Abrahamic Family house, Abu Dhabi
Before there was a political programme, there was a prayer. For two thousand years, scattered across the empires of the world, Jewish communities closed the Passover Seder with the same vow whispered across generations: L’Shana HaBa’a B’Yerushalayim “Next year in Jerusalem”. Zion was not merely a hill in Judea. It was the axis around which the entire Jewish people organised its longing, its liturgy, its identity. This religious Zionism, born at the moment of the first exile, predates every modern ideology by millennia. It is the oldest national movement in history, not a political invention but a spiritual inheritance.
Seder Plate, ca. 1900. Parcel-gilt silver. Brooklyn Museum.
Modern political Zionism, however, was born not in Jerusalem but in Paris, in the winter of 1894, in a courtyard of the École Militaire where a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of his rank before a jeering crowd chanting mort aux juifs. A young Viennese journalist and doctor of law named Theodor Herzl stood watching. What shattered him was not the antisemitism itself, he had encountered that before, but its location. This was France, the country that had given the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that had emancipated its Jews a century earlier, the very cradle of Enlightenment universalism. If hatred could flourish here, in this soil, then assimilation was a fantasy. Herzl drew the only conclusion his legal mind would permit: the Jews required not tolerance but sovereignty. Not a minority right but a state. Two years later, Der Judenstaat laid the blueprint. A dispersed people, ancient in memory, would reconstitute itself on its ancestral land.
Theodor Herzl in Austria in 1900. Imagno/Getty Images.
Pan-Arabism was born from a different rupture. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, the Arab peoples who had lived under its canopy for four centuries found themselves not liberated but re-colonised. France occupied Syria and Lebanon. Britain administered Iraq, Palestine and Egypt. Germany and Italy had their own ambitions in the region. The McMahon-Hussein correspondence had promised Arab independence; the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the spoils instead. From this betrayal emerged an Arab national consciousness, raw and urgent, seeking to transform the shared language, faith and culture of three hundred million people into political sovereignty.
This nationalism quickly bifurcated. One current was secular, modernising, broadly pro-Western in its instruments if not its allegiances. Mustafa Kemal in Turkey showed what disciplined Westernisation could achieve in a former Ottoman territory. Arab liberals in Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad looked toward constitutions, economic development and educated elites. Iran, under Reza Shah Pahlavi had pursued an ambitious programme of modernisation, secularising the state, expanding education and industrialising the economy. In 1928, in Ismailia, Egypt, a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood on a precise historical diagnosis: the Arab world had expanded with breathtaking speed from the 7th century onward, carrying civilisation from Arabia to Andalusia within a century, only to enter a long, humiliating retreat after the 16th century. The cause, in al-Banna’s reading, was not military or economic but theological. The Arabs had strayed from true Islam. The remedy was return. Western values were not solutions to adopt but sins to repudiate.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1925. Getty Images
Since 1948, these two movements pursued their divergent trajectories. Zionism was quietly constructive. Successive waves of aliyah brought Jewish immigrants to Ottoman and then British Palestine. They drained swamps, founded universities, built hospitals, created a modern Hebrew language, established cooperative agricultural settlements, and laid the legal, institutional and military foundations of a state-in-waiting. The process was not without conflicts and history acknowledges that. But its direction was unmistakable: a people was reassembling itself. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence in a Tel Aviv museum. Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon crossed the borders. Not the Palestinian Arabs, but the neighbouring states, each with its own agenda, each invoking Pan-Arab solidarity to mask competing strategic interests. The first war was launched not in the name of a Palestinian nation but in the name of an Arab world that could not agree on anything except rejection.
David Ben Gourion in 1948.
That inability to agree would prove fatal to Pan-Arabism’s grandest ambitions. Gamal Abdel Nasser came closest to embodying its promise, charismatic, defiant, capable of electrifying crowds from Casablanca to Baghdad with his nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956. But the United Arab Republic, his attempted merger with Syria, lasted three years before Damascus walked away. Every Arab state carried its own dynastic interests, its own colonial borders, its own tribal compacts. And beneath the political fractures lay a geological injustice: oil, the region’s defining resource, was distributed with radical inequality. The Gulf monarchies sat atop oceans of hydrocarbons while Egypt, Syria and Jordan had almost none, making solidarity a transaction that the rich could fund and withdraw at will.
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Israel, possessing no oil, drew the opposite conclusion. Self-sufficiency was not an option but an imperative. From its first decade, the state invested in science, technology, agriculture and defence research. The kibbutz and the university laboratory became twin pillars of national survival. While Pan-Arabism organised around a negative pole, against Zionism and against the West, Israel organised around a positive one: build, invent, survive, excel.
The year 1979 transformed the region’s fault lines entirely. Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran inaugurated not merely a new government but a new theological state with a revolutionary export mandate. The Islamic Republic was constitutionally committed to expanding its revolution across the Muslim world, erasing the state of Israel, and breaking American hegemony in the region. Controlling the Strait of Hormuz and sitting atop vast hydrocarbon reserves, the mullahs developed a patient strategy of proxy warfare, funding, arming and directing Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and extending tentacles into Syria and Somalia. The design was strategic encirclement: a ring of violence around Israel, sustained at low cost by fractured states that could be used as platforms without being held accountable. Pan-Arabism had not merely failed; it had been replaced by something more lethal and more coherent, namely Shi’a revolutionary Islamism with a nuclear ambition.
Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. Tehran (Stig Nillson/AFP)
On the Sunni side, the Soviet war in Afghanistan generated its own radical offspring. The mujahideen networks that fought Soviet occupation mutated, after the Red Army’s withdrawal, into al-Qaeda and its successors, organisations that competed with the IRGC for the mantle of Islamic resistance and the defence of the Palestinian cause while rejecting its Shi’a theology entirely. Pan-Arabism, squeezed between Khomeinism and Salafi jihadism, ceased to function as a coherent ideology. It became a memory, invoked in speeches, abandoned in practice.
Bin Laden
In Israel, the consequences were felt in the political landscape. Decades of suicide bombings, rocket fire and terrorist attacks produced a rightward gravitational pull that has not reversed. The last government led by the Israeli left was elected more than twenty years ago. In its place has grown a messianic Zionism, religiously nationalist, that counters in its own idiom the maximalism of the Islamist movements it faces. Each extremism feeds the other.
And yet, in 2020, a rupture occurred in this calculus. Under the auspices of the United States, the Abraham Accords normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, not as the conclusion of a war but as a strategic reconfiguration, signed without resolving the Palestinian question, based instead on shared interests: containing Iran, accessing technology, attracting investment. Morocco simultaneously received American recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, a diplomatic signal about the price and reward of regional realignment.
Abraham accords signing in Washington, 2020
This moment deserves to be understood as something larger than a diplomatic transaction. The Quran itself offers the ground. Surah Al-Isra (17:104) states: “And We said to the Children of Israel after him: Dwell in the land, and when the promise of the Hereafter comes, We will bring you forth all together.” Islam’s own scripture acknowledges the covenant between the Jewish people and their ancestral land. The three Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, descend from the same patriarch, share overlapping ethical architectures, and carry complementary responsibilities toward the land and its peoples.
King of Morocco, Mohamed VI, in 2019
The Iran-Israel-US confrontation now unfolding may, if it succeeds in neutralising the IRGC’s nuclear programme and toppling the regime of Velayat-e Faqih, will create the conditions for something new: a Pan-Arabism reborn not as anti-Western fury or anti-Zionist mobilisation, but as a positive civilisational project, an Abrahamic regionalism built on shared prosperity, technological cooperation and ecological stewardship of a land that belongs, ultimately, to those yet to be born.
This requires, simultaneously, that Zionism fulfil its own founding promise. Herzl’s vision was never of a fortress but of a nation among nations, at peace with its neighbours. The commitment to coexist, stated at independence and deferred ever since, must finally be honoured. A political solution to the Palestinian question is not a concession to pressure, it is the completion of the Zionist project itself.
Two movements born from the same century of colonial violence and world wars, organised around the same geography, sustained by the same desert and the same ancient texts: they were never fated to be permanent enemies. Coexistence, shared prosperity, and the keeping of this land for those who will inherit it, these are not the compromises of exhaustion.
They are the common destination that both, at their most lucid, should always have in view.