“The latest war in Gaza is unlike previous struggles between Israel and Palestinians,” writes Hicham Alaoui. So Israel too has been waging a struggle? What kind of a struggle is it? “The ongoing conflict [?] embodies a dramatic reconfiguration of regional order in the Middle East that no longer abides by old sectarian schisms.” And further down: “No longer does the Sunni-Shi‘a split shape its outlook, as in the past two decades.” ‘No longer’? The is a swallowing of the myth of a ‘sectarian’ conflict propagated after the invasion of Iraq the after 2011 uprisings. One can only wonder how come that in very few years sectarianism that had shaped the region’s outlook was ‘no longer’. (see Ussama Makdisi’s paper The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East , 2017) “So long as Hamas holds power over its fiefdom, its quest to hijack the Palestinian cause will remain intact…” Needs elaboration. Are we saying those who voted for Hamas were victims of a hijacking or they had just let themselves
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51