Is there still a place in this world for a New Middle East?

Open this photo in gallery:

David Berlin is a Canadian-Israeli journalist. He is the founding editor of The Walrus magazine and the author of The Moral Lives of Israelis: Reinventing the Dream State.

One of the undebatable casualties of the Israel-Hamas war and the more recent intensification of the Israel-Hezbollah clashes, which include the Sept. 27 killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, is the death of almost all the alternative ways of imagining an end to this 75-year-old conflict. No matter how this round ends, and it will end somehow, the old options – bi-nationalism, one state, or the once popular two-state solution – are now and for the foreseeable future, dead in the water. Whatever little trust once existed has now melted into air. Ditto for the once cocksure Israeli belief that they could “manage the conflict,” keep things on low burner, manipulate the Palestinians. That arrogance has now gone out the window.

Unless Iran gets further embroiled in the conflict, the end of this war will be but an interregnum, a promissory note portending the next round and another after that. And each future struggle will be more virulent and more dangerous if only because all parties will have had time to stockpile bigger caches of weapons and learn more of each others’ weaknesses, even as Iran may develop nuclear capability, which will add further fuel to Israel’s always simmering sense of an existential threat.

As the battle in Gaza wages on, extremists in Israel are considering an unthinkable, unjustifiable option that could be described as “winner takes all.” And even as the body count in Gaza and in Lebanon rises, Hamas extremists flaunt plans to carve up and dismantle the Israeli state which, they claim, has no right to exist. Zealots on both sides are committing to versions of a “final solution” and it is entirely unclear whether anything short of a full-on Armageddon can deter either side.

But there is another, hardly discussed option, which is as lively as those mentioned above are deadly. Though not without its own snags and inevitable hold-ups, this option, referred to as a “regional solution” or “The New Middle East,” stands to the “final solution” as scorched earth stands to the Fertile Crescent.

Diana Buttu: War in Gaza made me lose faith in international law

A decent, if incomplete rendering of the “regional solution” was put forward in 1993, by former Israeli foreign minister/prime minister/ president, the late Shimon Peres, who was also the chief architect of Israeli nuclear capabilities. In a book titled The New Middle East, Mr. Peres wrote:

“On the White House lawn, President Bill Clinton orchestrated the handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat and the ceremonial ratification of the Oslo Agreement. After I had signed in the name of Israel … I was almost more thoughtful than I was happy. I had already gone beyond this ceremony to the next step: how to build a new Middle East. Resolving past differences was not enough. We also had to look forward, to construct a framework that held a potential for happiness for all peoples in the region. This was not the time for memories. It was a time to form a new agenda. The accord in Oslo and the ceremony in Washington were but a step from which to leap, higher and farther than ever before.”

Mr. Peres developed the idea of a “New Middle East” along the lines of the European Union. As in the EU, the borders between the 18-22 member states would be soft. Citizens of The New Middle East (N.M.E) would be free to live, work and study anywhere in the region.

Many of the arguments which Mr. Peres put forward in support of the “new agenda” are economic but, he argued, have a moral dimension. To change “the distorted relationship between investment in military needs and investment in human needs is to decrease the proportion of the national budget earmarked for waging war and causing devastation. We will be able to use public and international money to support peace, further education, democratization, justice.”

Mr. Peres envisioned a flourishing tourism industry. He imagined sightseers visiting the holy shrines in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and then boarding a Maglev train to Medina, Mecca and farther. Energy, in short supply, may be generated via a canal linking the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point on Earth. Huge desalinization plants would create a Green Belt where once there was only desert.

When it came to issues of governance and to questions concerning Palestinian refugees, Mr. Peres was less resolved. “Nothing can better serve the Arab world, and particularly the Palestinian people, than democratization,” Mr. Peres wrote, and added that “fundamentalism is rapidly making its way deeply into every Arab country in the Middle East.” He did not imagine a time when Gazans would vote Hamas into power or support the Oct. 7 massacre, which many Gazans interpreted as a prison break. Nor did he address extremism among the Jewish settler population. The clash of rising fundamentalism represented by intransigent political parties has gone a long way toward redefining the meaning of land and struggle, which for such extremists is not about real estate but about “Holy Land” for Jews and about “Waqf” – consecrated and sacred land for Muslims. Mr. Peres did not dwell on such issues which are central to the conflict, but to me, it seems that the only way forward requires hard and fast agreements keeping religion out of the political arena.

Patrick Martin: A dark escalation in the West Bank

Mr. Peres believed in family reunification but claimed that “no Israeli government now or in the future would ever agree to implementing the ‘right of return,’” en masse. Israel, he said, would have no objection to free movement into the areas included in the Palestinian-Jordanian Confederation as mapped out in the Oslo Accords. Mr. Peres implied that until such time as terrorist activities would abate, Israel would insist on special status, which would include checkpoints and defined borders. But, of course, the Oslo Accords failed to bring about a discrete Palestinian confederation. Whether N.M.E. member states would carve out a Palestinian confederation in line with the Oslo Accords or imagine such an entity differently is uncertain.

On Nov. 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Since that tragic incident and until his death in 2016, Mr. Peres spoke little of the New Middle East and then only in hushed tones; at a college seminar, at a round table hosted by the Peres Center for Peace located in Jaffa, Israel. In an interview with Mr. Peres which I conducted in 2003, he wished to speak only of the “population time-bomb” which refers to the threat of an Arab voting majority resulting from annexation of the West Bank. When I pressed him on his vision for a New Middle East, he became wistful, and said that it sometimes returns, but only as a dream. “The failure of the Oslo Accords militates against mentioning it in public,” he told me. “To speak of it now, in the midst of the Intifada, is to commit political suicide.” I recall wondering how much worse things had to get before Israeli, Palestinian, and the international community’s leaders would intervene in the name of a fast-fading future.

And then, in 2016, not two months after Mr. Peres passed away, U.S. president Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office. Over the years of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner and a young lawyer, Avi Berkowitz, negotiated agreements to advance peace and prosperity between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. A Saudi deal is pending, though events since Oct. 7 have made ratification much more difficult. But if the U.S. insisted on renegotiation, this time with moderate Palestinian delegates at the table, and providing that the negotiators can keep their eyes on the future and resist the unbearable weight of the region’s history, then perhaps the New Middle East could arise as did postwar Europe; as does the Phoenix from its ashes. A second administration led by Donald Trump would undoubtedly remain true to its lopsided initiative. Perhaps president Kamala Harris could steer the region in the direction of an unprecedented future.