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More than half a millennium ago, Portugal’s Vasco da Gama discovered an alternative all-water passage to India and the Orient via the Cape of Good Hope. By diverting Europe’s lucrative spice trade from the traditional Mediterranean and overland caravan routes, he transformed the Levant (the area including present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel/Palestine) from a leading center of commerce to an economic, political and cultural backwater.
Complacency in 1498 cost the inhabitants of the region dearly. Indeed, only in the present era has the Middle East begun to recover its lost pride, economic and geo-strategic prominence, and political independence. However, in this post–cold war moment of renewed opportunity and potential, the region’s own internal shortcomings and the shortsightedness of its leaders once again combine with world trends in threatening to leave all peoples of the Middle East—Arabs and Iranians, Israelis, and Turks—far behind the global learning curve.
With this in mind, the perspective expressly adopted here is neither Israeli nor nationalist, but supra-nationalist, i.e., the perspective of a “Middle Easterner.” I define a Middle Easterner as a permanent resident in the region stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from the refugee camps of Gaza to the sparkling lights of Doha. In looking at long-term prospects, I harbor serious misgivings about preserving both the independence and collective viability of the Middle East. I believe that the only way to meet this challenge is through functional Middle Eastern regionalization, defined in this paper as a means of generating a
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