Rubble is Israel’s doctrine, not an improvisation.
Nathan J Brown pierces through the BS on @orderfromashes.bsky.social to identify a clear, intentional strategy — which won’t produce security for anyone.
A lot of Arabs predicted this of course--and ended up dead and/or in jail for their trouble.
Thanassis Cambanis
The Faustian bargain embodied in the Abraham Accords but stretching back to Camp David and Wadi Arabia was that the Arabs could trade complicity and authoritarianism (with the endemic repression and corruption entailed) for quiet and development. There's a good chance they'll end up getting neither.
There is a reason why France was Israel's closest ally for a while before it became too weak to back it the way it used to, and with America shedding all pretensions of trying to cater to Arab nationalists after the mid 1960s.
France also exchanged counterinsurgency tactics with the Israelis.
Unequal development, segregation, rigid hierarchy, oligarchy, the fostering of communal tensions were all stable French policy towards Arabs. They almost make America look altruistic.
Most observers just don't call them minority regimes because they believe Sunni Arabs are some unitarian blob where theological and class divides or urban-rural divides don't exist.
Madawi Rasheed in her books outlines how a Nejdi nationalism that centres Wahabism and the al-Saud family at its centre governs the rest of the country in an extractive way. The east of Saudi Arabia has all the oil while Hijaz has the water and farmland.
Assad's Syria or pre-civil war Lebanon often gets labeled minority regimes, which is true, but so is it for most of the monarchies: the framework which they govern around is just as minoritarian. That framework still being regionalist, tribal and sectarian.
There is also the long history of fostering sectarian tensions and insulating groups from each other in the form of segregation, which made Tunisian Jews especially vulnerable during the Vichy period.
The French also backed the most reactionary dependent oligarchic elements everywhere.
open.spotify.com/episode/53Gf...
Great episode on the effects of the war in the Gulf on Morocco and Algeria
