To Hussein Aboubakr, the signing of the Abraham Accords by Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel on Tuesday represents a massive change in the Middle East, and the Islamic world as a whole. For nearly a century, successive political and religious movements have held up the Palestinian—or, better, the anti-Israel—cause as a lodestar, imbuing it with near-eschatological significance. The willingness of these two Arab monarchies to engage openly with the Jewish state suggests signals that this cause is rapidly losing its power:

When I was a fourteen-year-old jihadist wannabe in Cairo in 2013, I didn’t care about Egyptian politics, Arabs, Hosni Mubarak, regional powers, Arab monarchy, Arab republicanism, capitalism, or any of the issues that animate worldly observers of Middle East politics. I cared about one thing and one thing alone: Palestine. All I needed to hear was the word “Palestine” in order to pledge my immediate unconditional loyalty to whoever was speaking. Few words—none, really—were fused with the fascinations, aspirations, emotions, longings, and mystical forces that the term “Palestine” summoned in me. Palestine was never merely a disputed geographical territory; it was a claim to the absolute fulfillment of the Islamic political vision, an eternal moral truth, secularized in Arab nationalism and sanctified in Islamism.

Palestine meant el-helm el-Arabi (the Arab dream), the tajj ‘alras (the crown on top [of Arab-ness]), and the beating heart of Islam. To evoke Palestine was to evoke Islamic brotherhood and Arab honor, for it was a reservoir of identity and a proof of faith. Palestine was the fulfillment of a state of spiritual purity of the Muslim individual and the whole body of Islam. The Arab will to Palestine was a Nietzschean will to power. It was the epistemological glue of the disparate components making up Arab political consciousness.

And I wasn’t alone. To the political and religious Arab minds of the 20th century, the idea of Palestine was everything. . .  . Much has changed in the past decade, however, and we are now entering the age of a post-Palestine Middle East.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”