Faced with the conflagration in the Middle East, a deeper crisis is emerging: that of international law which is faltering, cracking the universalist promises of the multilateral system. How, through violence, power relations are reconfigured on a global scale ?
Since October 7, 2023 and the attacks perpetrated by Hamas against Israel, two years after the start of a genocidal war ravaging the Gaza Strip, a historic rupture has occurred, according to Ziad Majed. Israel’s impunity in the face of crimes committed in Gaza has revealed the regime of legal exceptionalism that this State has enjoyed since its creation and the variable geometry of the humanist values that our Western democracies have long established as universal principles. The erosion of universalism and the flouting of the legal principles which govern the functioning of the international system, as we have known it since the Second World War, constitute the central postulate of this popular work. The Middle East appears here both as a space for revealing and accelerating this disintegration of the world order.
Ziad Majed lends himself to historical work which he places in the field of international relations. It places the events of October 2023 in a longer temporality, dating back to the end of the Ottoman Empire, the beginning of the XXᵉ century, and thus recalling the historical injustices, deprivations and colonial logics which have led to current violence. For this, it has the merit of making intelligible for the general public the history of a region too often understood through the prism of essentialist and binary analyzes (Shiites versus Sunnis ; Islamists versus secularists, etc.) giving little or no space to the representations of the populations who inhabit it.
The work is structured around eight moments during which the balance of power and collective representations are recomposed in the Middle East, a region which is not limited here to the east of the Mediterranean, but extends to the countries of the Maghreb and the Gulf, as well as to Iran and Afghanistan. If the proposed chronology does not depart from other works offering a connected reading of violence in the Middle East, it is nevertheless simplified and made accessible to a non-specialist audience. The author also relies on his position as an intellectual both from the region, but also involved in French public debates. It thus offers a non-Eurocentric account of Near Eastern history, sensitive to systems of representation and the agency of societies. This approach is all the more welcome as it takes place in a context of serious attack on freedom of expression, even though any attempt to historicize the events of October 7, 2023 is punishable by censorship or suspected of complacency with regard to the crimes committed by Hamas.
The establishment of a colonial order
The work opens with the end of the Ottoman Empire when the sharing of the region between the French and British mandatory powers compromised the aspirations for self-determination of the Middle Eastern populations. The second moment begins during the Nakba – there “ disaster » — from 1948, with the founding of the State of Israel, the dispossession and the exodus of nearly a million Palestinians to neighboring countries (Jordan, Lebanon and Syria). A period of instability begins which culminates with the war of 1967, thanks to which Israel asserts its military supremacy and occupies the rest of the Palestinian territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) as well as the Syrian Golan and the Egyptian Sinai.
The October 1973 war marks the beginning of a third moment and constitutes a symbolic victory for the Arabs, but which nevertheless ended with the signing of the peace agreements between Egypt and Israel (1978). In 1979, change was driven by the eastern extremities of the Middle East: Iran, where the fall of the Shah and the start of the Islamic revolution marked the country’s independence from American influence. ; and Afghanistan, where Soviet intervention gave rise to the organization of resistance led in the name of jihad and fuels a transnational Islamist dynamic.
A fifth phase was then inaugurated by the Gulf War, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990-1991). The United States is determined to impose a new regional policy. Peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in Madrid ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords (1993) which set the rules for the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, the illegal colonization of the West Bank continues and the peace agreements are rapidly becoming devoid of substance. The Second Intifada (2000) ushered in the resumption of armed violence.
The War on Terror
The attacks of September 11, 2001 against the twin towers in New York marked a new rupture on a global scale. The American response consists of a “ war on terrorism »: new military doctrine which is based on a global conflict strategy, without temporal limits and without the need for a multilateral mandate. In 2007 Hamas won the legislative elections and took control of the Gaza Strip, facing a lack of recognition of the electoral results. It was from this period that Israel imposed a strict blockade, locking up nearly two million Palestinians in what became an open-air prison.
The Arab uprisings of 2011 in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Yemen highlight, in different modalities and temporalities, three decades of social and political tensions linked to authoritarian and corrupt systems of power, and the consequent exacerbation of inequalities. Ziad Majed describes the trajectory of these revolutions, as well as the counter-revolutions and institutional failures that followed them. This period nevertheless ends with the signing of the Abraham Accords (2020) between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, which mark a regional normalization which further marginalizes the Palestinians from any political solution.
Gaza: tomb of universalism and international law
The last four chapters of the work are devoted to the period before and after October 7, 2023. The author first contextualizes the events by emphasizing that the first months of the year 2023 are marked by an intensification of colonization and Israeli military operations in the West Bank, while 60 % of the population in Gaza survives exclusively thanks to humanitarian aid. “ This spiral of violence, occupation, annexation and blockade took place in a climate of almost total diplomatic indifference », recalls the author (p. 230). It is in this context that Hamas attacks take place. These caused the death of 350 soldiers, more than 800 civilians, as well as the taking of 251 prisoners and hostages. Ziad Majed clearly qualifies these acts as war crimes.
The Israeli response initially took the form of intensive bombardments on the Gaza Strip. As the days go by, the logic “ absolute crush » and “ collective punishment » of the Palestinians in Gaza, became evident. It was justified by uninhibited political language making the Palestinians “ human animals “, as described by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. More than 70,000 Palestinians have died and 90% of people have been displaced according to the United Nations. Crimes of a multidimensional nature have been committed including urbicide, through the destruction of habitats and urban infrastructure, ecodice with the erosion of the environment and natural resources, educide with the deliberate bombing of schools and universities, achieving what Stéphanie Latte-Abdallah describes as “ futuricide », understood as all the processes which hinder the very possibility of a future for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip (Latte-Abdallah 2025). In addition to hardware erasure, there is “ dehumanization » of which the Palestinians are the subject in the Western media narrative and “ the lexical cleaning company » (p. 245) through which the legal categories capable of qualifying the crimes committed by Israel are silenced.
Faced with the total emancipation of the State of Israel from international law, Ziad Majed reviews the initiatives which nevertheless tried to re-establish it as a binding framework. The International Court of Justice was seized by South Africa accusing Israel of not respecting the Convention for the Prevention of Genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued international arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister. The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion denouncing the illegal nature of the occupation regime in the Palestinian Territories. The university mobilizations and the forms of international solidarity which were expressed during this period are also a source of hope for the author, and they could fuel a normative refoundation of universal principles. These should put an end to the legal exceptionalism enjoyed by Israel and the prioritization of human lives which excludes part of the world from the protection mechanisms established by international law.
The prism of social sciences
Ziad Majed’s work, with all the historical landmarks and bibliographical references it provides, constitutes a good tool for initiating the history of the Middle East, particularly for a public which, with the Gaza war, has become aware of the injustices experienced by the Palestinians and the people of the region. Reading the work from the perspective of social sciences, we can nevertheless criticize the author for not really pushing the limits of his discipline – international relations – and for not telling us more about the alternative forms of organization and structuring of the international system which could emerge post-Gaza. New spaces for struggle to obtain justice “ from below » emerge for example on a national scale. In France, procedures have been initiated on the basis of universal and personal jurisdiction, targeting Israeli officials as well as French companies involved in supporting Israeli colonization. Furthermore, if the history of the Palestinian question cannot be thought of in a distinct manner from the regional one, this broad scale of analysis nevertheless prevents the author from exploring in depth the way in which international law is exploited and misused by the State of Israel to carry out its colonial and genocidal enterprise.
The work could also have used more primary sources in Arabic, which are not easily accessible to the French public, which would have made it possible to truly highlight non-hegemonic perspectives. But this exercise undoubtedly goes beyond the author’s intentions in the context of a book which remains a work of dissemination. We can also regret the use of certain concepts from humanitarian and development language, such as that of “ resilience » to describe the forms of solidarity and action undertaken by populations in the face of the multiple crises they are experiencing. This term is strongly rejected by these same populations, for whom it implies a discharge of state responsibilities in favor of “ get by “. It would also have been interesting to devote more pages to the last moment inaugurated by the post-Gaza era, mentioned as central in the back cover, to propose a thematic development which would have consolidated the idea of a continuity of injustices experienced on a regional scale and of the vacillation of the international order which is at stake there. Despite these few critical notes, the work remains a valuable resource for finding one’s bearings in the dark and dizzying current events in the Middle East.