Manifesto of Arab Intellectuals Against Normalization with 'Israel' and for the Affirmation of the Right of Arab Peoples to Self-Determination
by Fausto Giudice
3 hours ago 9 min read
If the people decide to live, destiny must obey, and the darkness must dissipate, and the shackles must break
— Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi
We, intellectuals, academics, artists, activists from the Arab world and the diaspora, take the floor.
We take it today, at the hour when the blood of our people flows in torrents under Israeli-Western bombs, because another war is being waged against them, more silent but equally deadly: that of normalization with 'Israel', which corrodes our region, decreed by corrupt leaders against the will of their peoples, against their memory, against their spilled blood. From the Abraham Accords to the framework agreement signed between Lebanon and 'Israel' in Washington on June 26, 2026: betrayal is now written in series. We denounce it with the utmost firmness.
We must call things by their name: this agreement text is not a peace treaty among equals, it is the formalization of a relationship of submission with total contempt for the sacrifices of a large part of the Lebanese people for the conquest of their land and their dignity. While officials exchanged handshakes under the lens of American cameras, the Israeli army continued to strike Lebanese territory on the very day of the signing. A disconnect that, by itself, says much about the true nature of the signed text: a capitulation wrapped in the lexicon of sovereignty. Israeli leaders say it bluntly: their project goes beyond Hezbollah and Lebanon's southern border. What is at stake is older. It is a 'Greater Israel', overflowing the borders of 1948 into Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. A 'Greater Israel' that revives Jabotinsky's dream of turning the Zionist project into a regional power that intimidates its neighbors, seizes their resources, redraws borders at will. And at every step, the same word returns to dress this expansion: legitimate self-defense. As if conquering could be conjugated with defending oneself.
The succession of wars hitting the region: Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, etc., is not a series of independent crises. It is inscribed in this long colonial history: from the Congress of Berlin (1878) to the Sykes-Picot agreements (1916) and the Balfour Declaration (1917) to the confiscation of the Arab revolutions of 2011, the same imperialist logic is at work: delivering our lands and our rights to the voracious appetites of Western powers. Today still, it is about fragmenting to dominate. Today still, our annihilation is at stake. Normalization is not peace, it is deciding our crushing.
In this project of annihilation, 'Israel' plays a strategic frontline role. It is at the articulation of an imperialism that, forged in this long nineteenth century, operates its transformation with the complicity of some of our states. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations of five Arab countries with 'Israel', are inscribed in this new imperial moment that, under the cover of economic integration, seeks, at all costs, the safeguarding of a US hegemonic advantage in the region.
This is also what the IMEC project – India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor – announced at the G20 in New Delhi in September 2023 works for: consolidating the normalization of relations between 'Israel' and the Gulf countries and offering an alternative to the Chinese Silk Road. 'Israel' is thus the indispensable geographic node of the corridor: normalization is not an end in itself, but the infrastructural condition of US hegemony in the region. Genocide or normalization, two paths to the same goal: making the Arab region a free market of goods and identities.
Faced with this reality, only one conclusion imposes itself: the nation-states of the region share not only a language, a culture, and a history, but above all a community of destiny structured by the same mechanisms of submission and the same aspirations for liberation. The Tunisian slogan 'Free Tunisia and its capital Jerusalem', where Egyptian and Moroccan demonstrators brandish the slogan 'Palestine is a national cause' say it clearly: the Palestinian condition is the condition of all the peoples of the region, in different degrees.
We, signatories of this text, aware of the existential threat that the imperialist project of 'Greater Israel' represents for the entire Arab region, reject that the exhaustion of our peoples, caused by two centuries of perpetual war, blockade, and destruction, is presented as a free choice by traitorous Arab regimes, at the service of their Western masters. We reject that a relationship of force based on genocide and the crushing of all resistance is celebrated as peace.
We, signatories of this text, heirs to a long history of resistance of Arab peoples against colonialism and Zionism, affirm in this manifesto:
First: the rejection of a peace without reciprocity and of all forms of normalization with the enemy state 'Israel'
The Oslo Accords taught us this lesson: a peace negotiated under military and economic coercion, 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 vocabulary; it is the de facto guarantee of greater fragmentation and consolidated Israeli colonization. We denounce the complicity of a part of the Arab political, economic, and intellectual elites with the regime of submission imposed by Western imperialism, with contempt for the sacrifices of the peoples of the region. We address in particular the Arab leaders who, under the cover of realpolitik, have chosen the path of submission instead of that of dignity. We demand the rupture of all normalization agreements. We recall that the popular legitimacy of any power in our region is also measured by its ability not to betray, through diplomatic accommodations, the principles it proclaims. From anti-colonial struggles to the Arab revolutions, the same lesson has been inscribed in the DNA of the region: no collaborative regime survives contempt for the aspirations for emancipation of its people.
Second: the denunciation of the 'Greater Israel' project
We take note of the official Israeli declarations that openly announce the predatory and expansionist ambition of the Israeli colonialist project. When an Israeli minister declares that the Litani River must become the new border with Lebanon, when another demands colonization plans for southern Lebanon, these are not slips: they are the confession of a doctrine. We denounce with the utmost firmness these expansionist ambitions and recall that no agreement can be viable as long as this genocidal war machine is not explicitly and durably discarded. No agreement can be made without liberating all occupied land and without affirming the right of return of all Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967.
Third: the affirmation of the right of Arab peoples to self-determination as an inalienable principle
We recall here the respect due to this right, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and international law, which sanctions the legitimacy of armed struggle in the context of colonial domination and foreign occupation. This right is linked to the dignity of colonized peoples fighting for their survival. No geopolitical transaction can undermine it. No relationship of force that, today as yesterday, is unfavorable to us could reduce it. We reaffirm here this right for the Palestinian people, for the Lebanese people, and for all Arab peoples confronted with the same choice between genocide and dignity. We salute the courage of those who have chosen to resist with dignity and directly face the Israeli-Western machine of destruction.
Fourth: the rejection of purely symbolic international solidarity
Contemporary international solidarity has largely retreated, especially at the governmental level, towards forms that cost nothing and commit to nothing: diplomatic condemnations without follow-up, humanitarian aid that alleviates suffering without ever attacking its structural causes, awareness campaigns that inform without transforming. These gestures are not useless, but they allow states and public opinions to have a clear conscience without ever questioning the imperialist order that produces oppression. Supporting an occupied people only in ways that bother no one is supporting their suffering, not their liberation. It is accepting that the oppressed wait, be patient, negotiate indefinitely with those who oppress them, while the world watches with sympathy without ever accepting to pay the political price of real support for their emancipation by the means they consider necessary.
Fifth: the responsibility of the Arab intellectual
We make our own the demand formulated by Ghassan Kanafani or Basel al-Araj: intellectuals from colonized or dominated societies cannot take refuge in a façade of neutrality that, in fact, 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 executioners. It is not to polish, sweeten, make presentable what must remain an insurrection. Our role is to carry it, defend it, with all the tools at our disposal, and above all by rejecting any normalization, whether intellectual, cultural, or political. We denounce the permanent imperialist war that strikes this region. We support, without reservation, all forms of resistance that oppose it. What we want is not an armistice disguised as peace, a pacification that dispossesses us in silence. What we want is total liberation and full and complete sovereignty: over our lands, over our resources, over our modes of production. Nothing less.
We sign this manifesto as Arab intellectuals and activists, conscious that silence, at a time when the future of an entire region is being redecided, is in itself a form of abdication. We choose not to remain silent. We call for an end once and for all to unworthy negotiations and shameful compromises that legitimize the unacceptable, and to clearly identify the central threat: that of the expansionist project of 'Greater Israel', which constitutes the strategic node of Western imperialism. We adopt the stance of radical rejection shown by the different forms of resistance in the Arab world, the only one capable of guaranteeing the individual and collective dignity of the peoples of the region at 'zero distance' from the machine of destruction, at the point where erasure is most intense.
Algeria won, Palestine will win.
First signatories
Héla Yousfi, academic, Tunisia
Layal Ftouni, academic, Lebanon
Noureddine Amara, academic, Algeria
Omar Abdel Jawad, academic, Palestine
Mounira Khayat, academic, Lebanon
Ghassen Ben Khalifa, journalist, Tunisia
Hadeel Karkar, researcher, Palestine
Source: Faustotounsi
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