A Horizon of Violence
Last month, on the evening of October 2, 2024, my 12-year-old son and I rushed out into our garden in Amman. Like most residents of Jordan’s capital, we watched a barrage of Iranian missiles, headed toward Israel, get intercepted above the city. The missiles had been launched in retaliation for Israel’s attacks on the Lebanese armed movement Hezbollah and for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran in July. Small orange flares arced smoothly across the sky and then exploded with dull, deep thuds that we could feel in our chests.
It was the latest example of the war on Gaza spreading a bit further, as it has spread for over a year now. The defining characteristic of the military destruction that Israel has unleashed and the US has supported since Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, is its lack of discernible limits—whether set by time or funds, by unacceptable levels of death and suffering, by realistic expectations or strategic goals, by international law or world opinion.
A few weeks before we watched the missiles, on September 24, US President Joe Biden gave a valedictory speech at the UN General Assembly. After reflecting on how the US and its leaders have led the way through various difficult “inflection points” in world history, and expressing his belief that there is always hope and a “way forward,” Biden briefly turned to the Middle East. He called for a ceasefire in Gaza; a diplomatic solution to the fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah; and a future in which “Palestinians live in dignity, security and self-determination in a state of their own.”
At the time that Biden gave his speech, Israel had killed over 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, in a campaign that international institutions and scholars have deemed genocidal and that the US has supported financially, militarily, and diplomatically. A few days before, Israel had detonated thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah cadres—killing or injuring them as well as innocent bystanders—and had begun bombing the south of Lebanon.
The Biden administration had announced a plan for a 21-day ceasefire on the Israeli–Lebanese border, which it said had Israel’s backing. The Israeli government rejected the plan. This was but the latest instance in which Israel’s leaders publicly dismissed the proposals and warnings of the US government, challenging it to withdraw its support. As has happened before, US support remained unwavering. Israel announced it had secured $8.7 billion in additional US military aid.
On September 27, Benjamin Netanyahu gave his own speech at the UN. “Israel seeks peace, Israel yearns for peace, Israel has made peace and will make peace again,” the Israeli prime minister said. “Yet we face savage enemies who seek our annihilation and we must defend ourselves against them.” Using cartoonish visual props, Netanyahu presented the two alternatives facing the Middle East: “The Blessing” of an Israel-led regional order or “The Curse” of an Iran-backed one. The occupied Palestinian territories and a future Palestinian state, needless to say, did not feature in this imaginary cartography—since its purpose is to erase them.
Israel, Netanyahu said, is fighting a “seven-front war” (with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Syria and Iraq, terrorists in the West Bank and, above all, Iran, which is ultimately responsible for all the other forces arrayed against Israel). Despite these threats and the bias of the international community (including the UN, which Netanyahu called “contemptible” and “a swamp of anti-Semitic bile”), Israel’s “sacred mission” and total ultimate victory are assured. “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that’s true of the entire Middle East,” Netanyahu told his audience. “We are winning.”
On the same day as Netanyahu’s speech, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi addressed journalists. “We’re here, members of the Muslim Arab Committee, mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries, and I can tell you here very unequivocally, all of us are willing to, right now, guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state,” Safadi said, speaking quickly and with evident aggravation. He went on, “Can you ask Israeli officials: What is their end game? Other than just wars and wars and wars?” And: “The amount of damage the Israeli government has done. Thirty years of efforts to convince people that peace is possible, this Israeli government killed it. The amount of dehumanization, hatred, bitterness will take generations to navigate through. … Ask any Israeli official what is their plan for peace, and you’ll get nothing.”
Clips of Safadi’s speech went viral in the Arab world. Many people identified with his frustration; others denounced the weakness, complicity, and silence of Arab regimes.
Later that day, from New York, Netanyahu authorized an air strike on Beirut that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli planes dropped dozens of US-made guided 2,000-pound bombs on a suburb of the city, destroying four residential buildings and killing hundreds.
The Biden administration applauded Nasrallah’s assassination. It quickly abandoned talk of a ceasefire in Lebanon, just as it has never seriously pursued one in Gaza over the course of the last year. Once again, it ceded the initiative to Israel, not only condoning civilian casualties and the military adventurism it had warned against, but defending and justifying them.
These three speeches exemplify a cycle that has repeated all year: American delusion and disingenuousness, unaccountable Israeli escalation and aggression, and Arab helplessness and indignation.
US journalists have spilled much ink trying to parse the relationship between Biden and Netanyahu, to analyze the degree to which US officials are “frustrated” with their Israeli counterparts or—as all the evidence suggests—colluding with them and buying them time.
Here in Amman—less than a hundred miles from Gaza—there is no doubt of the responsibility of the West, the United States above all, in backing Israel’s “wars and wars and wars.”
“The United States is no longer seen as just a supporter of Israel,” Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian diplomat and a vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me in his office in late October. “It’s seen as complicit.”
For the past year, people here, as well as in other Arab countries, have watched a steady stream of videos showing Palestinian civilians being bombed, starved, maimed, killed, and tortured—carrying plastic bags full of body parts, clawing for corpses under collapsed rubble, begging the world to intervene. Young citizen journalists on TikTok and news anchors on Al Jazeera have covered the deaths of their colleagues and their own families, only to then be killed themselves. People here know it is American money and weapons and vetoes at the UN that make all this bloodshed possible.
Today, while there is palpable excitement in Washington over the opportunity to militarily engineer a New Middle East, in the Middle East itself there is only a sense of dismay and déjà vu. Israel is perpetrating another Nakba in Gaza; it is bombing and invading Lebanon as it did in 1982 and 2006. In Gaza, the US has ignored its own stated red lines, as President Barack Obama did during the Syrian civil war. A recent post on X from Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, celebrates an allegedly amazing new regional fluidity (“The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited.”); it echoes US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s infamous remark that the 2006 Israeli bombings of Lebanon were “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
One also can’t help thinking back to the Iraq war. I arrived in this part of the world, in Egypt, as the US invasion of Iraq was being prepared. Then, as now, the US defied international law; embraced military intervention that killed, displaced, and radicalized millions; and showed a deadly contempt for Arab people, designating them as terrorists or human shields, as subhumans with no right to the same protections or aspirations as Westerners.
And yet this moment is even more dire. The Bush administration was criminal, but compared to the Biden presidency, fairly straightforward. It had a doctrine that could be challenged or leveraged; citizens’ movements such as Kifaya in Egypt used its talk of democratization to criticize autocrats and push for real elections. It could also be embarrassed and challenged, as when its human rights abuses, such as the torture at Abu Ghraib, were exposed. Today, there is no accountability, no political process in sight, no popular mobilization, no promise of a day after—just a torrent of doublespeak and a horizon of violence.
Jordan borders the West Bank, and a majority of its population hails from Palestine—refugees and descendants of refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel. It is the Arab country most intimately connected to Palestine, geographically, historically, and socially. Jordan is also a small, arid, resource-poor country, structurally dependent on foreign aid and patronage. Its monarchy signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, the Wadi Araba Treaty, and is a close ally of the US.
The authorities here have had to balance the necessity of allowing public sentiment to express itself against their fear that popular mobilization about Gaza could eventually turn to them. The monarchy is frustrated with Israel’s leaders because their actions threaten its own stability. They worry that Israel’s next step will be to escalate the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, driving more Palestinian refugees into Jordan. The purpose of Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, says Muasher, who helped negotiate it, was to protect the country’s borders and “kill the idea that Jordan is Palestine” or an “alternative homeland” for the Palestinian people whom Israel would like to get rid of. Now Jordanian officials see that Israel doesn’t want a Palestinian state nor to incorporate Palestinians. “Then what option does it have to offer other than mass transfer?” asks Muasher.
For months after October 7, 2023, as Israel’s military campaign ravaged Gaza, Amman held its breath in wrath and grief. There were marches, vigils, cultural events, fundraisers, street art. Then the authorities started reining in popular sentiment. By last April, over 1,500 protesters had been arrested. Pro-Palestinian graffiti has been systematically painted over. People have been discouraged from displaying Palestinian flags. They have been summoned by the security services over social media posts and forced to sign pledges that they will not participate in or call for protests. In June, the journalist Hiba Abu Taha was sentenced to one year in prison for reporting on the highly sensitive topic of Jordan’s trade with Israel.
Despite this, on the anniversary of October 7, crowds gathered once again in the vicinity of the already evacuated Israeli Embassy. It’s hardly surprising that in the face of Israel’s ongoing war crimes and of domestic repression, support for Hamas (at least of the rhetorical kind) has become much more widespread and the tone of protests more militant. Cordoned off by riot police, several thousand demonstrators called for canceling the Wadi Araba Treaty, cutting all diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel, and ending military cooperation with the US. They saluted the Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida (a cult figure who regularly appears, masked, on TV) and the group’s leader Yahya Sinwar (who was killed by the Israeli army in Gaza last month). They chanted: “Look and see, here we are by the thousands.” They yelled: “Why should we keep silent? For our daily bread?”
Gaza was also a pivotal issue in Jordan’s recent parliamentary elections. The Islamic Action Front, which focused much of its campaign on the war there, had a particularly strong showing (which almost certainly would have been even stronger if not for interference by the security services). Yet overall turnout was low, as usual, reflecting people’s fear of getting involved in politics and their belief that elected bodies do not yield real power anyway.
One of the only means Jordanians have found to show their disapprobation of Israel and the West has been a widespread consumer boycott campaign. Local soda brands have taken the place of once-ubiquitous Coke. My local Starbucks (one of the global brands, alongside McDonald’s, most avoided) finally closed its doors in the spring. The boycott campaign is an expression of agency and a barometer of public sentiment. It is also a modest last resort: the sum of individual actions that do not expose anyone nor threaten the status quo. It has not swayed Arab governments to change their policies. The number of US troops stationed in Jordan has continued to rise (I have heard a figure as high as 20,000). Trade between Israel and many Arab countries has actually increased over the past year.
The Arab region has never been as divided, exhausted, and repressive as it is today.
The United Arab Emirates, a tiny nation whose extreme wealth feeds its insecurity, remains as committed as ever to the Abraham Accords and to strengthening security, intelligence and commercial ties with Israel. Its leaders were horrified by the uprisings of the Arab Spring that swept the region from 2010 to 2012; they have been leading a relentless counter-revolutionary agenda ever since. In September, the president of the UAE visited Washington and was designated a Major Defense Partner of the United States.
Saudi Arabia—the prize that American and Israeli would-be architects of the new regional order have their eye on—has been more cautious. Its priority is to pursue economic mega-projects. Before October 7, it was ready to join the Abraham Accords in exchange for security guarantees from the US and its support for a nuclear program. Now, given domestic opinion, it cannot do so without at least a nominal commitment from Israel to a future Palestinian state, a commitment that Israel is unwilling to offer.
Considering how circumscribed debate in the Gulf is, it is difficult to gauge public opinion there or the thinking of the region’s rulers right now. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are not unhappy to witness the weakening of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and their regional rival Iran. Gulf leaders have certainly not taken any strong steps to rein in the war on Gaza; other countries in the Global South, such as South Africa, have taken the lead. Qatar, as usual, has tried to play a mediation role and has been attacked by Israeli and US politicians for it. (Israel has also openly targeted and killed many journalists for Al Jazeera, which is funded by Qatar and has provided the only reliable coverage of events in Gaza, from which international media outlets are barred.)
The Emirati and Saudi rulers may well be frustrated with American officials for letting things get this far. But they show little inclination to challenge the US or Israel, or to expend real political capital in defense of Palestine or Lebanon—causes and countries they have written off as irrelevant to their aims of economic growth and regional dominance. Instead, they have tried hard to stay on the sidelines, looking to carve out their own long-term advantage.
But what clearly does concern them is a full-scale regional war with Iran, or retaliatory attacks by militias in Iraq or Yemen that might target them, especially their oil installations. Saudi Arabia re-established relations with Iran in 2023 (in a Chinese-brokered détente), and its leaders have gone out of their way to signal that they are not hostile to Iran; in fact, the two countries just held joint naval exercises. The Iranian foreign minister recently visited a number of Arab capitals, where officials promised that their land and airspace would not be used to launch attacks on Iran. The flurry of Arab–Iranian diplomatic activity seems to have averted further escalation: Israel ultimately responded to the Iranian missile fire with limited strikes on military targets, on October 26. It also shows what can be achieved when the Gulf States (and alongside them, presumably, the US) mobilize and set a hard limit to Israel’s actions.
Syria meanwhile has been conspicuously silent, even as Israel has carried out strikes against it. Having stayed in power and beat back its opponents in the country’s civil war by brutalizing its own population, Bashar al-Assad’s regime seems focused on maintaining its own stability and securing its place again in the region.
Egypt’s military government—whose corruption, economic mismanagement, and repression have reached spectacular levels—has capitulated to Israeli and US demands around the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza and, seemingly, the Philadelphi corridor, the strip of land along the Egypt–Gaza border that Israel now insists on controlling. Egypt was rewarded in March with an increase of its IMF bailout loan from $3 billion to $8 billion. The Rafah crossing has been closed since May. Before that, the Egyptian authorities had participated in fleecing Palestinians escaping Gaza: A company with connections to the Egyptian military and security services was charging $5,000 or more per person for facilitating entry into Egypt. But acts of solidarity with Gaza have provoked immediate crackdowns. This past October 7, near the 15 May Bridge in Cairo, half a dozen people holding placards staged a protest against the wars in Gaza and Lebanon; they were arrested within half an hour.
Arab governments, even as they tout their diplomatic maneuvering and philanthropic efforts on behalf of the people of Gaza, are censoring and criminalizing any popular mobilization for the cause. State-controlled media present Arab governments’ inaction as wise, pragmatic leadership. Journalist Shaker Jarrar argued on the Jordanian news site 7iber that the official message is that there is no alternative to American hegemony and that “not only can Israel not be defeated, it cannot be resisted.” But of course, muting public criticism doesn’t make discontent disappear; it doesn’t mean that people’s sense of humiliation, of vulnerability, of being the victims of double standards isn’t festering.
In fact, a young generation of Arabs is being politicized around Palestine at the same time that they are surrounded bywhat the columnist Hazem Saghieh calls “the likely extinction of politics.” Faced with the collapse of faith in international institutions, free and impartial media, human rights, and international law—in the belief that dialogue, persuasion, and appeals to justice and humanity can achieve anything—the only choice seems to be retreat into callousness or shame, acquiescence or violence.
Israel has long maintained, conveniently, that the one language Arabs understand is force. Is it any surprise that the feeling is now mutual? What message has the last year sent to Arab youth other than that the West is deeply hypocritical and biased against them; that all it respects is force? What avenues for self-assertion, what imagined identities, are available to those who don’t want to just be victims, losers, pawns?
Young people in the Arab world today are coming of age among the ruins of Arab nationalism, Islamism, the hope for peaceful social revolutions, resistance movements, and liberalism. No collective action or response, no political project, is on offer. They face a world in which they can survive by giving up on solidarity and trusting only narrow familial, communal interests or in which they assert their principles and their identities through quixotic violence.
In early September, a Jordanian truck-driver smuggled a gun into a border crossing between Israel and Jordan, shot three Israeli guards dead, and was killed. You won’t find the man’s name—Maher al-Gazi—in English-language media, but in Jordan and across Arab social media he is a hero. The 39-year-old husband and father had served two decades in the Jordanian army. He was not of Palestinian descent; he hailed from a large tribe in southern Jordan and had no known political affiliations. His family issued a statement saying that his act was “the natural reaction of a person who cares for his religion, country and Arabness, before the crimes committed by the Occupation against the Palestinian people” and that they were proud of him. A relative told journalists here, “Maher’s blood isn’t more precious than the blood of Gaza’s children.”
When Israeli forces stumbled upon and killed Sinwar, Hamas’s leader and the alleged architect of the October 7 attacks, they released drone footage of his last moments. Sinwar is seen slumped in a chair in a demolished building, covered in dust, bleeding from the loss of one hand. He throws a stick at the Israeli drone that is filming him. Sinwar’s death—the way he went down, fighting—was immediately celebrated as an act of defiance, an iconic end.
That people will cling to flawed and defeated leaders as images of resistance should surprise no one with any understanding of human nature or any knowledge of the history of colonialism. What is much more astounding is the expectation that all Arabs can be brutalized or browbeaten into an acceptance of their own inferior, expendable status.
“Demoralized,” “cynicism,” “hopelessness,” “disbelief,” “visceral anger”: These are some of the words I’ve heard from friends and colleagues while reporting this piece.
“The dehumanization and complete silencing of Arab voices in the Western narrative over the course of the past barbaric year is utterly breathtaking,” Hafsa Halawa, a political analyst and human rights advocate, told me. “I have no rational explanation except racism.” Halawa worries about a rise in radicalization and a retreat into “a tribalist Arab space,” driven by the feeling that “nobody cares about us.”
In the conversations I have in Amman, again and again I hear a desire to turn one’s back on the West, to reject it, to repay it in kind. Of course this is easier said than done. The region remains firmly enmeshed in a US security architecture—not to mention a US-led capitalist system—and although Russia and China have increased their presence here, they don’t necessarily offer better alternatives. But the dependance on the US and other Western powers only sharpens the feeling of betrayal. This sentiment is acute among those who, professionally and personally, have connections to the West, who know it and who had thought, until recently, that they spoke its language.
As the Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer notes, in the Western media Arab neighborhoods are“strongholds” and Arab men are “suspects” and “militants.” “Because,” Mounzer writes, “the world has always seen us—Palestinians, Lebanese, Arabs, Middle Easterners—this way, only now we are seeing this, too. Or rather, we see the extent of it, the inescapability of it. The fact that even those who thought of ourselves as exceptions—because of our passports or our languages or religions or politics—are not.” She goes on: “I don’t know what language it’s possible to use with people who will never see you as human. Who will always hear an animal braying when you speak. Aware that we will be misinterpreted, we too try to translate ourselves for the West in every sense of the word in order to make our suffering intelligible.”
Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a leading human rights NGO, told me that in the civil-society and human-rights space, “lifelong friendships and camaraderie have been severed completely.” He is disappointed that there have been so few resignations from the Biden administration. “You give people the time to ‘fight from within’ and the policy keeps getting worse and worse,” he said. In fact, it has come to light that some US officials buried reports about Israel obstructing humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Bahgat’s organization, like many, has cut ties with the US and German governments entirely (other organizations lost their funding from Western sources because of their stances on Gaza). In Jordan, the lawyer Hadeel Abdel Aziz returned the International Women of Courage Award she had received at the White House in March. She and other recipients of the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law published an open letter to the French and German governments, criticizing them for considering Gazans “as lesser humans.” The Jordanian Women’s Union has issued a call—signed by 68 organizations so far—to boycott US funding as well as events or meetings with US embassies.
Bahgat said: “My message has been: Don’t think this is temporary, that this is an episode that will end or will be overcome. This is generational; it changes everything.”
This rupture is likely to leave Arab civil-society and human-rights groups more vulnerable than ever. They will lose the leverage and protection that contacts with Western governments gave them. I also have no doubt that authoritarian regimes and extremists will weaponize anti-Western sentiment to further target or delegitimize them.
As I finish writing this, in early November, Israel’s bombings continue unabated; it is knocking down buildings in Beirut, wiping whole villages of southern Lebanon off the map, targeting hospitals and civilian infrastructure. Over one million Lebanese have been displaced. The ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza is underway. Israel’s siege hasn’t allowed any food or water in since October 1; 400,000 people have been told to leave or else they will be considered combatants. In one horrific attack on a hospital tent camp displaced people receiving medical treatment were set on fire.
Meanwhile, the United States has deployed B-2 stealth bombers, its most advanced aircraft, against sites in Yemen it says were Houthi weapon caches. It has shipped a powerful new antiballistic missile defense system—the THAAD—to Israel, manned by one hundred US soldiers.
What does US political, economic, and cultural decline mean for the Middle East, the part of the world that perhaps more than any other has been shaped by US military intervention? What does it mean here that the United States has less vision and less authority than ever before even as it continues to blithely dispense violence?
Nadim Houri, the director of the Arab Reform Initiative, says that the US acts like “a reluctant superpower that doesn’t want to get involved but does get involved, that doesn’t want to take responsibility but ends up owning it anyway.” He says that US officials “almost want you to feel sorry for them.” But, he notes, “you don’t have to give $20 billion to Israel, you don’t have to give so many weapons to Saudi Arabia, you don’t have to support Sisi,” the president of Egypt. He laments “the poverty of US strategic thinking”: “US diplomacy is just reduced to what the US military can do.”
All that most Arab citizens see of the US are its military and its fortified embassies, says Houry. And the US seems to see whole swaths of the Arab world as “badlands you fly over, try to control and subjugate.. . . It’s a relation purely based on dominance.”
In Amman, we are bracing for the next round of fighting, the next firing of missiles, the next news of a massacre or a bombing. In the prayers broadcast over mosque loudspeakers, imams repeatedly call for the protection of people—in Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon. The list keeps growing.
At a school function in late October, a Palestinian friend told me that she feels guilty when she watches her children eat, thinking of children in Gaza. That she had thought the trauma of her parents, passed down to her, might end with her generation, and now she knows better.
In my neighborhood, which is very international—full of students and workers (and normally, tourists) from many different countries—I have been moved by how polite and friendly people in the streets and shops have been to me over the course of the last year. Almost pointedly so, as if to say: We don’t hold you responsible. We can recognize one another as human beings.
The war in Gaza doesn’t come up in conversation these days as often as it used to: What more is there to say? It’s now the air we breathe. And that air is filled with dread. Dread not only at the irreparable damage being done every day—the families erased, the bodies mangled, the prisoners tortured, the children traumatized, the rivers and fields poisoned, the schools and hospitals and mosques and homes and villages destroyed. But also at the damage, invisible and deep, being done to everyone who is forced to witness this. I fear this violence, and its brutal message—“you are weak; you are less”—will burrow into minds and souls. I fear it will breed nihilism and indifference, hopelessness and resignation, hatred and revanchism, and a desire to be strong in one’s turn, in the worst possible way.
Ursula Lindsey is a reporter, essayist and book reviewer who largely writes about North Africa and the Middle East, where she has lived for the last two decades. After living in Egypt and Morocco, she is now based in Amman, Jordan. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and a co-host of the BULAQ podcast, which focuses on Arabic literature in translation.
