‘The Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between five Arab countries and Israel, are part of this new imperial moment that, under the guise of economic integration, seeks at all costs to safeguard US hegemonic advantage in the region.’ [GETTY]
When one day the people wills to live
Fate itself must answer that call
The night must surely fade away
The chains must surely break and fall
Abu el-Kacem Chebbi
We, intellectuals, academics, artists, and activists from the Arab world and the diaspora are speaking out.
We speak out today, as the blood of our people flows freely under Israeli and Western bombs, as another war is being waged against them, more silent but just as deadly: the war of normalisation with Israel, the enemy state, that is poisoning our region, decreed by corrupt leaders against the will of their people, against their memory, against their spilled blood.
From the Abraham Accords to the framework agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel in Washington on 26 June 2026: betrayal is now a serial act. We denounce it in the strongest possible terms.
To be crystal clear: the agreement is not a peace treaty between equals, but the formalisation of a relationship of submission that shows utter contempt for the sacrifices made by the Lebanese people in the fight for their land and their dignity.
While officials were exchanging handshakes and hugs before American cameras, the Israeli army was still striking Lebanese territory on the very day of the signing. This alone speaks volumes about the true nature of the signed text: a capitulation cloaked in the language of sovereignty.
Israeli leaders state it bluntly: their project extends beyond Hezbollah and Lebanon’s southern border. What is at stake is an older project and obsession: a Greater Israel, spilling over the 1948 borders into Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. A Greater Israel realising Jabotinsky’s dream of making the Zionist project a regional power that threatens its neighbours, seizes their resources, and redraws their borders at will.
And at every stage, the same word recurs to disguise this expansion: self-defence. As if conquest is synonymous with self-defence.
The succession of wars that have struck the region – Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and so on – is not a series of independent crises. These wars are a part of this long colonial history, from the Berlin Congress (1878) to the Sykes-Picot agreement (1916) and the Balfour Declaration (1917), to the hijacking of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. The same imperialist logic is at work: surrendering our lands and our rights to the voracious appetites of Western powers. Today, the goal is still to fragment in order to dominate. Today, our annihilation is still at stake.
Normalisation is not peace; it is deciding to crush us.
In this project of annihilation, Israel plays a leading strategic role. It lies at the heart of an imperialism forged in the long 19th century that is undergoing a transformation with the complicity of some of our states. The Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between five Arab countries and Israel, are part of this new imperial moment that, under the guise of economic integration, seeks at all costs to safeguard US hegemonic advantage in the region.
This is also the aim of the IMEC project – India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor – announced at the G20 in New Delhi in September 2023: to consolidate the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Gulf states and to offer an alternative to the Chinese Silk Road.
Israel is therefore the indispensable geographical hub of the corridor. Normalisation is not an end in itself, but the infrastructural condition for US hegemony in the region. Genocide or normalisation, two paths toward the same objective: to make the Arab region a free market for goods and identities.
Faced with this reality, only one conclusion is possible: the nation-states of the region share not only a language, a culture, and a history, but above all, a shared destiny structured by the same mechanisms of subjugation and the same aspirations for national liberation.
The Tunisian slogan “Free Tunisia and its capital Jerusalem,” or the Egyptian and Moroccan demonstrators chanting “Palestine is a national cause,” clearly show this. The Palestinian condition is the condition of all the peoples of the region, to varying degrees.
We, the signatories of this text, aware of the existential threat posed by the imperialist project of Greater Israel to the entire Arab region, refuse to allow the exhaustion of our peoples, brought about by two centuries of perpetual war, blockade, and destruction, to be presented as a free choice by treacherous Arab regimes serving their Western masters. We refuse to allow a balance of power based on genocide and the crushing of all resistance to be celebrated as peace.
We, signatories of this text, heirs to a long history of Arab peoples’ resistance against colonialism and Zionism, affirm, in this manifesto:
First, the rejection of sham peace and of any form of normalisation with Israel, the enemy state.
The Oslo Accords taught us this lesson: a peace negotiated under military and economic duress, where one party imposes on the other the timetable, conditions, and guarantees of its own security, is not peace. It is a surrender dressed in diplomatic language; it is, in practice, a guarantee of greater fragmentation and consolidated Israeli colonisation.
We denounce the complicity of a segment of the Arab political, economic, and intellectual elites with the regime of subjugation imposed by Western imperialism, in contempt of the sacrifices of the region’s peoples. We address ourselves in particular to the Arab leaders who, under the guise of realpolitik, have chosen the path of subjugation rather than that of dignity.
We demand the termination of all normalisation agreements. We reiterate that the popular legitimacy of any power in our region is also measured by its ability to avoid betraying, through diplomatic compromise, the principles it proclaims. From the anti-colonial struggles to the Arab revolutions, the same lesson has been inscribed in the region’s DNA: no collaborationist regime can survive by disregarding its people’s aspirations for emancipation.
Second, the denunciation of the “Greater Israel project”.
We take note of the official Israeli statements that openly announce the predatory and expansionist ambition of the Israeli colonial project. When an Israeli minister declares that the Litani River will become the new border with Lebanon, when another advocates settlement plans for South Lebanon, these are not mere slips of the tongue: they are the proclamation of a doctrine.
We condemn these expansionist ambitions in the strongest possible terms and reiterate that no agreement can be viable until this genocidal war machine is explicitly and permanently arrested and abandoned. No agreement can be reached without liberating all occupied land and affirming the right of return for all Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967.
Third, the affirmation of the right of Arab peoples to self-determination as an inalienable principle.
We reiterate the importance of respecting this right, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and in international law, which recognises the legitimacy of armed struggle in the context of colonial domination and foreign occupation. This right is intrinsically linked to the dignity of colonised peoples fighting for their survival.
No geopolitical compromise can undermine it. No balance of power – however unfavourable to us, today as in the past – can diminish it. We reaffirm here this right for the Palestinian people, for the Lebanese people, and for all Arab peoples facing the same choice between genocide and dignity.
We salute the courage of those who have honourably chosen to resist and directly confront the Israeli-Western war-machine. We call for the release of all Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners, together with all persons detained in Arab countries for expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Fourth, the rejection of purely symbolic international solidarity.
Solidarity today has largely retreated, particularly at a government level, to forms that cost nothing and commit to nothing: diplomatic condemnations without follow-up, humanitarian aid that alleviates suffering without ever addressing its structural causes, awareness campaigns that inform without transforming. These gestures are not entirely useless, but they allow states and public opinion to assuage their consciences without ever challenging the imperialist order that produces oppression.
Supporting an occupied people only in ways that bother no one is to support their suffering, not their liberation. This means accepting that the oppressed wait patiently and negotiate endlessly with their oppressors, while the world watches with sympathy, never willing to pay the political price of genuine support for their emancipation by whatever means it deems necessary.
Fifth, the responsibility of the Arab intellectual.
We endorse the demand made by Ghassan Kanafani and Bassel Al-Araj: intellectuals from colonised or dominated societies cannot take refuge in a facade of neutrality that in practice always serves the interests of the stronger party.
Our role is not to translate the revolt of our peoples into a language acceptable to the oppressors. It is not to polish, to soften, to make presentable what must remain an insurrection. Our role is to champion it, to defend it, with all the tools at our disposal, and first and foremost by rejecting any normalisation, whether intellectual, cultural, or political.
We denounce the ongoing imperialist war that plagues this region. We wholeheartedly support all forms of resistance that oppose it. What we want is not an armistice disguised as peace, a pacification that silently dispossesses us. What we want is total liberation and full sovereignty: over our lands, our resources, our modes of production. Nothing less.
We sign this manifesto as Arab intellectuals and activists, aware that silence, at a time when the fate of an entire region is being decided, is itself a form of abdication. We choose not to remain silent.
We call for an end, once and for all, to the disgraceful negotiations and shameful compromises that legitimise the unacceptable, and for a clear identification of the central threat: the expansionist project of Greater Israel that constitutes the strategic core of Western imperialism.
We adopt the stance of radical refusal, as demonstrated by the various forms of resistance in the Arab world, as the only way to guarantee the individual and collective dignity of the region’s peoples at “zero distance” from the machinery of destruction, at the very point where erasure is most intense.
Algeria was victorious; Palestine will be victorious and free!
List of signatories:
Hèla Yousfi, academic, Tunisia
Layal Ftouni, academic, Lebanon
Noureddine Amara, academic, Algeria
Omar Abdel Jawad, academic, Palestine
Mounira Khayat, academic, Lebanon
Ghassan Ben Khelifa, journalist, Tunisia
Hadeel Karkar, researcher, Palestine
Pierre Abi Saab, journalist, Lebanon
Ubada Kassar, university professor and researcher, Lebanon
Malek Abi Saab, professor of contemporary Middle Eastern history at McGill University, Canada/Lebanon
Faiq Mari, academic, Palestine
Bahia Shehab, artist/academic, Lebanon/Egypt
Latifa El Bouhsini, academic, Morocco
Naima Chalour, academic, Algeria
Ali Batha, researcher, Palestine
Sara El Masry, academic, Egypt
Ali Mattar, researcher and academic, Lebanon
Meryem Sellami, academic, Tunisia
Hala Amri, researcher, Tunisia
Nada Raad, academic, Lebanon
Malika El Assimi, academic, poet and writer, Morocco
Lubna Tarabey, academic, Lebanon
Yasmine Khayat, academic, Lebanon
Roula Khayat, academic, Lebanon
Islam El Khatib, researcher, Lebanon
Ali Aboud, academic, Lebanon
Muna Dajani, academic, Palestine
Julia Choukair Vezoso, researcher and organizer, Lebanon
Hamdeen Sabahi, politician, Egypt
Khaled Youssef, filmmaker, Egypt
Faida Hindawi, film critic, Egypt
Mariam Guellouz, academic, Tunisia
Iyad Abou Gaida, artist, Lebanon
Samar Kanafani, researcher, Lebanon
Sami Boukadida, researcher, Lebanon
Jad Melki, academic, Lebanon
Rana Sukkarieh, academic, Lebanon
Alaa Attia Mitwaly, researcher, Egypt
Chawki Attieh, researcher and professor, Lebanon
Laure Abi Khalil, academic, Lebanon
Kassem Kassir, academic, Lebanon
Majdolin Darwish, member of the BDS campaign, Lebanon
Tania Naplasi, visual artist, Palestine
Raja Jaafar, political activist, member of the boycott campaign, Lebanon
Hamza Hamouchene, researcher and activist, Algeria
Rami Salame, academic, member of the boycott campaign, Lebanon
Bashar Ahmad Al-Laqis, PhD in political sociology, Lebanon
El-Mouzafar El-Diguel, politician, Sudan
Moussa El-Sadah, researcher, Gulf
Mourad Ayyash, Palestinian activist, Baddawi camp, northern Lebanon
Arab Collective is made up of intellectuals, academics, artists, and activists from across the Arab world and the diaspora who are speaking out against normalisation with Israel.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.