On: Bowen: Trump and Netanyahu wanted to reshape the Middle East - now they risk a p

I open the newspapers this morning and see the word “permacrisis” used to describe the Levant, as if we are witnessing a meteorological phenomenon rather than a deliberate architecture of ruin. Trump and Netanyahu are portrayed as men who have “lost control,” a phrasing that suggests they were once legitimate stewards of a natural order. This is the first deception. One does not “lose control” of a fire one has spent decades feeding with the oxygen of dispossession; one simply reaches the limit of one’s ability to pretend the flames are a form of light.

The situation is not a tragedy of errors; it is a project of objectification. For years, the Palestinian, the Lebanese, the Iranian have been constituted as the “Other-as-object” - mere variables in a grand “reshaping” of the map. When Netanyahu speaks of a “New Middle East,” he is not describing a community of subjects exercising their freedom. He is describing a floor plan. He treats millions of lives as facticity - static things to be moved, walled in, or erased - while reserving transcendence only for his own political survival.

But freedom is never abstract. The “miscalculation” the analysts whisper about is actually the inevitable return of the oppressed subject. You cannot strip a people of their project and expect them to vanish into the landscape. The “permacrisis” is the name the West gives to the moment its colonial illusions shatter against the reality of human resistance.

I sit here in Paris, a situated observer, and I see the complicity of those who call this a “risk” rather than a choice. To treat this violence as an accidental byproduct of diplomacy is to naturalize the slaughter. It was made. It was chosen in specific rooms by men who believed they could define the world through the gaze of the conqueror. They are not victims of a crisis; they are the authors of a situation that now demands an accounting they are too cowardly to provide.