"No one will notice you, no one will ask about you. You are left alone to face your inevitable destiny." These words were printed on a leaflet that the Israeli occupation forces dropped on Gaza on March 20, 2025, at the height of their genocidal war against the Palestinian people. A few lines further down, we read again: "Neither the United States nor Europe cares about Gaza. Not even your Arab states care about it. They are our allies now, they provide us with money, weapons and oil. They only send you shrouds." This message not only extols the total impunity of Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people, but reveals the political infrastructure that underpins it: so-called "normalization" – the establishment, orchestrated by the United States, of formal ties between Arab states and Israel.
In a recent article entitled "The banality of normalization. The desecuritization of Israel's aggrandizement in the Middle East" or "The banality of normalization. The Desecuritization of Israeli Expansion in the Middle East," published in The International Spectator, questioned the normality with which "normalization" is commonly discussed and even celebrated. For example, the European Commission has allocated €18 million to support the so-called "Abraham Accords," the U.S.-led scheme to induce Arab states to recognize Israel. This happened just as Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people, as well as occupying and bombing several Arab countries, including Syria and later Qatar – without posing any threat to Israel. It is difficult to overestimate the extent of European dissonance. Top EU officials consider it abhorrent to hold peace talks between Russia and Ukraine while Russia continues to commit war crimes against Ukraine's civilian population. Why then do they find it normal, and even desirable, for Arab states to forge ties with a genocidal and expansionist state? In other words, how has Israel's territorial expansion in the Middle East become "normal"?
To answer these questions, one must look at the internal logic of the U.S. imperial order. Israel occupies its center, as a garrison state and laboratory of military technology and surveillance – through which the United States pursues its strategy of total incorporation of the Middle East into its sphere of influence. This is nothing new. The history of the region is littered with "peace" agreements that have functioned as instruments of ideological neutralization and economic subjugation: the 1978 Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt; the Oslo Accords in the 1990s; the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. The so-called "Abraham Accords" – a series of bilateral agreements organized by the United States starting in 2020 – build on the legacy of these agreements. The language of transactionalism, finance and innovation – often embellished with empty signifiers such as 'prosperity' and 'peace' – has progressively replaced and replaced the language of politics and international law.
Behind the diplomatic choreography lies the project to transform the Middle East into an imperial zone under exclusive US-Israeli control. The U.S. has given Israel carte blanche to use force in order to turn neighboring states into pacified facilitators of U.S. and Israeli affairs, or into entities with no name and no real sovereignty. This is an explicit plan. When American or Israeli officials, such as Jared Kushner, Tom Barrack, Mike Huckabee or Benjamin Netanyahu speak of a "New Middle East", they are referring to an economic zone driven by cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and oil and gas extraction, where the existence, aspirations, not to say sovereignty, of indigenous peoples are not contemplated. What they call "regional cooperation" is a fantasy of post-political capitalist futurism, built on the rubble of Palestine and the Arab states. This is what is called "normalization" – not a peace project but the routinization of genocide, apartheid, and perpetual war against any form of resistance. The banality of normalization lies in the lightness with which it is presented by the United States and welcomed by complacent Arab leaders seeking short-term profit, as well as other Western governments – particularly European ones – eager to preserve their dependence on the United States. There are no formal declarations of territorial conquest, but rather memoranda of understanding, in which domination, occupation and annexation are repackaged as an administrative matter, even when this involves the forced displacement and extermination of entire peoples.