Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pockmarked with rifle rounds. Misery is found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, and over 600,000 people have so far died. “A Revolution in a Civil War.” “A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway”. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you, and the dust gets into absolutely everything.
HEVAL CHIYA19
In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort, over 100,000 before the ISIS Wars were finally over. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus. Which, for millions of Muslims would signal that the end of times was upon us and prophesy was being unleashed.
Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services, the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.
The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted an exceedingly long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3rd November 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.
At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards (Pasdaran) and Russian special forces, also Wagner mercenaries; push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. captures most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.
“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing useful at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” It seems like every other day; a man wanders off and steps on something and explodes. The mines are everywhere, can’t be understated. You should try to never walk anywhere you have never seen someone else walk.
Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.
“There’s dust in my beard, and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland. As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky, and the night was lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah20, the largest rebel-held city, in the morning, and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course, several times, for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well-stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There, we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench, I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh21were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate.
Very bad intelligence, my friends! The bandits were still very well dug in; refugees were swarming out, and among them were suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions, capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river.
“If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they cross the river. Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.
So, the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gunfire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim22commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course, every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one-sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time. A small child runs out into the road and is blown away. Briefly, a pause, until he is clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually, the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won! Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.
“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish23 or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation, and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh24, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi-conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros25being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil26 probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes, Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Goldy, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
Kawa, the “so-called American”, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I longed for the fight and I got some fight.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once! They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for? Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made-up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.
“Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard?”
Those three letter affiliations do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains, they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in. How did we get here? How did this motley group of around 500 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?
Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name of this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.
El Al flight 510 touches down at Lod International Airport on May 9, 2001, at exactly 15:04 Israeli time. Which is usually on time but then makes you wait a long time. After someone is inevitably rude to you. The passengers on the plane started clapping as the wheels hit the tarmac. Many of the passengers are evidently very happy to be home, and happier still that the Palestinians didn’t manage to hijack or ‘explode’ the plane. Someone whispers that things had gotten much worse in the weeks leading up to Independence Day. There had been two bombings the week before. The second Palestinian Intifada has blown the top off the kettle.
“Welcome to Israel,” the flight attendant tells us. She gives the date, time, and weather in Hebrew and then repeats it in thickly accented English, and then once again in Arabic, which is the second national language. English lettering is below all the Hebrew/Arabic signs because America foots the bill around here.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We descend onto the tarmac from the hatchway at the back of the plane. I have an urge to bend down and kiss the ground, but I do not. It is not very dignified; something tells me, a voice inside that once had a name. It is brutally hot. I am wearing my kosher, blue pinstripe suit. I am glad I left my brown threadbare Kashmir trench coat in Spain. I stop for a moment and cover my eyes, lowering my head.
“Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohanynu, Adonai EhHad.” This is the only prayer I can remember that would make any sense on this occasion. Also, the only prayer I remember at all.
The revolution had failed me completely. But I knew I had also failed it. I was misguided. I lacked serious training and discipline. The staunch atheism that the Family School had instilled in me for a time seemed to have been shattered by my last three weeks in Golder’s Green. Rabbi Tatz had opened a door for me only to have it slammed in my face when Rabbi Gabi declared that I wasn’t’ a real Jew. As I stared out the open window of the cab, I saw the green fields of my people’s land blooming, highways filled with compact cars, and new buildings being erected everywhere. I was home and ready. Babylon was behind me. There was no longer a need to struggle needlessly. Believing in things that can never possibly exist.
***
All of Tel Aviv is bouncing off the walls. The streets are filled with loud and pushy people. There are beautiful women with olive skin and manly guys with tight t-shirts and jeans. They are all drunk or on the way down that road. Everyone has a gun and a flag. It is Israeli Independence Day and Israel had just won the basketball championship against all of Europe. I have never seen so many beautiful girls in my life. Tel Aviv was wild and free like New York on a beach. They may have driven us into the sea with gas and bullets in Europe but now we struck back with basketball and, well really fucking attractive women. The basketball win is a little hard to believe, but it made me happy we were winning wherever we could win. The racist in me asserted that Ethiopians had been put in charge of the team. Some girl told me they had just recruited a bunch of American Blacks. Even better.
I check into a hostel on Kikar Dizengoff or Dizengoff Square. An elevated platform supported a white sculpture fountain with interlocking-colored disks in the middle of the square. It was like a Union Square of the Middle East with more junkies and less skaters. The hostel smelled like radio deodorant-free Europe. I was in a coed dorm room with twelve bunk beds. My bunkmates were mostly South Africans. Afrikaans is the ugliest language I have ever heard. I changed out of my suit, showered, and decided to go explore. I grabbed a street map from the front desk and wandered into the bustling, raucous Ben Yehuda Street, which I hoped would lead to the beach.
There was a rally going on in the square for the union which controlled Egged Buses, one of the two major government-owned lines. Groups of teenagers were spending time together and drinking in public, which I am told is legal here. A group of Russian punks gave me some unbelievably cheap vodka, and I slammed it back. I drew a picture of a punk with a shotgun mashing. They gave me more vodka but did not speak a word of English. There was a large movie theatre on a corner of the square. What looks like a huge and shady motel occupied another corner under a huge red neon sign that says KDA. Hebrew is spoken everywhere or Russian. I am enthralled and overwhelmed. It is almost too much to take in. The signs and language keep reminding me that ‘the land is ours’. The cute girls with stacks of party flyers remind me that it’s not just another Friday night; it’s the biggest party night of the year.
Eventually, I wound my way down to the beach. It’s an endless strip of mini skyscrapers, hotels highway and the boardwalk, called the tiyeled. Itis the land of see-and-be-seen, play-and-get-hustled, hoot, holler and dance. Little wooden pergolas and stone benches run miles in either direction. It’s on the coast of the Mediterranean, but it’s more like Vegas than Nice. Everything is all lit up in a hundred shades of red or blue, and there is live music being performed on mini stages along the way, mostly salsa and house music. I stand below a huge white terraced structure called the Opera Tower and look down at the main strip from Hof Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Beach. Some came to the Holy Land for that broken down wall locked up in the mountains, but I like my pilgrimages to end by the beach with a cocktail. Cars fly by with Israeli flags flapping out the windows. The occupants are yelling on the top of their lungs, blasting Arabic sounding music from their vehicles. Everybody keeps offering me shots. Every crew and their Russian girl friends have multiple bottles of vodka and a hookah set up for the fireworks show about to light up the beach.
As I walked further down the boardwalk, halfway to drunk by now, I encountered every manner of hustler, hawker, pusher, and thief. Children are selling flashy neon toys. Eastern European émigrés hustling the tourists at games of three-card Monty lured in by a cute Romanian girl who keeps winning and might just be the dealer’s lady. Tables set up selling trinkets, temporary tattoos, selling smoke, selling girls who sell the smoke, and not a single street artist in sight. Or copper for that matter. I decided not to set it up tonight. It’s the Shabbos on top of Independence Day and Victory over Europe. Rabbi Tatz said I would learn to carry out the mitzvahs gradually. But then Rabbi Gabbi said I wasn’t a Jew, so why I kept referencing those Jews of the Green was beyond me. The Israeli government counts you as a Jew if a single grandparent was Jewish. This is surely better odds than having a halachically-converted Jewish mother.
I hear a South African saying that it was good they “let these not quite Jewish Ruskies in because with the uprising going on in, it was unwise now to let the Palestinians cross the green line to work like dogs in all the jobs the Jews don’t want.” Half the Russians I was drinking with had gold crucifixes come to think of it. Guess they had a Jewish grandparent before Communism made them Orthodox Christians or whatever-the-hell they are.
I’m happy to be reunited with my Noblisse cigarettes. I remembered hoping they came in menthol when I first found them in the ubiquitous cigarette machines. They aren’t that bad for smoke, which cost six shekels. That’s just $1.50. Thank G-d for no more TOP rollies. These are Israel’s general-purpose cigarettes. They are the cheapest cigarettes you can buy when you’re poor. They are also smoked by the kibbutzniks, because if you live on kibbutz, you’re inherently poor. The Russians don’t smoke them. They smoke something only a little better called L & M, which feels more like a cheap Marlboro Light.
With my sketchpad and accented-English flying, I befriend a Russian named Roman along with his car, his bottle of Russian Standard, and his three lady friends. I take off in this former Soviet stranger’s car, a Roman who “knows where the nature party is up country”. At a good party, you can forget about everything. So, I ended up staying in Tel Aviv in the arms of a wild little Russian sweet thing named Anya for nearly a week before I ended up making moves north. Because “a little Party never hurt nobody.” “If you could be dead by tomorrow, then you should make good use of today.”
“I’ll tell you what scares me about the Zionists,” one of the Russian girls says to me, “it’s the unlimited nature of the whole operation; like anything whatsoever is justified to secure a state here, anything. It’s that level of unlimited that makes us all party like this; we just really don’t know when the next bomb goes off. When the final shoe will come down.”
My father is a Lebanese politician. From what I gather, we are Shi’a, and the Shi’a are the good guys, but we, as in our faction of the good guys, want a more secular Lebanon, not what the Party of God wants; another brand of an Islamic State; something like Iran, or just like it. But, in Lebanon, you’re dealing with Phoenicians, not Arabs, so we have the mentality of trade, the mentality of sensualism; we are not dogmatic. The civil war, it happened by accident, but we all blame the Palestinians and the Israelis.
“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG!” a neo-Kurdish jangle plays on satellite radio. I need to find a red-lit room in “the Green Zone”. The kind of place off-duty soldiers get lap dances, drop dollars, and “get their dicks wet.” They say it’s “the world’s oldest profession”, but in fact the oldest profession is farming. I think Shermuta (a whore) is a very relative term in the Middle East. You can get called a Shermuta to hold a man’s hand on a park bench. You can get called a shermuta for selling your body to a man for their money. You can also get kidnapped, or raped, and/or killed over feelings. In Iran and in the ISIS-controlled zones, as well as in Afghanistan there is the Ministry for promotion of virtue and Prevention of Vice.
I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have a credit card and freedom of movement for the most part, but I have family honor to uphold too. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four-armed men with beards. Sebastian tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia. Some friends call me; Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla because I stay out all night partying. Or at least back in Beirut, I did. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something indirectly for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19!
My latest, shall I say favorite, boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that must be kept at least somewhat quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier or two and some very fancy carpets, which is the real thing. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the filled-up fridge. We have at least five south Asian servants, serfs, either one. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine Beiruti in Bagdad. What a repressive slum. Too easy to get kidnapped. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions, too! I am, however, deeply unhappy in Erbil; it is like a gilded bird’s cage. When my mother moved us all to Baghdad, it became much worse. Baghdad is of course, a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are fewer eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis.So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a “liberated woman” and “artistic” as well. Or just a little libertarian shermuta, depends on one’s values.
Sebastian Adonaev “one day the Jew of Beirut” gave me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him “do his thing”. Except. when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is a little scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war.
Sebastian told me that the dreams I had “old school prophecies”. That was nice of him to say, because my expansive white therapist says I’m “bipolar” and bored in a “guilded cage of Middle Eastern hyper-privileges”. He’s quite nice, for a Yahud, in some ways he is a real Middle Eastern man. In other ways, a colonial debaucher. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary too. I have never actually never had a Jewish friend before. Or let a Jew touch my breasts. We were never ever serious lovers, but he spoke sometimes about “running away with me. After the war, back to Beirut” and I agreed it was “a real hard possible”. It was a romantic idea, and I planned to go home to Beirut anyway, because Baghdad is “extra”. But the war will never-ever-ever-end so it’s a very silly notion, this running away staff. He says that in the old country, you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we must wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 33 toward dying. It’s not fully such a big deal. I am very-very beyond bored in the Green Zone. Alot of check points and a lot of showing my papers. A lot of bored Shebab, on some factions’ payroll, with machine guns. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the veritable hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted. Asa fixer being stressed and distracted is basically his job.
Comrade, Heval Sebastian Adonaev, he is probably getting involved over his head and language skills in the PKK. The Workers Party activities that Alacan introduced him to, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim. She’s over the years have gotten more excited about being Shi’a. She didn’t always cover her hair in a chador.
My man Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s “an artist”, “a biz-ness man” and “a free radical,” and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are strangely very close friends I have realized after the fact, and not just “friends of the Abdullah Ocalan type”. They have what Westerners call a “bromance”. Alacan is doing a lot of free fixing, and I believe Sebastian may have helped write his college thesis. Something about a “Confederation for all the Middle East.” As my fling and flirtations in Erbil with this slightly older male Jew Kafr18friend developed into mostly sleeping with his Kurdish friend Alacan, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria, respectfully. He’s my sweet infidel always being optimistic to me on WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again when he went to Rojava and I went to Baghdad. But we WhatsApp it up. He is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something Haram, something perhaps super inappropriate, well it was mostly missed.
What’s sexting in the Middle East? Well, it’s just like sexting in Europe or America. Telling people you want to fuck them by text. Sometimes I sext with Alacan, sometimes with Sebastian.
I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext back eagerly, I just don’t stop them. Its hot, we all could die in the war, everyone wants to talk about my tits. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off the roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off.
You see, on one side of the Middle East is art, math, reason, love, vision, and high points of science and philosophy. On the other, unseen hateful dark old gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. Telling everyone to wear more layers in this bull shit heat. Making up hypocritical rules about shit no one heard Muhammed say to anyone. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, toleration, pride in diversity, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. Massacres here, genocide there. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows it’s just fucking nanobots. Even though we are in a land of dust and fire; we are still in the future and “the future is 1000x more futuristic than anyone ever expected”.
A quote from a pamphlet I am reading, from the Party of God and Workers:
“The Enemy” reduces us to slumber, serfdom and indefinite toil. The enemy forces false and arbitrary division upon us, reducing us to a force for labor. They strip us of a life of any meaning, they abrogate our rights. Divided we die in half life. Reactionary thinking is an embrace of hopelessness and brutalist individualism. A life of minimizing harm and maximizing pleasure. Such a life is encouraged by every existing regime.
“A human person is born free and equal, fully conscious and capable of limitless possibility.”
A Cadro is a “conscious person”, of an open mind and collective spirit. A Cadro lives a dedicated life. She or he is not a monk, an extremist or a zealot. She or he is a partisan. A person of good morals and great fight. A person who through knowledge of truth lives by rights, sees value in collective existence. Lives a free life, in liberty and in virtue knowing self and loving others. The dedication of a Cadro is rooted in the tree of life, therefore the deep roots of our collective history, the tallest branches of our collective hope. He or she is dedicated to “the world of the real”, yet persistence and boldness drag us toward a world to come. By rights possessing a basis of just measurement, knowing good from wrong, by virtue of living with integrity.
***
Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside. The technology to control a person remotely. The technology to kill with a stroke like event or make someone see “visions” then blow themselves up in a truck bomb. Notice how any enemy of the Russian state dies and you will see traces. Of course there was Russian involvement in the effort; they are loyal allies of us and also, the meddling Syrians. Always just one coup, one plot, one dynasty away from trying to absorb Lebanon. That is the basis of “the axis of resistance”, or at least it was in 2015; Russia supporting Iran and Syria, Syria supporting the Party of God in Lebanon; who in turn was aiding and abetting 16 factions of Palestinians; Hamas and Islamic Jihad; the ones with more rockets and teeth. Somewhere to the Southeast, in Yemen; the nominally Shi’a Houthis aided and abetted by Iran against Saudi Arabia. Tens of thousands there dead from war and famine, no one really talks about it very much.
It is infact very hot, and people here in fact hold very zealous beliefs. By the Israelis and Iranians incubated all kinds of ways to murder each other shot of a nuclear bomb. Although Israel has 250 Nuclear missiles and Iran has 50, no matter what the other side claims, bluffs, declares; no one wants a nuclear war of any size.
It started innocently, scientifically, enough, a young Tehranian scientist moving to Baghdad, the Wild West! With Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition. With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand. Really the hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, the guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. “The men really running the show.”
But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to fully realize the potential dangers they posed. The nano-bots refused to be sectarian. In their most advanced coding and strain, they viewed all humans as a threat. In the wrong hands, perhaps their own self-awareness, which had perhaps already developed, could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds. Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience and her obligations. Should she continue down this path, fully knowing the potential consequences? Not robot vs. Zionist, but little deadly robots against all humans. Or should she destroy all her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the hyper-warlike, white settler colonialist demonic, racist Zionistical Israelites. In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead.
In the proxy wars and cold wars, and hot wars, man kills man over imagined identity. Woman wails, cries, prays, and sometimes does some killing too. In the world of artificial intelligence, in the world of tiny deadly robots, all humans were nemesis, no discrimination as per faction. When these are released, it will kill many of the white Jews, but realistically many of the white Jews are responsible for the Naqba and the fitna today. They are not all guilty, but they are predominantly guilty for the Genocide in Gaza. Although it must also be said that they were warned about October 7th multiple times, by Egyptian intelligence and the Pasdaran. It is said they not only did their State let the attacks happen, but that also then even went as far as moving that little rave from where it had been scheduled to only a few kilometers from the apartheid walls. These experiments were not yet in any state of perfection, but the Zionists are pushing us to the wall in Lebanon and Palestine. They say we are all bent on conspiracy theory in the Middle East; but I will say this, as a scientist, the little robots are quite real. To stop a man’s heart, to induce a stroke, to induce homicidal feelings. They have over two hundred nuclear weapons, we Iranians have close to five. But strange things that happen cannot be left to fog of war and mystical narrative.
When this weapon is perfected, we will be able to stop the white Jews in their tracks. Make them fall into the sand in thousands. When our work is done, we will be able to make all Europeans homosexual with gas. Of course, there was Russian involvement in the effort; they are loyal allies of us and the Syrians. They are not like the evil Americans; they will not falter to defend their allies. America will use the Israelites and use the Kurds, then abandon them all in the end. It is good to have loyal friends. Not friends like the United States of America.
“The Jewish military colony is filled with informants,” Zachariah told me one night on the roof of the Bedouin School House overlooking Be’er Sheva. “Every phone is bugged. Every e-mail is read. Any uprising here would have to be primitive enough to leave no fingerprints.”
He spoke calmly about terrible things. Arrests. Torture. Betrayal. In those days everyone understood that eventually somebody would disappear into a prison cell or a shallow grave. The Second Intifada hung over the country like smoke. Every café, every bus stop, every crowded market carried the feeling of an approaching explosion.
Still, people came to us.
Not because of ideology. Because of atmosphere.
The heroin dealers vanished from certain parks after EGROPH boys drove them out. Food baskets appeared outside poor families’ apartments. Gang graffiti disappeared beneath strange black symbols no one understood. Kids practiced martial arts in abandoned lots. Someone always knew someone who had joined Ha Irgun.
That was how it spread. Hand to hand. Mouth to ear.
By August we were organized across the country.
In Tel Aviv, the Manasseh Command gathered Black Israelites, expatriates, artists, and drifters around the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft where newspapers and forged papers were printed all night.
In Be’er Sheva, Gavroche led the Judah Command: punk rock kids, street fighters, and runaways training with rifles in the desert heat. The Bedouin School House became our headquarters after EGROPH cleared out the narcomaniim living there. Children slept on classroom floors beneath revolutionary posters and stolen fans.
Haifa belonged to the Asher Command, mostly Arab Christian youth led by Deeb al Hadid and university art students from Mount Carmel.
Only Jerusalem resisted us.
“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation,” Zach kept saying. The city exhausted him. Maybe because it was too holy. Maybe because it destroyed everyone equally.
On August 9th, Zach and I traveled there again to organize what he wanted to call the Ephraim Command. Around noon we ate at Mike’s Place near King George Street. He looked exhausted, digging through his satchel.
“Fuck.”
“What?”
“I’m out of art.”
Then came the explosion.
PEGUAH.
Three blocks ahead smoke erupted into the air. The blast rattled my bones. People froze before the screaming started. Dust rolled across the street. Blood, shattered glass, ambulance sirens.
The Palestinians had blown up a pizza restaurant.
Zach sat heavily onto a green bench and removed his hat. We waited because everyone knew there might be a second bomb for the rescue crews.
Then it came.
PEGUAH.
Another explosion somewhere near the incoming ambulances. More screams. More smoke.
The medics ran in anyway. They always did.
Zach stared silently at the chaos before finally flagging down a taxi back to Tel Aviv. Soldiers flooded the streets around us while helicopters circled overhead.
Halfway home he finally spoke.
“I won’t be caught dead in that city again.”
But we both knew we would return. That was how organizing worked: unreasonable persistence. Little speeches. Drawings in the sand. Whispers about impossible things.
And somehow, amid all the carnage, that summer taught me not merely how to hide underground from enemies, but how to breathe underwater.
“The Jewish Military Colony is filled with surveillance and informants, every phone is bugged, every email is read. The basis of any uprising must be so low tech that it leaves no fingerprints, a series of whispers, notes on paper, a war of cells.”
There is also a great deal of inevitability all your friends will get rounded up, tortured, and killed. Some will give each other up under torture, betray themselves and the cause.
I went on another scouting trip to Be’er Sheva at the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He was not a great thinker. He was a young person of action. What he seemed to like was that there wasn’t too much of a preset plan. He did not have to read anything to join. That was the beauty of it that made so many people just plug in and fight. For years people had said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.
None of that is important anymore though because we are a life support machine, a clandestine movement operating way behind the lines, which according to an unseen G-d, are our ancestorial homeland. You came by. You plugged in or enlisted was a better word because by then we had written our own Kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You got talked about it because a friend had signed up. You saw a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, saw them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hit you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park was gone. So were the junkies posted up on the playground. You noticed the gang graffiti on the bombed-out buildings had been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes, an odd black pictograph you have never seen in your life. A food basket ended up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you are hard up enough, any bit helps. It came again a few days later courtesy of Ha Irgun. You picked up someone hitchhiking, and they put you on to our righteous and almost self-obvious revolution. That someone was always the young Zachariah Artstein, making rounds with his old friend Hadas.
Zach got in trouble anytime we went up the hill to Jerusalem.
The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp. He had lost his passport some time ago and it was lucky they did not hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugavnik storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon.
But by the second week of August, we are solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter was called the ManassehCommand. Our network was based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We had secured a printing facility and were working on secure lines of online communication.
We were also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working-class hooligans. This formation we called the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters were training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. Expansion was being focused on christening cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements.
We were solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Ashkenazi artstudents at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel, who were led by a girl named Hadas, some one-time lover of Zach’s from the kibbutz days. The fighters in Galilee called the Asher Command.
There were several three to five person cells recently established in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there were a couple of Arab Israeli girls who owned a tattoo parlor. Afula never seemed that solid. Bet She ‘an consisted of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. There were a couple of paramedics in Rehovot. In Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya, it was more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s.
“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation.”
There was just one single mission. We would drive the U.S. influence out of Israel, and we would make a stand for a government that upheld human rights. I had spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s theory of communism would set us free or just get us killed for nothing.
“For many years as a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven.” I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I had ever loved were waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wondered if God valued the work we were doing even if I was not sure about there being a God. But I could never make myself honestly believe. And now I knew that the only heaven I might ever live to see was the one I was ready to fight for then defend. The heaven we would create right here, right now, our Zion in the wilderness.
This Romanian Jewish girl Noaah was making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha was editing the articles that would go into the first edition of our mini newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar, and ‘Molly the Fairy’ were sweeping up this massive, abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly lived in a room under the great stairs. She had become his little protégé. She followed him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin had been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who was a self-professed ‘anarchist.’ She was just 13. Enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing, little braids died different shades of pink. She adored Zach and believed in the ideas of Ha Irgun completely. Tribe Judah had a wide range of child soldiers, but it was the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher was Christian Arabs and Manasseh was mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites.
Three weeks ago, the Bedouin School House was overrun with narcomaniim until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah, and a few others from the Be’er Sheva Unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and then drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City. Ha Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure, destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows, and called it the KDAA, some made-up word surely of Zach’s inspired whims of creation.
You can’t teach what we were preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there was no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades kept everyone, for lack of a better phrase, “pretty fucking terrorized”. And all the while as both the second Intifada and our revolution unfolded around us so out of control, I never stopped thinking which among us would be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’d have our bangs and bullets too before long.
On August 9th, Zach and I left Be’er Sheva bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We got there around noon and got lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend, Canadian Dave. We take our time to eat. I think the kid was a little burnt out. He’d been busy and never seemed to like coming to the ‘holiest of holies’. We were both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We made our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looked in his bag.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
“What is it?”
“I’m all out of art.”
Then three blocks ahead of us we heard a
PEGUAH! And I jump in the air and my bones rattle inside me. We freeze. For a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. We do nothing helpful. Wait for a secondary explosion. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. One of the few that still sells Pepperoni. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Blood, dust, ambulance sirens. Zach slumps into a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people does not stop until he flags us a cab and tells the driver to “get us back to Tel Aviv.” There’s smoke, there are the screams of the injured, the incoming sirens. The ambulances show up and second bomber blows up the responding rescue crews. PEGUAH!
The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place around 2pm. The blasts kill 15 people, including 7 small children, and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad immediately claimed joint responsibility. The only thing he said on the road back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city was:
“I won’t be caught dead in that city again.” But that was just how he talked when he was upset by the intifada and carnage. We obviously would be back when we had set up a cell. That is how organizing works; unreasonable persistence.
Hand to hand, mouth to ear, little speeches, drawings in the sand, whispers about impossible sounding things. She showed me that summer was not just about going underground and becoming invisible to our enemies; she taught me how to breathe underwater and travel across time.
It happens with terrifying precision. Too fast for panic to organize itself into resistance. Too coordinated to be spontaneous. Women and children are separated first, herded outside beneath rifle barrels and shouted commands in French and Arabic. The men remain behind. Diplomats. Security contractors. UN staffers. Billionaires. Celebrities. Minor kings. Forgotten ministers from collapsing republics. All zip-tied wrist to wrist beneath the glow of the Millennium Theatre chandeliers.
The attackers move like professionals. Some wear cheap tactical gear. Others wear black suits beneath armored vests, their faces hidden behind flickering digital masks that distort into static every few seconds. Strings of explosives are wrapped around groups of hostages like grotesque Christmas decorations. Red lights blink softly in the dark.
At first there are screams, protests, demands for immunity.
Then pistol-whippings begin.
A Portuguese diplomat loses three teeth on the marble staircase. Warning shots crack through the theatre. Blood spatters across framed posters for Broadway revivals. The hostages are bundled together on the orchestra level floor with tape across their mouths. Anyone who speaks too long is beaten unconscious.
Outside, Midtown collapses into hysteria. Sirens echo endlessly through Newyorkgrad. NYPD Emergency Service Units establish barricades while helicopters churn overhead like insects. Thousands of civilians flood the streets recording everything on their phones. News anchors speak in hushed voices about “another 9/11 unfolding in real time.”
Then the first communiqué arrives.
A woman with brown hair tied tightly into a bun steps through the barricaded theatre entrance carrying typed sheets of paper. Calm. Expressionless. She slides the demands toward police lines before disappearing back inside. Minutes later the same statement appears online in multiple languages.
“WE ARE HOLDING OVER 800 INTERNATIONAL HOSTAGES. ALL ADULT MALE UNSTAFFED POLITICIANS, ELITES, AND VARIOUS CELEBRITIES. IN ONE HOUR WE WILL BEGIN EXECUTING UN PERSONNEL UNLESS NYPD WITHDRAWS FIVE BLOCKS. THERE ARE EXPLOSIVES ATTACHED TO THE HOSTAGES AND THROUGHOUT THE BUILDING. ANY GAS. ANY RAID. WE DETONATE EVERYTHING.”
Inside the theatre, terror settles into something quieter. Whimpering. Prayer. Shock.
Someone whispers they are speaking French. Someone else insists they heard Hebrew. Another swears one of the gunmen had a Brooklyn accent. Nobody knows anything.
Hours later a second video is released.
A masked woman identifying herself only as Anya sits beneath the theatre stage lights holding an assault rifle across her lap. She speaks in fluent English and French. Hebrew and Arabic subtitles crawl beneath her face.
“WE WILL EXECUTE A HOSTAGE EVERY HALF HOUR UNLESS ISRAEL OPENS ITS NORTHERN BORDER TO THE RETURNEES, ENTERS A FULL CEASEFIRE IN GAZA, AND ALLOWS PALESTINIAN MIGRATION SOUTH TO THE THIRTY-TWO DEGREE LATITUDINAL LINE. ANY ATTEMPT TO RETAKE THE THEATRE WILL RESULT IN TOTAL DETONATION.
AVOID CARNAGE BY CAPITULATING TO OUR RATIONAL DEMANDS. THE WAR MUST END TONIGHT.”
But Americans do not negotiate with terrorists. Or at least they repeat this to themselves enough times to believe it.
Twelve hours pass. Negotiations go nowhere. Federal agencies arrive. Armored convoys roll through Manhattan. The theatre becomes the center of the world. Every screen on Earth points toward it.
Then, shortly after dawn, the NYPD begins pumping odorless gas into the ventilation system.
Nobody knows who fired first.
Gunshots erupt almost immediately. Flashbangs detonate behind the lobby doors. ERU teams breach through shattered entrances while drones stream thermal footage to command trucks outside. Inside the theatre, the terrorists begin screaming religious chants and revolutionary slogans over one another.
Then come the explosions.
Not one. Many.
The orchestra level disappears in fire. Balcony sections collapse inward. Burning debris rains into the streets below as smoke pours from the rooftop in black pillars visible across the Hudson. By the time the shooting stops, nearly everyone inside is dead. Diplomats. Actors. Lobbyists. UN officials. Wealthy tourists. Terrorists. Hostages. Police. Ashes layered together indiscriminately.
The wars in Gaza, Southern Lebanon, and Northern Israel continue completely unchanged.
Cable news calls it The Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis.
Across much of the Arab world it becomes known instead as The Newyorkgrad Christmas Massacre.
The second deadliest terror attack ever carried out on American soil.
Officials publicly claim all perpetrators died during the assault. That statement is false. Two survive. Years later both quietly acquire Israeli passports under different names.
The attack ushers in a new era inside America: biometric checkpoints, expanded surveillance authorities, mass ideological paranoia, militarized policing, and a population willing to surrender nearly anything for the promise of security.
The theatre is rebuilt within five years.
No one attends opening night without looking for exits.
It all happens amazingly fast and all at once. As though a great deal of preparation and training has gone into it. Women and children are separated as quickly as possible and pushed outside. Soon, diplomats and various d-tier world leaders are being zip-tied, then wrapped in booby-trapped explosives that look like Christmas lights.
There are many screams and protestations at first, then only whimpering and begging to be released. Amidst the vibrant lights and bustling energy of the Millennium Theatre, a hostage crisis unfolds, shattering the illusion of entertainment and plunging the venue into chaos. The assailants, masked with flickering faces and heavily armed, stormed the premises during a sold-out performance, catching both audience members and staff completely off guard. Panic sweeps through the theater as screams pierced the air, and confusion reigned. A diplomat is pistol whipped. A few warning shots go off. The hostages are tied together into bundles. Anyone who speaks is promptly struck in the face.
As the situation escalates, law enforcement swiftly mobilizes. Surrounding the theater and the NYPD is attempting to initiate negotiations with the perpetrators.
A female terrorist with brown hair tied off in a bun; she passes typed demands out the barricaded entrance door. They are then released in a video.
“WE ARE HOLDING OVER 800 INTERNATIONAL HOSTAGES. ALL ADULT MALE UNSTAFFED, POLITICIANS, ELITES, AND VARIOUS CELEBRITIES. In one hour, we will begin executing UN personnel, beginning with European countries, unless the NYPD withdraws completely in a five-block radius. There are explosives attached to the hostages and all over the building. ANY GAS, ANY RAID, WE WILL BLOW EVERYTHING UP.”
Inside, tension hung thick, each passing moment fraught with uncertainty and fear. The hostages, trapped in a nightmare of uncertainty, clung to hope, their fates hanging in the balance. Some that try to make desperate speeches are beaten. Their mouths taped.
Outside, a tense standoff ensued, with ERU teams poised for action, and negotiators work tirelessly to secure the safe release of the hostages. Time seems to stretch endlessly as the world holds its breath, waiting for a resolution to the harrowing ordeal. So many seemingly powerful people taken hostage, so many celebrities. So many people with things to lose.
Amidst the chaos, stories emerged as individuals within the theater huddled together, offering comfort and support to one another in the face of danger. Families anxiously awaited news of their loved ones, their hearts heavy with dread yet buoyed by the glimmer of hope. “They’re communicating in French,” someone whispers. “What do they want,” someone else whispers.
A second communique was put out on video, but a terrorist claiming to be “Anya”. Delivered in English and French with Hebrew and Arabic subtitles:
“WE WILL EXECUTE A HOSTAGE EVERY HALF HOUR UNLESS ISRAEL OPENS ITS NORTHERN BORDER TO THE RETURNEES, ENTERS A FULL CEASEFIRE IN GAZA, AND ALLOWS PALESTINIAN MIGRATION DOWN TO THE 32-DEGREE LATITUDINAL LINE. ANY ATTEMPT TO RETAKE THE THEATRE WILL RESULT IN A DETONATION OF EXPLOSIVES THROUGHOUT.
AVOID CARNAGE BY COPITUALATING TO OUR RATIONAL DEMANDS. THE WAR MUST END TONIGHT!”
But nothing was lost in translation, and Americans do not negotiate with terrorists.
Eventually, after 12 hours of tense but meaningless negotiations, the crisis reaches its bloody conclusion. Through the combined efforts of law enforcement and skilled negotiators, the hostages were not freed, but the theatre of the oppressed, the cosplay with AR15s; this ordeal ended poorly. The NYPD began filling the Theatre with odorless gas.
At some point many shots were exchanged. The counter terrorism raid began. Soon after a series of explosions killed all the hostages and at least twenty of the terrorists. When the gas, dust, ash, and debris settled, the media circus began, but everyone was dead, or mostly dead.
The standoff in Gaza and Northern Israel, the Southern Lebanon Border was utterly unchanged, unaffected.
“Though scars, both physical and emotional, will linger, the resilience of the human spirit prevailed, offering a beacon of hope in the aftermath of such a tragedy.”
The Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis was after 9.11, the second largest terror attack ever carried out on US soil. Who it killed was a veritable who is who of diplomatic personnel and lesser world leaders. It was claimed all the terrorists died, but that is not true at all. Two survived, and both are today Israelite passport holders. In the words of the Western Media, this bloody debacle was called the “Millenium Theatre Hostage Crisis,” but in the papers of the Arab street; “the Newyorkgrad Christmas Massacre.” Terror on U.S. soil over foreign policy decisions being made in the Middle East.
This is the event that would usher in a security state and a period of prolonged fanaticism in America.
“Let me begin by saying: the Jew of Beirut is kind.”
They said this often, and with a strange insistence, as though kindness itself required defense in this city of layered suspicions. If ever anyone accused him of madness, of petty vice, of wandering too freely among the wrong streets and the wrong people, others would answer quickly, almost nervously: No, not him. You are mistaken.
And yet, even in their defense, there lingered a hesitation. For he had arrived not as a simple man arrives, but as one falls from some uncertain height into the waiting hands of a city already burdened by its own past.
His name was Sebastian Adonaev. Though in Beirut, names did not remain singular for long. He was also Abu Yazan, by inheritance of a story half true and half invented. And elsewhere, in colder lands of conflict, he had been called Kawa Zivistan, the blacksmith of winter. Each name clung to him like a fragment of a life insufficiently lived.
He was, by trade, a paramedic. Which is to say a man trained to intervene in the brief and decisive moments between breath and its absence. Such men develop a peculiar disposition, half healer, half intruder, capable of entering any space without invitation, provided suffering resides there.
This, perhaps, explained his presence.
Beirut did not receive him gently, nor did it reject him outright. Instead, it absorbed him, as it absorbs all things, into its contradictions. He walked its streets with an openness that was either admirable or naive, depending on who observed him. He spoke too much, listened too intensely, and gave of himself in ways that made people uneasy.
“They have no roots,” some said of his people. “They drift.”
But if this was true, then Sebastian drifted with intention. He sought not novelty, but belonging, an endeavor far more dangerous.
It was said he flourished quickly. That he suffered just as quickly. That within forty days he had lived through enough transformations to constitute several lifetimes. Whether this was exaggeration or not hardly mattered. In Beirut, myth attaches itself to the living with alarming speed.
No one knew how many Jews remained in Lebanon. Perhaps a handful. Perhaps fewer. But categories persisted even when their subjects vanished, and so he became, almost immediately, a symbol, claimed by none, suspected by all.
When they finally detained him, it was in Chiyah.
He had wandered there without clear purpose, or perhaps with too many purposes to distinguish among them. The streets were dim, the air heavy with that peculiar quiet that precedes confrontation. A patrol, informal, uncertain in its authority yet confident in its necessity, approached him.
They asked questions. He did not answer well.
There are moments when language fails not because words are absent, but because too many meanings compete for expression. Sebastian stood within such a moment, aware that whatever he said would be insufficient.
“Why are you here?” they asked.
It was, in truth, an unanswerable question.
Inside his mind, voices arranged themselves into a tribunal. One urged restraint, another absurd defiance. A third, quieter voice suggested that perhaps this scene had already occurred elsewhere, in another life, under different names.
He tried to locate himself within reality. Failed.
The slap came not as violence, but as punctuation.
And then, abruptly, motion. Confusion resolving into instinct. He moved, whether in resistance or escape, he could not later say. The street opened before him, narrow and uneven, leading nowhere in particular.
He ran.
Behind him, voices. Within him, more voices still. The city itself seemed to observe without intervening, as though this small drama were merely one thread among countless others woven into its fabric.
As he ran, he experienced a curious sensation, not fear exactly, but a displacement. As if he were crossing, not distance, but layers. Each step carried him further from the world he recognized and deeper into one that operated according to unfamiliar laws.
He wondered, briefly, whether such crossings were reversible.
Elsewhere, along the Corniche, another man arrived.
Yousef Bashir chose his hotel with care. Not for comfort, but for its particular deficiencies, privacy born of neglect, security softened by indifference. The city revealed itself differently from such vantage points, less as a spectacle, more as a mechanism.
Years earlier, their paths had intersected under far calmer circumstances. A shared ride. A conversation that began politely and ended somewhere far more consequential.
They had spoken, then, of history. Of land. Of the peculiar persistence of borders drawn by those no longer present to defend them. Each carried within him a narrative both deeply personal and broadly political. Each recognized, in the other, not agreement, but a kind of symmetry.
What emerged between them was not consensus, but a question.
If division had failed so thoroughly, if it had produced only smaller enclosures of conflict, then what alternative could exist? They entertained, cautiously at first, the notion of expansion rather than fragmentation. Not the erasure of identities, but their uneasy coexistence within a broader structure.
It was, perhaps, an idea suited only to the insulated environment in which it was conceived. Or perhaps it required precisely the chaos into which they had now separately ventured.
Time had not resolved their differences. It had, instead, deepened them.
Yet the question remained.
Beirut, indifferent and attentive all at once, continued its slow, inexorable motion.
And somewhere within it, a man ran through the dark, uncertain whether he was escaping danger, or approaching it.
“Let me begin by saying that the Jew of Beirut is kind!”
So, if anyone ever accused this man of madness, hijackings, robbery, or vice, or immoral acts of cavorting with criminals and whores, all would be fast to say, it is not true. That is not this man! And, they would say, “Go throughout our city asking questions because this man came to us at a tough and strange time with a giving of his whole self.” He employed, deployed his whole heart and naked soul and opened his pockets on the streets of Beirut for us to see into him. He was in some ways the finest of his kind, in other ways, a crude foreigner, but he was indeed filled with “old soul” and we saw what he said and did; clearly. Well, he has loveable madness.
They say here, that “the Roots of the Righteous will grow like a cedar in Lebanon” and he did immediately. He flourished, he wilted, and he died three whole times in just forty days for us, to impress us; or almost impress us. Or just to impress upon us that his soul is an old soul, his roots are from here. Or at least next door.
The Jew of Beirut has a name of course and that name is Sebastian Adonaev. His Kunya is “Abu Yazan,” because at some time during the Isis Wars, he took on the name of the illegitimate half-Druze son of his ex-romantic partner Polina Mazaeva. He also has a Kurdish name if you can even believe such robust internationalism: Kawa Zivistan; the blacksmith of winter; from his time serving in the YPG14. A Kurdish militia he served with in Syria. But we trusted and mostly still trust him. Though not completely with marrying our daughters, unless of course, he converts to Islam or Christianity depending which faction he wants to marry into. He is not wealthy or internationally famous to marry a Druze. Even if he were, we would all trust him even less, and kind of frown on those kinds of unions. Those people think they all come back, that makes them a little fancy if you ask around.
As we tried and recalled the speed of it all in an existential moment, he fell out of the sky into our laps and eventually hearts. Yet, this man was coming to know us, in our hardest times since the civil conflict. He sought to know not only about our current dire straits, but our epic past and a possible, yet improbable glorious future! He was not pursuing “unique experiences” instead he pursued a life he did not get to lead, at least not yet. An old saying of Kahil Gibran: “If I was not born Lebanese, I would have pursued it!”
The Jew of Beirut is a paramedic by trade. Which means at least he is good with his hands when it matters the most. Existing somewhere between a doctor and a bandit. That causes him to want to help anyone and everyone all at once, as well as have an eye for certain details. And so, he encountered us too, as a partly trained lawyer and a full-blown poet, a partisan commander of sorts in his left labor movement, a painter and a life lover; a hustler, a lover, a wide talker; in multilingualism so basically already in a sense fully Lebanese!? No, of course not, but he exudes the energy we have in us as a people surely. A laugh in the face of terrible odds, a free life with style.
They say the Jews are a people with no roots, a drifting trickster people. But as his tribe is known for, he tried to make himself valuable. And valuable we would certainly later declare him to be. A real Bonafide “Middle Eastern gentleman;” “one of us.” Though which faction could claim him?
No one knows precisely how many Jews are left in Lebanon. Maybe ten, maybe forty, maybe just one. But they are certainly one of eighteen classified and protected identities. So, all of them are welcome here in some form! If they are not part of a Zionist invader plot. Preferably if they convert to any of the 17 other confessions before marrying anyone. That would be preferred.
They say, “he is writing something about us.” Trying to translate some shall we call it Eastern-Western-Middle Eastern poetry? Something about a “confederation from the Maghreb to the Indus”; talk of a noble mad man.
When they finally arrested the Jew wandering around the working-class Shi’a neighborhood called Chiya he did not know where he was, did not even know what he was. He certainly did not have any “so-called EMT program” in mind at that point.
“A promising idea for a vacation was somewhere with a beach, and they do not hate Americans openly and do not want to immediately kill Jews. A bad idea is a place where just being you makes you a threat to a potentially considerable number of the natives, to several of the population; where being you could get you in trouble. Troubles such as when a citizen patrol stops you and an off-duty cop puts you in handcuffs. And natives are going in pockets for papers.”
“You’re making us look bad!” Yells Yaelle D’Arrigo in his head. Yaelle is his “new Vice President back in the States” and his voice of reason and constraint out here via a portable. Her role as “acting President” while he travels to Lebanon speaks to who he thinks he can trust, and “Sicilian Puerto Rican also Israeli” Yaelle D’Arrigo is stone cold tough, she had been in the service and he mostly trusts her instincts. But she cannot help him now.
They cuff him from the front, which means they don’t really think he’s an actual threat and they go in his pockets and take out his wallet which sort of proves he’s a well-meaning tourist and not an ill meaning spy; since the wallet confirms he’s a paramedic from the city of New York, and an American not an Israeli.
“Is he drunk?” the off-duty cop asks in French.
“I cannot believe you got arrested already,” says Yaelle in his head, “In Chiya of all places. Making our team look terrible!”
“Why are you here?” the off-duty cop asks. A small crowd had formed, “why are you here in Beirut?!”
“You’re making us look bad,” says Yaelle in his head. Then there is another voice inside his head, where it comes from and who it speaks for no one knows yet:
“If you want to save Yaelle’s life you have to ROAR! KUJUCHAGULIA!and throw this law man across the very pavement; and beat his fucking ass!” Then: “do something really extra fucking crazy so they have to tie you to a chair and disregard you, long enough to escape”, says a voice in his head.
“That is if you want Yaelle to live, if you do not care about the lives of your friends then just go quietly. They are gonna throw little Karessa of a plane with no parachute and splatter her on Martyr Square.” And then you fight your way through the unbreathing gloom!
In his head he wonders if everyone here is just an actor, gathered at dusk, watching him in hand cuffs. He is in one of those sensitivity training villages like in Jordan filled with actors playing Arab civilians. A teaching movement. The off-duty cop slaps him, “Why are you knocking on people’s doors man!”
In Chiya, Beirut the Shiite part of town. He sees a mental of the CIA pushing his little Asian girlfriend Karessa Abe out a plane cargo for and she explodes on the ground of Martyr Square like a red pasta coconut. Of course he does not want anything to happen to his friends.
He yells” “! KUJICHAGULIA!” And throws all his weight at the off-duty copper knocking them both on the ground then he takes off running down the poorly paved street, unlit boulevard howling into the night.
“You’re definitely making us look bad!” shouts big breasted Yaelle in his head.
“Why are you going to Beirut!” Karessa cried the night he left. She begged him not to go. She knew it was potentially a one-way trip. As he runs through the Beirut night, still in cuffs down the unlit streets of Chiya, all he can think about, all he can picture is that there are different layers to the world, and he is crossing over into an uncharted realm. As if, as if, in this world of layers you could take a deep breath, and drop yourself into a subverted reality, a whole other plane of being. And in the movement, in the passing through to the other side if you retained your perspective, you could learn something, even teach something to people that see and live in only one reality of their own creation. And it was if, almost if, you could look into the very eyes of G-d.
***
Yousef Bashir arrives in Beirut and checks into the seedy, but not ever dirty Lancaster Hotel in Raouche, Beirut right on the Corniche.
Why did he pick that hotel; it has good sized bathtubs, a working generator, tubs with warm water and truly minimal security. No working lobby or hall cameras. And it is close to the 3 camps where they will “liberate”, or, “open up” first.
Back in 2013 Sebastian gave a lift to Yousef Bashir in a white Honda civic. It was a small courtesy but also a chance to engage. It was fall and the two of them were in graduate school. Yousef, to author the greatest defense of Palestinian statehood so far written as essay, pamphlet, and film, and Sebastian to redeem Zionism by shedding its ethnic particularism and focusing on its tactics applied to wider humanity. Yousef was shot in the chest as a boy by the IDF, saved at Hadassa Hospital and went to Seeds of Peace Summer programs, but you will never forget who shot you in the chest. Sebastian had discovered a Jewish identity through the Holocaust and had later traveled to Palestine and Israel 5 times, the second one to work on a Palestinian Ambulance, the fifth time to be arrested and deported for having too many Arab friends.
When they met at Brandeis, it was neither the first rodeo, small talking, and big plotting with the imagined enemy. Yousef considered Sebastian incredibly unique in that he despised the Israeli Oligarchy with the same venom as Bashir despised the occupation, but both arrived in the end at a plan.
It was not big enough to cut up Palestine, hardly bigger than 2 hours across and 8 top to bottom. There was no room to divide a single Dunham. They instead should look across the region and question the validity of any of the borders. Was not Jordan 70% Palestinian, therefore also Palestine? Was Egypt Unable to part with Sinai? Were Lebanon and Syria still whole states? Why not then have all of them as one Confederation; that was all Grad school taught either of them.
An old Palestinian saying, “Patience in a catastrophe. If someone displaces you. Pushes all your people off their lands. Ruins your homeland and renames it in a foreign script. Coverts olive fields into a citadel of war. Put your people in camps and cages. Then shoots you in the chest like a child. You never forgive and you never forget them, how much you hate them, even if they put your ass back together from bones and ash. You wait. Wait nine generations if you must. Then you murder their child in front of them. You make them fear you more than they have the will to cling to your soil. As long as that all takes.”
“Are you talking about my people or your people,” Sebastian once asked him.
“I am talking about my people,” Bashir replies.
“But it takes more than two people to dance in a circle.”
Treatise on the Formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation
بحث في إنشاء كونفدرالية الشرق الأوسط
Preamble
Arabs, Persians (Iranians), Kurds (including Kurmanji, Sorani, and Zaza speakers), Turks, Azeris, Assyrians (Syriacs, Chaldeans, Arameans), Armenians, Circassians, Chechens, Druze, Yazidis, Bedouins, Berbers, Copts, Samaritans, Palestinians, Jews (Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Beta Israel, Karaite), Maronites, Lebanese, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Baháʼís, Alawites, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Turkmens, Baluch, Pashtuns, Lurs, Georgians, Greeks, Roma, Tatars, Shabaks, Mhallami, Dom, Nubians, Fang, Armenians of Cilicia and Anatolia, Kurds of Yazidi and Shafi’i traditions, Assyrian Christians of Nineveh Plain and Tur Abdin, Arab Christians (Melkite, Orthodox, Latin, Maronite), Samaritans of Nablus, Druze of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, Circassian tribes of the Levant, Chechen communities in Jordan and Syria, Jews of Yemenite, Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian origin, Baháʼí communities from Iran, Lurs of western Iran, Qashqai and other nomadic tribes of Iran, Baluch of southeastern Iran and Pakistan, Turkmen of Iraq and Syria, Afro-Arabs along the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt, various Bedouin tribes across the Arabian Desert, Aramaic-speaking communities in Syria and Iraq, Mhallami of Turkey and Lebanon, Dom and Romani groups scattered across the Levant, Nubians of southern Egypt and northern Sudan, and smaller scattered minorities such as the Talysh, Tats, Kurds of Kermanshah, Guran, and Feyli, Pontic Greeks, Assyrian Catholics, Armenian Catholics, and other historical or nearly extinct groups across Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf States, and the Caucasus region.
None of us needs to be pro-peace on essentially unjust terms. We are pro-survival. Pro-stability. Pro-living our lives with dignity. We are invested in the possibility that the birth of the Confederation will stop the flow of blood throughout our lands. We have all been taught an endless amount of mythology, based on extraordinarily little tangible evidence. It suggests that what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates, and what occurred down the Nile, was “progress”. It suggests civilization, and later religion, and even later science, all emanate from our peoples and our lands. Perhaps some of that is valid lore, but today in 2025, we are stuck in a period of perpetual war, state collapse, revolution, and widespread violence accelerated by foreign brokered weapons and aid.
Our many tribes, clans, confessional sects, our many peoples, are people who remember old ways and old customs back thousands of years. Peoples rooted in venerable traditions and lived religions. People who descend from the bloodlines of prophets, visionaries, and visceral authors of the word of God. With our stiff necks and incredible stubbornness to ever relinquish our sense of identity or core beliefs. We all live with memories and tribulations going back several thousand years. But atrocities are escalating, violence is accelerating, and we have gone from civilizational greatness to utter chaos, war, and genocidal practices.
It is not in our interests to keep fighting even if we have no will to make immediate peace. For we have no ability, or perhaps, actual willingness to completely destroy each other. But that assumption weakens each passing year. There have been atrocities in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. There has been over a hundred years of continuous regional war. Between us and outsiders, between us and ourselves. Perhaps were are so wildy diverse as a region it is hard to accept who is ‘our people’, who is ‘a stranger’. Who is of the book, who is of the land, who has always been here, and who migrates, was removed, or came back. We must now find a completely new way to live on our wildly different terms and conditions. For thousands of years, our peoples, very different peoples, gathered at the crossroads of the world. Or were born here in the shifting sands of trade, or warfare, and of revelation. We all traded, we all intermarried, we have all made shifting alliances. We have raided, we have fled, we waged great and small wars. We conquered, converted, pillaged, assimilated, massacred, and made a total fitna of these lands. We have shared blood, overlapped our laguages, prayed one way then prayed another. But none of our differing peoples have killed in the numbers we now kill with weapons from outside our sphere. Weapons, technology, and funding that we have been granted by the great powers, who once sought to control our holy sites, now who seek our oil, our gas, and persue raw hegemony.
This is a treatise co-written by the People of the Book, but also those who came before these books, and after those books, and those who never believed in a religion at all. It is pieced together and translated differently by the Zoroastrians, and the Judeans; by the Persians, by Arabs, and Phoenicians, by the Kurds; by the Palestinians living as citizens in exile or in camps as refugees. By Assyrians and Druze, by Shi’a, by Sunni, by Orthodox and Latin Christians. By Yemenites, Chechens, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, Sunni and Shi’a Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrian Arabs, Alawites, and Georgians as well. All who wish to see lasting peace, and if not peace, a separation of belligerents, a tempering of state violence, the irons heels of dictators, and a long-term ceasefire. Where the region may trade, heal, and develop ourselves. If not peace, if not better understanding, then trade and normality. Civility in wildly diverse societies. All the people in our region have suffered enough. To survive the wars of the last four thousand years, to stop the wars of tomorrow from occurring: “Enough! Ceasefire.” But that must be a building block to confederation; courts, trade agreements, transnational civil service, and collective defense, not dictated or dominated by the foreign policy of the meddling great powers. We must build our long-needed confidence apart. Let us separate into our respective camps and return to our ancestral lands or be in those lands where we are welcomed. Let us confederate and forever defeat the meddling of outside nations that speak of “peace” but trade in arms, and reduce us to all barbarism!” These authors and practitioners of a fourth track diplomacy call for an end to false, wasteful ideas of Western or Eastern peace. An end to all outside invasions. If we cannot pray in the same ways or all speak the same languages, this is no actual impediment to declaring HOLLIS! HUDNA! From our many flags, let us become a Middle East Confederation from the Western Maghreb to the Indus River.
A Regional Framework Defined
The Middle East is a transcontinental region located at the junction of Western Asia and northeastern Africa, generally encompassing the countries that lie between the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. Geographically, it typically includes Western Asian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Palestine, as well as parts of North Africa, primarily Egypt. Some broader definitions also incorporate Turkey and Iran due to cultural, historical, and geopolitical ties. The region is characterized by its strategic position connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, its arid and semi-arid climates, and its abundance of natural resources, particularly oil and gas reserves, which have made it central to global economic and political affairs.
A broader definition of the Middle East extends beyond the traditional core of Western Asia and northeastern Africa to include Turkey, the South Caucasus states of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the countries of the Maghreb in North Africa—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. This expanded conceptualization reflects not only geographical proximity but also historical, cultural, and political connections, including shared experiences of Ottoman and colonial influence, Islamic heritage, and trade networks linking North Africa, the Levant, and the Near East. Under this definition, the Middle East becomes a strategically and culturally diverse region bridging three continents, encompassing a wider array of climates, ethnicities, languages, and religious traditions, and highlighting the interwoven nature of geopolitical, economic, and social dynamics across its extended territory.
If we divide the region into varying confessional or alliance blocks we arrive at:
The Maghreb states (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunesia, Morocco, Mauratnaia)
Stateless Kurds (in Turkey, Syria, Iran, & Iraq)
Middle Eastern Christians in varying sects,
Turkey
Israel
In the Middle of what, East of who?
The Ziggurats of the Neolithic age tell a story. Civilization began with the creation of castes and the centralization of power into early state systems. The cradle of all civilization began with specializations of labor, chaining early humanity to useful trades, and the conscription of worker slaves. The appointment of Kings. It began with tributes to unseen Gods, all-powerful oligarchs, and eventually a cast of priests to preside over mythology, then later religions, and later still over since, and this all served one thing: to prevent us from rebellion. The unnatural subjugation of all humanity into productive labor is not a unique story to Mesopotamia. This book is not about insurrection or economic development. It is not a rejection of ethnic identity or the work of atheists. What is clear: the status quo is dangerous to states and people inside them.
It is chaotic uncertainty at best. The entire Middle East is awash in an endless war and has experienced every measure of barbaric atrocity. This state of modern warfare has proceeded without any actual peace since 1920, but the bloody chaos existed a long time before that. In perpetuity for as long as we have known.
Every nation is highly vulnerable; every nation is perhaps also complicit in the killing fields today. The Western powers and Eastern powers have used us. They have handed us sophisticated weapons to murder each other in varying combinations while the great transnational corporations harvest the energy supplies in the ground. This has nothing to do with civilizational clashes or the competing interpretations of the Abrahamic religion. That is just the framework for our terrifying division, but not the cause of it. The Modern Middle East must cast off its own oligarchy, jail its own collaborators, we must cast off foreign domination, cast off ethnic particularism, and embrace peace on its own terms.
It is not fully true that the tinderbox of the dying Ottoman Empire erupted in Palestine or can be cured from there. Nor can Turkey revive it. Or can Iran dictcate its Shi’a rivalist terms. Nor is it true that the roads to Jerusalem from Cairo, Damascus, Karbala, Najaf, Mecca, Medina, and Tehran are all guarded by the now-flailing American empire. The mulipolar world of rising China and reviving Russia will treat the region in a different, but not necessarily better way.
Not all our original sins of the region began with the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Zionists, with meddling foreigners, and with our oil. Long before the Crusaders attacked from the West and the Mongols came from the East; we fought wars of the Ziggurats. We fought wars of city states. We fought wars against Romans. We fought wars between Sunni and Shi’a. We fought wars between rival Caliphs. We fought wars against unbelievers and true believers of esoteric sects.
The truth is that any so-called peace process is little more than a short-term buy-off if there is no structural framework to actually exist together. Allowing the hegemonic powers (American, the EU, China, and Russia) more time to take, to utilize what lies under our sands until it all runs out, and it will run out in the next several hundred years. We cannot and should not seek to perpetuate war on Israel; we should all be seeking to decouple the Jewish state from the foreign policy goals of the West. But also the Muslm states that are Western or Eastern semi-peripheral states; such as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. We should take accountability for what we have done to and with Palestinians as a whole, both as Israeli occupiers and Arab state hosts. We should validate the Kurdish question and acknowledge the rights of 40 million stateless people, who have been massacred, particularly in Iraq and Turkey. We should acknowledge that the Sunni-Shi’a cold war is also quite violent and divisive to the region. We should prevent starvation, human rights violations, and genocide in Palestine, but also in Syria,Yemen,.and Sudan (which is not part of the Middle East but deeply affected by it). In short, we must be accountable for what is the violence inflicted by colonialism/ neocolonialism, and what is the violence we are self-inflicting. Violence baked into the fabric of our poltical consciousness as a region. In Islam, hypocrisy is a high level of contradictory sin; we must take stock of where the fault lies with foreign meddling and where it lies with our own leaders’ violent impulses and failed policies. Yet, the treatise does not reject states. But presupposes they are violent, inefficient, repressive, and prone to Oligarchic capture.
There are many failures of the modern state system. Innumerous failures and predations to indict. But these are the boundaries were working with, the confines of power we are conglamorating if this scheme might proceed, it is a balance of nationalism, an alliance of regional geographies, and has to balance the authoritarian nature of states and armies, with the civil society and constitutional rights entitlements of citizens organized into cantons.
What is a state in the Modern Middle East?
With the exceptions of Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Iran (because they have certain historical permanence or at least longer periods of imagined identity); most states are modern inventions of Sykes-Picciot and nationalisms of convenience. Borders drawn up by foreign powers then codified in over 125 years of basically continuous warfare.
The Ottoman Turkish genocide of the Armenians, carried out by Kurds. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine carried out by Israelis. The Iraqi genocide of the Kurds carried by Saddam’s forces. The war between Iraq and Iran. The ISIS genocide on the Yazidis.
The Yemen civil war, the Lebanese Civil War, the Syrian Civil War, the Libyan Civil War.
The most deadly engagements fought between Jews and Arabs, Christian Lebanese and Muslim Lebanese, Shi’a Iran against Sunni and Shi’a Iraq, the war between Turks and Kurds, the modern conflagrations in Algeria, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The spill over of these wars, into Sudan and Afghanistan.
What is Federalism is the Modern Middle East?
It is to allow states greater regional autonomy in their governance by allowing for sub-unit/provincial governments where federal states can have their own civil administration, state laws, and state self-defense in the form of national guards.
In the Middle Eastern context, federalism refers to a system in which power is divided between a central government and regional authorities, such as provinces, emirates, or autonomous territories. Unlike in Western democracies, where federalism often evolves from voluntary union or constitutional design, in the Middle East it tends to emerge as a conflict-resolution tool—a way to manage deep sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions within states that were often shaped by colonial borders rather than shared identity. Federalism in this region is therefore less about political philosophy and more about pragmatic power-sharing in fragile or post-conflict societies.
Historically, most Middle Eastern states developed under highly centralized, often authoritarian governments that concentrated power in the capital. This structure marginalized peripheral regions and minority groups, fueling recurring tensions. When these centralized states fractured—through wars, revolutions, or foreign interventions—federalism was sometimes proposed as a way to preserve unity while granting autonomy. The most prominent example is Iraq, which adopted a federal constitution after 2003 that recognized the Kurdistan Regional Government as an autonomous entity within a single Iraqi state. This arrangement sought to balance power among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, though it remains contentious. Another example is the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates that maintains stability through monarchical power-sharing rather than democracy—making it a rare case of successful, non-democratic federalism. Proposals for federal systems have also appeared in Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where decentralization has been discussed as a means to end prolonged civil wars, though these plans have yet to take hold.
Despite its appeal as a peace mechanism, federalism in the Middle East faces major obstacles. Deep sectarian mistrust, weak institutions, and the enduring culture of centralized authority make it difficult to implement effectively. Many political elites fear that federalism will lead to partition, while external powers—such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—often manipulate internal divisions for their own regional agendas. As a result, federalism in the region is frequently perceived as foreign-imposed or a prelude to fragmentation rather than a step toward stable governance.
In essence, Middle Eastern federalism is less an ideological system than a pragmatic survival strategy. It seeks to balance competing identities and distribute power in states where national unity is fragile. While in theory it could promote local governance, accountability, and reduced conflict over resources, in practice it remains a contested and unstable experiment—a reflection of the region’s complex interplay between unity, autonomy, and enduring historical divisions.
What are Cantons?
A means to organize a more localized civil administration in highly diverse societies with a tendency to wage protracted civil wars. Which have come out of the many wars but do not need to wait for a war to form structures. In fact it is more desirable for the existing states to undertake federalism, then to dissolve into further warfare.
Cantons do not have to geographic they can also be communal; the main benefit of canton level sub-organization to the the federalized state is to allow community organization on civil society lines, allow for local decision making on community life, and allow peoples of common affinity to organize their lives on those traditions and values.
For instance, in Lebanon, the idea of cantonization became prominent during the 1975–1990 civil war, when the country effectively split into Christian, Muslim, and Druze-controlled territories. Although the Taif Agreement later re-centralized the state, Lebanon still operates through an informal sectarian power-sharing system that resembles a confessional version of cantonal autonomy. In Syria, after the 2011 uprising, the country fragmented into several zones of control: Kurdish self-governed areas in the north and northeast (often described as “cantons” by their organizers), Assad regime territory, and opposition or Islamist enclaves. The Kurdish-led administration explicitly used the term “cantons” to describe regions like Afrin, Kobane, and Jazira, which were united under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)—a model inspired by decentralized and participatory governance rather than ethnic nationalism.
In Iraq, the term is less commonly used, but the reality is similar: the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Shi’a and Sunni-dominated provinces function as quasi-cantons within a weak federal framework. Similarly, in Yemen and Libya, ongoing wars have produced competing governments and territorial zones—effectively cantonized states divided by militia control, tribal loyalty, and external patronage.
Thus, in the Middle East, “cantons” are rarely peaceful administrative entities. They are instead manifestations of state disintegration or attempts to manage diversity through localized autonomy. While some scholars and diplomats propose cantonization as a conflict-resolution mechanism—for example, suggesting a canton-based solution for Syria, Yemen, or Palestine—risks entrenching division, legitimizing warlords, and formalizing partition. In essence, Middle Eastern cantons represent a hybrid between governance and survival, where local communities govern themselves amid the collapse or weakness of the central state.
Middle East (core countries – 20)
MASHRIQ
BILAD AL-SHAM (Egypt & Levant)
Egypt
Lebanon
Syria
Israel
Palestine
Jordan
BILAD AL-RAFIDAIN WA FARIS
Iran
Iraq
KHALIJ (Gulf States)
Bahrain
Kuwait
Oman
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
United Arab Emirates
Yemen
MAGHREB (Northwest Africa)
Libya
Algeria
Tunisia
Morocco
Mauritania
Total (core Middle East): 20 states
Middle East Semi-Peripheral
Turkey
Iran
Egypt
Israel
Saudi Arabia
Middle East Peripheral
Cyprus
Azerbaijan
Georgia
Armenia
Sudan
Afghanistan
Middle East Non-State Cantons
Kurdistan-Iraq (KRG-Bashur)
Kurdistan-Syria (Rojava)
Houthi Territories-Yemen
Palestine Gaza
Palestine West Bank
Druze in Syria
Hezbollah in Lebanon
= 27 countries total
Egypt, Jordan, and briefly the PLO were all bought off to make an awkward peace with Israel with American development aid dollars. In recent years, the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and, one day soon, Saudi Arabia most likely are paid to recognize Israel because the Americans and Europeans use Israel in Palestine as a forward operating base.
They use it as a litmus test of their hegemony. Just as the Russians used Syria until its total collapse and still use Iran in some agreed to forms. The Iranians and Israelis have their specific confessional interests, and of course, they have their own regional goals; but without external arms and subsidies, they could not sustain such aggressive posturing and mount such an adventuristic foreign policy. The Israeli military machine is funded by the United States, and the Iranian one (and the Assad regime in Syria before it collapsed) partially by Russia and China, though to the same effect: perpetuating adventuristic and militant regional foreign policy.
The capital inputs for development or military aid allow the Saudi Arabian and UAE to sustain devastating intervention in Yemen. They subsidize Israeli hyper-militarization and the Palestinian occupation, but they also subsidize Hezbollah, Hamas, and Shiite militia forces. It is hard to imagine such horrific localized wars without the foreign powers subsidizing them.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem/Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by the leftist Palestinians and trained to reorganize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these proxies.
Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is actually over 60-70% Palestinian, and without American and Israeli support, could not exist as a country.
So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the linchpin of regional peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say, the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews, as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
Palestine is an open wound. It is with the latest round of fighting in Gaza evidently a genocide. Over 65,000 people have died so far. It shall be remembered to all that over 4 million have died in Sudan, so far. Over 630,000 were killed in the Syrian Civil War (mostly by the Russian-backed Assad regime), and the war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Houthis has led to the deaths of over 377,000 people, that we know of.
It is a wild deception that the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), Daesh, has its origins in any normally accepted version of Islam. Its goals were allegedly divinely inspired in prophecy. Its defeat will be no means bring an end to this type of Wahabi Salafist insurgency, exported in petro-dollars from the Gulf. ISIS was an entity controlled by, supplied by, and supported by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan’s intelligence services. That is one theory, another that was Ba’athist intelligence and varying Al Qaeda offshoots, using messianic fervor and rhetoric. If not for the Coalition forces, particularly the US, the French, the British, the Kurdish SDF, Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iraqi PMF, they very well might have conquered the entire Middle East. How close they came is understood only by those who were there on the ground.
It is time now for the coming generation of the Middle East to take steps to prevent the interventions of all types of foreign power, the meddling of the great powers, as well as to contain the regressive impulses of our varying theocracies. In short, the road to an actual long-lasting peace is not through the conquest of states, the dispersion of the Jews yet again, or doubling down on depper religious zeal and fundamentalisms!
The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units, but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders, particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO-aligned neocrusaders, Russian-aligned neocrusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions, and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil. The Muslim world is obsessively fixated on Palestine because it is an open wound, it is a blatant ongoing human rights violation, a violent occupation, and because it instills a crusader-like, colonial force in our midst that is not fully Western, but also not fully Middle Eastern. As long as Israel has no alignment in culture, trade, and security, it will remain a destabilizing entity. One that, in any projection of isolation, resistance, demographic shift, BDS, international divestment/ shaming, has 200 nuclear missiles. Its Jewish population in religious identity and political imagination is indigenous to the Middle East. Removing it, secularizing it, demilitarizing it, or refusing to deal with it is political imagination. The highest level of human rights and civil rights safeguards one can deliver to Palestinians is an Israel and Palestine fully integrated into the region. The Western media and the Muslim streets obsessively focuses on Palestine because:
It is an open wound with ongoing human rights violations that antagoize and grieve the very heart and soul of the region.
(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish, are at least half European or Slavic in roots and appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi), so aesthetically it triggers the latent crusader imagination. Were their no real and imagined Arab enemy the Jews might fight yet another civil war for the soul of thier state. It is deeply baked into Chrisitian theology the Jews must gather again in Israel before their Christian messiah returns. The war in Palestine-Israel is thus deeply and subconsciously understood by Western minds as theological and geostrategic.
(b) Israel is, without a single doubt, is a manifestation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a military colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. There is not a realistic scenario where the Jews will lose a military confrontation. They will not pack up and leave. There is a highly realistic scenario they will lose lose a demographic one. The birthrates of Palestinians already place them above 20% of Israeli passport holders.
It cannot be denied that both the West and East have not been short on Muslim proxy clients. Pahlavi Iran until 1979. The U.S. bases in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Turkey. Russia once heavily invested in Egypt until it went to America, and also Syria until the Assad regime fell in 2024.
The abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia, as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege, of 8-9 million Israelites, 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders, culminating in the holocaust, the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel, decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by the Romans 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also know a great deal about enduring persecutions. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics developed adjacent to the Jews. Particularly, a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. A feeling of a need for a vigilant ethno state. The world’s oldest groups of Christians, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites, have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward maldevelopment: USA-NATO, the Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified. Broken into federal units within exisitg states, then administered by canton level governance.
Lebanon- 4 cantons
Sunni
Shi’a
Christian
Druze
Palestine-Israel- 2 cantons
Judean
Palestinian
Jordan-2 cantons
Hashimite
Palestinian
Syria- 4 cantons
Kurdish (SDF)
Sunni Arab
Alawite
Druze
Iraq- 3 cantons
Shi’a Arab
Sunni Arab
Kurdish (PUK/KDP)
Iran- 5 cantons
Shi’a Persian
Azeri
Kurdish
Baloch
Lur
Second Phase
Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan regions.
Gulf States & Saudi Arabia.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 200 years old. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years, and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
Realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned, restore the Palestinians and also the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder, and they, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye, will have to be managed one by one. The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to a hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.
We, the peoples of the Middle East, comprising all peoples listed above and all indigenous communities acknowledge the history of millennia-long coexistence, conflict, trade, and cultural exchange. The region has endured cycles of war, conquest, displacement, and foreign interference. It is the imperative of survival, dignity, and justice that motivates this treatise.
Chapter I: Principles of Survival and Peace
Principle of Non-Annihilation: No party possesses absolute capacity to destroy another; hence, the continuation of conflict is neither inevitable nor desirable.
Principle of Diverse Society: Peoples must establish arrangements permitting ethically and religiously divergent communities to coexist while preserving autonomy, identity, and historical heritage.
Ceasefire Imperative: Immediate cessation of hostilities is mandatory. External actors benefiting from ongoing conflict must be neutralized in policy and practice.
Chapter II: Recognition of Indigenous Sovereignty
All peoples retain sovereignty over ancestral lands or lands where they are received. Their civil, poltical, economic, culturalm and social human rights will be affirmed in the formation of governance cantons in federalized states.
Political and territorial arrangements must respect cultural, ethnic, and religious distinctions.
State boundaries will be altered to reflect demographic realities and avoid further armed conflicts.
State governance will be remodaled to a Federal system of sub units called Cantons, inside Federalized States, bound in a Confederation.
Historical grievances shall not preclude functional coexistence; legal recognition of past injustices shall guide reconciliation mechanisms.
Chapter III: Formation of the Middle Eastern Confederation
Structure: The Confederation shall comprise autonomous cantons existing inside the state frameworks, each preserving ethnic, linguistic, and religious governance within a shared federal framework.
A Federal structure for existing states will be established on regional or confessional lines to propagate the terms of the Confederation.
Cantons can form based on shared ethnicity, religion, or logical geography
Cantons have a civil administration and a series of democratic term based councils that sent delegates to a Federal State level Assembly.
Like an American state with a national guard and its own constitution and taxation powers.
The elected leadership of several cantons form a Federal State Assemby of a geographic unit of the country (nation state).
The nation State will have a unicameral Congress/Parliment/Majalis which in turn elects Confederation level Reprentatives (like representatives to the EU).
The Confederation is a voluntary association of existing states that share a framework of free travel, free trade, triparte taxation, a Confederation wide civil service, and miliary security cooperation agreements.
A referendum of cantons can asl to withdraw from the Confderation obligations
The target goal is ten years to integrate all the miliary forces
Each State wiil adopt a Federal framework transferring certain civil administration and taxation responsibilities to a Canton Administation.
One or several Cantons will comprise a Federal unit of an existing State.
Each State will adopt constitutional amendments enshrining a civil code of the cantons, the availability to seek justice under that code or religious courts
Cantons can propagate a Modal Civic Code with variations for local religious law
Human rights law shall supersede all local or religious law where conflict arises.
Human rights law shall be derived from existing Human right treaties.
Citizens retain the right to relocate between cantons or exit the Confederation entirely by a popular vote.
Cantonal legislation may govern internal religious matters provided compliance with federal legal standards.
A unified supreme judiciary shall arbitrate disputes between cantons and states.
Chapter IV: Governance and Civil Service
Rotational Leadership: Leadership positions across cantons shall rotate to ensure equitable representation.
Civil Institutions: Shared civil services shall administer education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Defense and Security:
A coordinated defense council shall maintain sovereignty and internal stability.
Military and police forces shall operate under confederal oversight while respecting cantonal autonomy.
No foreign powers will be allowed miltarya bases in the region.
The Confederation will draft an collectively maintain a unified multinational defense force.
Chapter V: Engagement with External Powers
The Confederation shall maintain non-alignment with foreign powers.
No external power shall dictate domestic policy, supply advanced weaponry, or manipulate regional conflicts.
Strategic self-reliance shall be developed in energy, defense, and civil administration.
Chapter VI: Strategic Objectives
Arrest cycles of conflict across the region through structured separation and collaboration.
Priorities include pacficiaiton of protradcted conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Libya, & Israel-Palestine
Secure survival and autonomy of all indigenous peoples.
Establish a legally binding and historically informed framework for peace and cooperation through a regiona Human Rights Court.
Prepare for post-conflict sustainability: energy, economic stability, and civil resilience.
Chapter VII: Immediate Measures
Initiate a region-wide ceasefire framework within six months.
Convene representatives from all states, militai, cantons, and indigenous communities to formalize governance structures.
Draft a constitution codifying rights, responsibilities, and federal oversight.
Establish mechanisms for dispute resolution and conflict prevention.
FRAMEWORK This treatise is not a theoretical abstraction. It is a practical, legally grounded roadmap for survival, dignity, and justice in the Middle East. It acknowledges history, respects diversity, and insists on immediate action. The formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation is the sole viable mechanism to halt ongoing cycles of destruction and secure the future of its peoples.
A confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development, intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Arabs, Persian, Judeans and all of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”
The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that, through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.
There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”
Between October 7th, 2023, and the January 2025 ceasefire the Palestinians killed around 1,700 Israelis, the Israelis killed around 75,000 Palestinians (and counting) and over 5,000 Lebanese. Some portions had weapons, and many did not.
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael3which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna4. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered even openly said in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah5 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary6. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian7) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives8. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians9. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.
Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
Then in under two years the Jewish State killed over 70,000 Palestinians in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7th of 1,200 Israelis.
Hamas, and the ideas behind them, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood, must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).
The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is an ever-narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”
“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”
By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nation. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief.
The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders; particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO aligned crusaders, Russian aligned crusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil.
The academia, the media, and the West obsessively have focused on Palestine, because:
(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish are at least half European or Slavic in appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi) so aesthetically it triggers the latent crusader imagination.
(b) Israel is without a single doubt a manipulation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. But while accepting or refuting that statement; it cannot be denied that so was Pahlavi Iran until 1979. So has been Jordan and Egypt, and the abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia; as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege; of 8-9 million Israelites: 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders culminating in the holocaust; the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by Romans 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also knows a great deal about enduring persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics like the Jews. Particularly a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. The world’s oldest groups of Christians; the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.
Thus, an unusual realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned restore the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder and they; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye will be managed one by one.
The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward Maldevelopment: USA-NATO, Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Türkiye, Armenia, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Kashmir.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 100 years. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem to Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by Palestinians and trained to organize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these Proxies. Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is over 60-70% Palestinian and without American and Israeli support could not exist as a country.
So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the lynchpin of peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
“Essentially speaking we are talking about a confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Judeans, Persians, Arabs of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”
The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.
There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”
Between October 7th, 2023, and the January 2025 ceasefire the Palestinians killed around 1,700 Israelis, the Israelis killed around 75,000 Palestinians (and counting) and over 5,000 Lebanese. Some portions had weapons, and many did not.
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael3which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna4. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered even openly said in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah5 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary6. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian7) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives8. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians9. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.
Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
Then in under a year the Jewish State killed over 75,000 Palestinians in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7th of 1,200 Israelis.
Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).
The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is an ever-narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”
“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”
By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nation. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief.
“We are going to use thin, durable, and yet fully understandable code.” We are going to use metaphors inside the allegories. We will fight on the low roads and high roads and from the mountains. We will not contradict myths or religious tenets; we will not offer science as a new kind of positivist God. “We call on all patriots to mount a defense of our realm. The barbarians are not just inside the gates; they have taken over most of our states and their governments.”
ACT I — “NEWYORKGRAD: The Man Who Returned Without Returning” (3-page dark literary summary)
Newyorkgrad, winter bleeding into a tired spring, 2018.
Sebastian Adonaev arrives at the Bulgarian Tavern like a man returning not from a journey, but from the inside of a wound that never closed. The doors shut behind him as if sealing a cell. Outside is America. Inside is something older—exile disguised as warmth.
He is already half-broken when he enters: a veteran of forgotten wars in Rojava and Iraq, a soldier of collapsing causes, a man stitched together from foreign dust and blood that is not entirely his own. His mind does not behave like a mind anymore. It behaves like a battlefield that keeps replaying its last minutes.
He remembers everything in fragments.
Missile strikes dissolving his column. A bunker filled with piss, shit, and other men’s dying. A commander named Jansher disappearing into a drone’s silence. A birthday spent in a Kurdish bathhouse that could not wash anything clean.
Even pleasure there had felt like contamination.
When he returned through the long bureaucratic tunnel of war logistics—Baghdad, Cairo, turbulence over oceans, borderless transit through systems that do not care who survives—he arrived in New York as something legally alive but internally unfinished. A body with no country left to justify it.
Now he moves through the city like a man surveilled by invisible consequences. Subway cars full of ordinary people feel like an insult. He thinks he is followed, or maybe he is simply unable to stop following himself. Time is unstable: March, April, or something after time stopped agreeing with him.
He has no phone. He has no stable past. He may have an assault charge waiting somewhere like a patient predator.
The only place he trusts is the Bulgarian Tavern on Ludlow Street—half refuge, half trap. Four exits. One entrance. A geometry of escape that never feels real.
Inside waits Maria Silverstova.
She is new, or appears new each time he sees her: a shot girl with a body shaped like commerce and survival. She sells vodka in measured plastic bullets, but her gaze is not for sale. She claims Moscow but belongs to no clean geography. A Slavic impersonation of multiple stolen histories.
She recognizes him before he recognizes her.
They speak in broken familiarity.
He asks for Medved. She tells him Medved is looking for him. She tells him everyone is looking for everyone in this city.
Her tone is half mockery, half diagnosis.
Sebastian tries to anchor himself in ideology—his time with the YPG, the Kurdish militia, the strange international war where revolution, imperialism, and survival blurred into one continuous excuse for violence. He insists they were building something, defending something, planting something in soil that refused permanence.
Maria listens like a court recorder for the condemned.
She asks him what it mattered.
He answers like a man still inside gunfire:
It mattered because it was real.
But even as he speaks, he knows it is not enough.
Because what returns from war is not conviction—it is residue. And residue cannot argue.
Maria dismantles him gently, clinically. She names what he is:
No car. No property. No stability. No function beyond memory.
A soldier without a war, which is worse than losing.
Sebastian reaches for meaning and finds only exhaustion. He reaches for love and finds absence shaped like a woman named Goldy—someone who once wrote him daily through war, anchoring him with words that may or may not have survived reality.
Now she is gone into a different life: Midtown, stage lights, a new patron, a new geometry of survival that excludes him.
Medved arrives like an interruption dressed as friendship. A gangster, a witness, a man who speaks without illusion. He embraces Sebastian too hard, like someone trying to confirm he is still physically present.
Medved reduces everything to structure:
The war meant nothing. The woman is gone. The state is watching. The past is not returning in the way Sebastian expects.
Sebastian resists.
He insists on Goldy. On return. On unfinished obligations of love that behave like military orders.
Medved rejects it:
She is kept now. Someone owns her stability. Not you.
This breaks something in Sebastian—not dramatically, but quietly, like a structural beam giving up its last justification.
Maria watches this collapse with professional detachment. She offers him a final proposition disguised as commentary: desire, money, illusion, distraction—but nothing resembling rescue.
Sebastian has no currency left. Not even symbolic currency.
He asks what his story is worth.
Maria answers without cruelty, but without mercy:
Less than a lap dance. More than nothing.
And still, Sebastian insists on narrative coherence. On meaning. On the idea that suffering must resolve into something legible.
He cannot accept that war does not resolve—it disperses.
Medved and Maria together form a chorus of the real world:
There is no return. There is only continuation under different names.
Sebastian begins to fracture inwardly. He talks about dying with clarity, as if death is simply a missing administrative step he failed to complete in Syria. He speaks of revolvers, of rightful endings, of dignity through self-erasure.
But even death, in this place, feels bureaucratic. Delayed. Misfiled.
Maria interrupts his mythology by forcing him into structure:
Tell your story properly. Begin at the beginning. Be linear.
She demands order from someone whose mind has been reorganized by chaos.
Sebastian cannot comply. His life does not proceed—it loops, collapses, repeats.
Medved reasserts reality again:
You are alive. That is the problem.
The tavern becomes a small theater of broken ideologies:
Sebastian Adonaev enters the Bulgarian Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A busty Slavic shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka-based drinks. They meet in the eyes. He is “a completely used up Israelite gun man”. Brown hair and Chechen mannerisms. I wonder where he developed Chechen mannerisms.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“During our border reentry run from Rojava back into Suly, most of our column was blown apart in repeated missile strikes. We hid in a dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long, hot shower. Wash the filth and death from me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Goldy alive!”
I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Yet not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani,” is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated Northwestern Iraq. A “liberated, but unrecognized” country politically divided by two city states.
The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment, and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees, and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at the airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then there was a 24-hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then, with no questions asked, I was in JFK.
Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! War and ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time.’ By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind is not where I had thought I had left it, and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It is March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow Street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me. I just want to kill myself, or at the very least get myself killed. Throw myself in the East River.
I show up at the Tavern early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Goldy will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call in a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I am just too late. I think I am being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I do not have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again. Well anyway, there is only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me. Not Medved, he is buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he does not give a fuck!
In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is from the glorious nation of Bulgaria.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia10.
MARIA SILVERSTOVA
You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you are naked.
SILVERSTOVA
I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day.
She gave me a decent price. There are 88.95 Rubles in the Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people, “I’m from Moscow,” though of course I am not.
My waist is tight, and my breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am an exceptionally good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I am looking for Oleg Medved.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medved, your friend the bear, he looks for you, droogy.
Sasho said, “try and make him happy.”
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, they encourage him. Giving him refuge.
Adonaev does not remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sorted out some work and some papers for him.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria, how does life go at night?
SILVERSTOVA
I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your pale ruble.
SILVERSTOVA
There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Syrian Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV
Far more good was done than any real evil. By my Otriad anyway. I am sure the others killed more Jihadists, and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. In which one did their little part. But really, few of my single serving friends survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Türkiye rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA
What Otriad did you serve in? I am a little familiar with the actors.
ADONAEV
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA
Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE?
ADONAEV
The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA
Freedom fighting and or raw U.S. Imperialism, both? Same, same; not different?
ADONAEV
We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Türkiye was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from whoever offers them in that kind of situation, nu.
SILVERSTOVA
So, on the Russian speaking news tonight. Türkiye has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is completely overrun and Manbij is next, and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned it.
ADONAEV
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA
Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone pays to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we even French kissed. It all just made me pity you.
You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no respectable job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. She and others like us must think about papers.
ADONAEV
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That is enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy, and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal!
SILVERSTOVA
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain your motivation to me!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV
Tovarish Maria,I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount of green dollars.
SILVERSTOVA
“Your money Tovarish,” they say is no good here. You cannot pay for a bullet or a dance. You cannot pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars11.
You can buy time with or without sympathy.
ADONAEV
Sympathy with “the resistance”?
SILVERSTOVA
Sympathy with the American Mayakovski, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV
You do, in fact, know what!
SILVERSTOVA
You know I don’t partake in the Lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod and a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I do not think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV
I do not have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA
Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA
It is worth less than a lap dance. More than a Dabka.
ADONAEV
I need her, you know.
SILVERSTOVA
Oh, we all know that sad fucking story. “It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.”
Old American saying?
ADONAEV
I don’t follow your allegory.
SILVERSTOVA
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your whole mask falls off!”
ADONAEV
That one I understood almost perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA
As if I was making reports in Russian, or even Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months, were we to include Cuba and Russia and Iraq, Türkiye, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.”
Well, I guess you did not die in the war.
ADONAEV
Well, I guess I did not die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat12… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little seditious rumor I heard?
ADONAEV
A rumor?
SILVERSTOVA
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blyat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor.
ADONAEV
Go on.
SILVERSTOVA
I heard that the same people that did 9.11 created the Islamic State from scratch.
Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace.
ALAN OLEG MEDVED
Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction.
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in, hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air!
SILVERSTOVA
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVED
One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.
Shall I call them “American secret police?”
His voyage, quest, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Goldy.
ADONAEV
What news do you have about Goldy?
MEDVED
Listen, man, not again. She has all cleaned up. Singing and dancing at the Millenium Theatre.
She has a lovely place in Midtown. A fully kept woman now.
ADONAEV
She wrote to me…
MEDVED
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV
Da13.
MEDVED
They have AI apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day, too. You don’t even need to pay them or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can be figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
MEDVED
You can’t even consider supporting Goldy, look at the state you are in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce?
MEDVED
What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems.
ADONAEV
I need to see her tonight!
MEDVED
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV
Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly is possible.
MEDVED
Leave her alone man. If you know what is good for her. Also, for yourself.
ADONAEV
I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war.
MEDVED
Nope. You do not have to do anything, blyat! In a month, or less, you will have another woman. In the meantime, is your fucking Goldy even talking to you?
ADONAEV
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago.
MEDVED
Prosto, that is it. You two were an okay team, once. You supported each other in a very strange way. But really, Suka is a curse on you.
ADONAEV
She is only with whoever she is with for some spending money and a green card.
MEDVED
And you want a paperwork marriage and a world of work? You are not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride. You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars, hard maybe.
You cannot afford a woman like Goldy Andreavna. I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things. You are not a man of stability and security. You are a man of adventures too enamored with the “good of the people.”
ADONAEV
Not yet.
MEDVED
Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 