Year Zero in The Middle East

Biography of Ziad Majed

Ziad Majed is a French-Lebanese political scientist. He is an Associate Professor and the Program Coordinator for Middle East Pluralities at the American University of Paris. He is the author of Syrie, la révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, 2014), Dans la tête de Bachar Al-Assad (avec S. Hadidi et F. Mardam Bey - Actes Sud, 2018 et 2025) and of Le Proche-Orient, miroir du monde. Comprendre le basculement en cours (La Découverte, 2025).

Prolog

Championing the Palestinian cause used to be what one could expect from Arab governments, even when they trampled on the civil and political rights of their own citizens. After the brutal backlash that followed the uprisings of the early 2010s, however, some heads of state reckoned that the time had come to forfeit this last concession to their own public opinions.

Hence the so-called Abraham Accords brokered by the first Trump administration in 2020, whereby Morocco, Bahrein, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan recognized Israel without making any demand regarding the creation of a Palestinian state. Soon thereafter, rumor had it that more countries, including Saudi Arabia, considered following suit. Meanwhile, the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, whose far-right coalition had returned to power in the fall of 2022, made it clear that, under his leadership, all occupied Palestinian territories would become integral part of “The Land of Israel”.

Both the deadly attacks perpetrated by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing genocidal campaign launched by the Israeli army occurred in that context. For the Islamist organization, the purpose of the ill-fated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was to challenge the erasure of the Palestinian people. For the Israeli authorities, the invasion and destruction of Gaza was less a matter of retaliation and vengeance, let alone an attempt to free the hostages, than an opportunity to implement their stated agenda at a much faster pace.

In the interview he gave us, as in his most recent book, the French-Lebanese political scientist Ziad Majed explores the unfolding and the implications, regional as well as global, of this ongoing catastrophe. To shed light on the epochal crisis confronting the Middle East, his privileged vantage point is neither Israel nor Palestine but the neighboring countries – Lebanon and Syria in particular – that have been engulfed in the Israeli attempt to find a final solution to the Palestinian question.

In Lebanon, Ziad Majed recounts, Hezbollah, the Shi’ite political party and militia, initially tried to do its part as a member of the Tehran-led “axis of resistance”, yet without waging a full-fledged war against Israel. For the Netanyahu government, however, containment was no longer the order of the day. Emboldened by the unconditional support of the US – under Joe Biden and Donald Trump – as well as by the acquiescence of European governments, Israel did not merely set out to crush Hezbollah’s military capacities. To preempt any further threat, its army has turned large swaths of Southern Lebanon into an inhabitable buffer zone and is keeping the rest of the country under permanent aerial control.

In Syria, meanwhile, both the Israeli campaign and the war in Ukraine eventually deprived Bashar al-Assad of the support that had kept him in power – namely Iranian and Hezbollah militiamen on the ground and Russian planes in the air. While the fall of the Baathist regime, in November 2024, was greeted with elation by a vast majority of Syrians, fresh anxieties were quick to arise regarding both the fate of minorities, whether Kurdish, Druze, or Alawite, and the ambitions of foreign powers. Among the latter, Israel soon became the most ominous menace to the unity and the reconstruction of the country. Determined to subject Damascus to the same political tutelage as Beirut, its military forces not only grabbed more territories around the Golan heights but also destroyed what was left of the Syrian army’s weaponry – there again with Washington’s full support.

In our conversation, we asked Ziad Majed to ponder the leeway that both Nawaf Salam, the Lebanese Prime minister and Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian ruler, might still have at their disposal to regain a modicum of autonomy. We also asked him to examine the agenda of powerful regional actors such as the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to assess the role of brokers assumed by Qatari officials and, to a lesser extent, by the Egyptian military leadership, and to reflect on the options still available to the Iranian regime. As our discussion illustrates, much will depend on the willingness of the United States to keep enabling Israel’s hubris, but also on whether social movements, both in the Middle East and beyond, succeed in dissuading their governments from turning a blind eye to the annihilation of the Palestinian people.

Our interview with Ziad Majed took place in Paris and includes two sessions. We first talked to Ziad on May 9, 2025, when Donald Trump was about to meet Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh and seemed to be heeding the Prince’s call to rein in Benyamin Netanyahu and keep negotiations going with Tehran. A month later, however, Israel launched what came to be known as the Twelve-day War against Iran, which the Trump administration seconded by bombing three nuclear sites. We thus decided to update our interview with a second exchange, which took place on August 30, 2025.