Middle East's masked hegemonies: Tyrants wrestle in the name of salvation

Mail & Guardian

24-06-2025

Israel and Iran are rival expressions of authoritarian impulses.
What unfolds today in the Middle East is not a conventional clash of nation-states pursuing divergent interests. Rather, it is a confrontation between two competing eschatologies — each seeking to monopolise meaning, to remake the symbolic and political architecture of the region in its image. Israel and Iran are not true opposites; they are rival expressions of authoritarian impulses, each armed with its own mythologies, institutions and metaphysical claims.
The Zionist project is not simply security-driven nationalism but a colonial modernity that positions itself as the centre of global civilisation while relegating the Arab, the Muslim — and even the Mizrahi Jew — to the margins of personhood. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not behave as a statesman in a pluralistic democracy but as a high priest of an exclusionary creed presiding over a militarised state that performs structural violence under the guise of 'the only democracy in the Middle East'.
The West persists in presenting Israel as a neutral political arena, one where diverse identities engage in liberal dialogue, as if statehood were a card game played fairly in a cosmopolitan club. This is fiction. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé reminds us, Israel remains a colonial enterprise, morphing from overt military occupation into a subtler regime of epistemic domination and structural control across historical Palestine.
Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz once described Zionism's mutation into a civil religion — an idolatry of state and army, converting identity into weaponry. From Syria to Lebanon, Gaza to Tehran, Israeli power extends not as a defensive necessity, but as a project of domination. In this vision, 'security' becomes a permanent rationale for violence and 'the enemy' a theological constant that justifies endless expansion and subjugation.
Yet Israel's core anxiety towards Iran is not rooted in the Islamic Republic's 'revolutionary' character, but in the fact that Tehran disrupts the liberal-Western narrative and exposes the hypocrisies of post-Sykes-Picot legitimacy.
But Iran does not offer a liberationist alternative but rather a mirrored authoritarianism — a theocratic state that exports revolution instead of reform and marginalises non-Shiite constituencies instead of embracing pluralism.
Despite internal dissent and mounting international pressure, Iran's ruling elite — anchored in the Revolutionary Guard and velayat-e faqih — has doubled down on its own messianic supremacy, excluding minorities, women and secular voices alike. As Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush cautioned: 'When religion becomes a state, both lose their essence — faith becomes police and power becomes a fatwa.'
Amid this strategic delirium, the real choice is not between an Iranian bomb and Israeli bombardment, but between two worldviews, one rooted in coercion and dogma, the other in historical justice and emancipatory rationalism. What truly unsettles both regimes is the emergence of a third paradigm — a post-sectarian, post-colonial vision that dissolves the myths both sides depend on to maintain symbolic power.
The end of Zionism as an imperial structure does not require Israel's annihilation, but the dismantling of its exclusionary logic. And the end of Iranian tyranny will not be brought about by assassinations or sanctions, but by liberating the state from the militarised grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and returning it to the civic hands of its people.
Such a future will not be born from geopolitical brinkmanship or theological absolutism, but from a democratic, secular and decentralised reimagination of statehood — one that acknowledges cultural and ethnic rights, and ties citizenship to historical redress, rather than tribal belonging.
This is not a fantasy. It is the only serious alternative to an endless cycle of apocalypse masquerading as salvation.
The 'New Middle East' cannot be a nuclear pact or a lopsided deal crafted by impervious elites. It must be a vision of dignity, placing the human — not the hegemon — at its moral and political centre. It must transcend false binaries — 'resistance' versus 'capitulation' and 'faith' versus 'reason' — and demand the dismantling of both colonial and clerical despotisms.
We stand today not between East and West, Sunni and Shiite, but between two visions of power — one that serves itself through myth and machinery, and another, yet to be born, that speaks for the people, in the name of justice, freedom and truth.
Dr Waleed A Madibo is a Fulbright scholar, as well as the founder and president of Sudan Policy Forum.