Between the Light of Abraham and the Darkness of Khomeini

His Majesty’s Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.

This is how Ernest Bevin, then Foreign Secretary, presented the deadlock in Palestine to the British Parliament on February 18, 1947: “an irreconcilable conflict of principles.” On one side, the Jews, determined to establish a Jewish state in part of Palestine; on the other, the Arabs, unwavering in their rejection of any form of Jewish sovereignty over any part of that territory. For Bevin (who, it should be recalled, was openly anti-Zionist and even considered the Balfour Declaration a disastrous document of foreign policy), this deadlock went beyond the strictly geographical or diplomatic realm: it was, in truth, ontological in nature.

The “irreconcilable conflict of principles” did not represent a mere dispute over borders, administrative statuses, or models of territorial coexistence. What was at stake was not a negotiation, no matter how delicate, between two competing national projects, both endowed with inherently legitimate claims to sovereignty, though circumstantially in conflict. The clash was not between two peoples vying for the same space, aspiring to the same ground, but between two mutually exclusive founding principles.

On one side, the gesture of foundation and self-determination—the will to establish a Jewish national home; on the other, the relentless and uncompromising refusal to allow that gesture to take place. The conflict did not oppose symmetrical aspirations (as the later conventional formula of the ‘two-state solution’ might suggest), but rather an impulse of affirmation and a determination of negation. As in the biblical trial of the two mothers claiming the same child before Solomon, the true issue did not lie in dividing the infant, but in the willingness to let it live.

Since the British Mandate conferred no authority to impose a solution and negotiations had failed, His Majesty’s Government decided to refer the matter to the United Nations, acknowledging that the commitments undertaken under the Mandate were, ultimately, irreconcilable. From that moment on, everything that followed—up to the present day—has been nothing but the prolonged manifestation of that original conflict between affirmation and negation, between the determination to exist and the determination to prevent that existence.

In 1947, it is worth recalling, the State of Israel did not yet exist: there were no “settlements,” no “occupation,” no “blockades,” no “refugees,” and no regime that could be described as “apartheid.” None of the conditions now cited as causes of the conflict existed at that time, when the conflict was already fully underway—and already, according to Bevin, of an irreconcilable nature. The current logical absurdity is glaring: it seeks to explain the origin of the refusal by the consequences of what was refused; it attempts to explain the genesis of a rejection by invoking phenomena that had not yet occurred—as if the effect could, by some magical sleight of hand, precede the cause, and history, in a fit of whimsy, contradict its own chronology.

What Arab leaders rejected from the outset was not a policy or a border: it was the very idea of Jewish sovereignty in the region, in any form whatsoever. Paradoxically, the neighboring states (such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, or Jordan) were all created through the same mandatory mechanisms imposed by colonial powers, sharing the same artificial and exogenous origins—“colonialist” and “imperialist,” in the current political lexicon—so often attributed to Israel. Their sovereignty and legitimacy, though the product of colonial arrangements or imperial tutelage, were never called into question, let alone subjected to existential rejection.

Jordan, in fact, is a particularly telling case. According to historical anecdote, it was “with a single stroke of a pen, on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo in 1921” that Winston Churchill created the British Mandate of Transjordan (now known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). Years later, Churchill would declare in Parliament: “Emir Abdullah is in Transjordan, where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.” Indeed, one need only glance at the zigzagging eastern border of Jordan with Saudi Arabia to understand why it is mockingly referred to as “Winston’s hiccup” or “Churchill’s sneeze.” Imperial hiccup or colonialist sneeze, no one, however, contests Jordanian sovereignty. Jewish sovereignty – only Jewish sovereignty – is contested.

The Arab refusal, which did not stem from a struggle against colonialism as such, carries a deeper genealogy, rooted in the symbolic history of denial itself. When, in the second century, Emperor Hadrian crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt, he did not settle for military victory. He renamed Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, banned Jews from entering the city, and buried the name of Judea under a punitive and humiliating designation: Syria Palaestina. His aim was to sever the bond between a people and their land. Inscribed on the imperial map, a damnatio memoriae that endures to this day. The word ‘Palestine’—today, just as then—stands for, not the affirmation, but the negation of a sovereignty: that of the Jews.

It is this symbolic operation that still reverberates in the catacombs of the political discourse that, in our time, denies the legitimacy of Israel, the Sovereign Collective Jew. From ancient Rome to modern Rome, from Sinwar’s tunnels to Khomeini’s missiles, from the fanatical cries of “Death to Israel!” to the choreographed chants demanding a Palestine “from the river to the sea” (a sweetened version for Western palates of the Arabic formula Min il-ṃayye la-l-ṃayye, Falasṭīn ʿarabiyye – “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab”), the conflict reveals its true nature not as territorial, but existential.

When, nearly nineteen centuries later, one hears the slogan “From the river to the sea” echoing through the avenues of major cities and the halls of prestigious universities, it becomes impossible not to recognize in it the distant yet unbroken echo of Hadrian’s posthumous, but still living, gesture of eradication.

What is being contested, in fact, is not what Israel does, but what Israel is: Jewish. It is not the occupation that disturbs, it is the existence: Jewish. What truly unsettles is not that the Jew might be an aggressor, but that the Jew is master of his own destiny. For many, then and now, the Jew remains tolerable only as a submissive figure, an assimilated one, or, not so long ago, one destined for extermination. It is also for this reason that anti-Zionism has become the new lipstick on the old antisemitism: a kind of respectable antisemitism, antisemitism with painted lips.

And it is also for this reason that the world—which has never truly been a refuge for the Jews—rushes, from UN resolutions to “humanitarian” demonstrations, from Western chancelleries to TikTok videos, to condemn the Jewish state: not for killing, but for surviving. The most shocking thing, in the end, is not that Israel pulls the trigger, but that it defends itself. That it dares to pull the trigger in defense of its condition—precisely, the supreme, archetypal, unforgivable crime—of being Jewish. After all, the dead Jew has always been a singular and traditional inspiration, for poets and executioners alike. That the Jews have ceased to inspire Schindler’s lists and boys in striped pajamas, only to once again inspire caricatures and demonological libels dragged up from the murky sewers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, may be the clearest sign of this shift: the sovereign Jew is even more intolerable than the exterminated one.

Iran’s long war against Israel must be understood as an integral part of this same dark genealogy of negation. The regime of the ayatollahs—Hadrians in turbans, wrapped in a totalitarian eschatology—has made the denial of Israel its founding dogma. Its hostility is not a reaction to specific policies, but to the very presence of Jews as a sovereign entity in a region where—both historically and theologically— they were meant to remain submissive. Khomeini’s proxies–Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—are not, as Western media romantically portrays them, resistance movements, but armed extensions of this theology of annihilation. The hatred that animates them predates any map and is independent of any territorial concession.

Israel, which has always made peace when it had a willing partner (Egypt and Jordan, to begin with; more recently, in the context of the Abraham Accords, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco), represents less than 0.002% of the territory of the Islamic world. No, it was never about territory. The Houthis’ flag leaves little room for doubt (except, of course, for Western useful idiots, especially those with advanced degrees): inscribed on it, without any euphemism, is the message of negation itself: “Death to Israel,” and, not coincidentally, “Curse upon the Jews.”

The current duel between Israel and Iran is not, and never has been, about land, nor, ultimately, even about a nuclear program (which is, in fact, the technological extension of that original conflict): it is about the soul of civilizations. Across the deserts of the Dasht-e Kavir and the Negev, and in the crossed skies above Tehran and Jerusalem, a duel is underway—perhaps the final duel—between the light of Abraham and the darkness of Khomeini.

The invocation of Abraham, enshrined in the 2020 accords, reminds us that hatred is not destiny. Whenever an Islamic nation manages to break the cycle of decay, corruption, and victimhood, it discovers that it does not need the Collective Jew as scapegoat for its failures and tragedies. In contrast to the Khomeinist eschatological delirium, which offers its population only martyrdom, prison, or the grave—and, to the region, only war and ruin–, some Islamic countries have found, in the recognition of Israel and the reconnection with the Jewish people, not a denial of themselves nor a renunciation of their faith, but a golden key to security, prosperity, and rebirth.

For the first time in a long time, Arab leaders have dared to break the vicious cycle of rejection, recognizing Israel not as an intruder, but as a legitimate neighbor. And more than that: as a brother. The name of these accords contains a profound and intentional hermeneutic key: Abraham, the common father of Jews and Arabs, a symbol of a shared origin, one that predates division and resentment. What the Abraham Accords affirm is more than political reconciliation: it is a reunion between heirs, a concrete acknowledgment of each other’s sovereign dignity. Lasting peace will only be possible when that original rejection is finally rejected. When, having rejected the rejection, Arabs come to see in the Jew not the enemy long sought, but the brother long lost.

As the Israeli intellectual Einat Wilf beautifully puts it, the conflict will begin to end the day Arabs look Jews in the eye—as equals, as brothers—and finally say: “Welcome back home.”