This essay tries to understand, not to excuse. It is not a defense of conquest or cruelty. It is a meditation on how, across millennia, the Middle East has been reshaped by collisions — political, religious, and civilizational — and on what those collisions may yet demand of us. Image by Haley Black
HOF — These days, condemning Israel has become a global ritual. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics make it easy. His right-wing populism, his faith in force, and his disregard for international restraint have turned Israel from a fortress into a lightning rod. But the more we fixate on Israel, the more we ignore what its existence exposes in all of us — the ancient machinery of power that keeps the Middle East locked in its endless loop of birth and collapse.
Hamas deserves scrutiny, even if its violence has been eclipsed by Netanyahu’s war. But so does the entire system that produced it: a regional order sustained by fear, pride, and inherited rage. From Doha to Tehran, and Ankara to Cairo, governments have long weaponized religion and nationalism as tools of survival. The result is a region addicted to opposition — to Israel, to “the West”, to itself.
I grew up hearing that Syria and Iraq were the “cradle of civilization”. It’s true. But it’s also true that we’ve been its graveyard. Every generation builds, purges, rebuilds — as if stuck in the same tragic orbit. Conquerors arrive and become natives. Locals resist and become conquerors. When the new order fails, we mourn the old one we once cursed. The cycle never ends because each power insists on beginning from zero.
Even Israel, the newest claimant to antiquity, plays by the same script. It absorbs, imitates, and rebrands — sometimes turning Palestinian culture into Israeli heritage, as if changing the name could rewrite the lineage. The debate over falafel and other foods claimed as “Israeli” isn’t trivial; it reflects how identity in this region is always recycled, never fully owned.
After October 7, a new word began echoing in Israeli discourse: the West. It’s a curious turn, as if the country is once again looking for a larger identity to anchor itself. But the West today is not a geography — it’s a gravitational field built in cyberspace, sustained by the cloud, diffused across the networks that shape how we live and think. It pulls in everything orbiting modernity: Europe, Latin America, Russia — and even at its farthest edge, encounters the counter-orbits of India and China, civilizations deeply influenced by the West yet vast enough to bend its gravitational field.
The “cradle of civilization” has become the centrifuge of civilization: everything pours in, everything spins, and what comes out is rarely what went in.
From the Assyrians to the Americans, two forces have shaped this region. The first is the empire — always seeking to divide and rule. The second is the regional power — always trying to isolate itself in the name of sovereignty. Rome tried to unify through law and roads. Persia ruled through tolerance and local autonomy. Both eventually collided with the faiths born here: Rome with Christianity, Persia with Islam. Every empire that touched this land had to wrestle with its prophets. Every local kingdom that survived had to become, in time, an empire of its own.
Between the two forces — imperial expansion and local resistance — there has always been a third constant: violence. It is the grammar of this region, the language through which power negotiates meaning. It destroys, but it also defines.
When scientists describe how the moon was born, they speak of a cataclysm. Early Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet, Theia. The impact was violent beyond imagination — yet from it, the Earth stabilized, and the moon emerged. That collision gave us tides, seasons, and balance.
Civilizations behave much the same way. They grow out of collisions — cultural, religious, economic. The Mongols, the Crusaders, the Ottomans: all came with fire, and left with ideas. The Mongols burned Baghdad, then built an empire that connected China to Europe. The Crusaders invaded the Levant, but their return seeded Europe’s own Renaissance. In each case, violence was both the undertaker and the midwife of a new age.
This doesn’t make it right. It makes it human. The task of civilization has always been to refine the fire — to learn from the impact, even when the lesson repeats itself.
Judaism’s long exile through Europe made it the ethical backbone of Western civilization — and its most persistent outsider. From the Torah came both the Church and the Reformation, even as Europe tried to erase the people who carried those texts. After centuries of exile and genocide, the remnant returned to a homeland that had itself become foreign. The State of Israel was born out of catastrophe, but also out of an ancient reflex: to rebuild on the ruins.
That return reignited the region’s dormant collisions. The Arab world could not decide whether to reject Israel as an invader or to see it as a mirror — another branch of itself, claiming what it, too, had lost.
Israel today might be seen as a civilizational Theia — a force whose impact is reshaping everything around it. Its existence forces the region to face questions it has avoided for a century: what borders mean, how faith and governance coexist, and whether coexistence is possible at all.
The tragedy is that the participants in this collision can’t see its purpose. They count bodies, not orbits. They guard their walls and call it peace. But if history has a pattern, it is this: every violent shock in the Middle East eventually yields a new alignment. The only question is whether the region will reach that point through exhaustion or through wisdom.
Condemnation alone won’t save us. Understanding might. The moral goal — peace, liberty, stability — is clear, but we can’t reach it by pretending the world already obeys those rules. It doesn’t. Progress begins when nations build systems sturdy enough to survive their next impact — institutions that allow rivalry without disintegration.
The lesson of Theia is not that catastrophe is noble. It’s that catastrophe can be transformed. The Middle East has always been where worlds collide. Perhaps the next civilization, like the moon, will rise from our debris — steady, luminous, and finally aware of its own orbit.
Relevant links
When God Plays Dice with the Universe
The Thin Line Between Us And The Enemy
What War and Terror Do to Principles
Roumani Line 