Sune Haugbølle, Roskilde University
The period from October 2023 to October 2025 can be seen as a regional war of epochal importance that involved the decimation of military resistance to Israel, the fall of the Assad regime, and the re-internationalization of the Palestinian question. It arguably continues with the latest conflict between US, Israel and Iran that began on February 28. The de-facto military defeat of the Iranian resistance project should not just be understood as a political event that is changing regional and international alignments and economic constellations, possibly towards what Bernard Haykel (2025) recently called “Pax Hebraica” – an Israel-imposed regional order backed by the US. Like the epochal wars in 1948 and 1967, the Gaza war is also likely to shape political and ideological trajectories. In the tradition of vernacular political theory, I reflect on the notion of epochal transition in the double meaning of the Arabic expression ma ba’d al-harb, which means post-war as well as simply a big, open question about what comes after the war. As we appear to be on the precipice of a fundamental change in the regional order, how are Arab publics interpreting the change underway in the Middle East after Gaza? What can Arab intellectual reactions to the war/genocide tell us about the meaning of epochal transition? Is the Arab public the same public that responded to those earlier moments? This essay investigates assumptions about the nature and significance of the Arab public sphere, and what can be learned about the meaning of the Gaza War through close engagement with the ideas and arguments circulating within it.
Not all events have meanings as such, but epochal events do. I see the war since 2023 and specifically the part of it that concerns the destruction of Gaza as an epochal event (Simon 2020), defined as events like wars and catastrophes that attain symbolic significance across borders and come to define international relations, economies and cultures. They are different from other historical events in that the transformations they provoke open to a “new reality” with the potential to introduce a radical temporal break. Historians and political sociologists have theorized how such events over time shape worldviews and outlook through interpretive and commemorative practices in the public sphere (Assmann and Shortt 2012). In the Middle East, the well-known wars of 1948 and 1967, and revolutions in 1979 and 2011, each engendered ideological, intellectual and political formations. Just as French history is constantly re-interpreted in light of 1789, modern Arab history as it is interpreted by intellectuals, historians and the general public reflects on these important turning points and their effects on thought and politics. The most important turning points are the Nakba that made the Palestinian cause a central pivot of Arab politics for decades, the Naksa that ended the pan-Arabist project and triggered self-critique and revolutionary and Islamist tendencies after 1967, the return of religion symbolized and empowered by the Iranian revolution, and the popular uprisings from 2011 that challenged neoliberal autocracy but in many places ended up solidifying it. Over time, they have become markers of wider social, cultural and political reordering.
As Hayden White (2008), Reinhart Koselleck (1989) and other theorists have stressed, epochal events change the way we view history, both because of their symbolic meaning and because of the way they are experienced individually and socially. They shape transitions to new eras through successes and (more commonly, as per Arab history) failures of grand political projects and ideological tendencies in the region, and in doing so also change consciousness of what is at stake during a particular period and the broadly accepted narratives about the event that began it. In that way, epochal events take form gradually in a conversation over their significance. That conversation may be different in wider society than among intellectuals, but the two things are usually related. To orientate themselves in time and create historical consciousness, intellectuals, professional historians as others tend to identify events that ‘bookend’ periods. In Europe today, for example, liberal intellectuals are obsessed with the idea that the 1990s was a golden era for something they call the rules-based international order forged on the basis of the end of the Cold War. As they now feel it is unravelling, they bookend it, perhaps by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or by the election of populist leaders in 2016, or most recently by Donald Trump’s attempt to claim Greenland in 2025. In the case of regional events like 1967, that conversation was and is mainly “Arab.” In the case of the Gaza War, the conversation is global, reflecting an epochal event akin to 9/11 and the end of the Cold War, which could, over time, bookend a period not just regionally but also globally.
Gaza in the ‘new new Arab public sphere’
There is no clearly established narrative about the Gaza War yet in the Arab public sphere. At some level, confusion reigns supreme as violence continues in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, and Yemen, and now Iran and the Gulf. However, conversations are underway among Arab intellectuals and in the public sphere, and there are certain discernable tendencies that I hope to outline in this paper. The place where this public conversation takes place is important to define first. Whereas researchers two decades ago talked about the emergence of a “new Arab public sphere” produced by the integration of national discussions on satellite TV and the Internet (Lynch 2006), today’s media ecology is much more fractured. State-controlled national media (conglomerates) exist next to various counter-publics on the Internet that do not always fully communicate with each other. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other satellite channels that also operate as web-based media, continue to have high viewerships. No-one who has followed Gaza in the Arab world would be unfamiliar with al-Jazeera correspondents like Anas al-Sharif (killed in August 2025) and Wael al-Dahdouh, the bureau chief whose family was killed in October 2023. Their voices, and the general editorial interpretation of al-Jazeera, have shaped the general understanding of the war for Arabs globally. That interpretation can be summarized as pro-resistance without being overtly pro-Hamas, dedicated to documenting crimes and injustices against the Palestinian people, while criticizing Western hypocrisy and the absence of international law. But also, just the sense that the world as it used to be portrayed does not make sense anymore. Witnessing in this reporting becomes a kind of truth-telling, which the reporters share with a general audience, who can only watch as the butchering and destruction continues unabated.
As the prominent Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé writes in an essay in Le Monde from November 2024, expanded and published as a book in 2025, this experience of watching a live-streamed genocide marks a shift not just for the region but for the world:
This world has crossed a line since October 7, 2023. Every day since then has been a caricature of the day before: a delirium to which the mind becomes accustomed as if under the influence of a drug, as if it had nothing to say or nothing better to say. It’s as if this deluge of fire were normal for the simple reason that it exists. We were in a neurotic situation; now, beyond all politics, we find ourselves on the edge of a generalized psychotic state. In neurosis, reality tests or exhausts its subject. In psychosis, the subject loses sight of it (Eddé 2025: 34).
If it makes sense to talk about one keynote in the cacophony of Arab interpretations of Gaza, the experience of relentless horror and an injustice that beggars belief, or as in Eddé’s text even trust in reality itself, aligns with the experience that viewers of al-Jazeera’s coverage will have had (Hassan 2024). But much has also changed in Arab media in the past two decades. Al-Jazeera has many competitors. And traditional venues for intellectual debate such as the Arab press and publicist media generally (to the extent that this category makes sense in authoritarian states) have almost fully collapsed under pressure from the Internet, although London-based newspapers like al-Quds al-Arabi and state-controlled national newspapers like the Saudi Okaz, and the Egyptian al-Ahram still serve a function (if nothing else as a mirror of state discourse and ideology and, by omission of what is not said on their pages, of the red lines). What has emerged instead is a variety of web-based journals, podcasts, bloggers, collectives, influencers, and content-creators, who influence public debate. There is also an Islamic public sphere where devout Muslims and committed Islamists debate Gaza through a religious lens. The Islamic sphere matters a lot, because of the centrality of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in the war/genocide and in culture wars over Islam and Islamism (Gunning and Valbjørn 2025).
The most important counter-publics, in terms of wide media consumption, are probably new internet-based media sites with a more secular and often liberal profile that resulted from the Arab uprisings and have grown popular for their ability to interact seamlessly with social media debates as shared and liked content. They include Mada Masr (Egypt), al-Mudun (Lebanon), Megaphone (Lebanon), Daraj (Syria), al-Arab al-Jadid (Qatar), and al-Jumhurriya (Syria/Turkey), which are all mainly written and edited by Arabs (including Arabic speaking non-Arabs) born between 1980 and 2000. These generational differences matter a lot for intellectual debate and historical interpretation, especially in today’s rapidly changing media ecology. Other than reading these online media forums and posts, the younger Arab generation also debates and processes the two-years war through artistic and cultural production, such as novels, plays, poetry, cinema and documentary.
Transformations of the intellectual field
If we take such a broad view of intellectual debate that also encompasses media discourse, cultural production and social media, it becomes a gargantuan task to make sense of Arab interpretations of the war and of Gaza as a historical bookend. So, my approach is admittedly impressionistic and could be criticized for representing my own situated viewpoints. However, I believe that this debate about the meaning of Gaza is crucial for our understanding of the contemporary Middle East and that, although difficult and diffuse, it must start somewhere. I concur with the Lebanese philosopher Suzanne Kassab (2025), who recently suggested that the debate about Gaza is crystalizing the emergence of a “new contemporary” thinking in the Arab world that has been underway since 2011. In her view, our old ways of understanding the intellectual field are becoming obsolete as the very notion of an intellectual sphere – of who fits the category of an intellectual – has changed drastically in the Middle East and globally because of the changing media ecology. By way of criticizing her own older work on contemporary Arab thought, Kassab now does her own kind of epochal bookending. She highlights the way that the discipline of Arab intellectual history from Albert Hourani and his genre-defining book Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age to her own influential Contemporary Arab Thought (2010) and Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution (2019) has tended to favour ‘great’ (male) intellectuals, and whether consciously or not, exclude political thought at ‘lower’ levels of society, including mass media and popular culture.
Where to start, then? Methodologically, one can start the discussion about broader tendencies through analysis of texts, expressions and individuals whose verdicts have stood out and have given shape to public debate. At the very beginning of the war, there were many statements circulating on social media and in the press, mawqif (statement) after mawqif, bayan (communique) after bayan. Both among Arab writers and intellectuals, and in academia and the culture industry, people sought to collectively express their horror over the Israeli attacks on Gaza but also protest the relative silence from Arab regimes and the West, who were shell-shocked by their own horror of the attack on Israeli citizens and therefore maintained the right of Israel to defend itself, even when that defense very early on clearly took the form of revenge and collective punishment.
One example of collective texts is a public letter from Arab intellectuals to their Western colleagues organized by the Syrian veteran poet Adonis (2023). Signed by several hundred Arab intellectuals mainly of the older generation, the letter called for a common human response to the atrocities, to war crimes and to genocide, and it decried the silence from the West, whose leaders’ openly supported Israel’s bombing campaign. In early 2024, the letter was answered by a letter signed by Western intellectuals who largely agreed and called for intercultural dialogue. The Adonis letter in many ways represents what Kassab calls the old guard of ‘contemporary Arab thought’ and their old mode of expression suited to the Arab public sphere before the Arab Uprisings and before the Internet, when newspapers and books were primary media for intellectual exchange. When we look a bit wider in the media landscape, the newspaper al-Quds al-arabi and other ‘resistance’ media including al-Jazeera and al-Mayadeen, went much further in their critique. Some openly defended the Islamic resistance, while many others stressed the Palestinian right to national defense, the hypocrisy of calling any armed Palestinian group from the PLO to Hamas ‘terrorist,’ and generally criticizing the American imperialist imprint on Israeli actions. Some also lambasted loyalist Arab intellectuals who toed the line to please their rulers. Most of all, critics condemned the Western reaction. But unlike Adonis, they did not look for bridges and allies, mainly for the destruction of an outdated order where the West has the prerogative to dictate universal values and norm. Revolution, not reform.
In the view of this discourse, the significance of the Gaza War is to have revealed once and for all the racist roots of Western thought. By ignoring a genocide in motion, Western leaders and much of its public have exposed the way deep-seated double standards in the international system undergird the erasure of colonized people. In the words of Hamid Dabashi (an Iranian intellectual aligned with Arab post-colonial critique), whose book After Savagery – Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization is the most critical of a number of recent book-length interpretations of Gaza: “The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism. What remains of the theories we use to understand our world?” (Dabashi, 2025: 2).
This lifting of the scales from the eyes affects the problem-space of intellectual debates. To Kassab, the “new contemporary” intellectuals of the post-Arab Spring era are thus done with two longstanding debates that had dominated pre-2011 Arab thought: first, the endless debate over how to engage with Tradition (al-turath), and second, the equally exhausted debate over how to engage with the “West” as a modern intellectual episteme. In her reading of Arab intellectual debates after Gaza, it is not just the critique of the West that stands out but the very need to defer to Western standards. In short, she writes, “The whole claim of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization to universal categories and values collapsed irremediably in the genocide in Gaza. This time, it was no longer the well-known problem of ‘double-standards’ but the total loss of intellectual and moral credibility.” (Kassab 2025). What had been underway in the wake of a democratic uprising in 2011, which many Arabs felt that the West did not support wholeheartedly despite their pretense to support universal values of freedom, now became crystal clear as Gazans were bludgeoned and the built infrastructure smashed to dust.
That conclusion has been drawn on the basis of Palestinian documentation of the war. Embedded journalists in Gaza have paid with their lives for reporting where Western reporters could not. Palestinian testimonies in form of books, websites, essays, films, and poetry have recorded the genocide for an Arab audience. And Palestinians in the diaspora have recorded their grief and stood at the forefront of a global protest and solidarity movement that has also encompassed parts of academia and the student body. In fact, Palestine protests have been more substantial in Western countries. Some Arab intellectuals explain this by autocratic crackdown and ‘activist burn-out’ in countries like Egypt where popular uprisings were effectively defeated. Others like the Lebanese writer and co-founder of Megaphone, Samer Frangie, point to a general ‘Palestine fatigue’ that took hold after the 1990s. Oddly enough, he writes in a recent essay, Palestine was not a key priority for the Arab revolutions that broke out in 2011. “In the division of Arab opposition discourse since after the end of the cold war, the issue belongs to what is known as the axis of resistance and has been separated from internal political contexts” (Frangie 2025).
The revolutions did not center Palestine due to ‘tiring’ of al-qadiya (“the cause”) in large parts of the Arab public. In Frangie’s view, the 2021 Sheikh Jarrah protests were more of an event in the West than in the Arab public. This Palestine fatigue is a “structure of feeling” – to use Raymond William’s expression of a social and cultural mood – that, according to him, allowed Gulf countries and Morrocco to sign the Abraham accords in 2020 without any general uproar from the Arab public. He sees fatigue as a symptom of a long-standing project to destroy Arab politics, empowering autocrats allied to the West – backed and governed by immense technological advantage. The Arab Uprisings, in this reading, protested this order, but largely in a liberal or Islamist framework that – for several reasons – often (not always) sidestepped Palestine. One of the reasons was the set framework of the Resistance Axis versus the ‘moderate’ Arab states in the region, in place even before the end of the Cold War and at least since Egypt’s peace with Israel in 1978. Here, Gaza becomes the culmination of a long, twisted process where neoliberal autocracies and Islamist movements had become the de-facto safe-keepers of the Palestinian cause, as opposed to a defeated and cowed Palestinian Authority, formally backed by the West but with no ability or ambition to stop the advance of Israeli control over Palestinian land. In the lands of defeated revolutions, a re-empowered form of neoliberal autocracy thus ruled – or should we say rules – supreme. This order fits perfectly with and in fact accommodates the ultraviolent assertion of what pro-Israeli pundits now perhaps prematurely call ‘Pax Hebraica’.
Rethinking order after Gaza
If the Gaza War is supposed to mark a transition, but the political order is not changing but in fact consolidating, how are we to interpret this change? The war/genocide was/is regional. Therefore, a post-war transition will be regional too. Like previous transitional periods in the region, such as the two-years war in Lebanon that marked the first phase of civil conflict from April 1975 to November 1976, the Gaza War could also turn out to be but a first phase in a longer conflict. Hamas could use the current ceasefire to re-arm; the Iranian leadership could double down on regional resistance rather than disarmament and entente; Hizbollah could continue to resist the attempt by the US, Israel and the Lebanese state to disarm the group and use the current moment of uncertainty to replenish weapon stockpiles north of the Litani river. In fact, some of these scenarios appear to be playing out as of early March 2026. We may now be in a full confrontation between the resistance Axis and the USA, Israel and their regional allies. For those who choose resistance, their arguments are partly religious, and partly based on a long-established anti-imperialism, both of which have been buttressed by a particular interpretation of the Gaza War that highlights American hegemony. They simply refuse to surrender to the idea that ‘resistance is futile.’
The important point is that these interpretations, as I have shown, do not stand alone in confined political environments of the mumana’a (critics of US hegemony in the region) but echo broader readings and concerns in the Arab public from leftists, liberals, nationalists, Islamists and many other orientations. They rely on a historical experience made since October 2023 by following the many reactions and testimonies of the Gaza genocide that Palestinians and others have continued to produce.
For intellectuals, the act of observing, bearing witness, as Palestinian writer Hala Alyan (2024) writes in an essay from January 2024, becomes the central task of writing in a time of genocide. In Greek, as she cites Agamben for pointing out, the word for martyr is ‘martis’, derived from the verb ‘remember’ or, ‘Those who bore witness to their faith.’ In Arabic, the word ishtashada – derivative of shadid, martyr – means to have borne witness to God; that is, to have been martyred (i.e. killed by the enemy). The connection between seeing and dying is visceral if we think of the more than 200 Palestinian journalists but also literary writers who have been ‘martyred’ in the past two years. Key works like the poems of Areef al-Arir, whose was killed during the war and whose long poem If I must die (2024) has become emblematic of the war, as well as powerful and widely read essays by writers like Mohammed al-Kurd, Hala Alyan, Nour Hindi and others writing in the West, circle around witnessing from afar, from the position of exile. And having to live with the strange double consciousness of the genocide-denying society on one hand, and on the other hand the daily experience of witnessing the horror on al-Jazeera, on Instagram, in that steady flow of dead, mass mediated children, broken buildings and broken bodies competing with empty words, vague calls for restraint, and flat-out denials in Western media. And, as the Palestinian-American academic Helga Tawil-Souri records in a strong essay called I don’t heart Palestine, the constant need to “like” and follow the horrors, to be attached to the grief without being able to do much in reality. This has been the structure of feeling for so many Arabs and the epochal, bookending experience that they will draw from as they make sense of it in the years to come.
References
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Frangie, Samer. 2025. ” الكتابة التي لم تنجُ من الإبادة”, Megaphone, 7 September 2025.
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