Nasrallah; martyr of normalization of relations
By Mohammad Reza Ghaemi Nik
Scholar
1. It appears that the order to attack the Dahieh district of Beirut on September 27, 2024, was given by Netanyahu himself during his speech at the United Nations. In that speech, Netanyahu explicitly stated that the process of normalizing relations with regional countries, especially Saudi Arabia, had reached positive milestones until the October 7 Hamas attack pushed this normalization to the sidelines. In this context, Ismail Haniyeh, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, and other martyrs accompanying them were martyred in a conflict whose immediate outcome was the rejection of normalization between the Zionist regime and regional countries.
2. The idea of normalizing relations between the Zionist regime and Islamic or Arab countries, particularly in West Asia (the Middle East), has been one of the most important strategies of the regime in recent years. To understand the significance of this idea, one must consider the confrontations of said countries during the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973 with the Zionist regime. These initial intense confrontations, through a process of attrition and compromise, eventually led to the 2008 war between Hezbollah and the Zionist regime. This process ultimately resulted in the adoption of normalization policies by some Islamic and Arab countries with the Zionist regime, as seen in the Camp David Accords of 1978 with Egypt, the 1983 agreement with Lebanon, the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, the Abraham Accords of 2020 with the UAE and Bahrain, and even the laying of the groundwork for a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia before Operation Al-Aqsa Storm on October 7, 2023. Thus, over approximately half a century, we have witnessed a shift from military confrontation to the normalization of relations and friendly cooperation between the Zionist regime and some Arab and Islamic countries.
But on what basis does the project of normalization rest? More precisely, what process has occurred in the last two to three decades in the aforementioned Islamic countries of the region that has led them, both politically and socially, to move from military confrontation to the normalization of relations? If we consider the motivation behind the conflicts and wars prior to normalization by Islamic countries to be the incompatibility of the idea of political Zionism with Islam or even Arab nationalism, what fundamental process had taken place that had resolved this incompatibility for a while? What cognitive or fundamental idea had changed so that the hostile incompatibility between Jewish Zionism and Islam turned into the normalization of relations?
3. It seems that this shift and change in direction cannot be explained solely in terms of political relations as the fundamental transformation — from military and wartime confrontation to the normalization of relations based on friendly cooperation — requires a comprehensive explanation and public persuasion of Arab and Islamic societies, and thus, an explanation based on a grand social and political narrative. To understand this fundamental transformation, we must pay special attention to the foundations of the formation of Jewish Zionism in Israel.
According to the logic of divine religions, the most significant challenge faced by the prophets in fulfilling their assigned mission was in calling their people to the path of God. In other words, all the hardships and difficulties endured by the prophets arose when the issue of “calling” the general public to God and divine religions was at stake. As long as a prophet was personally inclined toward a religion, there was no significant problem, but all the troubles — from persecution to execution — occurred when the prophets called the general public to their religion. In this sense, it can be argued that these problems arose when the religion of each prophet became a political religion. However, political religions, each in their own time, made such calls in the language and wording of their era.
According to a hadith from Imam Hadi (AS), the miracles of Jesus, Moses, and the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon them) were all appropriate to the conditions of their time. However, considering the evolutionary process of religions, a new religion abrogates the previous one and is sent to perfect it. Therefore, given the role of Sharia in establishing social and political order in each religion, the issue revolves around the logic governing large-scale political and social relations that determine the overall happiness of humanity in each historical religious period. This is why the lives of followers of Judaism or Christianity among Muslims are respected, as long as they do not engage in proselytizing, forming governments, or opposing Islamic Sharia within Islamic society; although they are invited to Islam. In other words, what happens in the rule of abrogation of religions is the abrogation of the laws of the previous religion due to the exhaustion of its historical capacity to create a comprehensive historical order for guiding humanity. Considering this evolutionary logic, the continuation of a religion in a period when its capacity has been exhausted and a new religion has been revealed, especially in terms of proselytizing and politics, is reprehensible because its proselytizing capacity has ended, and relying on proselytizing based on the logic of that religion means violating the rule of human evolution and disrupting the historical order that God has intended for humanity.
4. The capacity of Judaism and Christianity to call humanity to the truth, in terms of official history, began in the early 7th century AD, coinciding with the advent of Islam. However, according to the analysis of the famous German philosopher Leo Strauss regarding Spinoza’s views, the solution of European thinkers to prevent the Islamization of Europeans was to find a way to revive the political and social capacity of Judaism and Christianity in the world known as the modern world. As we know, the modern world is secular, and the secular world has taken a neutral position toward divine religions. In this context, as Spinoza stated, if the Jews have not already weakened their religious foundations, he deeply believes that, given the fact that human affairs are changeable, they will once again regain their sovereignty in a favorable situation. Strauss considers this Spinozian point as a complete “substitution of a purely political solution for the miracle of redemption toward which men can contribute”. Strauss sees this moment as the birth of the idea of Jewish Zionism, in which a new possibility (unlike possibilities based on divine religions) is defined for reviving a this-worldly narrative of political Judaism. At this moment, a paradoxical event occurs. Judaism, relying on secular politics or the secular world, can revive its proselytizing capacity, and the idea of Jewish Zionism is formed.
The inherent contradiction of the idea of political Zionism immediately becomes the “Jewish Question” for 19th-century thinkers. Bruno Bauer, in his 1843 book The Jewish Question, reveals this contradiction in the relationship between Judaism and their refusal to submit to the modern secular state. Jews, due to their religious belief in the uniqueness of the Jewish race and its chosenness, cannot accept a secular state based on democracy. The Jewish Question was also “incompatible” with the idea of secular democracy. The Spinozian idea sought to unify Jews and Christians under liberal democracy, but Jews, not due to a conflict with the secular nature of the modern world but because of their belief in the chosenness of the Jewish people, could not submit to the idea of democracy, because, assuming unification, enduring suffering for Judaism would become meaningless, while the chosenness of the people of Israel [in the eyes of Jews] is certain and absolute. A unified, homeless Jew had nothing but himself to confront hostility and humiliation. The complete realization of social equality required the complete erasure of Jews in terms of their Jewishness. Unification [resulting from secularism] was the most disgraceful fate for a people who had gone from the house of bondage to the desert of Sinai and were simultaneously prevented from entering the land of the Palestinians.
According to Strauss’s analysis, this Jewish stance was the most important factor in the complex situation of Jews in the first half of the 20th century, especially from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany, which hindered the formation of a secular German state.
5. Europeans, to resolve this ontological contradiction of the Jewish people, sought to transfer this contradiction to Islamic societies. This transfer initially began through one of the most secular aspects of human life, namely land purchases, but quickly expanded. Since contradictory behavior in human life sooner or later leads to ontological violence, Jewish Zionism, in the Islamic world, which was fundamentally alien to secularism, quickly turned into a machine of violence.
In this regard, the most significant factor behind the violence of the past century by Israel should not be attributed to Judaism but to the inherent contradiction of the idea of Jewish Zionism, which has attempted, in an inherently contradictory combination, to revive the non-existent historical capacity of Judaism to call all humanity to the truth in the secular space of the modern world. However, after the relative establishment of this regime, which has always been accompanied by numerous acts of violence, the spread of secularism to Islamic countries could have reduced the level of violence. Therefore, in the past decade, the Zionist regime has tried to extend secularism and all its implications in the region, effectively carrying out its historical proselytizing through the call to secularism. It is no coincidence that most countries in the region that have accepted normalization have embraced secularism more than other Islamic countries. In these countries, a significant boundary has been drawn between Islam and culture, politics, economy, science, and the like, and thus, by adopting a secular narrative of Islam, all conflicts are considered resolved there.
However, the most significant risk that the countries of the resistance axis cannot accept, and therefore will be in endless conflict with Israel and Jewish Zionism, is the conflict over the survival of Islam as a religion with a global proselytizing capacity, which abrogates this capacity in past religions. Apart from this view of Islam, which can be pursued in the idea of “political Islam,” conflict with Israel is not very reasonable. But it is through commitment to this political narrative of Islam that Islam can be the religion that calls all humanity to the truth and, of course, enters into serious conflict with Jewish Zionism.
Thus, it is only here that the boundary between truth and falsehood becomes clear, and truth and falsehood or good and evil are not forgotten under the process of secularism. If we consider the fundamental logic of divine religions to be adherence to inherent truth and inherent falsehood, from this perspective, this conflict is essentially a conflict over the death of truth or its revival and survival. Here, secular processes, which initially advocated the elimination of violence in religious conflicts, succumb to any form of ontological violence, and the clear result of ontological violence is only one action: assassination; the assassination of Seyyed Abbas Musawi, the assassination of Haj Qassem Soleimani, the assassination of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. All of them were heralds of calling humanity to peace and Islam and submission to divine truth, and they were victims of the secular logic of Jewish Zionism in Israel.
The article first appeared in Persian in Vatan-e Emrooz.