have to defend against the ramifications of this demographic trend, and maintaining a state of conflict is their only way to counter the birth rate advantage of the Palestinians, I e by carrying out sporadic massacres and forced displacements. The worst thing that could ever happen to Israel is for conflict to end. We are well beyond the point where we should acknowledge that the two state solution is a euphemism for unending conflict and that a one state solution is the only viable, the only realistic, and the most positive plausible outcome to the Palestinian Israeli issue.

Now, obviously, this is a long term target as in it will take a great deal of time to create the facts on the ground that will make it achievable. But the standard approach has already clocked in decades and achieved nothing like a solution, and it never will. Now it is unrealistic that the Israelis would accept a tactical surrender of the Palestinian territories that would see the populations of Gaza and the West Bank granted Israeli citizenship with equal voting rights. But why would they reject this? Why would they reject it if the Palestinians were to voluntarily surrender their authority over Gaza and the West Bank?

Why? Precisely because they know that such a surrender would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state. The state of conflict would be over, and very quickly Palestinians would become the majority. And since Israel is, as they like to boast, the only democracy in the Middle East, the government and the nature of the society would just as quickly become Arab and Muslim. If all the land that the Zionists dream of having for their greater Israel project were to be voluntarily ceded to them on the condition that all the current inhabitants of those lands must be absorbed into the citizenry of Israel, the Jews would suddenly become a tiny minority.

If every single Jew on earth moved to Israel, they would constitute a minuscule segment of the population barely enough to even fill a major city. If on the other hand, conflict continues and eventually Israel seizes the land that it wants by means of warfare, then all of the Palestinian inhabitants of those territories will either be slaughtered or forced to flee, thereby enabling the Jews to maintain dominance within the country demographically. The last thing Israel wants and the last thing that the West in general wants is for there to be an end to the conflict in the region. If lands were tactically surrendered, nature would take its course and things would return to basically what they always have been in historical Palestine. It would be an Arab Muslim country with a small Jewish minority.

The only way to prevent that from happening is to continue the conflict because that is the natural geopolitical demographic trajectory of historical Palestine. Israel has been America's best military asset in the Middle East, and both sides know it. This is why arguing against US support for Israel on moral or humanitarian grounds was never going to work, and why no American Muslim lobby was ever going to change American foreign policy because Israel is American foreign policy in The Middle East. The only thing that I can think of that could potentially change Israel's status in American foreign policy is normalization. Normalizing relations with Israel degrades Israel's strategic importance to The United States as well as nullifies the existential threat narrative that has always been key to Israel's argument for unconditional endless aid.

Now as with The UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, normalization with Israel accompanies a strengthened alliance with The US, comes with benefits, including but not limited to access to arms and status as military allies. Now if The UAE is currently demonstrating a degree of defiance of The United States, maintaining a certain amount of autonomy in its policies towards Russia and China. They're only doing so because they know they have made themselves valuable enough to The US to be able to do so. The UAE has basically been buying influence not only in the region, but in The US and Europe for many years, and now they are buying influence in Israel. When you have been boycotting a country for seventy five years, you have zero leverage.

And the only way to build leverage is by developing a relationship, economic and political ties. That's what The UAE is doing right now with Israel, and all of this serves the long term goal of potentially realizing a one state solution. A prerequisite for the one state solution has to be the decreased strategic dependence of The US on Israel in The Middle East and an increase in the number of reliable US allies in the region. As much as we are instinctively opposed to it, this requires normalization. No one is more averse to a one state solution than Israelis themselves precisely because they know what it means in terms of the demographic changes it will instantly bring to Israel as well as to Israel's access to unlimited American funding.

But Israel cannot oppose normalization with rich countries like The UAE because it comes with too many financial benefits. Just as The UAE has purchased influence in Europe, The UK, and America, they are doing it now with Israel. And they are bankrolling an end to the state of regional Arab and Muslim hostility towards Israel. In other words, they are dismantling the existential threat narrative on the one hand, and on the other hand, they are integrating Israel into economic interdependence with the Arab and Muslim world, which brings the potential of considerable leverage over Israel's behavior and policies, a leverage that we have never had before. Essentially, by refusing normalization, we absented ourselves from the field and left only the Israelis and the Americans in the arena to do whatever they liked with the Palestinians.

The theory is that normalization brings more players into the game, and these players will have more opportunities to influence the ultimate outcome. Now having said that, what we're talking about here, and this is the fundamental philosophy of realpolitik, and that is that the ends justify the means. In other words, it follows a similar principle to the statement of the prophet that Allah can benefit the deen even through a wicked man. Because, of course, it is abhorrent to recognize Israel. It is abhorrent and morally repugnant to make peace and establish relations with people who are violently brutalizing our fellow Muslims on a daily basis.

It is on the face of it, un Islamic and immoral. But what if by kissing the head of your captor, you can free yourself and all the other hostages? What if by agreeing to a distasteful treaty, you can create conditions for ultimate victory? What if by normalization, you can amplify your voice, sway policy, and create mechanisms of accountability? What if you can undermine decades long propaganda narratives that have always given your enemy impunity?

What if Israel has to begin integrating the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians themselves into one unified land where equal rights can be pursued and where the Muslims can gain the demographic upper hand? What if the counterintuitive and painful compromise of normalization can lead to Israel's abandonment of the outdated and offensive racist notion of being a Jewish state. And it has to become a normal country like everyone else where all citizens enjoy equality before the law. Now that is an argument for normalization, and it's a sound argument. You can like it or not.

You can agree with it or not. But if you oppose it, I would ask you, what's the useful alternative? What are the other feasible options for confronting Israel? Because if you properly understand the situation, you should recognize that normalization is a form of confrontation. So if you oppose it, what alternatives would you suggest?

If your only idea is armed conflict, then in my opinion, you are a dangerously deluded fanatic who's only advocating an approach that the Zionists fully welcome and that exclusively serves their interests. I do not believe that it is true, and I do not believe that it is fair to portray strategic compromises as inherently corrupt nor to say that anyone who signs a treaty with Israel has abandoned the Palestinian cause. Please show me what good has been done for the Palestinians by non normalization. I do not believe that the Muslims accept Israel nor that we ever will, and that includes The UAE and the countries that signed on to the Abraham Accords. I believe that there are differences in strategies and tactics, but all with the ultimate goal of ending Palestinian suffering.

So if you don't have a better idea for how that can be achieved in the real world, then your opposition to normalization is little more than virtue signaling with no tangible benefits for the Palestinians. It may make you appear righteous, but it does not accomplish righteous results. Unfortunately, unfortunately, in the ugly and ruthless world of politics, you cannot afford to allow moral ideals to obstruct the achievement of moral outcomes. Now I would also like to add that I believe it is a serious mistake to frame the Palestinian conflict in the context of hadiths about the end of the world. If you're planting a crop when the hour comes, you should continue planting it.

In other words, you should always focus on practical work to achieve results, planning and working for a future without relying upon the grim but self indulgent hope that a catastrophe will strike that will render your work pointless. As far as we know, the last day could very well be hundreds, if not thousands of years away. And if we spend our lives complacently waiting for it, we will be a useless and blameworthy generation. If there are more aggressive alternatives for confronting Israel that are actually feasible in the real world, I believe most, if not all of us would support them, including the countries that have normalized relations. But I think Muslim states around the world have made an evaluation that any such aggressive measures are not feasible and could not achieve the desired result, and I don't think they're wrong.

It is perhaps heartbreaking, it is humiliating, and it is painful, but that's the way it is. Pretending that it isn't that way just because it shouldn't be that way is not mature. And I can't blame anyone for pursuing strategies of realpolitik that break with the accepted logic in order to pursue a positive change, particularly when the accepted logic has miserably failed to achieve anything positive in almost a century.