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When a nation’s options are narrowed by dramatic developments, it is left with two choices: gloating or denial.

Both affirm that this nation has resigned itself to a life on the margins of history.

We Arabs currently constitute a strong majority in West Asia and North Africa. Our territories are home to some of the world’s most significant natural resources; they are by most of the ancient world’s seas and are part of the most important trade and civilization routes known to humanity.

After the First World War, as borders and the balance of power were shifting, ideologies shaped the equations of the next phase in the “game of nations,” and it had been assumed that we would keep up with the transformations.

We should have noticed, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which had spanned most of the Arab region, from Iraq to the Algerian-Moroccan border, that new interests, circumstances and priorities had emerged. However, neither we nor others managed to grasp these shifts in time. That is why the Second World War erupted, changing things and setting new rules for the game.

As for us Arabs, we failed to process the implications of the partitioning of the Levant and the Nile Valley or what was happening in the Maghreb.

The Arabs find themselves powerlessly watching their region being reassembled before their very eyes

Eyad Abu Shakra

We failed to grasp how the Balfour Declaration would change things on the ground, especially in the context of a global Cold War that divided the world into two camps. The conflict among the old European colonial powers, and later between them and the two rising giants — the US and the Soviet Union — accelerated the Global South toward independence and gave rise to Third World socialism, beginning with China.

Iran, for its part, underwent a remarkable transformation as Britain and Russia jockeyed for influence. In 1925, officer Reza Pahlavi overthrew the Qajar dynasty and established the Pahlavi state. He ruled until 1941, when the Russians and the British removed him because of suspicion that he had been sympathetic to Nazi Germany, replacing him with his son Mohammed.

The son, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, understood the rules of the game with the major powers. He played well for a few years, before choosing to align with the US and his difficult neighbor, Ataturk’s Turkiye, during the Cold War.

Despite their ancient rivalry, Turkiye shared with Pahlavi’s Iran not only a commitment to secularism, but also a desire to join the West, as seen with the Baghdad Pact. Likewise, Ataturk’s Turkiye coexisted, for a while, with Zionist Israel, whose establishment fueled anti-Western sentiment in more than one Arab country.

As we know, military governments began emerging in the 1950s. The Soviet bloc backed their revolutionary policies. Thus, the rift widened, first within the Arab world itself and, second, between the Arab world and the regional triad that supported and was supported by the West: namely, Iran, Turkiye and Israel.

This state of affairs continued until Pahlavi’s secular Iran was ousted by Ayatollah Khomeini’s so-called clerical revolution and until Ataturk’s secularism in Turkiye was undermined by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who aspired to combine “caliphate rule” and Turkish nationalism. As for Israel, which was once defined by the Histadrut and cooperative socialism, it has become a model of racist, theocratic fascism.

Currently, the Israeli-Iranian war and Turkiye’s silent, calculated role in the Fertile Crescent seem to have caught the Arabs off guard. They find themselves powerlessly watching their region being reassembled before their very eyes.

And today, the most that some of them — those who have conveniently forgotten the rabid belligerence of Benjamin Netanyahu — can do is gloat out of childish spite. Is cheering the army that destroyed Gaza and killed its children merely out of spite toward Iran not a reflection of paralysis and an utter disregard for the future?

Conversely, denial has become a comfortable refuge for segments of the Iranian regime’s support base, who turn a blind eye to its actions.

The fundamental contradictions between the two opposing camps of arrogant extremists, Jewish and Christian, are surfacing

Eyad Abu Shakra

Here, I claim that our duty is to think in terms of other — plausible this time — options. Personally, I am convinced that defeating Israel is virtually impossible: it is nothing more than a front for the US. Until Washington is persuaded that aligning fully with Tel Aviv is not inevitable, the Israeli fascists and their allies will continue to choose America’s leaders and drag the US into fighting their wars.

Incidentally, the marriage of convenience between hard-line Christian fundamentalists and Jewish communities was consolidated by evangelicals like the pastor Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority movement, and extremist Jewish right-wing groups — both economically and religiously — toward the end of the Cold War amid Ronald Reagan’s rise.

At the time, their greatest common denominator was hostility to the Soviets and the global left. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Samuel Huntington observed, they were united by their hatred of political Islam. This tactical alliance reached its peak with the emergence — or fabrication — of Daesh-like movements.

Now, these movements are about to expire. Meanwhile, the fundamental contradictions — theological and ethnic — between the two opposing camps of arrogant extremists, Jewish and Christian, are surfacing, with each claiming a monopoly over religious truth, virtue and salvation.

Recognizing this fact, proceeding accordingly and examining the implications and consequences would be a thousand times more useful than indulging in the negative, foolish reactions of a bygone past that will never return.

• Eyad Abu Shakra is managing editor of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was originally published. X: @eyad1949