Introduction
No event since the Second World War has commanded as much global attention as the recent assault on Gaza, a fact made evident by the relentless coverage across both traditional media and social platforms. An attentive observer cannot but pause to ask: why has this particular conflict drawn such extraordinary focus, when the Russian–Ukrainian war arguably poses a greater threat to international peace and security, given its potential to escalate into a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO?
The answer may be expressed in a single word: Zionism.
The war in Ukraine is, in essence, a conflict within the broader European—indeed Zionist—world, much like the Second World War before it. It unfolds according to familiar rules and is likely to conclude, as earlier European conflicts have, with redrawn national boundaries and a renewed equilibrium that preserves Europe’s Zionist identity.
What has occurred in Gaza, however, is of an entirely different order. For the first time, an organized armed group from what is often termed the Global South—the “Third World,” the “developing world,” or by any of its many designations—has struck at Zionism within what is perceived as its own domain. Such a reversal has no precedent. For five centuries, Europe has projected beyond its borders; never has it been subjected to attack from beyond them.
Thus, Zionism has risen in full force—not merely because Israeli lives were lost, but because the event itself is without historical parallel. For half a millennium, the arc of history has been defined by European expansion: movement, conquest, occupation, dispossession, and destruction, justified under a succession of pretexts. The reverse—a force from the Global South striking European land, and that Palestine, as a usurped land, is regarded as European territory—is exceedingly rare, having occurred only twice: on 6 October 1973 and on 7 October 2023, separated by fifty years and a day.
The events of October 2023 have left an imprint on European historical consciousness, compelling it to pause and reconsider what it had long assumed to be its unquestioned right to shape the world as it pleases.
I will not dwell here on the war of 1973, despite its importance, as doing so would divert from the present argument, nor will I focus on the details of the 2023 war. Rather, the subject at hand is Zionism itself.
To understand what the Arab world has faced in the form of European aggression over the past two centuries, one must begin with Europe: what it is, how it emerged, and how its internal conflicts evolved. Only then can one grasp why it regards us with hostility and persists in aggression despite all that Arabs have done—and continue to do—to appease it.
Europe, like other regions of the world, is composed of a heterogeneous assemblage of tribes. Its early history, as elsewhere, recedes into obscurity prior to the advent of written record. Europeans themselves broadly acknowledge that the continent is principally constituted of two major tribal groupings: the Germanic peoples of the West and the Slavic peoples of the East, alongside a multitude of smaller groups whose origins remain difficult to trace.
Emerging from the last Ice Age, Europe possessed no continuous civilizational inheritance upon which to build. The tribes that settled it lived primitively in forests and caves, dependent on hunting and lacking the capacity for stable settlement or structured society. By contrast, the regions to its south—the Mediterranean basin, the Levant, and Mesopotamia—had not suffered such civilizational rupture. Their inhabitants, benefiting from historical continuity, had already settled, cultivated land, established cities, developed tools, and engaged in trade.
The civilization of the Mediterranean naturally expanded wherever conditions permitted, reaching the fringes of what is now called Europe—though such distinctions did not exist at the time. The regions then known as “Asia Minor” encompassed lands including modern-day Greece. On the island of Crete, around 1500 BCE, early forms of thought emerged that would later evolve into Greek philosophy. This intellectual tradition did not arise in isolation; it was an extension of the broader Mediterranean intellectual milieu spanning Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia.
One might argue that intellectual exchange is the common heritage of humanity—and indeed it is. Yet this is not how the European narrative treats Greek thought. Europe insists on presenting Greek philosophy—upon which it later built its political and philosophical systems—as an exclusively European creation, detached from and even opposed to the East. This insistence constitutes one of the roots of Europe’s antagonism toward us, as will be discussed further.
As Europeans began to settle—partly through the migration of peoples from the southern Mediterranean who brought with them agriculture and social organization—they sought systems of belief. The human need for faith is profound; in the absence of a deity, one is often fashioned. Despite the rise of Rome as a dominant empire, this search persisted.
The Greeks, situated at the point of contact between the Mediterranean world and the rest of Europe, were among the earliest to embrace Christianity. From them, the faith spread to Rome and the wider continent, and thus Europe became Christian.
Yet the story does not end there. Europe did not merely adopt Christianity from the peoples of the Mediterranean; it appropriated and reshaped it, claiming superior authority over its origins. It constructed its own theological frameworks and declared dissent heretical. This authority was justified by the assertion that the Apostle Peter (Simon Peter) had come to Rome and established its church—despite the absence of firm historical evidence for such a claim. As so often, history is not simply what occurred, but what people come to believe occurred.
Although this appropriation was contested by Christians of the Mediterranean, the dominance of Rome and the reach of what it termed the “Holy Roman Empire” ensured that Europe became not only the seat of Christianity but its reference and arbiter. Here lies a first key to understanding Europe’s hostility: it adopted its religion from us, claimed it as its own, and then re-exported it to its origin. Notably, in fifteen centuries of papal history, not a single pope has come from our region. One may well wonder how different the world might be had Christ been born in Rome rather than Bethlehem.
Centuries passed in which Europe entered what is often termed the “Dark Ages,” largely under ecclesiastical dominance. When it emerged from this period, a new intellectual awakening demanded forms of political, social, and philosophical thought beyond inherited religious frameworks. Europeans turned to Greek philosophy—engaging deeply with the works of Aristotle, Plato, and their successors.
There is no fault in this engagement. The issue lies in the insistence that Greek thought was purely European in origin, uninfluenced by the broader Mediterranean tradition, and fundamentally distinct from it. Equally overlooked—whether by design or neglect—is the decisive role played by Arab and Muslim scholars in preserving Greek philosophy through translation into Arabic and critical commentary. It was through these efforts that Europe, during the Renaissance, regained access to Greek thought.
Thus emerges a second foundational explanation of Europe’s antagonism toward us: it has drawn the principles of its intellectual tradition from us, yet claims to have created them independently.
At this juncture, we may pause to reflect on these two truths, from which two principal reasons for Europe’s hostility arise.
Europe, once overrun by the Germanic Vandals—whose name gave rise to the term “vandalism” to denote wanton destruction—has since advanced technologically and scientifically, developing industry and producing the airplane, the computer, and the mobile phone. It has extended its reach across continents, extracting wealth and resources.
Yet in reflecting upon itself, Europe cannot escape the awareness that it has derived its religion and much of its intellectual and philosophical tradition from the very peoples it now deems backward. This tension—between material superiority and perceived intellectual and spiritual dependence—has generated a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. To conceal this, Europe has cultivated narratives of military and scientific supremacy, expressed historically through conquest and domination.
Unable to reconcile this contradiction, Europe has sought to mask it. Among its methods were missionary campaigns aimed at persuading Christians of the Mediterranean to adopt a form of Christianity reshaped by Europe—ironically overlooking that communities in Syria still speak Aramaic, the language of Christ.
As Europe expanded outward in search of resources, it justified its actions in the language of religion, civilization, justice, and, later, “democracy,” while ignoring the fundamental contradiction between such ideals and the realities of conquest and dispossession. Spain celebrated the Christianization of South America, yet neglected to mention the gold it extracted. Europe praised the establishment of democratic states in North America, yet omitted to mention the genocide of indigenous populations who had not threatened Europe.
The Arabic translation of the Latin term colonialism as isti‘mār (“development” or “cultivation”) is, in this context, profoundly misleading. What occurred was not construction but appropriation—indeed, violent seizure. European powers did not develop the lands they occupied except where they displaced or eradicated their inhabitants, as in the Americas and Australia. Britain transformed Egypt into a supplier of raw cotton for its mills; France turned Algeria into vineyards serving its own markets. The USA turned Dubai into the largest brothel in the world!
European intellectual history in recent centuries has also produced ideologies—communism, fascism, Nazism—that share a common structure: claims of superiority, rooted in materialist conceptions, emerging from and dominated by Europe. Even movements that professed internationalism remained, in practice, European in origin, control, and aspiration.
Among the earliest manifestations of asserted European supremacy were the Crusades, in which Europe collectively sought to rule the eastern Mediterranean under the banner of defending Christianity. A foothold was established there— just as occurred again in the twentieth century with the establishment of a base in usurped Palestine. Though the Crusader presence eventually receded, its underlying ambitions did not disappear; they merely weakened due to internal European transformations and the power of the Ottoman state, which once reached the gates of Vienna.
To be continued