If the people one day truly aspire to life
then fate must needs respond
the night must needs shine forth
and the shackles must needs break.
Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi
We, intellectuals, academics, artists, activists of the Arab world and the diaspora, speak out.
We speak out today, at a time when the blood of our people flows in torrents under Israeli-Western bombs, because another war is being waged against them, more silent but just as deadly: that of normalization with “Israel,” which is corroding 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 being 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 between equals; it is the formalization of a relationship of submission, in total disregard 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 was still striking Lebanese territory on the very day of the signing. A discrepancy that, by itself, says much about the true nature of the signed text: a capitulation draped in the lexicon of sovereignty. Israeli leaders say it bluntly: their project goes beyond Hezbollah and Lebanon’s southern border. What is at play is older. It is a “Greater Israel,” overflowing the borders of 1948 up to Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. A “Greater Israel” reviving Jabotinsky’s dream of making the Zionist project a regional power that intimidates its neighbors, appropriates their resources, and redraws borders at will. And at every step, the same word returns to dress up this expansion: self-defense. As if conquering could be conjugated with defending.
The succession of wars striking the region: Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, etc., is not a series of crises independent of one another. It is part of this long colonial history: from the Congress of Berlin (1878) to the Sykes-Picot agreements (1916) and the Balfour Declaration (1917) up to the confiscation of the 2011 Arab revolutions, the same imperialist logic is at work: delivering our lands and our rights to the voracious appetites of the Western powers. Even today, it is about fragmenting to dominate. Even today, our annihilation is at stake. Normalizing is not peace; it is deciding on our destruction.
In this project of annihilation, “Israel” plays a leading strategic role. It is at the hinge of an imperialism that, forged in this long 19th century, is transforming with the complicity of some of our states. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations of five Arab countries with “Israel,” are part of this new imperial moment which, under the cover of economic integration, seeks, at all costs, the preservation 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, is working towards: consolidating the normalization of relations between “Israel” and the Gulf countries and offering an alternative to the Chinese Silk Road. “Israel” is therefore the indispensable geographical 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 towards the same objective: making the Arab region a free market for 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 subjugation and the same aspirations for liberation. The Tunisian slogan “Free Tunisia and its capital Jerusalem” where Egyptian and Moroccan protesters brandishing the slogan “Palestine is a national cause” clearly state it: the Palestinian condition is the condition of all the peoples of the region, to varying degrees.
We, the signatories of this text, conscious of the existential threat that the imperialist project of Greater “Israel” represents for the entire Arab region, refuse that the exhaustion of our peoples, caused by two centuries of perpetual war, blockade, and destruction, be presented as a free choice by traitorous Arab regimes, serving their Western masters. We refuse that a power relationship based on genocide and the crushing of all resistance be celebrated as peace.
We, the signatories of this text, heirs and heiresses of a long history of resistance of the Arab peoples against colonialism and Zionism, affirm in this manifesto:
Firstly: the refusal of a peace without reciprocity and of any form of normalization with the enemy state “Israel”
The Oslo accords taught us this lesson: a peace negotiated under military and economic constraint, where one of the parties imposes on the other the timetable, the conditions, and the guarantees of its own security, is not peace. It is a surrender dressed in diplomatic vocabulary; it is the guarantee, in practice, 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, in disregard for the sacrifices of the peoples of the region. We address ourselves in particular to the Arab leaders who, under the cover of realpolitik, have chosen the path of subjugation rather than that of dignity. We demand the breaking of all normalization agreements. We recall that the popular legitimacy of any power in our region is also measured by its capacity not to betray, through diplomatic accommodation, 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 collaborating regime survives the contempt for the emancipation aspirations of its people.
Secondly: 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 claims colonization plans for South Lebanon, these are not slips: they are the admission 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 permanently set aside. No agreement can be made without liberating all the occupied land and without affirming the right of return for all Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967.
Thirdly: 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 United Nations Charter and in international law, which sanctions the legitimacy of armed struggle in the context of colonial domination and foreign occupation. This right is attached to the dignity of colonized peoples fighting for their survival. No geopolitical transaction can diminish it. No power relationship 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 the Arab peoples facing the same choice between genocide and dignity. We salute the courage of those who have chosen with dignity to resist and to directly face the Israeli-Western destruction machine.
Fourthly: the refusal of purely symbolic international solidarity
Contemporary international solidarity has largely retreated, particularly at the governmental level, to forms that cost nothing and commit to nothing: diplomatic condemnations without follow-up, humanitarian aid that relieves 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 ease their conscience without ever questioning the imperialist order that produces oppression. Supporting an occupied people only in ways that disturb no one is supporting their suffering, not their liberation. It is accepting that the oppressed wait, are 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 deem necessary.
Fifthly: the responsibility of the Arab intellectual
We make our own the demand formulated by Ghassan Kanafani or Bassel Al-Araj: intellectuals from colonized or dominated societies cannot take refuge in a facade of neutrality which, 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 executioners. It is not to polish, to water down, to make presentable what must remain an insurrection. Our role is to carry it, to defend it, with all the tools at our disposal, and first by refusing 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 moment when the future of an entire region is being replayed, is itself a form of abdication. We choose not to be silent. We call for putting 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 posture of a radical refusal 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 destruction machine, at the point where erasure is most intense.
Algeria has conquered, Palestine will conquer.
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
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