In December 2024 the attorney general of Arizona sued a Saudi-owned farm called Fondomonte. The complaint laid out one allegation that captures a whole region’s predicament. In 2023 alone, the state alleges, the company pumped about 31,200 acre-feet of groundwater from the Ranegras Plain Basin in western Arizona, more than four-fifths of everything drawn from that aquifer that year and enough to supply roughly 90,000 homes for a year, to grow alfalfa it then shipped across an ocean to feed dairy cattle in the Arabian desert. What the state says that pumping left behind is declining groundwater levels and escalating land subsidence, harming everyone else who depends on the basin. Alfalfa is a hay crop, and a famously thirsty one. Fondomonte had been farming the Arizona basin since 2014, and by 2018 Saudi Arabia had banned large-scale cultivation of the crop at home, precisely because it drinks too much water, with a full prohibition scheduled for the 2027/28 season. The two moves are halves of one strategy, and the buyer said so at the time. Announcing the purchase to the Saudi exchange in 2014, Almarai, Fondomonte’s parent, called it part of its effort to secure alfalfa from outside the kingdom and “in line with the Saudi government direction toward conserving local resources.” The thirst was exported rather than spent at home, to a place where the water was still, for the moment, unmetered and cheap.

That is one country’s answer to a problem the whole region shares. The Middle East and North Africa sits where the world’s two tightening constraints, water and grain, press hardest. A hot, dry climate caps how much food the region can grow, populations keep rising, and the gap is filled with imported grain. Imported grain is really imported water. It takes an enormous amount of water to grow a crop, and when a country buys wheat instead of growing it, someone else has already spent that water on its behalf. Economists call this “virtual water,” the hidden water embedded in a traded good. Every metric ton of wheat carries roughly 1,800 metric tons of water the buyer never has to find, about 70% of it rain that fell on the exporter’s fields rather than water a desert state could ever have diverted. That figure is a modeled global average based on 1996 to 2005 production data, and a rough accounting heuristic, not a literal transfer, but it explains why a desert can feed itself from the sea lanes: it imports the water in the form of bread. The region’s net farm imports are projected to keep climbing for the next decade. The squeeze is shared. The responses are not.

Faced with the same arithmetic, the region splits three ways. The capital-rich Gulf buys its way out, turning oil money into farmland abroad, the world’s largest fleets of seawater plants, and food reserves measured in months. A strained middle tier races to build new water supply before the gap widens, and Israel sits at the far end of that group as the extreme case, a desert state that now manufactures most of its drinking water yet still imports almost all its bread. And a cluster of collapse states has lost its buffer entirely, breaking with each new shock and living shipment to shipment. This is the third of a four-part series. Earlier parts traced the grain lifeline and the dams that meter the region’s rivers, and the chokepoints and fertilizer arteries that carry the trade. Read alone, this is a field guide to three survival strategies and the price each one carries.

The ladder everyone stands on

Start with the resource, because it sorts the region before any policy does. Hydrologists use a rough rule of thumb. Below 500 cubic meters of renewable freshwater per person a year, a country is in “absolute scarcity,” meaning it simply does not have enough water for normal modern life and has to find the rest somewhere. The line is conventionally drawn on a country’s total renewable water, including what flows in from upstream. The chart below counts only the water a country generates inside its own borders as rain and snow, which is what a state actually controls. On that stricter measure almost every state in this story sits beneath the line, and several sit far below it; counted the conventional way, Iraq, Syria and Morocco clear it, and Egypt sits just on it.

At the bottom are the Gulf states, with essentially none: Kuwait rounds to zero, and its neighbors are only a notch above. Jordan, one of the most water-scarce countries on earth outside the Gulf, has almost nothing. Yemen, once thought wetter, has fallen with its swelling population into the same band. Egypt is the instructive exception. Its own internal water is a rounding error, and even the headline figure that merely reaches the line appears only when you count the Nile, water that arrives almost entirely from upstream and over which Cairo holds no source control. On the ladder Egypt belongs near the bottom with the Gulf. The difference is that roughly 97% of Egypt’s total renewable water comes down the river, which makes its scarcity a problem of dependence rather than absence. (These per-person figures are model estimates, sensitive to how you count, so small gaps between countries should not be over-read.) A national figure is also an average, and it says nothing about who inside a country actually gets the water: every tier in this story contains people living far below their own country’s number.

The ladder explains an irony that runs through every country in this story: the places with the least water spend the most of it on farming. Agriculture takes the lion’s share of water almost everywhere here, around 80% in Egypt and about 90% in Yemen, against a global average closer to 70%. Tunisia is the emblem: it pours about 75% of its water onto roughly 9% of its cultivated land, the irrigated sliver, while the rest is rain-fed and draws nothing from the tap. Every liter saved on a field is a liter freed for a city. But cutting farm water means cutting rural incomes and abandoning the self-sufficiency story governments have built their legitimacy on. So the water keeps flowing onto the fields, and the cities and the bread come from the world market.

Iran sits outside this three-way split, and not because it is spared. Rainfall about 45% below normal has left 19 of its 31 provinces in severe drought, with the president warning that Tehran’s 15 million residents could be forced to leave. Sanctions cut it off from the capital markets and import finance that define all three responses below, which is why it enters this story as a combatant rather than as a tier.

What separates the region into three groups is not where each country stands on this ladder. It is what each can afford to do about it.

Buy: the Gulf converts oil into food

The Gulf never pretended it could feed itself, and stopped trying decades ago. Saudi Arabia ran the cautionary experiment for everyone else. From the 1970s it spent its way to wheat self-sufficiency, paying farmers $1,000 a ton between 1975 and 1980 against a world price that oscillated between $99 and $180, and in doing so drained underground reserves that had taken tens of thousands of years to fill and do not refill. By 2016 it had phased out the old wheat self-sufficiency program, later allowed limited capped production, and rebuilt its strategy around a simpler proposition: buy the food, buy the land that grows it, buy or build the plants that water the cities. The other Gulf states converged on the same model. Across the GCC, imports cover up to 90% of domestic food requirements. This is not failure. It is a financing model, and it works as long as the capital flows.

The model rests on four visible instruments. The first is the deep reserve. Where Lebanon holds no national reserve at all, only mill working stock that as of 2023 covered at most three months, Saudi Arabia’s state buyer holds a strategic wheat reserve worth more than six months of demand; Qatar aims to store eleven key staples for up to eight months, and its new port terminal is designed to hold two years of rice, sugar and edible oil for three million people. Those are national aggregates, and in the Gulf the nation being aggregated is mostly not its citizens: around nine in ten UAE residents are foreign nationals. A reserve counted in months describes what the state holds, not who reaches it first in the days after a supply interruption.

The second instrument is farmland abroad, the literal offshoring of the field. Saudi Arabia’s state agricultural fund owns farmland in Australia, Brazil and Ukraine and part-owns a Canadian grain handler, and in a deal completed in April 2026 took a controlling stake in a major global grain trader, paying $1.88 billion to lift a 35.4% holding to 80%, buying not just land but the import chain itself. The UAE’s national champion farmed some 350,000 acres of irrigated cropland (about 140,000 hectares) across more than twenty countries as of 2020. The Fondomonte alfalfa in Arizona is the same instrument at its most exposed.

The clearest sign of where that instrument now points is Pakistan, which the Gulf has turned into a kind of offshore farm. It belongs in this story not despite sitting outside the region but because it mirrors, from the losing end, the exact upstream-water weapon the region wields against itself. Having turned against thirsty fodder at home, Saudi Arabia is moving it onto Pakistan’s river plains through an army-led corporate-farming push launched in 2023. The UAE was there first: its agribusiness champion Al Dahra has been growing forage in Sindh for shipment home for more than two decades, so the new program widens a channel rather than opening one. Pakistan has identified nearly two million hectares of state land for the program, a ceiling rather than a tally: about 400,000 hectares have been allocated to private investors, and some 44,000 had actually changed hands by January 2025, on leases running thirty to fifty years. A 2024 Saudi deal set aside land in Punjab to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi dairy cows. (The fullest running account comes from the advocacy network La Via Campesina, whose framing is critical of the program and should be read as such.)

The catch is that these farms drink from the same stressed, contested Indus river on which about 90% of Pakistan’s crops already depend, a river whose headwaters lie in India, which in April 2025 held the treaty governing it in abeyance, and whose water minister vowed in June 2026 that not a single drop would flow to Pakistan. The vow outruns the plumbing: the treaty capped Indian storage on the western rivers at about 4.4 cubic kilometers against the more than 170 that come down them each year, and the dams that would change that are not due before 2032. The near-term threat is announcement, not a dry riverbed. A parallel plan to cut six new canals into the Cholistan desert, drawing on those same waters, triggered weeks of protest among downstream farmers in Sindh, and the canals were shelved within weeks, pending agreement among the provinces. The land leases were not. Pakistan is committing its scarce water, embodied in Gulf-bound fodder, for thirty to fifty years, on a river whose governing treaty India has suspended with no stated end.

The third instrument is desalination, and it is here that the model’s deepest fragility shows. Desalination means making fresh water from the sea, pushing seawater through filters at high pressure to strip out the salt. It is how the Gulf supplies its cities. The Gulf does not have water; it manufactures it, running roughly a third of the world’s desalination capacity. Saudi Arabia operates the largest fleet anywhere, supplying as of 2023 50% of all water piped to users, industry included, up from 44% the year before, and about 70% of its drinking water.

The dependence is near-total for drinking water, and the buffer behind it is thin to the point of vertigo. Qatar draws about 99% of its city water from the sea; Kuwait and Bahrain around 90%. And the stored reserve behind that supply is measured in days. The UAE’s 2036 water security strategy, unveiled in 2017, targets stores covering two days of national demand under normal use, sixteen to forty-five days under emergency rationing, and it is not there yet; a Qatari government simulation of a strike on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant found that radioactive fallout would foul the Gulf itself, and that the country would run dry within three days, because desalination plants are not built to filter it out. That number comes from the prime minister describing his own government’s model, whose assumptions are not public.

The war that began in February 2026 and has not ended turned that structural exposure from a modeled scenario into a targeting record. As US-Israeli strikes and Iranian retaliation have hit water and energy plants across the Gulf and inside Iran, the plants keeping sea-fed populations alive have been shown to be reachable. Iran said a strike on a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea passage at the mouth of the Gulf, disrupted water supply to about 30 villages. Bahrain’s interior ministry said an Iranian drone hit one of the country’s desalination plants, without affecting water supplies, part of a system that supplies about 90% of drinking water to 1.6 million people. The pattern held into July. On 17 July 2026 an Iranian strike hit a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant, damaging a large number of power generation units and starting a fire that authorities contained after activating emergency contingency plans. The next day a second strike hit another Kuwaiti desalination and power plant, and several generating units were shut down as a precaution; the strikes ran on for a fourth consecutive day into 21 July, in a country that draws about 90% of its drinking water from the sea. The energy damage was heavier still, and it fell on a different line of the balance sheet. Iran’s March retaliation against Qatar’s main gas-export terminal damaged two LNG production lines worth about 17% of Qatar’s LNG exports, with repairs its energy minister put at up to five years. The strikes hit the export trains rather than the domestic feed; what they cut was the revenue that pays for the imported calories and the manufactured water alike, a loss the same minister put at $20 billion a year. Desalination is the most energy-hungry water on earth, and a Gulf state can import every calorie it eats and still face a survival-level crisis if the plant keeping its population alive loses power for a week, because the stored buffer behind that water runs in days, not months.

The fourth instrument is the headline-grabbing margin: high-tech farming for high-value perishables. Dubai’s Bustanica, billed as the world’s largest indoor vertical farm, grows greens on what its operator says is 95% less water than conventional agriculture. Qatar’s Baladna airlifted thousands of dairy cows after a 2017 blockade and went from importing most of its fresh milk to making nearly all of it within two years. Qatar grows much of the herd’s fodder at home: green fodder took up 58% of the country’s cultivated land by 2018. It does so by pumping groundwater faster than it recharges, on an aquifer whose freshwater lens shrank from 15% of the country’s area in 1971 to 2% by 2009. The milk is domestic. It is also a draw on a stock that is not being replaced. The Gulf has not solved scarcity. It has converted a resource deficit into a financing problem, and bet that the capital, the gas, and the shipping lanes outlast the climate. A sustained oil-price slump would squeeze the import bill, the desalination fleet and the bread subsidy all at once. Months of war have shown that a missile can reach the plants faster.

Build: the middle tier races the deficit

One rung up the affordability ladder sits a different kind of country. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia cannot out-buy their scarcity the way the Gulf can. They finance imports on thin reserves, donor money and subsidy budgets they cannot afford to cut. What they are betting on instead is construction: new desalination and water-recycling capacity arriving before the water gap widens past the point of management. It is a race against a clock, and the clock is the deficit.

The desalination race makes the bet visible. Jordan, which imports more than 95% of its wheat, has staked its future on a roughly six-billion-dollar pipeline designed to desalinate Red Sea water in the south and pump most of it more than 400 kilometers north, aiming to cover around 40% of its drinking water supply by 2030. Part of what it is racing is a demand shock it did not choose: hosting Syrian refugees raised water demand in Jordan’s northern governorates by roughly two-fifths, and in some places cut the supply cycle from once a week to once a month. Morocco, whose water per person is projected to keep falling, has set a target of drawing 60% of its drinking water from the sea by 2030, up from roughly a quarter in late 2025, with a plant rising near Casablanca that will be Africa’s largest. Its operating plants and those due for completion in 2027 would together produce about half the volume that target requires; the rest is still to be put out to tender. Egypt is building toward a far larger total but on a quarter-century horizon. Tunisia is running the same race with the smallest wallet, and from much further back. The World Bank puts desalination at about 2% of Tunisia’s total water supply as of early 2026, a share of all water rather than of the drinking water Jordan and Morocco are counting; the government’s stated target is 30% by 2030. It is building anyway: the Zarat seawater plant, co-financed with German development money, has come online, with two more at Sfax and Sousse. The state can barely finance the wheat it already buys.

This tier carries the heaviest political risk in the region, because its stability contract is written in subsidized bread baked from imported wheat. Egypt is the starkest case. At the time of a 2024 reform, about two-thirds of the population drew subsidized loaves, and wheat supplied roughly a third of the average citizen’s daily calories in a country that is the world’s largest wheat importer. When a global price spike and a currency devaluation strained the budget, Cairo quadrupled the subsidized loaf price in 2024, from 5 piastres to 20, about a tenth of a US cent to four-tenths at 2024 exchange rates. It was the first increase since 1989. Even quadrupled, the loaf stays overwhelmingly subsidized: the increase cut the state’s share of its production cost only from 96% to 84%. The 2010-11 revolution that opened the Arab Spring began in Tunisia’s rural interior, set off by a street vendor’s self-immolation over police harassment and driven by unemployment and a corrupt regime. Record global food prices aggravated those tensions rather than created them, and protesters brandished baguettes. One widely cited model found that historical bouts of unrest cluster above a particular reading of the global food-price index, a striking correlation, though it is fitted to a handful of events and is contested as a precise threshold rather than a law. That reading was fitted to an earlier index base, so it cannot be laid against today’s number directly. The number is the wrong thing to watch anyway. The mechanism is intact, and it is narrower than the threshold: a global price spike still runs straight through this tier’s import bill into the price of a subsidized loaf. Whether that becomes a protest depends on the unemployment and grievance already in place.

The build strategy also reproduces the region’s central irony at higher cost. Morocco’s reservoirs sat about a third full at the end of 2025 after seven dry years, before a wet winter reversed the trend: the government declared the drought over and the dams climbed to about 75% by mid-2026, even as Morocco remains the near-indispensable supplier of the phosphate rock that fertilizes everyone else’s crops. Jordanian farmers, on the estimate of a US Commerce Department trade guide, apply water at two to five times what crops need while the state spends billions to manufacture more. Tunisia’s Water Observatory recorded more than 2,100 unannounced water cutoffs in 2024, roughly six a day, many of them lasting more than 10 hours. For Jordan and Morocco, with functioning states and credible financing, the hardware is likelier to arrive at all, though not obviously on time: Jordan’s pipeline won its funding approval only in October 2025 and had still not entered implementation by mid-2026, leaving under five years to build the plant, the pipe and the solar capacity to run them. For Tunisia, whose foreign-currency reserves cover about three months of imports of any kind and which has no IMF program, the race is closer than its government will admit, and fiscal fragility could yet turn a builder into a breaker.

The extreme case: the country that makes its own water

The build tier’s furthest-developed example is Israel, though it belongs there on strategy rather than on strain. It is a high-income state that never faced the financing constraint binding Tunisia, and that is exactly what makes it the useful upper bound: the same technology with the money taken out of the question. It shows both how far the strategy can go and where it stops cold. Israel began with one of the worst natural water endowments on earth, deep below the absolute-scarcity line, in the same tier as the Gulf. It answered not by finding water but by manufacturing it, and the inversion is now near total.

The Israeli model stacks three technologies. The first is desalination, which now provides between 70 and 80% of the country’s potable water from a string of coastal plants, with a new one near Rishon Lezion reaching full operation in early 2026. The second is reuse, recycling treated wastewater back into supply, and here Israel reclaims 87% of its treated sewage as of 2018, one of the highest rates in the world, and routes almost all of it to farms. Households and nature get the fresh and desalinated water, and farms drink what the cities send back. The third is drip irrigation, which feeds water to plants drop by drop through buried tubing instead of flooding a field, squeezing far more crop from each liter than the flood irrigation still standard across much of the region. Stacked together, these turned a desert state into a net producer of water, running what Mekorot, the national water utility, said in 2023 was roughly a fifth more water than the country needs, the utility’s own figure on a measure of need it does not spell out, and exporting some of it.

The clearest demonstration came in the drought of 2025, the driest winter in Israel in roughly a century. As the Sea of Galilee fell toward the level at which a freshwater lake begins to die, Israel began pumping desalinated seawater up into the lake, reversing the direction its national pipeline had run for sixty years. The scarcity that has drained Morocco’s reservoirs across seven dry years and driven Tunisia’s unannounced cutoffs arrived in Israel as a budget line and an engineering reversal, not a harvest collapse. The plants sit on top of a water authority that prices scarcity, meters and permits pumping, and mandates reuse. Jordan shows that endowment is not the whole story: it sits a rung below Israel on the same ladder, in the same weather, with 61 cubic meters of internally generated freshwater per person against Israel’s 80. That measure counts only water generated inside a country’s own borders, and leaves out the inflow from shared rivers and aquifers that both countries draw on. It also says nothing about coastline, which is where the strategy actually lives: Israel’s runs along the Mediterranean beside its cities and farms, while Jordan’s short frontage on the Gulf of Aqaba sits 400 kilometers south of its demand centers and a long climb below them. That geography is most of why Jordan’s pipeline costs six billion dollars and Israel’s plants did not. Yet Israeli domestic use, a category that since 2015 folds industry in, ran to 96 cubic meters a person a year as of 2016, roughly 260 liters a day, more than the 80 above, which counts only what nature supplies and not what the coast manufactures, while in Jordan about half the population receives piped water for less than 24 hours a week and drought rationing has cut service to as low as 70 liters a person a day. Whether the institution, the income or the coastline is doing the work, this case cannot separate: Israel has all three, and the countries without the hardware are also the ones without the balance sheet.

And yet the model solves water, and only water. The USDA’s grain attaché in Tel Aviv puts it flatly: “Approximately 90% of Israel’s grain supply is sourced from abroad.” Israel grows only about a tenth of its milling wheat and no corn at all, buying most of its wheat from the same Black Sea suppliers that feed Egypt and the Gulf. The same country that pumps the Mediterranean uphill imports its bread by sea, and knows it: in April 2026 it passed a law requiring big wheat holders to report their stocks monthly, the same defensive posture as the importers it out-farms. You can manufacture water; you cannot manufacture the millions of rain-fed hectares that bulk grain requires, and a high-tech economy on a small land base does not have them. Manufactured supply solves the thirsty, high-value end of the food system, where Israel earned $2.8 billion in agricultural exports in 2024, mostly into the European Union and the United States, and leaves the calorie staples untouched. The most advanced answer to water scarcity the region has produced still runs on calories it has to buy.

Break: the states with no buffer left

At the bottom of the ladder are the countries that have stopped racing because there is nothing left to bet. Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Sudan have each lost the buffer that matters against the constraint that actually binds them: war and finance in Syria, import cover and aid in Yemen and Sudan, a national grain reserve that no longer exists in Lebanon, and upstream water in Iraq, whose silos are full and whose rivers are not. Each shock now lands on people rather than on a reserve. The difference between this tier and the one above is not the size of the deficit. It is the absence of slack. And as of 2025 a second constraint has bound tighter than the harvest: the money to move food at all.

For most of the past decade the binding question in these countries was logistics, whether the grain could be financed and shipped. In 2025 it became aid. The World Food Program, the United Nations agency that is the system’s backstop of last resort, took in about ten billion dollars in 2024 and 6.5 billion in 2025, a drop of roughly a third in a single year that had the agency warning of pipeline breaks in six of its largest operations by that October. The exposure was structural. The agency had drawn nearly half its 2024 funding from the United States alone, so when Washington paused foreign assistance in January 2025 and wound down USAID, the single largest source of that budget contracted at once. The deeper problem was never whose budget it was. It was that a whole tier had come to treat someone else’s discretionary aid as its reserve, and a reserve you do not control is not a reserve. By mid-2025 the agency projected cutting up to 16.7 million people from emergency food assistance, roughly one in five of the 79.9 million it fed in 2024. The cut is not a proportional shave but a triage: eleven countries would each lose more than half a million people from the rolls, Yemen alone 4.8 million of the total, and 3 million of the 16.7 million are already in IPC Phase 4, the emergency tier one step below famine. For the buffer-less tier this is the new binding constraint, a variable that now moves outcomes as sharply as the weather does.

Lebanon shows that the constraint is buffer, not water, because Lebanon is not naturally water-poor. It gets real rain and holds far more internal water than its desert neighbors. Yet governance collapse has engineered scarcity out of plenty. The 2020 Beirut port explosion destroyed the country’s main grain silos, the national reserve facility, with capacity for 120,000 metric tons, about two months of national wheat consumption, and they have never been rebuilt. That was the state’s only strategic storage, and it sat in one place; by 2023 what remained was at most three months of wheat scattered across mill warehouses, working stock with no reserve behind it. On the water side, the same 2025 drought drove the reservoir behind the country’s main river to its lowest level ever recorded, and what water remains in it, about 61 million cubic meters, is too polluted to use at all. The water exists. The state that should manage it does not.

Iraq shows how fast a buffer evaporates. In June 2025 the government declared a record wheat harvest and announced self-sufficiency, 6.3 million tons, the largest in its history. FAO put the 2025 crop at 4.4 million tons, about 4% below average, though its estimate excludes the Kurdistan Region and some villages in five governorates; the government’s number counts what state silos take in rather than what fields were measured to have grown, and the ministry’s own season-end tally, 5.1 million tons of wheat received by the close on 19 July, came in below the June boast. Two weeks earlier its national water reserves had been reported at about 10 billion cubic meters, the lowest in 80 years, roughly half what they held a year before and well under the 18 billion the ministry says a summer should open with at minimum. The boast and the emergency were the same season. Part of that gap is the difference between a harvest already gathered and the water needed to grow the next one, but the structural exposure underneath it is real and lies upstream: most of the Euphrates is generated inside Turkey, and Iraq holds no binding annual allocation from Ankara. What it has instead is a run of discretionary releases: a February 2025 pledge of 500 cubic meters per second, a summer arrangement set at 400 that in practice delivered nearer 120, and a November 2025 framework under which Turkish firms build Iraqi water infrastructure against Iraqi oil revenue, opening with a one-off billion cubic meters. Each is revocable, and none of it is a share.

Turkey’s only treaty pledge on the Euphrates, 16 billion cubic meters a year under a 1987 protocol, is owed to Syria at the Syrian border, roughly half the 30 billion the river carried there naturally and closer to two-thirds of the 25 it has averaged since the dams went in; Iraq’s share rests on a 1990 accord with Damascus that divides whatever arrives. The same announcement put strategic grain reserves at 5.5 million tons, above a year’s consumption, but that stock is the harvest itself, procured into state silos rather than a buffer standing behind it: at the season’s close the ministry counted a reserve of 6.5 million tons, the 5.1 million just received plus 1.4 million carried over from 2024. It is the only cushion Iraq has, and it is exactly one harvest deep: a downstream state whose silos fill in the same season its water reserves hit an 80-year low holds a year of grain against no guarantee of the water to grow the next. That was the mid-2025 position, and the cycle that followed drew the cushion down rather than refilling it. FAO’s country brief of March 2026 forecast Iraq’s 2025/26 cereal import requirement at about 2.4 million tons, nearly 8% above the five-year average, and reported that a dry October and November hampered planting of the 2026 crop before December and January rains recovered some ground in the north. The 2026 harvest and reserve figures are not yet published.

Yemen and Sudan are past the price story and into the hunger story, and both are sliding faster because the aid is going. Yemen imports about nine-tenths of its wheat with no meaningful reserve, and its capital’s wells are sinking toward exhaustion. The IPC assessment covering May to August 2025 found more than 17 million people, nearly half the population it analyzed, in crisis-level hunger or worse, and projected 18.1 million, just over half of it, for September 2025 through February 2026. That window has since closed with no verified outcome published; the projection for it was raised slightly, to 18.3 million, including 5.5 million in emergency. Aid cuts are one of the drivers the IPC names, alongside the conflict itself and the economic collapse: funding for the agency’s Yemen operation fell by more than 70% in a year, forcing a pause in food handouts in some areas and leaving families who once collected a monthly ration to arrive and find none. And the money is only half of why the aid fails to arrive. The Houthi authorities that hold the north have detained at least 73 UN staff, all of them Yemeni, in a wave of arrests running since 2024, with one World Food Program worker dead in their custody as of February 2025; rather than keep working under those conditions the UN suspended its operations in the northern governorate of Saada. What survives the budget still has to move past an authority that jails the people who carry it.

Sudan has crossed the line the others fear. The war between the army and a rival paramilitary force has produced the worst food crisis in the country’s history, and its irrigated breadbasket has been scorched: in the Gezira scheme, which once grew half the country’s wheat, output fell 58% in 2023-24 and the canals were wrecked, with satellite data showing only early crop recovery by December 2025. The paramilitary seized the besieged city of El Fasher in October 2025, in mass killings the UN is investigating. International monitors who had confirmed outright famine there months earlier now count about 19.5 million people, two in five Sudanese, in crisis-level hunger or worse in early 2026, some 135,000 in the catastrophe tier where mothers boil leaves and peanut shells to fill children’s stomachs, but no area currently in famine, only its risk persisting. That the total keeps easing, from the 21.2 million counted in September 2025, tracks the states where the fighting receded and the markets reopened, which is the point: in this tier it is conflict and access, not aggregate scarcity, that decide who eats. And the lifeline is fraying exactly as it is needed most. Sudan’s 2025 aid appeal drew about 40% of the 4.16 billion dollars it asked for, and by January 2026 the World Food Program had cut Sudan rations to what it called the absolute minimum for survival; half a year on, it was pre-positioning only about two months of food at a time. The cruelty of the timing is the throughline of the whole tier. In Syria, post-war reconstruction is estimated at around 216 billion dollars, close to ten times its collapsed annual output, while a modest appeal merely to restart its farms arrives at the precise moment the emergency money that keeps Syrians fed is breaking. In this tier the next dry year, blockade, currency collapse or funding shortfall is not a budget line. It is measured in people who do not eat.

The bottom line: where the tiers stand in 2030

The forecast to 2030 is not one basin-wide war. It is water and grain acting as force multipliers on droughts, currency collapses and existing conflicts, widening the distance between the three tiers until they barely look like one region. By 2030 the World Bank projects that even the region’s average water per person will fall below the absolute-scarcity line of 500 cubic meters a year, a line almost every state in it crossed long ago on its own water. It falls mostly because the denominator grows rather than because the water does: the region held just over 100 million people in 1960 and more than 450 million by 2018, with medium forecasts above 720 million by 2050. On the current path the Bank puts the longer-run bill at 6 to 14% of GDP by 2050, against a global average loss of under 1%. No major state in the region has a credible path to growing its own staple food. The ones still trying are doing it on capped acreage, or on water drawn from fossil aquifers and upstream rivers they do not control. The region will import more grain, hold less water, and lean harder on a Black Sea anchor it does not control, with Russia projected to hold about a quarter of world wheat exports by 2034.

Each tier ends the decade in a recognizable place, and further apart than it began. The Gulf buyers stay secure but more exposed, their security resting on capital markets, on shipping lanes, and on desalination plants that strikes since February 2026 have repeatedly reached, with a stored buffer counted in days of normal use. The builders win or lose on one question, whether new water supply outruns the deficit. Jordan and Morocco are the likeliest to get the hardware built at all, though on their own current schedules not by 2030; Israel, at the far end of the group, will manufacture a growing share of its own water while still buying nine-tenths of its bread; Tunisia is the one to watch, where fiscal fragility could tip a builder into the breaker tier. And the collapse states remain one drought, one blockade, one currency shock, or one more aid cut from catastrophe, because they have spent the buffer the other two tiers still hold, and the buffer of last resort, the world’s humanitarian budget, is now shrinking under them.

The Fondomonte alfalfa, then, was never an anomaly. It was the logic of the whole region distilled: when you cannot grow water at home, you reach for someone else’s, whether by buying their farmland, building plants to make your own, or, when both fail, simply going without. The three answers look very different on a balance sheet. They rest on the same fact. Even Israel, which manufactures most of its own water, still imports almost all its grain, because no one has found a way to manufacture rain-fed land or to escape the world market for the calories that keep a country fed. The distance between the states that can pay for it and the states that cannot is the defining story of the decade. The final part asks what can realistically be done about it, and what the answers cost.

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Part 2 of a part series on food and water security in the Middle East and North Africa. Start with Part 1: The Trap.

On the morning of 3 March 2026, QatarEnergy had already halted LNG production after attacks on its operating facilities. Within days it issued force-majeure notices to affected buyers, a legal way of saying: the ships may not come, and it is not our fault. Five days earlier the Strait of Hormuz had effectively closed. That strait is a twenty-mile-wide neck of water at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and in a normal week roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes through it, along with a comparable slice of its liquefied natural gas. When war between Iran and its adversaries turned kinetic, traffic through the strait collapsed. Tanker movements fell by more than 90% in the first days of March, more than twenty ships were attacked in the strait in the weeks that followed, and the price of Brent crude oil vaulted above 100 dollars a barrel.

Most of the world watched the oil price. The people who watch the food system were watching something else move through that same channel, in the opposite direction to the wheat the region is famous for buying. They were watching fertilizer, the chemistry on which next season’s harvest depends across three continents, fail to leave port.

This is the part of the MENA food story that the usual map gets backwards. The region is cast as the world’s most exposed buyer of grain, a place that imports its bread because it cannot grow it. That is true, and the first part of this series traced it. But the same Gulf coast that ships wheat in ships fertilizer out. On two of the three nutrients that grow the world’s food, the Middle East and North Africa are not the dependent. They are the supplier everyone else leans on. Here is why that matters, and how it works.

The inversion: a region that exports the chemistry of food

Start with what fertilizer actually is, because the whole story turns on it. Plants need three things from the soil that farmers must replenish: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Each comes from a different industry, and none can stand in for another. A field starved of one cannot be rescued by a surplus of the others.

Nitrogen is the strange one, because it is manufactured rather than dug up. The air around us is nearly four-fifths nitrogen gas, but plants cannot use it in that form. A century-old industrial reaction called Haber-Bosch forces that airborne nitrogen to combine with hydrogen, and the cheapest source of that hydrogen is natural gas. So a nitrogen-fertilizer plant is really a machine for turning gas into plant food. Gas is as much as 90% of the cost of making ammonia, the building block for urea and most nitrogen fertilizers. The consequence is direct: when gas prices rise, nitrogen prices rise with them, and because nitrogen is the most heavily applied nutrient on earth, that rise travels into the cost of grain and then into the price of bread. The chain runs gas, ammonia, urea, yields, prices, and it runs fast.

How far it runs depends on the eater. In a rich, heavily processed food economy the fertilizer signal is muffled: the farm captures only about 12 cents of every retail food dollar, and fertilizer is a sliver of that, so a spike at the plant barely reaches the supermarket shelf. In this region it lands hard, because bread is a near-unprocessed staple, food eats a large share of the household budget, and there is no processing margin to absorb the blow. The pass-through the rich world shrugs off is the one that sets a Cairo bread queue.

Now the inversion. The Gulf sits on enormous reserves of cheap gas that would otherwise have little market. Feed that gas into Haber-Bosch and you get a low-cost nitrogen machine at continental scale. In 2024, about a third of all globally traded urea and roughly a quarter of traded ammonia passed out through the Strait of Hormuz, shipped by five neighbors: Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. Add Egypt, Oman, and Jordan, which ship through other passages, and the region accounts for close to half of all the urea that crosses a border, however it travels. The same corridor also carries nearly half of the world’s traded sulfur, which is what you need to process the second nutrient.

The upshot is a kind of inversion most readers never picture. When Hormuz closes, it is a fertilizer shock as well as an oil shock. The oil shock is the one the world sees; the fertilizer shock is the one that reaches the food system, and it does not land on the wealthy Gulf that ships the stuff. It lands on the countries that buy it: Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Sudan, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, the importers the United Nations food agency flagged as most exposed.

Phosphorus, the second nutrient, tells almost the same story in a different country. Unlike nitrogen, it is mined, dug out of the ground as phosphate rock and processed into fertilizer. And the world’s phosphate is concentrated to an astonishing degree. Morocco alone sits on roughly two-thirds of global phosphate-rock reserves, more than every other country on earth combined, held through a single state-owned company, OCP. Morocco is the world’s second-largest miner of the rock, and OCP commands close to a third of the global trade in phosphate fertilizer. On phosphorus, in short, the planet depends on North Africa the way it depends on the Gulf for nitrogen. Two of the three pillars of the world’s fertilizer trade rest on one strip of MENA coastline.

Then comes the exception, and it is the exception that keeps the argument honest. The third nutrient, potassium, sold as potash, the region barely has. Potash is mined from a handful of deposits worldwide, and before 2022 the supply reaching MENA came overwhelmingly from Russia and Belarus, two countries that between them control about 40% of the world’s potash exports. That is the mirror image of the Gulf’s nitrogen power: a single, politically fraught node sitting upstream of a region that cannot replace it. The only meaningful domestic potash is in Jordan, where the Arab Potash Company produced almost 2.8 million metric tons in 2023, a useful hedge but nowhere near the Russia-Belarus scale. So the inversion has a ceiling. MENA exports the nitrogen and banks the phosphate. On potash it is as exposed as anyone, to the very supplier concentration that makes its own grain imports fragile.

What 2022 taught, and what 2026 confirmed

The system has now broken twice in four years, and the two breaks teach different lessons.

The 2022 break was about gas and sanctions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove fertilizer prices up more than half between February and April of that year, and the most-watched North American fertilizer index hit an all-time high in March 2022, above even its 2008 record. Three pressures arrived together: a gas spike that hit nitrogen, sanctions that hit the Russia-Belarus potash and nitrogen node, and pandemic-era demand already running hot. One peer-reviewed study estimated the shock pushed roughly 27 million more people into poverty and about 22 million more into hunger as input and food costs compounded. That figure is a model, not a head count, but it is the scale the system can throw off when it tightens. Prices later fell back without returning to their old lows, and the concentration that made the shock possible was never engineered out.

The 2026 break confirmed the harder lesson: the system can break on geography too. The conflict that began on 28 February cut Hormuz tanker traffic by more than 90% in early March and stalled an estimated three to four million metric tons of fertilizer trade a month, with several Gulf plants damaged or idled. Granular urea in the Middle East rose nearly a fifth in the first week of March, and Egyptian urea surged more than a quarter. The World Bank’s April outlook projected fertilizer prices up about a third in 2026, driven by a roughly 60% jump in urea, easing again in 2027 as Gulf exports recovered.

Here is the difference that matters. The 2022 shock could, in principle, have been diversified around, given enough alternative suppliers. The 2026 shock could not, because geography does not have alternatives. There is one Strait of Hormuz, and a third of the world’s traded urea has to pass through it. The one mercy in 2026 was that gas rose less sharply than in 2022, which capped the nitrogen pass-through. The vulnerability itself stayed exactly where it was.

The three arteries

Import dependence is only ever as safe as the route that delivers it. The region’s food and fertilizer ride three narrow passages, and each was priced, throttled, or rerouted at least once between 2024 and 2026.

Hormuz is the energy and fertilizer artery, the one the February war shut. Oil flowing through it averaged about 20 million barrels a day in 2024, roughly a fifth of the world’s petroleum use, alongside about a fifth of traded LNG, mostly Qatari. A closure here cuts both ways at once. It raises the gas-linked energy price that sets the cost of making nitrogen, and it blocks the finished nitrogen from leaving port.

Bab el-Mandeb is the strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, the gate through which ships from the Indian Ocean enter on their way to the Suez Canal. In a normal year it carried about 6 million barrels of oil and products a day, about 9% of all seaborne petroleum. This is the pinch point the Houthis squeezed.

The Suez Canal is the grain artery. It is the shortcut between the wheat exporters of the Black Sea and Europe and the importers of Asia and East Africa, sparing them the long voyage around Africa. In a normal year around 76 million metric tons of grains and oilseeds, roughly a sixth of world trade in them, ship from the EU, Russia and Ukraine to Asia and Eastern Africa, most of it through Suez. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat buyer, takes its cargoes through the Mediterranean mouth of that same canal. So a blockage at the southern, Red Sea end lengthens and prices every shipment at the northern end too.

The Houthi campaign that began in November 2023 is the clearest demonstration of what happens when an artery is throttled rather than cut, because it left a clean before-and-after. Oil and product flows through Bab el-Mandeb fell by more than half, from 8.7 million barrels a day in 2023 to about 4.0 million in early 2024, while traffic around the Cape of Good Hope rose to fill the gap. Container tonnage crossing Suez fell by 82% by mid-February 2024. For grain, the rerouting was fast and measurable: the share of EU, Russian and Ukrainian wheat shipments to Asia and East Africa avoiding Suez jumped from a 3% baseline to 42% by early January 2024. The detour around Africa adds something like ten to fourteen days to a voyage, and dry-bulk shipping rates for grain and fertilizer rose by roughly a third over the year before settling well above where they had been.

The cleanest price signal for chokepoint risk is insurance. A “war-risk premium” is the extra the owner of a ship pays an insurer to cover a passage through dangerous water, charged as a small percentage of the vessel’s value. For a Red Sea transit it was a rounding error, near zero, before the campaign. At the 2024 peak it climbed to around 1% of hull value per voyage. On a 100-million-dollar ship, that is about a million dollars of cover for a single trip, a cost that arrives before any cargo is unloaded, and that operators either absorb, pass on, or dodge by sailing around Africa. After a Gaza ceasefire in October 2025 the premiums eased and large container ships began to return, with the CMA CGM Jacques Saadé transiting in December 2025, yet Suez traffic stayed roughly 60% below its old level even after a hundred days without an attack. The exposure did not close. It went dormant.

The lesson the arteries teach is structural, and it cuts against the usual comfort. A Gulf state can stockpile ninety days of grain and still face a supply shock if the route that refills the silo is throttled, because the cost lands first as freight and insurance, then as the fertilizer price that sets the next harvest. Reserves are a buffer against a shortage of grain. They are no buffer at all against a shortage of passage.

The switchboard: the UAE turns a chokepoint into a corridor

If the arteries are the vulnerability, the United Arab Emirates is the region’s bid to turn that vulnerability into leverage. The country grows effectively no wheat. It harvested zero hectares and imported about 1.9 million metric tons in 2023/24, nearly all of it raw grain. Yet it sits at the center of a grain flow far larger than its own population could eat, because Dubai is one of the world’s great re-export hubs.

A re-export hub is worth pausing on, because it is the engine of the whole strategy. The idea is simple: goods arrive from one country, pass through with little or no tariff, get lightly processed or merely repackaged, and ship onward to a third country at a profit. Jebel Ali, the free-trade zone next to Dubai’s port, hosts more than 20,000 companies doing exactly this, and the UAE keeps zero import tariff on wheat, flour and rice, which is what makes it pay. Grain can land, be milled or simply re-papered, and move on the same week.

The recorded grain re-export tonnage is modest but revealing in its direction. UAE wheat re-exports were about 133,000 metric tons in 2022/23, nearly all of it raw wheat grain. The true flow is larger than the count, because grain traded inside the free zones never formally clears UAE customs and so never shows up. On rice the pattern is sharper: the UAE imports close to a million metric tons a year of Indian and Pakistani basmati, cleans and repackages it, and forwards it to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and beyond. The physical plant behind this is real: well over a million metric tons a year of milling capacity, plus federal reserves covering several months of basic commodities.

The ambition is now national policy. In March 2023 the UAE Cabinet approved a National Agenda for Re-Export Development, a package of 24 initiatives aiming to double re-exports within seven years. And the food strategy reaches well beyond the docks. According to the NGO GRAIN, in an assessment it titled from land to logistics, the UAE has amassed roughly 960,000 hectares of farmland abroad, much of it in Egypt, while its port operators DP World and Abu Dhabi Ports run terminals worldwide that feed back to the home harbors. Control the farm, the ship, the port and the mill, and the grain that reaches Oman, Yemen, Iraq and a string of East African states arrives on Emirati terms.

The capstone of all this is a planned corridor. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, unveiled at the G20 in September 2023 by India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the EU and others, is meant to move goods from India through Gulf ports and onward by rail and sea to Europe, cutting freight time toward twelve to fourteen days against close to twenty-four today, with agriculture named among the cargoes. The food piece predates it: in 2019, UAE firms announced plans to invest up to 7 billion dollars over three years in an India-UAE food corridor, buying grain direct from Indian farmers for Emirati-financed processing and re-export.

The promise of the corridor is resilience, a route that sidesteps the Red Sea pinch the Houthis exposed. Its risk is a new concentration. If a handful of Gulf hubs come to sit astride the grain supply of poorer states, then a disruption at any one of them ripples out to everyone downstream. And February 2026 made the catch concrete. The corridor’s signature advantage is that it routes around Bab el-Mandeb and Suez. It cannot route around Hormuz, the one strait the war actually shut, because the Gulf ports the whole scheme depends on sit inside it.

Bottom line

The fertilizer layer flips the standard reading of MENA food security, and the flip is not a curiosity. It is the mechanism by which the region’s vulnerabilities become the world’s. MENA imports its bread, but it exports the nitrogen and banks the phosphate that grow everyone’s bread, and it ships them through passages narrow enough that recent conflicts have shown each one can be throttled, and a compound crisis could pressure several at once. February 2026 ran the test. Hormuz shut, fertilizer prices jumped from Asia to Africa inside a week, and the Gulf switchboard meant to make the region’s food flows more secure discovered that its prized corridor cannot escape the one chokepoint that matters most. The concentration that the 2022 shock exposed on gas and sanctions, and the 2026 disruption confirmed on geography, has not been engineered out of the system. It is only waiting for the next time an artery closes.

The supply chain, then, is the layer beneath the maps of who imports what. The next part of this series turns to the responses: the desalination plants, the strategic reserves, the overseas farmland and the engineered surpluses with which the region is trying to buy, build, or break its way out of a dependence that, as the inputs and arteries show, runs in both directions at once.

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In late February 2026, as the war between Iran and its adversaries widened, the fighting reached a target soldiers had rarely bothered with before: the water itself. Within weeks, plants on the Gulf coast that turn seawater into drinking water, the process engineers call desalination, were reported damaged. For years hydrologists had warned that a coastline lined with such plants is a coastline full of soft targets. Now the warning had teeth.

Here is why that matters so much in the Gulf. Several of these states draw most of their tap water from desalination, and the emergency stockpile sitting behind those plants is measured in days, not months. A single strike on the coast can cut the supply faster than a cabinet can meet. The war did not create that weakness. It exposed how little stands between the Middle East and the two things it has never managed to produce for itself: water and grain.

This is the trap. The Middle East and North Africa is where the world’s two tightening resource constraints, food and water, press hardest against each other. The region is hot, it is dry, and its population keeps climbing, which means every season it eats more than it grows. It closes that gap two ways. It buys grain outright. And it buys what economists call virtual water.

That second idea is worth pausing on, because the rest of this series leans on it. Growing food takes enormous amounts of water, most of it invisible in the finished product. A single metric ton of wheat carries, on the global average, roughly 1,800 cubic meters of water used to grow it. When a desert country imports that wheat from a rainy one, it is, in effect, importing the water it never had to spend. No water actually crosses the border; the figure is an accounting device, and it swings widely with where the wheat was grown. But it captures the bargain exactly. A nation short of water can drink, in a sense, by eating someone else’s rain.

Both halves of that bargain run through hands the region does not control. Russia anchors the price of bread for much of the region. Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran sit upstream, and no enforceable basin treaty binds them to the states below. This is the first of a four-part series on food and water security in the region. It lays out the diagnosis: how the trap was built, and how tightly it has closed. Later parts follow the supply chains that run through it, and ask who is trying to escape.

The region that cannot feed itself

Start with the water, because it sets the ceiling on everything else. By the standard international yardsticks, much of the region falls below the line that defines water scarcity. These are modeled estimates, sensitive to how you count, so small gaps between countries should not be over-read. But the broad picture is stark. Jordan has about 61 cubic meters of its own renewable water per person each year, among the lowest figures on earth. The Gulf states are lower still, Kuwait effectively at zero on this measure.

Egypt looks healthier, at roughly 500 cubic meters a head. But that number is borrowed. It counts the Nile, a river generated almost entirely outside Egypt’s borders. Egypt’s own home-grown water comes to about nine cubic meters a person. The other 500 are a courtesy extended by the countries upstream.

The map of who falls below the scarcity line is, with few exceptions, a map of the region itself. What a map cannot show is the deeper point: water and food are the same problem seen from two ends. A country short of water cannot grow its own grain, and a country that cannot grow its own grain must buy the water that grew someone else’s.

Across the region, farming swallows the great majority of every drop used, from about 80% in Egypt to around 90% in Yemen, well above the global norm of roughly 72%. And still the region grows only a fraction of what it eats. Wheat provides half to two-thirds of the calories here, and most of it is imported. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat buyer, grows about half the wheat it consumes and ships in the rest, close to 13 million metric tons a year. Even Israel, the regional showcase for engineered water abundance, still imports about 90% of its grain. The water miracle stops at the field gate.

And the trend runs the wrong way. The main international forecast for the sector projects the region’s net farm imports rising about a third by 2034, as population outgrows a farm base pinned down by the lack of water and land. The near-term numbers already show the climb, with record wheat imports across the region in the 2025/26 season. The region is not closing in on self-sufficiency. It is drifting further from it, year by year, with the shortfall made up by ships.

Russia anchors the price of bread

Those ships increasingly fly one flag. The grain lifeline that feeds the region runs through a single supplier with its own political agenda, and the dependence has tightened, not loosened, since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, shipping about 45 million metric tons in 2025/26, roughly a fifth of all the wheat traded on earth, a share the main forecast expects to climb toward a quarter through 2034. And Russia is cheapest precisely where the region buys: the price-sensitive markets of North Africa and Western Asia. In the most recent season, Russian wheat made up about 42% of North Africa’s imports, and USDA data show that share climbing.

Egypt is the sharpest example. Russia supplied roughly three-quarters of Egypt’s wheat imports in 2024, by far its largest source. Cairo has been working to spread its bets, courting Romania, Bulgaria, the wider EU and Ukraine, and in late 2024 it handed public wheat buying to a military-linked agency that scrapped the old open-tender system for direct private deals. The diversification is real but slow against Russia’s price and shipping edge. It is also the reason the 2022 disruption in the Black Sea, the shipping route that carries both Russian and Ukrainian grain, hit Egypt so hard.

The same exposure repeats across the region. Turkey now buys almost all its imported wheat from Russia. Iran takes roughly half of its imported wheat from the same source. Sudan, in the middle of famine, has leaned on Russian grain straight through its own collapse.

A single dominant supplier would be a manageable risk if that supplier behaved like a neutral market. Russia does not. Moscow runs its grain trade as a tool of the state, with export caps, a shifting export tax, and an unofficial price floor that traders pegged near 250 dollars a metric ton. And it has shown it will use grain as leverage. In July 2023 it tore up the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the deal that had let Ukrainian grain sail safely to dozens of countries, after it had moved nearly 33 million metric tons. It has paired the squeeze on Ukrainian supply with “free grain” diplomacy in Africa that arrived alongside military deployments and new embassies. And when the Assad regime fell in Syria in December 2024, Russia suspended wheat shipments there within weeks, leaving a country already short of bread scrambling to cover the gap. The lesson is consistent: the cheapest supply is also the most political, and a deliberate cut transmits straight to a bread counter.

The bench behind Russia is thin and thinning. When Black Sea harvests disappoint, the backstop suppliers are the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the EU. But the American share of world wheat exports has fallen from about a quarter in the early 2000s to roughly a tenth, turning the United States from the market’s price-setter into a mere balancer.

Rice is more concentrated still. India alone supplies more than 40% of the world’s traded rice, and India is the most volatile of the big suppliers, ready to slam its border shut whenever food prices at home start to climb. New Delhi banned wheat exports in May 2022 and held the ban for nearly four years. Separately, it banned a major category of rice exports for fifteen months, a move that pushed world rice prices about a fifth higher than before the curbs and, by one IFPRI estimate, cost African consumers a welfare loss of some 3.8 billion dollars. For the region’s heavy rice buyers, Iraq, the Gulf and Iran, that border-closing reflex acts like a recurring tax. A region this dependent on so few sellers has handed its stability to other governments’ domestic politics.

Pakistan shows how that dependence can be doubly geared, exposed on two fronts at once. It is the world’s fourth-largest rice exporter and, with India, the swing supplier that sets the global price: when India banned a swathe of rice exports in 2023, Pakistan surged into the gap, lifting its own exports more than 60% to a record near 6 million metric tons. Yet that rice is grown with water from the Indus river, water that India is now threatening to withhold. The day after a deadly attack in Pahalgam in April 2025, India suspended the 1960 treaty that governs how the two countries share the Indus, halting the data and flood-warning sharing on which Pakistan depends, with officials vowing that “not even a drop of water” would reach it (CSIS). The Indus waters about nine in ten of Pakistan’s crops. This is the same upstream weapon Turkey holds over Iraq, but here it is aimed by one nuclear-armed rival at another.

Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran meter the rivers

If grain is the lever held abroad, water is the lever held next door. Most of the region does not own the water it drinks. The two great farming civilizations, Egypt on the Nile and Iraq on the Tigris and Euphrates, sit at the tail end of rivers whose sources lie in foreign capitals. The Tigris-Euphrates basin is the heart of the old Fertile Crescent, where wheat and barley were first farmed some ten thousand years ago. The cradle of agriculture now buys much of its bread, its founding rivers metered by the powers that hold the headwaters.

The physics of a dam are unforgiving. A dam upstream turns a shared river into a tap the upstream country controls. The country downstream cannot force a release, cannot check the reservoir’s true level, and cannot plan a harvest around water it does not command.

Turkey is where that leverage has already been used. Nearly nine-tenths of the Euphrates is generated inside Turkish territory, and through a vast project of around 18 dams built by the end of 2023 in its southeast, Ankara controls the flow. The downstream effect has been severe: the Euphrates’ inflow to Iraq has fallen sharply, and the Tigris with it. A 1987 protocol commits Turkey to send a set minimum of Euphrates water to Syria; since 2021 the measured flow has run roughly 60% short of that promise, starving both Syrian irrigation and the dams that supply about 70% of Syria’s electricity. Turkey is not bound by a basin-wide allocation treaty; in practice, control sits with the dams.

On the Nile the leverage is newly installed and not yet pulled. In September 2025 Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, known as the GERD, the largest hydropower plant in Africa, with an installed capacity of 5.15 gigawatts, holding back a reservoir of 74 billion cubic meters. The branch of the Nile that fills it, the Blue Nile, supplies about 59% of the water that reaches Egypt over a year, and up to 85% in flood season.

In a normal year the dam is manageable, even helpful, smoothing floods and trapping silt. The danger is the refill scenario: a multi-year drought during which Ethiopia chooses to keep filling its reservoir rather than let water through. Egypt spent more than a decade trying to bind Ethiopia to a legally enforceable minimum release in drought years, and failed. The dam is now full and running without one. Egypt rests its claim on a 1959 treaty that grants it the lion’s share of the Nile’s flow, an agreement Ethiopia was never part of and does not recognize.

Iran is the third upstream actor, sitting on the headwaters of the Tigris’ tributaries. Through a building program of 16 dams plus diversion tunnels on the Sirwan, Tehran has sharply cut the rivers that feed roughly a quarter of the Tigris’ flow inside Iraq; Iraqi Kurdistan reports drops of up to 80% in one of them below Iran’s dams.

The bitter irony is that all three of these upstream powers are themselves running dry, which makes their incentive to hoard stronger, not weaker. Turkey’s own water per person has slipped into the stressed band. Iran is in open water bankruptcy, pumping out more groundwater each year than the rains put back, to the point that parts of Tehran are sinking by up to 25 to 30 centimeters a year, a collapse no wet year can reverse. An upstream power running dry has stronger reason to hoard, not less.

When surface water fails, these states pump groundwater. Much of it is fossil water, laid down in wetter ages and effectively non-renewable: once an aquifer this old is drained, no rainfall in human time refills it. That deeper drawdown is a pressure the later parts return to.

The treaty gap

What makes all this leverage usable is that almost nothing constrains it. The closest thing to a global rulebook for shared rivers, the 1997 UN watercourses convention, was adopted with Turkey among only three states voting against, and Egypt and Ethiopia abstaining. In the Tigris-Euphrates basin, only the two downstream states, Iraq and Syria, have signed up; Turkey, the country holding the dams, has not. The rules bind the downstream states, not the upstream one holding the dams. On the Nile, the story rhymes: Egypt leans on a 1959 treaty that excludes the very country now controlling the headwaters. As one 2026 legal commentary argues, international water law is failing exactly where it is needed most.

The cooperation that does exist is telling in where it shows up. Jordan joined the UN water convention in early 2026 and paired the move with bilateral deals, including a 2025 agreement with Syria to share the Yarmouk river. Turkey and Iraq signed a water-cooperation framework in late 2025, though it is bundled with a contested oil-for-water arrangement and leaves day-to-day control with Ankara rather than guaranteeing Iraq a fixed share. The pattern is consistent: cooperation appears between weaker or roughly equal parties, and is missing exactly where one state holds decisive upstream power. The states with the leverage have no reason to give it up, and the convention that might bind them is one they have refused to join.

The bread queue is the social contract

The reason all this matters beyond trade tables and river charts is that bread, in this region, is politics. Stability here is built on subsidized flour. The gap between the world price of wheat and the cheap price of the loaf is paid by the state, a transfer every finance ministry knows is fiscally indefensible and politically untouchable at the same time.

Egypt is the clearest case. Subsidized flatbread supplies about a third of the average person’s daily calories to roughly 73 million people, around two-thirds of the country. When Cairo finally raised the loaf price in June 2024, quadrupling it, it was the first increase since 1989. That thirty-five-year gap is the whole problem in a single fact: the subsidy is so politically loaded that it can only be touched once the fiscal pain becomes unbearable, which means it is always adjusted at the worst possible moment.

The link between the price of bread and the survival of governments is real, though it is best described as a strong pattern rather than an iron law. One influential model, from researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute, plotted a global food-price index against outbreaks of unrest and found that historical riots clustered above a particular threshold on the index, beyond which, the authors argued, food riots and political instability became highly likely in import-dependent countries. That threshold is a line fitted through a small number of events, mainly the price spikes of 2008 and 2011, and the exact figure is contested rather than independently proven. The same institute flagged the danger to a US government audience shortly before a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation in December 2010 set off the Arab Spring, an instance often cited as foresight, though it is a single one.

What is not in dispute is the underlying pattern. The two great price spikes of 2008 and 2011 lined up with the political record, and the states that fell hardest, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, were the import-dependent ones where bread was both a household staple and a state promise. The detonator can be pulled from three directions: a global supply shock, a currency collapse at home, or a regional drought.

It need not be a global shock. A currency collapse does the same work from the inside. In early 2026, with no harvest failure to blame, Iran’s flour prices ran about 170% higher than a year earlier, and rice about 220% higher, a rise widely pinned on the collapse of the rial. What decides how long a government can absorb such a shock is the depth of its emergency grain reserve. The Gulf holds the deepest cover, six months or more in Saudi Arabia. At the other end sit the collapse states living shipment to shipment. Lebanon’s reserve fell from many months to under one when the 2020 Beirut port explosion destroyed silos holding most of the country’s cereal storage, and was never rebuilt. Syria handed over only months of stock at its 2024 transition, its pre-war two-year reserve long gone. Yemen holds no meaningful reserve at all. The cushion is thinnest exactly where the money and political capacity to respond are thinnest too.

As of mid-2026 the global food-price index sat at a moderate level, which is why this year has seen no region-wide bread crisis. But the right reading of the present is a cautious one. Global prices are calm, yet the transmission machinery is fully intact. The index is a worldwide average, and the mechanism also fires locally, so Iran and Lebanon can run their own price crises while the world figure sleeps. The buffers in the most exposed states are thinner than they were in 2011. And the structural trend runs the wrong way, with import dependence growing while the cheapest supplier grows more dominant and more exposed to its own droughts. A bad Russian harvest landing on top of a weak North American one is the scenario that would push prices back toward the danger zone. The region has spent the years since the Arab Spring managing its food fragility, not solving it.

When the drought becomes the trigger

Water and grain are rarely the sole cause of a crisis. They are the force multipliers that turn a drought, a currency shock or a border war into a survival emergency, and the multiplier is growing. The clearest recent evidence comes from the science of attribution, the field that works out how much a given extreme event was made worse by human-caused warming.

The most rigorous recent result examined the drought that gripped the Tigris-Euphrates basin and Iran from 2020 to 2023. It found that human-caused warming made a drought of that severity in the Euphrates-Tigris basin about 25 times more likely, turning what would once have been a one-in-250-year event into a one-in-ten-year one. Its central finding reframes the whole problem: the drought was driven mainly by extreme heat, not by missing rain. In a climate just over a degree cooler, the study concluded, the same shortfall in rainfall “would not have been classified as a drought at all,” because lower temperatures would have left more moisture in the soil.

That mechanism, heat baking moisture out of the ground rather than rain simply failing to fall, shows up across the recent science, from the Horn of Africa to Sicily and Sardinia. Here is why that distinction matters: warming now bites through heat, not rainfall, which means it bites even in years when the rains arrive on schedule. That is what turns the region’s import dependence and upstream exposure from a cyclical pressure into a steadily worsening one.

The human cost is direct, not abstract. In Iraq, nearly 90% of rain-fed crops failed in 2022, and the country entered 2026 with national water reserves the water ministry put at an 80-year low. By late 2024, more than 168,000 Iraqis had been driven from their homes by climate factors, families walking away from villages where the wells had turned salty and the canals had run to cracked mud. Iraq is the cleanest illustration of how structural exposure works. In 2024 Baghdad reported a record harvest and declared self-sufficiency; a single drought year then cut the 2025 harvest by roughly a third and sent the country back to the import market. Part of that swing is ordinary reversion from a bumper year. But the thin reserves and the upstream hoarding behind it are not cyclical. They are the structure a drought exploits.

The Syrian precedent is the warning the region never absorbed, and it should be stated carefully. One prominent 2015 study estimated that the drought of the late 2000s in the Fertile Crescent was made more than twice as likely by human-driven warming, and argued that the rural collapse that followed, which uprooted perhaps 1.5 million people, fed the grievances that preceded the 2011 uprising. Both the attribution and the chain of cause to the war are contested in the research, and Syria’s war had many drivers: repression, sectarian politics, regional contagion. What is not contested is the structural lesson, that agricultural collapse can feed instability. And it is no longer hypothetical. Syria now imports two-thirds or more of its wheat, with 2025 grain output more than 60% below average and only 40% of its farmland cultivated. The conditions that produced the catastrophe have intensified everywhere the trap closes tightest.

Bottom line: the trap to 2030

The honest read to 2030 is not a single basin-wide war but a region living closer to the edge of both constraints every year. The structural deficit widens on food and water alike. Net farm imports rise by about a third by 2034; the farm base stays pinned by the lack of water and land; and the supplier market concentrates further onto Russia and a shrinking handful of rice exporters, even as those origins face their own droughts. Water tightens in parallel: one major assessment projects the 83% of the region’s people already under extreme water stress reaching 100% by 2050. The upstream powers will keep building and keep retaining, because their own scarcity gives them every reason to. The legal vacuum will persist, because the states with the leverage will not constrain it.

The trap is not sprung evenly. It sorts the region along the line of the buffer. The wealthy Gulf stays secure but more exposed, its manufactured water now a target sitting on the coast. The fiscally strained middle, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, wins or loses on whether engineered supply can outrun the deficit, while subsidized bread on imported wheat stays its stability contract and the price-to-protest mechanism stays live. The collapse states, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq in a bad year, remain one drought, one blockade or one currency shock from catastrophe, living shipment to shipment with no reserve to fall back on.

The same drought that empties an Iranian reservoir lifts the price of the Egyptian loaf, because the water that should grow Egyptian wheat is being imported, virtually, inside grain whose price and availability are shaped by foreign policy as well as weather and markets. That is the trap in one sentence: a region that cannot produce its own water cannot produce its own food, and must buy both from powers that owe it nothing.

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Inputs, Arteries, and Chokepoints turns the map around: the region that imports the world’s bread also exports the nitrogen and phosphate that grow everyone else’s, and ships them through straits narrow enough that one war can throttle them. It follows the fertilizer, the shipping chokepoints, and the corridors being built to route around them.

Part 2

On June 15th the United States Department of Agriculture published a quiet sentence with loud consequences. The USDA’s June forecast puts the country’s 2026 crop of hard red winter wheat, the workhorse class that fills American flour bins and a good share of the world’s, on track to be the smallest since 1957, a harvest of about 13.5m tonnes, well below the average of recent years. A drought stretching across the southern Great Plains had done the damage: by early June only a quarter of the winter-wheat crop was rated good or excellent, one of the worst readings in the four decades the government has kept score, and nearly two-thirds of the winter-wheat crop sat in areas gripped by drought, against 15% a year earlier.

Commodity desks reacted in the usual register, parsing yields, export pace and the price of a bushel in Kansas City. Almost none of them noticed that the same report landed on a much older ledger: a biblical grain law that binds every Jew, though only a determined minority, along with the bakeries that supply them, still keep it. In a kosher grocery somewhere a shopper is holding a phone over a box of crackers, checking an app to see whether the flour inside is permitted; the answer depends, though they may not know it, on rain that did or did not fall over Kansas. For them, a bad year in the wheat belt is not only an economic event. It is a religious one.

Set against every American crop since the 1950s, the 2026 shortfall is steep:

A law older than the futures market

The law is called ḥadash, “new,” and its mirror image yashan, “old.” It covers the five grains of Jewish tradition, wheat, two kinds of barley, spelt and emmer (though there are those who believe oats and rye to be among the five). The point is not pedantry. The identification fixes which grains the law governs at all. Leviticus 23:14 forbids eating from the new grain harvest “until the selfsame day” that the Omer offering was brought in the Temple, the 16th of Nisan, which falls in spring around Passover. (The Temple’s own grain-offerings had to wait longer still, until the two loaves of Shavuʿoth seven weeks on; but for the bread on an ordinary table the Omer was the gate.) Grain that took root before that date is yashan and permitted; grain that took root after it is ḥadash and forbidden until the following year’s 16th of Nisan comes around. Maimonides, codifying the Talmud in the 12th century, ruled in his Laws of Forbidden Foods that the prohibition binds everywhere and in every age, in the Land of Israel or the diaspora, whether or not the Temple stands. The Omer offering itself ceased when the Temple fell in 70 CE, but the prohibition did not lapse with it: the 16th of Nisan still does the permitting the offering once did, and the law has run on the calendar, unbroken, for two thousand years. Flour, in other words, has a birthday, and for part of the year the wrong birthday makes it off-limits.

For most of Jewish history this was a problem only where Jews farmed their own fields and knew exactly when each crop went into the ground. Industrial agriculture severed that knowledge. A modern observant consumer staring at a supermarket cracker has no idea when the wheat inside it rooted, and the answer turns out to depend on a distinction most shoppers have never heard of: the difference between winter wheat and spring wheat.

Why the calendar runs through Kansas and North Dakota

American wheat comes in two great families defined by when it is planted, and the difference is the whole story. Winter wheat, about 70% of the crop in a normal year and nearer two-thirds in 2026, goes into the ground in autumn, germinates, and survives the cold as a low green mat, drawing on the winter’s moisture to put up high yields when it ripens the following June. Because it takes root in the autumn, well before the spring cutoff, winter wheat is almost always yashan by the time it is milled. Spring wheat, grown in the cooler northern plains of North Dakota, Montana and Minnesota, has a shorter season: planted in April and May, after the 16th of Nisan has passed, it roots on the wrong side of the line and stays ḥadash, forbidden, until the next Passover, even though it is harvested and sold that same summer, months before the Passover that finally permits it. A third class, durum, the hard amber wheat ground into semolina for pasta, is spring-planted too, mostly in the same northern belt, and shares spring wheat’s predicament.

The whole logic fits on a calendar, with each class on its own side of the cutoff:

This is the hinge of the whole problem. The class of wheat that is reliably kosher for the yashan-keeping year is winter wheat, and hard red winter, its dominant class, is exactly what drought has just driven to a 69-year low. The class that is off-limits for most of the year, spring wheat, came through 2026 almost unscathed: only 22% of the spring crop sat in drought, and it was planted ahead of its normal pace.

Drought does its worst to winter wheat at one particular moment. The plant sets its yield in late spring, in the few weeks of “grain fill” when the kernels swell and harden; a run of hot, dry, windy weather then, exactly what the southern plains got this year, forces the crop to ripen too fast and leaves the grains shrunken and light. A field can stand green in April and still come up short in June. That is why a dry spring in Kansas, more than a hard winter or a wet autumn, is what surfaces months later as a thinner harvest, and a thinner supply of yashan flour.

The full ledger is grim across the classes. The USDA’s June forecast put the 2026 hard red winter crop at 497m bushels, which on that estimate would be a 69-year low; soft red winter at 300m and white winter at 233m, with durum and the other spring wheats together near 514m, a figure USDA still estimates rather than surveys. Winter wheat as a whole fell 27% in a year, to 1,030m bushels, its smallest since 1965, and the all-wheat crop, 1,543m bushels, was the lowest since 1970. Last year’s wheat averaged $5.05 a bushel; the USDA forecasts $6.00 for this smaller crop. The damage is concentrated exactly where yashan observance leans hardest, on the hard red winter class.

The geography says the same thing, the winter belt scorched and the spring belt spared:

The slow drift from the granary to the truck

The wheat at the center of all this is itself an immigrant. Hard red winter wheat reached the American plains in the 1870s with Mennonite refugees fleeing the Russian Empire, who brought a hardy variety called Turkey Red from the Black Sea steppe after the tsar revoked their exemption from military service. A Mennonite miller named Bernhard Warkentin, who had come ahead to scout the land, championed the grain and imported it in bulk, making it the foundation of the Kansas crop; the hard winter grain shrugged off the plains winters that had killed the soft wheats before it, and a state that grew little wheat became the nation’s breadbasket. The grain that observant Jews now lean on to keep an ancient law was, in other words, carried out of the same Russia-and-Ukraine borderlands whose wars and droughts still move its price.

Spring wheat, by contrast, was a fringe crop in America until the 1870s and 1880s, when new milling technology made its hard, high-protein kernels commercially valuable, and it climbed from there to almost a third of the national harvest today. As far back as the 1930s, American winter wheat was routinely stored for a year or more before it was milled, which meant that almost anything reaching a mill was old enough to count as yashan by default, and an observant baker needed no special vigilance at all.

When that changed, the law did not lapse, but its keeping grew hard, and for much of the 20th century yashan was kept in America only by those willing to do the detective work themselves. Its modern revival was the work of a few. In the 1950s Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik, finding that domestic wheat was no longer held long enough to presume it yashan, persuaded Streit’s, the matzoh company under his supervision, to source only old grain; for a time, the story goes, he ate only yashan matzoh himself, waiting on a freezer to lay in a supply. When Washington began selling surplus wheat to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and American granaries drained further, Rabbi Yosef Herman of Monsey, New York, took up the labor of fact, tracking crop by crop and brand by brand which products were still yashan. The work he began lives on in Yoshon.com and a phone app with a supermarket barcode scanner. Each year the major kashrut agencies, from the Orthodox Union to the London Beth Din, issue a “yoshon advisory”: new-crop flour typically begins to reach American shelves around August, with barley products and, last of all, durum pasta and beer following into the winter.

For the shopper, yashan is a year-round act of label-reading made just barely manageable. From after Passover until late summer everything on the shelf is old crop and safe; then, as the new harvest works into flour, cereal, pasta and beer in the staggered order the guides spell out, each product has to be checked, often by reading the date code the manufacturer stamps on the package against a list of which plants and which dates are still in the clear. Careful buyers lay in certified-old flour before the season turns, watch for the “made with yoshon flour” labels that more kosher products now carry, and lean on the agencies’ advisories and the barcode scanner to tell a permitted box of crackers from a forbidden one.

Over a century the mix has shifted, spring wheat creeping up on winter even as winter still rules the crop:

The war that spiked, then didn’t

When Russia invaded in February 2022, the two countries together accounted for more than a quarter of global wheat exports, and prices reacted violently: the benchmark American hard-red-winter quote climbed from about $390 a tonne on the eve of the invasion to a peak above $520 in May 2022. The shock was not confined to grain. Soaring natural-gas prices choked production of ammonia, the feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer, and Russia and Belarus, which together ship two-fifths of the world’s potash, fell under a sanctions cloud; fertilizer prices climbed steeply.

In May 2022 India, alarmed by a heat-blasted crop and its own food-price inflation, halted most wheat exports; the following summer it pulled most of its rice off the world market too, and India supplies two-fifths of globally traded rice. The buyers that felt these tremors first were the great importers of the Middle East and North Africa, Egypt above all, the world’s largest wheat buyer, which on the eve of the war drew some four-fifths of its imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Egypt has reason to dread a shortage: when a Russian drought and export ban sent wheat to a multi-year high in 2010, the cost of bread helped touch off the Arab Spring, and in a country where the word for bread, ʿaish, also means life, governments have trembled over the price of a loaf. The United Nations spent 2022 brokering a grain corridor out of Ukraine for exactly that reason. The United States is the residual supplier in this system.

The price record traces the whole episode, the spike and the long descent that followed:

The worst of the 2022 scenario never arrived; global trade re-routed rather than ruptured. Russia went on to harvest enormous crops and ship more wheat than any other country, and the American benchmark eased into the low $240s by late 2025, then climbed back toward $300 a tonne by mid-2026 as the new drought tightened supply. But the system keeps seizing somewhere new. In 2026 the pressure point is the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer moves: a conflict with Iran has throttled those shipments and prompted the United Nations’ food agency to warn of a disruption “at the core of the global agrifood system.”

The exposure runs both ways, and fast. American flour is priced off the same global market as everyone else’s bread, so a failed harvest in Russia, an export ban in India or a fertilizer squeeze at Hormuz lifts the price of a bushel in Kansas within a season, not a decade. When the world eats more than it grows, or a shock takes a big exporter offline, American mills pay the higher world price and American shelves feel it within months. For the observant baker that means his permitted flour answers not only to the weather on the American plains but to every shortage half a world away, long before the next harvest can make up the difference.

And yet America’s own 2026 wheat problem is the quiet kind. It is not a chokepoint or a sanctions list flashing on every screen. It is a narrow, physical shortage of one class of wheat, the very class that yashan observance depends on, caused not by geopolitics but by weather in Oklahoma and Kansas.

When the market tilts toward the forbidden grain

The mechanism that connects a Kansas drought to a Brooklyn bakery is now running in plain sight, and the USDA spelled it out. With hard red winter so scarce, it has become unusually expensive, in some places dearer than spring wheat, which the government notes is “providing an incentive for millers to change the blend of wheat used for milling.” Translated: when winter wheat is short and costly, millers reach for more spring wheat. And nothing on the package records the change: the federal standard of identity for flour makes no mention of whether the wheat is winter or spring, and both classes are used in ordinary flour blends, so a sack of bread flour may be one, the other or a mix of the two, with nothing on the label to say which. That silence is why yashan is kept by date code, not by what the bag claims. The trade flows run the same way, and against the yashan-keeper. What America sells abroad is mostly winter wheat, led by hard red winter, typically its single biggest export class; what it buys in is the opposite: total US wheat imports run about 125m bushels a year (some 3.4m tonnes), most of it the hard red spring and durum bought from Canada, along with flour, pasta and noodles, and all of it ḥadash. A short winter crop therefore squeezes the very grain America exports and leans the country harder on those imports, even as the USDA expects total wheat exports to fall to 775m bushels in 2026-27, the third-lowest since 1971. The market, following nothing but price, drifts toward exactly the grain that observant consumers may not eat, at exactly the moment the permitted grain is hardest to get. None of this reclassifies anything: winter wheat that rooted last autumn stays yashan whatever the weather does to its yield. The harm is quieter, a shrinking and dearer pool of the permitted grain, and a market leaning ever harder on the forbidden kind.

There is an irony in the price tags. Keeping kosher almost always costs more, the supervision, the certification, the premium for shemura maṣṣa (shmurah matzoh) at Passover. This time it inverts. Hard red winter, the permitted grain, has long traded at a discount to the spring wheat that is forbidden for most of the year. In 2026 that discount all but vanished, and in June it inverted outright: in the futures pits the nearby Kansas City hard-red-winter contract traded more than ten cents a bushel above Minneapolis spring, the yashan grain now the dearer one. A drought had made the stringency the expensive option.

Charted side by side, the spread all but vanishing:

The calendar sharpens it. From Passover until about August, every grain on the shelf is permitted, old crop by default; then new-crop flour begins to appear and observant buyers start reading labels again, just as the thinnest winter-wheat harvest in 69 years pushes mills toward the spring wheat they must refuse.

The result for yashan-keepers is not famine but friction: a thinner, pricier supply of compliant flour, more products quietly slipping to ḥadash status earlier in the season, and more work for the volunteers who track them. It is a small community absorbing a second-order consequence of a problem it did nothing to cause, the way a stone dropped in Kansas sends a ripple to a shelf in Lakewood.

That friction is felt first at the bakery. A Shabbath Pita (or challah), and any well-made loaf, is built on hard, high-protein wheat, and the hard wheat that is reliably yashan is hard red winter, the very class the drought has driven to a 69-year low; the soft wheat that goes into cookies and cake, a different class altogether, was barely touched. Even so, the loaf itself will barely move in price. Wheat is only a small fraction of what bread costs, on USDA figures nearer a twentieth than a tenth, the rest being milling, baking, labor and the shop’s margin; a fifth more for a bushel is not a fifth more for the challah on the table.

The stakes reach the seder table too, but on a delay. Passover maṣṣa is yashan almost by definition, baked from winter wheat harvested the summer before, so this spring’s was milled from the 2025 crop and is untouched; it is next year’s seder that inherits this year’s drought, when the thin 2026 harvest would be the wheat in the box. Even then the reach is uneven. The hand-made shemura maṣṣa (shmurah matzoh) at the top of the market is the best insulated: its wheat is grown on small, deliberately dry plots, in places like Arizona rather than the scorched plains, and its price turns on labor and supervision far more than on the grain itself. The drought’s pull on Passover runs instead through ordinary maṣṣa, whose wheat sits closer to the general crop, a slow strain on the unleavened bread of the festival that fixes the cutoff the whole law turns on.

The cushion is thinning

It is tempting to read 2026 as a bad year that will pass, and in the narrow sense it will; droughts break. The harder fact underneath it is that the yashan-reliable crop is in a long retreat. American farmers planted about 44m acres of wheat in 2026, the least since the government began keeping the record in 1919 and about half the 88m they sowed at the 1981 peak; wheat has spent forty years losing ground to corn and soybeans. And the hard-red-winter belt that anchors the permitted supply sits on some of the most exposed land in the country, the southern plains above the Ogallala aquifer, where parts of western Kansas have already drawn down more than 60% of the water they began with. One peer-reviewed projection is blunter still: a study of Kansas winter wheat projects production falling 17% by mid-century under a moderate warming path and 31% under a harsher one, most of it from lower yields rather than from farmers giving up.

None of this means yashan flour disappears. The crop may simply migrate north, as spring wheat already has, and the likelier future is not absence but volatility, a permitted-grain supply that is thinner, dearer and more easily tipped by a single dry spring. 2026 is not the storm. It is the forecast.

The decline is not this year’s alone; it has run for forty years:

That is the real subject here, and it outlasts any single harvest. A grain law written for a society of subsistence farmers now depends on the planting decisions of agribusinesses, the storage economics of grain elevators, the blending choices of industrial mills and, this year, the rainfall over the southern plains. The people keeping that law have built an entire apparatus, rabbinic and digital, to stay on the right side of a line drawn in Leviticus. The wheat market has never heard of them. It moves their world all the same.

This article was first drafted in early 2022, at the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with The Economist in mind.

It grew out of a deep back-and-forth with a good friend at the time, and I remain grateful for that conversation.

Since then, the piece has been substantially rewritten in light of current events, updated reporting, and the broader context now before us.

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At 12:47 a.m. local time on the third of January, 2020, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone fired several Hellfire missiles into a convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport. Two cars, ten men. Among the dead were Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force and architect of the Iranian regional system for more than two decades, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. No state had killed a serving foreign general of that rank, outside an active declared war, for a very long time. American planners called it the elimination of Iran’s most consequential warfighter. They were right about who he was. They were wrong about what removing him would do.

Within hours, Iran’s Supreme Leader had named the new Quds Force commander, Esmail Qaani, with the assurance that the unit’s strategy would be “identical” to Soleimani’s. Within two days, the Iraqi parliament voted to demand U.S. forces leave. Within four days, Iran’s parliament unanimously designated every U.S. soldier in the region a “terrorist” and allocated an additional 200 million euros (about $223 million) to the Quds Force. Within five days, Iranian ballistic missiles struck the U.S. air base at Ain al-Asad, wounding more than a hundred American servicemembers. A million-strong funeral procession marched through Tehran, Mashhad, Qom, Ahvaz, Karbala, and Najaf, chanting intiqām (revenge). Hezbollah continued its normal operations. Iraqi Shiʿa militias continued theirs. The Houthis continued theirs. Inside a month, the network functioned as if Soleimani had never been killed.

Western analysts called this institutional resilience. The phrase is true and insufficient. No conventional Western military replaces its single most important commander in a day. The IRGC named Qaani in hours and was firing ballistic missiles in days. The Iranian system did not pause for so much as a week.

This was not even the most central death the system has survived. On the third of June, 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini died: the founder, the source of the script itself, the queen of the colony. The Assembly of Experts named Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader the following day. Khamenei was, at that point, not a marjaʿ, not a senior jurist, barely an ayatollah. He was the sitting president of an emergency state. He was named under a constitution that still required the Leader to be a marjaʿ. That requirement was removed only weeks later, by a constitutional revision already underway before Khomeini’s death and ratified by referendum that July. The transition should have detonated the regime. It did not. The system named him, raised him, gave him the title Āyatollāh ol-ʿOẓmā by retrofitted consensus, and kept moving. The script kept running.

The reason is not institutional. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not a normal military, not a normal state organ, and not, in the ordinary sense, a chain of command. It is a hive. And a hive does not collapse when its largest bee, or its queen, is killed.

A hive is not leaderless. It is not anarchic. It is not unstructured. It has a queen, a doctrine of survival, a division of labor, and a set of shared signals that organize every bee toward the life of the colony. But it does not run on instructions. No bee sits and waits for an order from the queen before it forages, defends, builds, or stings. The colony coheres because every bee already knows what the colony is for.

The biologist Thomas Seeley documents six decades of research into how the colony decides. When a hive grows too large, ten thousand worker bees leave with the old queen and settle on a branch in what Seeley calls a “beardlike cluster,” homeless, waiting. Several hundred of the oldest bees become scouts. They fly out, find candidate nest sites, return, and advertise what they found by dancing: the direction, distance, and quality of a hollow tree encoded in the angle and vigor of the dance. Other scouts watch the dances, fly out, evaluate, return, and either dance for the same site or dance for a different one. A debate runs for hours, sometimes days. When the quorum at one site crosses a threshold (typically twenty to thirty scouts present at once), the whole swarm lifts off and flies, together, to the chosen home. Seeley’s central finding, replicated across hundreds of swarms: the bees pick the best available nest site, by collective debate, with no central authority, with near-perfect reliability (Honeybee Democracy, 2010).

Kevin Kelly, writing in Out of Control in 1994, named the principle. “The world of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adaptable, and creative but, consequently, out of our control.” Complex systems (colonies, coral reefs, mycelium networks, ecosystems) do not run on instructions. They run on shared signals and a purpose that has been distributed through every part of the body.

A hive is not the only system that runs without a center. A franchise is distributed, a terror network is distributed, even a market is distributed. What makes it the right comparison is the property the others lack: in a hive, the death of a part is not a loss but a signal. A franchise that loses a store is weaker; a hive that loses a bee is confirmed. That property is what the IRGC was built to have. Not by accident. By doctrine.

One caveat keeps the model honest. Bees are siblings bound by genes; they cannot defect, and they believe nothing. The IRGC’s people are strangers who can defect and must be made to believe. That gap is not a flaw in the analogy; it is the problem the system exists to solve. How it solves it, and where the solution can break, is the rest of this essay.

Mosaic Defense

The Iranian military has a name for it: defāʿ-e mūzāʾīkī, mosaic defense. The doctrine took shape after the Iran-Iraq War, was articulated by Mohammad Ali Jafari in 2005, and was formalized as IRGC structure in June 2008, when Jafari, by then the Guard’s commander, oversaw the most extensive restructuring of the force since 1985. Its premise was learned from a specific case: the rapid regime collapse that followed Saddam Hussein’s centralized command in Iraq in 2003. The IRGC, reading that, decided the center would be the first thing destroyed in a war with the United States or Israel, and the system had to be able to keep operating without it. So the IRGC was reorganized into thirty-one provincial corps, each with its own intelligence, logistics, militia (Basij) integration, and authority to conduct operations in its zone without authorization from the center. Doctrine is set at the top. Execution is pushed down. Local commanders are expected to keep operating along the strategic mission even if Tehran goes silent.

This is exactly what a hive does. The queen does not direct the foragers. The colony’s purpose has already been internalized in every bee’s behavior. Cut off the queen, and the colony will rear a new one. Cut off the foragers, and the remaining bees adjust. The hive is resilient because purpose is distributed through the whole body.

A standard military without this doctrine collapses when its command-and-control is broken. The IRGC does not. By design.

The Script

A hive needs more than structure. It needs a shared script: something that tells every bee, without being told, what the threat is and what the mission is. The IRGC has one, and Khomeini built it.

The previous essay in this Substack, The Bait and Switch: How the Iranian Revolution Was Hijacked, argued that Khomeini’s central move was to transform Karbala from a Shiʿa memory of martyrdom into a universal political grammar. The kalima-ye bozorg, the “great phrase” he endorsed in Ṣaḥīfa-ye Nūr, vol. 9, p. 202, is the operating instruction of the entire system:

“کلّ یومٍ عاشورا و کلّ أرضٍ کربلاء”

“Every day is ʿAshura, every land is Karbala.”

Read it as theology and it is moving. Read it as a system specification and it is something else: it is the line of code that lets the hive identify a threat, name the enemy, and authorize sacrifice anywhere, without instructions. Every battlefield becomes Karbala. Every enemy becomes Yazīd. Every sacrifice is interpretable in advance. The local commander in Mosul, the Hezbollah cell in southern Lebanon, the Houthi missile officer in Sanaa, the IRGC operative in Damascus: none of them needs Tehran to define the meaning of what they are doing. The meaning has been pre-loaded.

What Khomeini fused, Shiʿa martyrdom and the grammar of class struggle, is best called Islamo-Marxist populism (a compression neither scholar uses). Ervand Abrahamian, in Khomeinism (1993), reads the revolution as populism rather than fundamentalism, akin to Latin American Peronism, recasting Qurʾanic categories like mustazʿafīn (the oppressed) and mustakbirīn (the arrogant powers) through a borrowed class-struggle frame. Hamid Dabashi, in Theology of Discontent (1993), traces the same ideology as a structure built in dialectical argument with the West. What both are describing, in different vocabularies, is the construction of the code.

Call this ideology and you have said something true and stopped where it gets interesting. An ideology is a set of beliefs: things a man holds, that a leader broadcasts and a follower absorbs, that he consults before he acts. You can argue with a belief; you can outbid it, embarrass it, talk a man out of it. What Khomeini built is not held that way. It has dropped below belief into perception. The believer does not consult the script and conclude that the enemy is Yazīd; he sees a Yazīd where it tells him to look, and his own free act is the system’s act before Tehran has heard of it. That is the difference between an order and a lens: you can disobey an order, but you cannot disobey the thing you see with. Every lever the West reaches for (money, sanctions, the threat of prison) is addressed to a man weighing his options, and this sits beneath the weighing. The word makes you reach for a counterargument. There is nothing here to argue with. It has already been installed.

This is why the IRGC is not destroyed by salaries being unpaid or commanders being assassinated. Money buys a bureaucracy. Patronage buys loyalty. Neither produces martyrdom. The hive moves because every bee already knows what the colony is for.

The Code Outside Iran

The same code runs outside Iran. The “Axis of Resistance” is read in Western press as a hub-and-spoke system in which Tehran issues orders and Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad carry them out. That is the chain-of-command picture, and it is wrong in the part that matters.

Hezbollah’s Open Letter of 1985 and its 2009 manifesto, both reproduced in Joseph Alagha’s Hizbullah’s Documents, show a movement that does not have to be told what to do because it has already internalized Khomeini’s grammar. The Open Letter opens by stating it:

“إننا أبناء أمّة حزب الله التي نصر الله طليعتها في إيران وأسست من جديد نواة دولة الإسلام المركزية في العالم، نلتزم أوامر قيادة واحدة حكيمة تتمثل بالولي الفقيه الجامع للشرائط… وتتجسد في روح الله آية الله الموسوي الخميني…”

“We, the sons of Hizbullah’s umma, whose vanguard God has given victory in Iran and which has established the nucleus of the world’s central Islamic state, abide by the orders of a single, wise and just command represented by the guardianship of the jurisprudent (waliyy al-faqih), currently embodied in the supreme Ayatullah Ruhallah al-Musawi al-Khumayni…”

The Arabic is sharper than the translation in two ways. The pledge is not to “the guardianship of the jurisprudent” abstractly; it is to al-jāmiʿ al-sharāʾiṭ, the jurist who fulfills the classical canonical conditions for guardianship under Twelver law. Allegiance to a doctrinal credential, not to a man. And what Iran calls itself is not “the world’s central Islamic state” but a nawāt: a nucleus, a seed cell. Hezbollah’s founding document is already a biological text. The hive was always in the source.

A movement that calls itself the vanguard of Khomeini’s revolution does not need orders from Tehran in order to act for Tehran. It is acting for what Tehran represents. The letter then names the United States and Israel as the mustakbirīn. It names the mustazʿafīn. It places its struggle inside the same Karbala-script. By 2009, Hezbollah is operating as a state within Lebanon, with its own social services, its own neighborhoods (mapped in detail in Hanin Ghaddar’s Hezbollahland, 2022), its own clerical authority structure (described in Rodger Shanahan’s Shi’a of Lebanon, 2005), and its own military doctrine. It does not wait for Tehran to authorize a war. It fights its own.

The Houthi takeover of Sanaa in 2014 was not directed from Tehran. Iran reportedly advised the Houthis against taking the capital, and they pressed on anyway; the U.S. National Security Council assessed in April 2015 that “Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen.” The Iraqi militia operations against U.S. forces between 2003 and 2011 were not micromanaged from Tehran. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi was, in the assessment of one analyst cited by CFR, “a very poor prospect as an Iranian proxy,” too xenophobic and disenchanted with Iran’s exiles to be steered from Tehran. Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack was not orchestrated in Tehran. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Iranian leaders neither directed the operation nor had operational foreknowledge of it (the Wall Street Journal reported the contrary the day after the attack, though the U.S. assessment stands), and Hamas spent months trying, and failing, to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to commit forces. In each case the local actor had its own grievances, its own leadership, and its own timing. What it shared with Tehran was the script.

A limit has to be marked, because the proxies are not interchangeable. Hezbollah is Khomeini’s grammar internalized whole: Twelver, clerical, bound to the Velāyat-e Faqīh. The Houthis are Zaydi; Hamas is Sunni. They do not share the script’s content, and their autonomy is partly the proof of it: they act on their own because they have their own engines, not only Tehran’s. What crosses the sectarian line is thinner: the grammar Khomeini abstracted out of Karbala on purpose, so that mustakbirīn and mustazʿafīn, resistance and martyrdom, could be spoken by anyone with an enemy. That is the most the shared code carries into Sanaa and Gaza, and it is worth saying plainly that it carries less there than in Beirut.

Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr’s The Shia Revival (2006) frames the regional consequence. The 2003 toppling of Saddam handed power to Iraq’s long-suppressed Shiʿa majority and set off a region-wide Shiʿa assertiveness that Iran did not manufacture but inherited and amplified, a resurgence that is not the same thing as Iranian state expansion, yet is impossible to understand without it. The IRGC did not build a chain of command across the region. It distributed a code, and the code keeps running on whatever hardware is available.

A chain of command can be broken. A code, once distributed, has to be unwritten.

The Minority That Rules

A second piece is needed before the picture closes. The hive explains how the believers cohere without orders; it does not explain how so few of them hold a whole country. Why does this system govern a population that, by every honest estimate, does not believe in it?

The IRGC’s true ideological hard core is small. Polling under authoritarianism is unreliable, but large independent surveys, defector accounts, internal regime polling that has leaked, and the scale of the 2009, 2017–18, 2019, and 2022 protests all point the same way: the committed believers are a single-digit fraction of the population. A wider patronage class (Basij rank-and-file, contractors, conscripts, regime-dependent civil servants, the families who eat from the system) pushes the regime-tied bloc up to perhaps twenty percent. The rest of the country is, in revealed preference, against the regime, or indifferent, or exhausted.

How does a single-digit minority govern the rest?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Skin in the Game (2018), formalized the mechanism. He called it the most intolerant wins, or the dictatorship of the stubborn minority. The argument is not folk wisdom. It is drawn from the same mathematical apparatus, the renormalization group, that physicists use to model how local interactions scale up into system-wide states.

The core asymmetry is simple: an intransigent minority refuses to compromise; a flexible majority finds it cheaper to accommodate than to resist. Taleb’s worked example is dietary: kosher eaters are less than three-tenths of a percent of the U.S. population, yet almost all drinks are kosher-certified. Halal eaters are three to four percent of the U.K. population, yet close to seventy percent of New Zealand lamb imported into Britain is halal-slaughtered. The minority will not eat what the majority eats; the majority can eat what the minority eats; producers find it cheaper to comply with the minority than to maintain two systems. Repeat that calculation up the chain (household, neighborhood, supplier, distributor) and a three-percent preference becomes a hundred-percent supply.

Two structural conditions have to hold for the minority rule to scale, and both hold inside Iran.

First, the minority must be spatially distributed, not contained in a ghetto. The IRGC is the most evenly distributed institution in the country. Its provincial commands span all thirty-one provinces. The Basij is neighborhood-level: mosque-anchored, present on every block in every Iranian city. There is no district in Iran that can quietly opt out.

Second, the cost of complying with the minority must be low enough. Public compliance in Iran is cheap. Don’t say what you think. Wear the hijab. Don’t sign your name to the wrong petition. The cost of resisting (losing a job, losing a child, prison, exile, death) is enormous. The asymmetry is exactly the shape the minority rule requires.

Taleb’s grocery-aisle version runs on preference; Iran’s runs on fear. The mathematics does not care which. Renormalization needs only that compliance be cheaper than resistance; it is silent on whether the price of refusing is a costlier soft drink or a prison cell.

So one gets the result Taleb predicts and that journalists describe as a puzzle: the regime’s behavior looks like the country’s preference, even when only a small fraction of the country actually holds those preferences. “A naive observer (who looks at the standard average),” Taleb writes, “would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.” That is the optical illusion behind the way the Western press misreads Iran every week.

The same logic explains why ordinary metrics of regime fragility fail. A normal authoritarian state weakens when its support drops below fifty percent. A renormalization-group state, an ideological vanguard with the right spatial distribution and the right cost asymmetries, does not. Joseph Sassoon’s two studies, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party (2012) and Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (2016), show how comparable vanguard regimes engineered the same structure: a small armed believer-cadre over a wider patronage class over a public that learned not to test the cost of resisting. Sassoon’s archival reconstruction shows what bound the Baʿthist version together (demanded loyalty, an elite tied down by patronage, and a pervasive climate of fear) and why it stayed brittle: those bonds were transactional, and transactions can be outbid or outlasted. The IRGC has built the same machine with one decisive difference. Baʿthism’s vanguard ran on Arabism and a leader cult, and both proved exhaustible. The IRGC’s vanguard runs on Karbala, and Karbala does not exhaust.

Taleb has another line that applies. “Hidden asymmetries that make aggregates strange animals.” Iran, as governed by the IRGC, is one of those strange animals. It is not the sum of its citizens. It is the structure of how they are arranged.

The two mechanisms lock together. The hive gives the believers their coherence without a chain of command; minority rule lets that small, coherent core stand in for a whole country that never chose it. Neither alone would hold. Together they do.

The Queen and the Colony

The natural objection to all of this is centralization. The IRGC is not a leaderless swarm; it has a Supreme Leader, a chain of command, a constitutional doctrine of absolute clerical authority. Strip out Khamenei, the argument runs, and the whole thing collapses. The system is a hive only until its actual head dies.

The objection mistakes the queen for the colony.

The Supreme Leader’s authority is real, but it is not operational authority over what each bee does. It is doctrinal authority over what the script means. He sets the boundaries of the velāyat, names the Friday-prayer leaders, ratifies the candidates of the Guardian Council, blesses the strategic posture. He does not direct the Hezbollah cell in southern Lebanon. He does not pick the targets of the Quds Force’s operations in Iraq. He does not write the Houthi communiqués. The script that does those things has already been distributed.

The proof used to be a single data point, and a historical one. When Khomeini died in 1989, his successor was not a marjaʿ; he was the sitting president. The Assembly of Experts named him inside twenty-four hours, and the clerical establishment retrofitted his religious credentials to fit the title afterward. No interregnum, no splintering. They named a new queen and kept moving.

Then, in 2026, the experiment was run again, this time not by history but by an airstrike. On the twenty-eighth of February, a joint U.S.–Israeli operation killed Ali Khamenei himself, along with much of the senior command, in a single night of some nine hundred strikes. The queen, dead. By the standard theory of decapitation that is the blow that ends a regime. Within ten days the Assembly of Experts had installed Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead leader’s son, in his place. The system did not collapse. It did not even pause the war it was fighting; the missiles kept flying for another five weeks before a ceasefire.

Here the honest critic has a sharper version of the objection, and it deserves an answer. Look at what the IRGC did after Khamenei’s death, the critic says: it stepped out of the shadows and seized the state in the open, sidelining the president, routing decisions through its own commanders and the Supreme National Security Council, reducing the new Supreme Leader to a figurehead it had pressured into place. Is that not the system centralizing, collapsing onto a single power center, the very opposite of a distributed hive?

It is the opposite of what it looks like. A hive whose queen is killed does not promote a worker to think for the colony; it raises a new queen to lay eggs, and the workers go on running the hive exactly as before. That is what happened. Mojtaba is the new queen (the ceremonial source of legitimacy, the body that lets a next generation form), and the Guard is the colony that was always doing the work. Killing Khamenei did not force the IRGC to centralize. It removed the curtain that had let outsiders mistake the queen for the brain. The brain was always distributed. What would make it true centralization is a single point of failure, and there still is none: kill Mojtaba tomorrow and the Guard keeps running the state exactly as it does today. A command center cannot survive losing its center; this one has now done it twice. The 2026 succession did not refute the hive. It was the most expensive confirmation of it on record.

Antifragility

This is where the analytic mistake does the most damage.

Taleb’s other concept, antifragility, describes systems that do not merely survive pressure, but grow stronger from it (Antifragile, 2012). A glass is fragile: it breaks. A stone is robust: it does not break. An antifragile system gets better under stress. Living organisms are the canonical examples. Bone grows denser under load. Muscle grows stronger under tearing. An immune system gets sharper after each infection. The body does not merely tolerate stress; it requires it in order to maintain its form.

The IRGC’s narrative is antifragile in exactly this organism sense.

Every U.S. sanction confirms it: the mustakbirīn are besieging the revolution. Every Israeli airstrike confirms it: this is Karbala. Every assassination of a commander confirms it: this is martyrdom, this is Ḥusayn at the hands of Yazīd. The Karbala-script does not need defeat in order to claim victory. It claims victory through sacrifice itself. The death of the bee is, in the hive’s grammar, the proof of the hive’s righteousness.

This is why two decades of maximum pressure have not broken the system, and were never going to; they were structurally configured to feed it. Notice, too, that the regime and its enemies are not keeping the same scoreboard. By the Western count the 2026 war was a rout: the leader dead, the command gutted, the economy in free fall, Tehran suing for terms. By the regime’s own count it stood: it absorbed the worst the United States and Israel could deliver in a single night, was still standing by morning, and had a successor in place within two weeks, which in the grammar of Karbala is not mere survival but vindication. Pressure is the wrong tool, not because Iran is too strong to hurt, but because hurting Iran is the regime’s deepest source of legitimacy.

The bee analogy is exact. A swatted bee is not a loss to the hive. The hive interprets the swat as confirmation that the threat is real and the defense was just. The remaining bees mobilize harder, pheromone signals strengthen, the colony’s purpose is reaffirmed, and the next bee is more committed. Bombing the hive does not weaken the hive. It immunizes it.

A theory that explains every outcome explains none, so this one should say what would sink it. The claim is not that the regime cannot be hurt; it is that it is armored on every axis but one. If a decapitation the system was built to survive ever shatters it, the hive is wrong. If pressure applied long enough ever hollows the believers’ conviction instead of hardening it, the antifragility is wrong. And if the regime is ever disenchanted from within and does not weaken, the whole argument is wrong. It is a bet that can be lost.

The Cost of Adaptation

There is one move, though, that the pressure can force, and it is the one that does real damage, never in the way the people applying it intend.

Pressure makes the hive adapt, and for a system like this one adaptation is not free. Recall what lets a minority rule in the first place, in Taleb’s mechanism: intransigence. The kosher-keeper governs the soft-drink aisle precisely because he will not bend. Let the intransigent minority turn flexible and it stops being the minority that can rule; it dissolves back into the accommodating majority, and the renormalization that handed it the eighty percent begins to run backward. Which leaves the regime in a bind with no clean way out. It can hold the line and pay in prestige: that is what the hijab killings of 2022 bought it, a generation that now hears “morality police” and thinks of a dead girl’s name. Or it can ease the line to broaden its appeal and pay in purity, and purity is the only currency an intransigent minority has to spend.

The second cost is the one to watch, because its sharpest form is already on the horizon: the regime’s drift toward Persian nationalism. Picture a state founded on Khomeini’s repudiation of pre-Islamic Persia beginning, under pressure, to reach back toward Cyrus and Persepolis and the imperial past, toward the very jāhiliyya, the age of ignorance, that the revolution was raised to abolish. This is not a hypothetical the regime can wave away. The Shah threw a pageant for that past at Persepolis in 1971, and Khomeini, from exile, called it the Devil’s Festival and accused its guests of betraying Islam and the people of Iran. He read it exactly right: an appeal to pre-Islamic glory is an appeal to put the nation in the place of the umma, Cyrus in the place of Ḥusayn, the flag in the place of the faith. A regime that now reaches for the same well (and nostalgia for that pre-revolutionary past is spreading inside Iran faster than the regime can answer it) is not widening its base so much as confessing that its own sacred story has stopped selling. And it confesses in the one idiom its hardest core can never forgive. Praise the pre-Islamic past and you have told the believer that the revolution mistook ignorance for the enemy. Each concession buys a foot of tent and hollows a yard of the center.

So the adaptability that lets the hive survive a decapitation is also the slow machinery of its unwinding, along the single axis no airstrike can reach. Bomb it and it hardens. Corner it until it must cheapen its own cause to live, and it softens from the inside, where no missile goes. The regime can adapt. What it cannot do is adapt and stay intransigent, and intransigence was the whole engine.

Disenchantment

That unwinding can also be pursued on purpose. The remaining question is the one no Western policy framework currently asks: if bombs and sanctions do not weaken the system, what does?

A hive does not collapse when bees are killed. It collapses when the bees stop believing the hive is sacred. Scott Atran’s work on what he calls sacred values and identity fusion, drawing on years of fieldwork with Al-Qaeda affiliates, Hamas operatives, Tamil Tigers, and frontline fighters in Iraq and Syria, shows that committed actors do not respond to cost-benefit calculation about money, jobs, or sanctions. The line he settled on in Talking to the Enemy (2010), after a decade of field interviews, is more precise than the bumper-sticker version of it:

“people almost never kill and die just for the Cause, but also for each other: for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers — their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem, or tribe.”

The Cause is the script. The group is the brotherhood. Each one alone is fragile. Together they are nearly impervious to ordinary incentives. Neither is negotiable in the language of money or jobs.

Weakening such a system is therefore not a project of pressure. It is a project of disenchantment. There are concrete pressure points, and they are not the ones being used. None of them is a lever a foreign military can pull; they belong to Iran’s own clerics, its diaspora, its women and its students, and to outside powers willing to back those actors patiently instead of reaching for ordnance.

1. Disrupt the sacred story. Make the Karbala-script stop fitting reality. If every Iranian airstrike on a market in Yemen is Karbala, then Karbala becomes cheap. Internal voices have already begun to say so. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf, the most-followed Shiʿa cleric in the world, with more religious authority than any IRGC-aligned figure, used his Friday sermons (delivered, as ever, by his representative in Karbala) in October–November 2019 to demand that Baghdad stop killing its own protesters, broke publicly with the Iran-aligned militias’ violent crackdown, and forced the resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abd al-Mahdi. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the 2009 presidential candidate and former prime minister, is now fifteen years into a house arrest the regime has never lifted; Mehdi Karroubi, his fellow Green Movement leader, was finally released in March 2025 after fourteen years. Both have spent that time insisting that the Islamic Republic has betrayed Khomeinism, not embodied it. The dissident clerics, Hossein-Ali Montazeri before his death, Mohsen Kadivar in exile, Abdolkarim Soroush, argue against Velāyat-e Faqīh from inside Shiʿa theology, not against it. They are arguably the threat the regime treats most seriously: it placed Montazeri under house arrest, drove Kadivar into exile, and silenced Soroush. They are also the least supported by Western policy.

2. Separate believers from dependents. The hard core believes. The outer ring serves. Pension recipients, contractors, conscripts, civil servants, the family of a Basij commander: most of these are not ideologues. They are trapped by livelihood, by fear, by family. A credible path out reduces their dependence. The system is strongest when all of them feel they have the same fate. It weakens when they begin to see different futures.

3. Make service less prestigious. A vanguard order is sustained not by money but by honor. Service to the IRGC carries identity, status, masculinity, belonging, sacred purpose. The disruption is not material. It is that association with the system becomes morally embarrassing: among one’s own clerics, one’s own family, one’s own neighborhood. The killing of Mahsa Amini on the sixteenth of September, 2022, in the custody of the morality police, and the Žin, Žiyân, Âzâdî (Woman, Life, Freedom) protests that followed, did exactly this. Women cut their hair publicly. Men marched beside them. Schoolgirls flipped the Khamenei portraits in their classrooms. The U.N. fact-finding mission later confirmed that Amini died of physical violence in custody, that the regime arrested more than twenty thousand protesters, and that hundreds were killed. What the regime was trying to suppress was not a policy demand. It was a prestige collapse. The violence of the response was the regime’s admission that the prestige attack was working.

4. Create credible exits. A hard minority rules when leaving the hive feels impossible. Defectors who believe they will be destroyed cling harder. Defectors who believe survival is possible peel away. Mohsen Sazegara is the proof that this is not a theoretical category. He helped found the IRGC in 1979: he was one of the original architects of the force from Khomeini’s exile headquarters at Neauphle-le-Château, returned with the Ayatollah to Tehran on the revolutionary flight, then served in the post-revolutionary government as deputy in the prime minister’s office, deputy minister of heavy industries, and vice minister of planning and budget. In the early 2000s he turned. He was barred from running for president in 2001, imprisoned repeatedly, suffered torture during a seventy-nine-day hunger strike that cost him fifty pounds, and now lives in exile, where he tells anyone who will listen that the IRGC has “converted to a monster” and is now “the backbone of keeping the dictator in power.” A co-founder of the IRGC became one of its most articulate dissidents and survived. The outer rings do not need to be persuaded that the revolution is false. They need to believe that not-the-revolution is survivable. Sazegara is a man who proves it can be.

5. Build a rival civic body. A twenty-percent minority dominates when the eighty percent is private, frightened, cynical, or fragmented. The counterweight is not “more people disagreeing.” It is another body: networks of trust, shared language, civic courage, religious counter-authority, women’s networks, student networks, diaspora amplification, elite defection. The eighty percent has to become a hive of its own.

None of these are quick. None of them produce a headline. All of them are slower than an airstrike and more frightening to the regime than a sanction. That is the test of whether they are working: if the regime fights them harder than it fights pressure, they are the right tool.

What Holds It Together

The IRGC is not held together by money. It is held together by story. The story tells every node (Tehran, Beirut, Sanaa, Baghdad, Damascus) what the enemy is, what sacrifice means, and why the struggle must continue. The center sets the doctrine. The story has been distributed. The hive can be cut in many places and keep moving, because every bee already knows what the colony is for.

A hive is an organism. It is not a machine with a switch. It does not collapse when a part is broken. It collapses when it can no longer recognize itself as a hive.

A chain of command can be bombed. A hive cannot. But a hive can stop reproducing belief.

It is not paid to serve the Islamic Republic. It has been formed to believe that preserving the Islamic Republic is itself a sacred duty.

Disenchanting that duty is the work.

Bombing the bees is not.

Recommend Reading:

• Seeley, Thomas D. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2010.

• Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Addison-Wesley, 1994.

• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House, 2018.

• Khomeini, Ruhollah. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (1941–1980). Translated and annotated by Hamid Algar, Mizan Press, 1981.

• Abrahamian, Ervand. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. University of California Press, 1993.

• Atran, Scott. Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists. Ecco, 2010.

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Every November, Americans return to the question of what Thanksgiving represents. The holiday appears uncomplicated, yet it carries a surprising amount of historical and political weight. Some view it as a celebration of gratitude, others as a reminder of colonial violence, and many treat it as a seasonal ritual whose origins require little scrutiny. These disagreements arise not from a lack of information, but from the coexistence of multiple narratives about the holiday and what it is meant to honor. Thanksgiving has become less a shared observance than a mirror for the country’s unresolved arguments about its own past.

Most popular accounts begin in Plymouth in 1621, where English settlers and Wampanoag people shared a harvest meal. The event was real, but it was not the foundation of the national holiday. It created no tradition, was not considered a thanksgiving by those who participated in it, and played no role in the development of the civic observances that shaped the country. The story settled into the American imagination only much later, when educators and cultural reformers needed a unifying national origin myth and turned to the Pilgrims for one. Their appeal came less from historical relevance than from narrative simplicity: a small community, a shared meal, a reassuring scene of harmony.

The actual development of Thanksgiving reflects a different set of priorities. Early American thanksgivings were not feasts but public observances declared during times of military danger, failed harvests, political anxiety, or providential deliverance. They resembled days of prayer or fasting more than celebration. These early proclamations reveal a society that understood gratitude as a civic responsibility, a moment to acknowledge vulnerability and to reinforce communal discipline during periods of uncertainty. They were pauses in the midst of struggle rather than commemorations of triumph.

This public dimension is essential for understanding how Thanksgiving eventually became a national institution. The observances functioned as deliberate interruptions in the political calendar, opportunities for citizens to reflect collectively on whether the fledgling nation could survive its challenges. The habit persisted because the challenges persisted. Leaders repeatedly turned to the language of thanksgiving whenever the country confronted constitutional instability in the early republic or the threat of dissolution in the nineteenth century. Thanksgiving belonged to civic life long before it belonged to domestic life.

This deeper history bears little resemblance to the sentimental version promoted in the nineteenth century. That later image, anchored in nostalgia, cultural assimilation, and simplified storytelling, was easier to teach and easier to celebrate. But it obscured the civic purposes that actually shaped the holiday. The result is a modern Thanksgiving that feels both familiar and strangely unsettled, a holiday with enormous symbolic power but contested meaning, its origins at once widely told and widely misunderstood.

To understand what Thanksgiving was intended to represent, it is necessary to recover the early traditions that shaped it. Only by tracing its evolution from occasional public observances into a national ritual can we see why the holiday mattered to the people who first invoked it, and why its original purpose may still have relevance for a divided nation.

The Early American “Thanksgivings”

Long before Thanksgiving became a national holiday, American communities observed occasional days of thanksgiving or fasting in response to political uncertainty, military danger, or moments interpreted as providential deliverance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonies in New England regularly declared such days. They were civic observances rather than private celebrations. Governors or assemblies issued the proclamations, ministers preached on them, and the public gathered for solemn services instead of feasts. These practices reflected a society in which religious meaning and civic life were closely intertwined, and where survival often depended on shared discipline and public resolve.

By the time of the American Revolution, this tradition was deeply rooted in New England civic culture. When the Continental Congress sought ways to unify sentiment across thirteen colonies that still thought of themselves as separate political societies, it adapted this familiar tool. Proclamations became one of Congress’s few instruments for encouraging a sense of common purpose. Days of thanksgiving or fasting offered scheduled moments of collective reflection, especially when the war’s progress was uncertain and the survival of the Patriot cause was in doubt.

The first national thanksgiving proclamation came in 1777 after the American victory at Saratoga. Henry Laurens, the South Carolinian serving as President of the Continental Congress, issued the declaration on November 1:

“It is therefore recommended to the legislative or executive powers of these United States, to set apart Thursday, the 18th day of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise; that with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor...”

Saratoga was a turning point that convinced France the revolution could succeed. Laurens’s proclamation was therefore both celebratory and strategic. It framed the victory as a moment requiring humility and gratitude, and it reinforced the idea that the struggle was communal and morally serious.

Two years later, in 1779, Congress confronted a darker moment. Supplies were scarce, inflation was rising, and the outcome of the war remained uncertain. John Jay, then serving as President of Congress before becoming the first Chief Justice, issued a proclamation calling the nation to penitence:

“Appoint the First Thursday in May next to be a Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer to Almighty God, that he will be pleased to avert those impending Calamities which we have but too well deserved...”

Jay’s language reflected the moral gravity Congress associated with the war and the fragility of the American cause. Gratitude, in this framework, was inseparable from self-examination.

In 1781, with the Revolution entering a decisive phase, Samuel Huntington issued a proclamation urging unity:

“That Thursday the third Day of May next, may be observed as a Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, that we may with united Hearts, confess and bewail our manifold Sins and Transgressions...”

Huntington believed civic virtue and divine favor were linked. The nation’s political fate required not only military perseverance but moral clarity. His proclamation treated thanksgiving as a civic discipline necessary for sustaining the republic through hardship.

Later that year, the British surrender at Yorktown allowed Thomas McKean, Huntington’s successor, to issue the first proclamation grounded in genuine relief:

“It is therefore recommended to the several states to set apart the THIRTEENTH day of DECEMBER next, to be religiously observed as a day of THANKSGIVING and PRAYER; that all the people may assemble on that day with grateful hearts to celebrate the praises of our glorious Benefactor...”

Even then, McKean avoided triumphalism. The war was not yet concluded, and the political future of the fledgling nation remained uncertain.

The final major Revolutionary-era thanksgiving came in 1782, after the Articles of Confederation had been ratified. John Hanson, the first President of Congress under the Articles, issued a proclamation for November 28:

“the observation of THURSDAY the TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY OF NOVEMBER next as a day of SOLEMN THANKSGIVING to GOD for all His mercies...”

Hanson’s proclamation reflected cautious hope as peace negotiations unfolded in Paris. Gratitude, in this context, was both a recognition of endurance and a reminder of how precarious the achievement remained.

Taken together, these proclamations reveal how early Americans understood thanksgiving. The observances were irregular and always tied to specific pressures or deliverances. They employed religious language, but their purpose was fundamentally civic: to steady a population living through war, scarcity, uncertainty, and political fragility. Thanksgiving was a public act that joined moral reflection with political responsibility. It taught the new nation that gratitude was not merely personal sentiment but a collective obligation, and that pauses for reflection were essential to the endurance of self-government.

These early observances did not yet form an annual holiday. But they created a vocabulary and civic habit that later presidents, most significantly Washington and Lincoln, would inherit. The tradition made it possible for the United States to develop a national Thanksgiving rooted not in mythic colonial harmony, but in the political and moral challenges of sustaining a republic.

Washington and the Constitutional Thanksgiving

When George Washington issued the first presidential Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789, the United States was a nation still testing the strength of its new political order. The Constitution had been ratified only a year earlier. The federal government, freshly assembled in New York, was an experiment whose long-term viability remained uncertain. Many Americans wondered whether the fragile union would hold, whether the states would cooperate, and whether the new national institutions could command public trust.

Washington understood that his presidency carried symbolic weight far beyond ordinary governance. Every action established precedent. When Congress approached him in late September 1789 with a resolution recommending a national day of thanksgiving, the request was not simply devotional. It was a deliberate attempt to create a shared civic moment for a country unsure of its own cohesion.

The timing was significant. Congress had just transmitted the proposed Bill of Rights to the states for ratification. The government had completed its first legislative session. A national thanksgiving offered an opportunity to acknowledge that the republic had taken root, however tentatively, and that its constitutional framework had begun to function. Washington drew on the Revolutionary tradition in which public fasts and thanksgivings had served to steady a people facing uncertainty.

On October 3, 1789, Washington issued his proclamation (Proclamation, 3). It echoed the older language of public observance but placed it within a constitutional frame. He opened with a broad statement of national duty:

“Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.”

Washington designated Thursday, November 26, as a day for citizens to gather:

“Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

He then linked the observance directly to the Constitution itself, inviting the public to give thanks:

“For the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted.”

This was the first moment in American history when a president framed the Constitution as a blessing whose legitimacy required public reflection. Washington emphasized civil and religious liberty, the advancement of public knowledge, and the preservation of national peace. For him, thanksgiving was a civic ethic: a ritual that reinforced the responsibilities of citizenship within a constitutional order that was still untested.

Washington sent copies of the proclamation to every governor, prompting sermons, ceremonies, and public gatherings across the states. The responses revealed that thanksgiving resonated as a civic ritual rather than a domestic celebration. Americans who had lived through war, economic uncertainty, and political instability recognized the day as a chance to reflect collectively on the improbable survival of their new government.

Among the most notable responses was the participation of New York’s Jewish community. Reverend Gershom Mendes Seixas, leader of Congregation Shearith Israel (founded in 1654), delivered a thanksgiving sermon on November 26. His role was significant. During the Revolution, Seixas had carried the congregation’s Tora scrolls out of New York when the British occupied the city in 1776, aligning his community with the Patriot cause. After the war, he advocated for Jewish civil equality in Pennsylvania before returning to New York to resume leadership of Shearith Israel.

In his 1789 sermon, Seixas urged his congregation to recognize the new government as a safeguard of liberty and justice. He described the day as an opportunity to strengthen the moral foundations of citizenship. He reminded his congregants that civic responsibility was a religious duty, especially, he said, “when we are situated under the best of constitutions.”

This tradition endures. Shearith Israel still incorporates into its liturgy chapters of Psalms associated with the ancient Temple festivals (Hallel), concluding with prayers for the American government.

Washington’s understanding of thanksgiving grew partly from his experience during the Revolutionary War, when he periodically declared fasts or thanksgivings to maintain morale and discipline in the Continental Army. As President, he used the 1789 proclamation to reinforce the legitimacy of the new federal government and to cultivate civic unity without compulsion.

Washington observed the day quietly. He attended services at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City, then donated food and beer to imprisoned debtors. These gestures reflected his belief that gratitude entailed social obligation. Thanksgiving, as he envisioned it, was not simply a devotional pause but a public ethic that linked moral humility with civic responsibility.

Washington issued one additional thanksgiving proclamation (Proclamation, 6), in 1795, after the Whiskey Rebellion challenged federal authority in western Pennsylvania. That proclamation emphasized gratitude for internal peace, for the “suppression of an insurrection which so wantonly threatened it,” and for the continued “prosperous course of our affairs, public and private.” Washington urged the public to give thanks for “constitutions of government which unite and by their union establish liberty with order,” and to guard against “the arrogance of prosperity.” Even then, thanksgiving remained an irregular civic observance tied to specific pressures rather than an annual tradition.

Yet the 1789 proclamation had lasting significance. It demonstrated that thanksgiving could unify the nation outside the context of war. It provided the Constitution with a public ritual that underscored its legitimacy. Most importantly, it created the precedent Lincoln would later adopt during the nation’s greatest crisis.

Washington created the idea of a national thanksgiving. Lincoln made it a permanent holiday.

Lincoln and the Birth of The Thanksgiving

By 1863, the United States had entered the third year of a war more destructive than anything earlier generations had imagined. The Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect on January 1, transforming the Union cause into a struggle for both national preservation and human freedom. Victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg offered hope, yet the country remained exhausted and deeply uncertain about the outcome. No previous generation of Americans had confronted a crisis of such magnitude.

It was in this setting that Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation that created a regular national Thanksgiving. Earlier thanksgivings had been declared only in response to particular events: a battlefield victory, a political deliverance, or a moment of grave uncertainty. Lincoln’s proclamation of October 3, 1863 did something fundamentally different. It designated the last Thursday of November as a fixed annual observance throughout the country. Thanksgiving became a recurring civic ritual rather than an intermittent response to circumstance.

Lincoln made no reference to the Pilgrims or the 1621 feast at Plymouth. That story had not yet become central to the public meaning of Thanksgiving and had played no role in the holiday’s development. Instead, Lincoln drew directly from the Revolutionary-era tradition shaped by Henry Laurens, John Jay, Samuel Huntington, Thomas McKean, and John Hanson. All of them had treated thanksgiving as a public responsibility at moments when the new nation faced danger or instability. Lincoln adapted that structure to a republic divided by civil war.

The 1863 proclamation (Proclamation, 106) opens with a striking assessment of the nation’s condition:

“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.”

Lincoln acknowledged that this assessment might seem at odds with wartime reality. Despite the conflict, he noted that “Peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed,” and “harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theater of military conflict.” Even in that theater, he observed that “that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.”

He listed the ways the nation had endured: population growth, agricultural productivity, expanding industry, abundant mines, and continued development of settlement and commerce. None of these achievements, he insisted, were the work of human ingenuity alone. “No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things,” he wrote. “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God.”

The proclamation was not triumphant. It was an honest accounting of national endurance in a year marked by devastation. Lincoln urged Americans to “commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.” Thanksgiving, in this conception, was not an escape from war but a moment to acknowledge its human cost and to recognize the moral seriousness of national survival.

Lincoln concluded by calling for “a return of the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.” The word “Union” defined the purpose of the day. Thanksgiving, as Lincoln envisioned it, was a civic ritual intended to steady the nation at a moment of existential danger.

Lincoln reinforced this vision one year later. On October 20, 1864, with the war nearing its end but victory still uncertain, he issued another proclamation (Proclamation, 118) framing thanksgiving as a moment of national reflection:

“It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year… and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

By describing the Confederacy as “our own household,” Lincoln acknowledged the painful nature of the conflict. Thanksgiving became a vehicle not for celebration but for sober recognition that the goal was restoration rather than retaliation. Lincoln asked Americans to offer “fervent prayers and supplications” for “peace, union, and harmony throughout the land.”

With two consecutive proclamations, Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a permanent national institution. The day was no longer irregular or dependent on circumstance. It became part of the civic calendar: an annual reminder of the fragility of the republic, the obligations of citizenship, and the possibility of renewal even amid profound division. Presidents continued the practice until Congress codified the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day in 1941.

Lincoln’s Thanksgiving differed sharply from the version that later entered popular culture. It was not a harvest festival. It was not a commemoration of colonial origins. Its purpose was to steady a democratic nation under extreme pressure. Like Washington, Lincoln used thanksgiving to reaffirm the responsibilities of self-government in a moment of constitutional crisis. Washington’s 1789 proclamation expressed gratitude for the establishment of the constitutional order. Lincoln’s proclaimed gratitude for its possible survival.

Thanksgiving became a national holiday because the republic needed a ritual capable of acknowledging danger, loss, endurance, and renewal. The holiday Americans observe today descends from Lincoln’s decision, not from the 1621 meal at Plymouth. It is a civic practice rooted in the country’s most perilous moments and intended to remind a divided nation of its shared obligations.

The Making of a Myth and the Rewriting of Thanksgiving

For most Americans, the story of Thanksgiving begins in 1621. A small community of English settlers at Plymouth, having survived their first difficult year, shared a harvest meal with Wampanoag neighbors. This image appears in textbooks, paintings, school plays, and seasonal advertising. It is widely treated as the origin of a national tradition. Yet the connection between that harvest and the modern Thanksgiving is largely a creation of the nineteenth century rather than the seventeenth. The 1621 event was real, but it played no role in shaping the holiday that emerged more than two centuries later.

Only two primary sources describe the 1621 gathering. In Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims in Plymouth (1622), Edward Winslow writes that “our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling” who obtained enough birds “to serve the Company almost a week.” He notes that “many of the Indians coming amongst us,” including Massasoit and “some ninety men,” joined the celebration and that they “went out and killed five Deer” to present to the English. William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), adds that the colonists gathered “the small harvest they had” and that “besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys.” These descriptions are brief and matter of fact. Neither author calls the event a thanksgiving. Neither claims it initiated a tradition. As Pilgrim Hall Museum summarizes:

“The Pilgrims did not call this harvest festival a ‘Thanksgiving,’ although they did give thanks to God. To them, a Day of Thanksgiving was purely religious.”

The first recorded religious thanksgiving in Plymouth occurred not in 1621 but in 1623, after a rainfall ended a prolonged drought. That observance involved fasting and prayer in keeping with longstanding Puritan practice. The 1621 meal was an English harvest celebration, not a ritual of thanksgiving as the colonists understood the term.

For more than two hundred years, the 1621 event attracted little attention. It was not cited by the Continental Congress, by Washington in 1789, or by Lincoln in 1863. Nothing in the early civic tradition of thanksgivings drew from Plymouth. The national holiday developed instead from the Revolutionary and Civil War proclamations that framed thanksgiving as a civic obligation at moments of political danger. The later prominence of the Plymouth feast reflects cultural needs that emerged long after the founding of the republic.

The reinterpretation began in the nineteenth century. In 1841, historian Alexander Young republished Winslow’s narrative (Chronicles of the Pilgrim fathers of the colony of Plymouth, from 1602-1625) and added a footnote identifying the 1621 feast as “the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.” The claim was not historical fact but editorial invention. When Bradford’s manuscript resurfaced in the 1850s, writers eager for a simple and uplifting national origin story found new material that could be shaped into one. The image of Pilgrims and Wampanoag sharing a peaceful meal offered moral clarity, and in a rapidly industrializing and diversifying nation, clarity was useful.

The decisive transformation came after the Civil War. A nation absorbing millions of immigrants and searching for symbols of unity required stories that could be taught easily and embraced widely. The Pilgrims provided such a story. They were Protestant, English-speaking, and presented as principled figures whose hardships could be romanticized. The presence of Wampanoag guests could be interpreted, however superficially, as evidence of cooperation that softened the harsher truths of colonization. Sentiment and pedagogy blended into a narrative that felt comforting, accessible, and national.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, played a prominent role in promoting this version of the holiday. In 1865 she wrote that “The Pilgrim Fathers incorporated an early thanksgiving day among their moral influences… it blessed and beautified the homes it reached.”

Her essays helped formalize the domestic and sentimental dimensions of Thanksgiving, portraying the holiday as a celebration of home life, virtue, and national continuity.

Yet the most influential institution was the American public school system. Teachers needed a unifying narrative appropriate for children whose families had come from across Europe. The Plymouth feast supplied an origin myth that could be taught without touching the conflicts of the Revolution or the Civil War. Through lesson plans, recitations, and illustrated readers, the story became embedded in the curriculum and circulated across the country.

One example appears in The Journal of Education (Vol. 50, No. 17, Nov. 2, 1899, p. 286). The page titled “THANKSGIVING REFERENCES” offered teachers a curated list of stories, poems, and illustrations presenting the 1621 feast as the definitive origin of the holiday. Many recommended materials were fictionalized accounts, including Jane G. Austin’s Standish of Standish and an 1897 Ladies’ Home Journal article titled “The First Thanksgiving.” These resources encouraged teachers to construct a shared national memory even when the narrative was more cultural invention than historical description.

By the early twentieth century, the Plymouth feast had become the dominant public image of Thanksgiving. Paintings depicted Pilgrims and Wampanoag dining in idyllic settings. Department stores used Pilgrim imagery in seasonal displays. Newspapers framed the Pilgrims as the founders of the holiday. In the process, the civic origins of Washington’s 1789 proclamation and Lincoln’s 1863 declaration receded from public awareness.

Indigenous perspectives were generally excluded from this retelling. The Wampanoag communities whose ancestors attended the 1621 meal endured land loss, disease, political marginalization, and violent conflict in the decades that followed. Linda Coombs, an Aquinnah Wampanoag educator, noted in 1997:

“Thanksgiving is celebrated at the expense of Native Peoples who had to give up their lands and culture for America to become what it is today.”

Her critique highlights the tension between the idealized narrative of harmony and the historical trajectory of English–Wampanoag relations, which deteriorated rapidly after 1621.

Recognizing the mythic character of the Plymouth story is not an attempt to diminish the significance of the 1621 event. The feast was a moment of real cooperation between communities navigating uncertainty. But it did not generate a tradition, nor did it shape the later civic observances that became the national holiday. Washington’s 1789 proclamation marked gratitude for the constitutional order. Lincoln’s 1863 declaration created a recurring civic ritual in the midst of civil war. The modern holiday descends from these political and constitutional moments, not from a colonial harvest meal.

The elevation of the Plymouth feast reflects the cultural needs of the nineteenth century more than the historical origins of Thanksgiving. The story offered a simplified beginning for a nation seeking unity amid demographic change, industrial growth, and the unresolved memory of civil war. It provided a narrative of harmony that was easier to teach than the complex civic history behind the actual holiday.

The result is the dual memory that shapes Thanksgiving today. One tradition is civic, originating in the crises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The other is sentimental, originating in the cultural and educational storytelling of the late nineteenth century. Both have influenced the modern holiday, but only one explains how Thanksgiving became a national institution.

Recovering The Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in the United States has never been a single idea. It has been, at different points, a harvest festival, a religious observance, a political instrument, a cultural myth, and a domestic ritual. It has also been a site of critique, a day of mourning, and a moment of contested memory. The holiday’s meaning has shifted across centuries because it has always reflected the needs and anxieties of the society that invoked it. The task today is not to choose among these meanings but to understand how they coexist and what they reveal about the nation that observes the holiday each November.

The story most Americans learn, the Plymouth feast of 1621, carries symbolic appeal but lacks historical authority as the origin of the national holiday. It was a local harvest celebration shaped by the precarious circumstances of two communities negotiating a fragile alliance. It did not initiate a tradition and was not considered a thanksgiving by those who participated. It became central to the national imagination only when nineteenth century educators and reformers constructed it as a story of harmony suitable for classrooms and civic instruction. Their intention was understandable. The nation was trying to integrate new populations, rebuild after civil war, and cultivate a sense of shared belonging. A tidy origin story was more usable than the complexities of constitutional uncertainty or wartime sacrifice.

Yet the prominence of this mythic beginning has overshadowed a deeper and more consequential tradition. The thanksgivings declared by the Continental Congress, by Washington in 1789, and by Lincoln in 1863 belonged to a civic vocabulary that treated gratitude as a public duty. These observances appeared when the nation confronted danger or instability. They asked citizens to pause, consider the survival of their institutions, recognize their dependence on forces beyond their control, and reflect on the responsibilities that accompany self-government. Washington tied thanksgiving to the establishment of constitutional order. Lincoln tied it to the effort to preserve that order during civil war. Their vision was sober, collective, and oriented toward national endurance.

Indigenous critiques add another dimension that has long been missing from the holiday’s popular narrative. For many Native communities, the traditional story of Thanksgiving has obscured the consequences of colonization and has presented a simplified image of early relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples. The perspectives offered by Wampanoag leaders, Indigenous historians, and participants in the National Day of Mourning challenge the sentimental myth by pointing to the realities of disease, dispossession, forced conversion, and political loss that followed the 1621 feast. These critiques do not reject the idea of gratitude. They call for a more honest account of the histories that the traditional narrative has minimized or excluded.

To recover The Thanksgiving does not require discarding the cultural practices that make the holiday familiar. Families will continue to gather, meals will continue to anchor the day, and the rituals that have developed around the holiday will endure. But recovering the civic roots of Thanksgiving requires attention to the elements that have been overshadowed. It requires recognizing the political purpose Washington and Lincoln attached to the observance. It requires situating the holiday within the broader Indigenous histories that preceded and followed the 1621 encounter. It requires treating gratitude not only as a private feeling but as a public act that shapes civic life.

The holiday’s strength has always rested on its ability to balance remembrance with hope. Washington encouraged Americans to reflect on the fragile achievement of constitutional government. Lincoln asked them to confront the suffering of a nation at war and to look toward the possibility of reunion. Indigenous communities ask the nation to acknowledge the consequences of colonization and to recognize the endurance of peoples who survived it. Each of these perspectives deepens the holiday rather than diminishes it. Each offers a way to understand thanksgiving not as a single story but as a recurring opportunity for national reflection.

In its best form, Thanksgiving is a moment of civic clarity. It asks the nation to pause and consider the distance between its aspirations and its reality, between the stories it teaches and the histories it inhabits. It invites Americans to reflect on the responsibilities they share toward one another and toward the institutions that sustain their republic. The holiday endures because it speaks to a need that remains constant. A nation that governs itself requires periodic moments of humility. It requires rituals that remind citizens of the fragility and promise of the political order they inherit. It requires acts of reflection that deepen moral resilience.

Recovering The Thanksgiving means recovering this purpose. It means understanding the holiday not only as a celebration of abundance but as an acknowledgment of limits, obligations, and shared vulnerability. It means treating gratitude as a form of public reasoning rather than a seasonal sentiment. And it means recognizing that the holiday’s power rests not in the myths created for national comfort but in the civic traditions that shaped it.

The nation Washington addressed in 1789 was fragile and untested. The nation Lincoln addressed in 1863 was torn apart. The nation that observes Thanksgiving today remains divided, confident in some ways and unsettled in others. The holiday offers the same possibility it always has. It allows Americans to reflect on what binds them together, to confront the histories that shape them, and to imagine how they might move forward with clarity rather than illusion.

Thanksgiving began as an act of national self-examination. Recovering that spirit may be the clearest way to reclaim the holiday for the future.

There was more to cover and much more I wanted to say.

Recommend Reading:

• Baker, James W. Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. University of New Hampshire Press, 2009.

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Pre-Script

This essay continues from The Day the Sun Stopped Speaking, which explored the stillness of Yehoshuwaʿ’s long day as biṭaḥon (trust) through ʾemuna (reliability) in God, framed by the charge ḥazaq weʾEmaṣ.

Here we search the heavens to see whether this event can be found in history — a natural occurrence written into creation since Maʿase Bereshith (the work of creation) — and how other cultures of the ancient world understood the same phenomenon.

Where others saw the heavens as omens, Israel received from God their grammar — a language of instruction and law, not terror.

Enūma Anu Enlil (𒌓𒀭𒈾𒀭𒂗𒆤𒇲, “When Anu and Enlil …”) was the great Mesopotamian compendium of celestial omens, seventy tablets interpreting the behavior of the heavens as divine speech. Compiled in its canonical form during the Kassite period (ca. 16th–12th centuries BCE) and transmitted for over a millennium, it became the foundation of Babylonian and Assyrian astrology and statecraft.

The collection records more than six thousand omens drawn from every region of the sky: the rising and setting of the moon (tablets 1–14), lunar eclipses (15–22), solar phenomena and eclipses (23–39), weather and earthquakes (40–49), and the movements of planets and stars (50–70). Each tablet follows the same conditional grammar:

DIŠ (𒁹, šumma) “if” + observation → protasis (what is seen in the heavens) → apodosis (its consequence on earth).

The system did not describe nature; it prescribed meaning. Every anomaly—a faint moon, a red dawn, a halo around the sun—was a form of divine address, most often directed to the king. The heavens were a text, and the ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil (scholar-priests, the scribes) were its interpreters. A dimmed sun might portend war; a double halo could foretell locusts or drought.

To Babylonia, the sky spoke in fear; to Israel, in trust. The same light that demanded ritual repair in one culture became revelation in the other.

In this omen logic, eclipses marked the most perilous form of divine communication. Both lunar and solar eclipses signaled royal danger or cosmic imbalance—disruptions that demanded ritual repair. Enūma Anu Enlil thus functioned as a celestial–terrestrial codebook. Its omens concerned kingship, agriculture, and the stability of the realm. A shadow over the sun or moon was never a curiosity but a crisis, a moment of divine speech requiring substitution rites and appeasement.

While many tablets detail the observation and interpretation of eclipses (especially 23–35), Tablet 47 shows how the same logic extended to other disturbances of light. Line 9′, for example, treats the dimming of the sun not as meteorology but as divine language:

EAE 47 rev. 9′
𒁹 𒂍 𒈨𒌍 𒀭𒌓 𒆠𒁺 𒂗𒆤 𒌋𒆠𒁕𒌅𒈨𒌍
DIŠ 2 AGA da-um-ma-ti ú-kal dIŠKUR …
šumma šamaš ina āgê dummāti ukal Adad […]
“If the sun wears a corona of darkness, Adad (the storm god) will act.”

As Reiner and Pingree note in Weather Omens of Enūma Anu Enlil, Tablet 47 belongs to a sequence that expands celestial omens into weather and atmospheric disturbances. The “corona of darkness” here does not describe a full eclipse but a dimming, a sun veiled by shadow.

The same tablet continues:

EAE 47 rev. 8′–10′ (Reiner & Pingree, Weather Omens of EAE, p. 139)
8′ 𒁹 𒍝 𒀀𒈨𒂵 𒌓 𒌋 𒆪 𒇻𒇻𒀀𒀀 𒌓 𒆳
šumma šamaš ina ṣalmi u sāmi šubšubat, ūmu ikturru […]
“If the sun is speckled with red and black repeatedly, the day will be disturbed […].”

9′ 𒁹 𒂍 𒈨𒌍 𒀭𒌓 𒆠𒁺 𒂗𒆤 𒌋𒆠𒁕𒌅𒈨𒌍
šumma šamaš ina āgê dummāti ukal Adad […]
“If the sun wears a corona of darkness, Adad (the storm god) will act.”

10′ 𒁹 𒌋 𒀭𒌓 𒈨𒂵 𒉺𒌑𒍣𒊏𒋾 𒀭𒂗𒆤 𒀀𒈾 𒆳 𒍣𒌑𒌝 𒇻𒌋𒊒𒄭𒀀
šumma šamaš ina āgê šamši puzzurat Enlil ana māti ziūt buruḫḫi […]
“If the sun wears the crown of the sun, Enlil will grant protection to the land, and locusts will attack […].”

These lines are preserved on the reverse of the composite tablet K 3535 + K 6265 + K 17366 + K 17481 + K 19476 (see EAE 47, Plate 28 in Reiner & Pingree, Weather Omens of Enūma Anu Enlil). The god named is Šamaš (𒀭𒌓 = dUTU), and the imagery concerns the sun’s surface and brightness. The phrase āgê dummāti (“crown of darkness”) evokes the dim ring encircling the sun when its light is obscured—what modern astronomy calls an annular eclipse, when 80–90 % of the solar disc is covered by the moon and only a thin halo remains visible.

To the Babylonian observer, the sun’s light was an atmospheric state. When its brightness changed, the world’s balance shifted. A darkened sun signified the weakening of royal strength, divine displeasure, or disorder in the land. The priests’ task was to repair that imbalance through ritual substitution and appeasement. Light was not neutral; it was a moral medium. The eclipse thus became a kind of celestial syntax for vulnerability. When the sun faltered, kingship trembled.

In Enūma Anu Enlil, every celestial irregularity carried terrestrial consequence. Cosmic disorder mirrored political vulnerability. The heavens were not descriptive; they were prescriptive. Light itself became a medium of divine speech: blemished, dimmed, or ringed by shadow, it was never silent.

The same sequence that Babylonia read as the vocabulary of divine unrest—the sun spotted, then shrouded—appears in Yehoshuwaʿ as the theater of divine partnership. Where the Mesopotamian scholar read warning, Yehoshuwaʿ commanded stillness. The contrast is not astronomical but theological: the same sky, the same disturbance, two grammars of meaning.

The comparison does not suggest borrowing but inversion: the same light, reinterpreted through covenant rather than omen. The Israelite response is interpretive rather than magical. Yehoshuwaʿ perceives in the same event not peril but assurance.

Against that background, the command Sun, in Giḇʿōn be dōm (silent) becomes an act of theological reversal. Where Babylonia heard the gods’ anger in the darkening of the sky, Israel heard divine steadiness. Where others performed appeasement, Yehoshuwaʿ enacted biṭaḥon.

Enūma Anu Enlil required ritual to quiet the heavens. Yehoshuwaʿ required the commandment of ḥazaq weʾEmaṣ—strength and steadiness—to listen to them.

The Eclipse and the Assurance of Israel

While Babylonia gives us the richest omen handbooks, it was not alone in reading eclipses as signs of peril. Across the ancient world, the dimming of the sun marked royal danger and cosmic imbalance. The Hittite Annals of Muršili II (Year 9–10) record a “sign of the sun,” likely a solar eclipse, as the prelude to war (Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2.12; Hawkins, “The Solar Omen of Muršili II,” Anatolian Studies 52). Herodotus recounts a similar omen in Histories 1.74, where an eclipse halts battle between Lydia and Media. Egyptian ritual and mortuary texts from Deir el-Medina and Book of the Dead Spell 135 speak of “darkness by day” and “the covering of the sun,” imagery that may reflect eclipse phenomena (Parker, Ancient Egyptian Astronomy, 3.8; Smith, Following Osiris, 6.2). Comparable anxieties appear in the Assyrian Eponym Chronicle, notably the Bur-Sagale entry (763 BCE), where a solar eclipse precedes civil unrest, and in Greco-Roman sources such as Pliny the Elder (Natural History 2.12–15), which lists eclipses among omens of public calamity. Farther east, Shang oracle-bone inscriptions likewise record eclipses within royal divination (Keightley, Sources of Shang History, 12.4; Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing, 5.2). From Anatolia to the Yellow River, the eclipse’s shadow was read as a tremor in kingship and cosmic order. Within Israel, the same darkness was never omen but oracle, a summons to moral attention rather than a sentence of doom (Amos 8:9; Joel 2:31; BT Sukka 29a).

Where other civilizations read disruption, Israel read disclosure. Yet the reflex to see a darkened sun as peril remained nearly universal, and nowhere more fully systematized than in Babylonia, whose scholars preserved the most intricate grammar of celestial fear.

In the Weather Omens tablets (47–49), the month Araḫsamna repeatedly signals vulnerability.

• EAE 47 r 47′ — “If the earth quakes in Araḫsamna, acts of violence and famine will occur in the land.”

• EAE 48 19′–20′ — “If [the same phenomenon] occurs in Araḫsamna, the downfall of the powerful.”

• EAE 48 31′–32′ — “If [the same in Araḫsamna], the land will experience hard times.”

• EAE 48 78′ — “If fog rolls in during Araḫsamna, there will be fewer offspring in the land.”

These are seasonal omens, not records of total eclipses, yet they map the month as one of strain, a time when the natural cycle was felt as precarious, poised between fertility and decline.

“If [the same phenomenon, noted earlier] … in Araḫsamna” predicts the downfall of the powerful (48 19′–20′) or hardship in the land (48 31′–32′). The specific phenomenon is lost in the damaged line above, likely rain or storm, but the structure reveals a consistent pattern: Araḫsamna always carries a negative apodosis.

As noted earlier, Tablet 47 extends this omen logic beyond eclipses to disturbances of light itself (rev. 8′–10′). It is therefore plausible that such omens, though grouped among the “weather” series, were still understood as part of the same continuum of atmospheric imbalance, manifest through cloud, shadow, or diminished sunlight alike.

Whatever the priests might have verified and interpreted through ritual, for the common observer such signs would have appeared as cosmic turmoil — a sky in disarray.

At the time of the eclipse (≈16:25–16:31 IST), the Sun stood only about 7° above the western horizon, azimuth ≈ 253°, directly over the Shephela (lit. ‘the Lowlands’). From Gilgal (32.03° N, 35.48° E), the army had marched all night up from the Jordan Valley, reaching Giḇʿon (31.85° N, 35.17° E) at dawn, facing westward into the highlands. By late afternoon, the pursuit of the Amorites had carried them down through Ayyalon Valley (31.84° N, 35.00° E) toward ʿAzeqa (31.70° N, 34.94° E), precisely beneath the path of the annular eclipse.

Following the account in Joshua 10:10–11, they pursued them along the ascent of Beth-Ḥoron, striking them as they fled toward Ayyalon and ʿAzeqa. From Gilgal, the Israelite forces ascended westward through the Shephela toward Giḇʿon, where the conflict commenced, and then pursued their enemies through the Valley of Ayyalon to ʿAzeqa. Their route followed the very corridor of the eclipse’s shadow, the central path where the obscuration was greatest and the ring of light burned longest.

The Sun that had risen behind them over Gilgal in the east was now dimming before them in the west. The verse “Sun in Giḇʿon; Moon in Ayyalon Valley” therefore spans the entire trajectory of that day’s campaign, from morning victory to evening stillness. Astronomically, both luminaries were in conjunction in the western sky; poetically, they mark the two horizons of the Israelite’s march. To the Israelite eye, the day seemed to fold back on itself, light rising from the east and fading prematurely in the west, as though the cosmos had turned inside out in obedience to command.

Tragically, the tablets for this section are incomplete. Whatever the Babylonians once recorded about eclipses in Araḫsamna is now lost. Yet the surviving pattern is unmistakable: the month was read as a threshold of instability, when heaven and earth alike trembled at the edge of darkness.

Physicists Colin J. Humphreys and W. Graeme Waddington (2003) proposed that Joshua 10 may describe a solar eclipse — specifically the annular eclipse of 30 October 1207 BCE (21 Boul / Marḥeshwan, 2554 Anno Mundi).

According to Seḏer ʿOlam Rabba, the earliest rabbinic chronology of biblical history traditionally attributed to R. Yose ben Ḥalafta (2nd century CE), the Exodus occurred in 2448 AM. This would place the crossing of the Jordan and the beginning of Yehoshuwaʿ’s conquest around 2489 AM (≈1273 BCE), roughly sixty-six years earlier than the eclipse-dated event in 1207 BCE (the NASA website lists the astrological date year 1206 BCE), depending on calendar alignment. Despite the discrepancy, the range remains plausible when accounting for differences between rabbinic and astronomical chronology.

Their analysis situates the event near Azeqa, where a partial eclipse would have begun at 15:27, reached annularity between 16:48 and 16:53, and ended at sunset (17:38). During those minutes nearly 86 % of the solar disc was obscured. Daylight dimmed into dusk, then briefly returned before sunset — a double dusk, the sun speaking twice before nightfall. At 86% the exposed 14% is more than enough to cause retinal injury.

In the omen logic of the ancient Near East, such dimming was a sign of royal peril — a sky unsettled. Yet in Joshua 10 it becomes a sign of biṭaḥon. The same darkness that Mesopotamia read as danger is transformed into assurance. The God of Israel commands, and the heavens obey.

Humphreys and Waddington’s study, published in Astronomy & Geophysics 44 (2003), drew on NASA’s retro-calculated eclipse data and the chronology of the Merneptah Stele (ca. 1208 BCE), which names Israel in Canaan during the reign of Merneptah, son of Ramesses II. No ancient astronomical record preserves this eclipse, yet their reconstruction shows that an annular eclipse, visible from the Shephela near ʿAzeqa and Giḇʿon, occurred in late afternoon, producing that striking double dusk.

At ʿAzeqa (31° 42′ 00″ N, 34° 56′ 09″ E; elevation ≈ 339 m), the annular eclipse of 30 October 1207 BCE (astronomical −1206 Oct 30; 21 Boul / Marḥeshwan 2554 AM) began at 13:06 UT (15:06 IST) with first contact (C1), reached annularity from 14:25 to 14:31 UT (16:25–16:31 IST), and ended at 15:39 UT (17:39 IST), overlapping sunset (15:08 UT / 17:08 IST).

Obscuration reached ≈ 86 %, magnitude 0.953, and the Sun stood about 7° above the horizon at maximum. The antumbral path was approximately 397 km wide, moving eastward at 3.38 km/s (≈ 7,560 mph). Computations use ΔT = 29,136.9 s, consistent with NASA GSFC’s Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses (updated 2025 Apr 03).

Annularity at ʿAzeqa lasted six minutes before sunset, producing a brief “double dusk” over the Shephela — about forty minutes of diminished daylight from 16:25 to 17:08 IST as the annular phase faded into night.

To the ancient Near Eastern interpreter, such dimming would have been an omen of instability. To Yehoshuwaʿ, it was a sign of presence. The same sky that elsewhere read as fear, Israel received as biṭaḥon — the command to be ḥazaq weʾEmaṣ, strong and resolute, within the silence of the sun and the order of God’s creation.

Every generation inherits the same sky but not the same grammar. To the Babylonians, a dimmed sun meant imbalance. To Israel, it meant encounter. One looked upward in fear; the other in listening.

Yehoshuwaʿs command, Sun, in Giḇʿōn be dōm (silent), is not a defiance of heaven but its sanctification. The miracle lies not in the suspension of nature but in its comprehension. The sun does not rebel against law; it fulfills it. The stillness of the heavens mirrors the stillness within — the biṭaḥon that steadies the heart and the emuna that affirms the world’s coherence.

Where others read omens, Israel learned to read order. The command ḥazaq weʾEmaṣ begins as courage in battle and ends as a theology of attention. To be strong is not to conquer the sky but to stand within it, to see its light dim and return, and to know that even silence speaks in the language of creation.

Postscript
This piece continues from The Day the Sun Stopped Speaking.

I recommend:

• Enūma Anu Enlil, Tablets 47–49. Reiner, Erica, and David Pingree. Weather Omens of Enūma Anu Enlil. Brill, 2012.

• Humphreys, Colin J., and W. Graeme Waddington. “Solar Eclipse of 30 October 1207 BC Confirms the Date of Joshua’s Long Day.” Astronomy & Geophysics, vol. 44, 2003.

• Espenak, Fred. Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses: −1999 to +3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE). NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, updated 3 Apr. 2025.

• Jubier, Xavier M. Five Millennium (−1999 to +3000) Canon of Solar Eclipses Database. 1991–2025, International Astronomical Union, Working Group on Solar Eclipses. I gratefully acknowledge Xavier M. Jubier, IAU Working Group on Solar Eclipses (Member 15159), for maintaining the Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses Database and providing the interactive map tools used to generate eclipse path visualizations in this study.

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Pre-Script

Part I of II. This essay examines the stillness of Yehoshuwaʿ’s long day — the moment Israel learned to trust the order within creation.

The next, Joshua’s Eclipse in History — 1207 BCE | 2554 AM, will follow the same event as a historical eclipse, tracing how the heavens once spoke to every nation.

The Babylonian Tora cycle has just ended. The month of Tishri draws to a close, and we are left with Moshe’s final charge:חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ — Ḥazaq weʾEmaṣ |“Be strong and resolute” (Deuteronomy 31:6–7, 23).

These are not words of conquest but of equilibrium. To be ḥazaq is to hold steady when the ground shifts; to be ʾemaṣ is to stand firm within uncertainty. This is the grammar of biṭaḥon — trust that steadies the heart and anchors courage to obedience.

It is a phrase that refuses to fade. Yehoshuwaʿ Bin-Noun hears it not once but repeatedly, from God (Joshua 1:6–9), from the people (1:16–18), and from the echo of Moshe’s own voice still lingering in the nation’s memory.

We end the Tora with this exhortation and begin the Book of Prophets with its reverberation:

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר ׯ אֶל־יְהוֹשֻׁ֙עַ֙ אַל־תִּירָ֣א מֵהֶ֔ם כִּ֥י בְיָדְךָ֖ נְתַתִּ֑ים לֹא־יַעֲמֹ֥ד אִ֛ישׁ מֵהֶ֖ם בְּפָנֶֽיךָ׃ — “Do not be afraid of them,” said YHWH to Yehoshuwaʿ, “for I will deliver them into your hands; not one of them shall withstand you” (10:8).

When Israel enters the land, confidence swells, then curdles. The silence that brought down the walls of Yeriḥo (Joshua 6) — seven days of restraint before a single trumpet blast — taught that victory depends on listening. But at the City of ʿAi (Joshua 7) that discipline fails, and strength without obedience collapses. Later, the covenant made in haste with Giḇʿon (Joshua 9) binds Israel to unintended allies and summons the coalition of five kings. Between these two moments, silence and haste, the stage is set for Chapter 10, where both time and motion must again learn stillness.

אָ֣ז יְדַבֵּ֤ר יְהוֹשֻׁעַ֙ לַֽׯ בְּי֗וֹם תֵּ֤ת ׯ אֶת־הָ֣אֱמֹרִ֔י לִפְנֵ֖י בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וַיֹּ֣אמֶר ׀ לְעֵינֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל שֶׁ֚מֶשׁ בְּגִבְע֣וֹן דּ֔וֹם וְיָרֵ֖חַ בְּעֵ֥מֶק אַיָּלֽוֹן׃ — “Then Yehoshuwaʿspoke to YHWH on the day the LORD gave the Amorites into the hand of Israel, and said before the eyes of Israel: ‘Sun, in Giḇʿōn be dōm (silent); Moon, in the valley of ʾAyyalon’” (10:12).

וַיִּדֹּ֨ם הַשֶּׁ֜מֶשׁ וְיָרֵ֣חַ עָמָ֗ד — “And the sun was dōm (silent), and the moon ʿamaḏ (stood)” (10:13).

This passage is often read literally, as though the heavens themselves paused in defiance of natural law. But the Neḇiʾim rarely write in such simple terms. Their language invites layers of resonance: poetic, theological, and historical. Those who stood with Yehoshuwaʿ may have seen an extraordinary natural phenomenon — perhaps the long light of an extended day. Yet the Neḇiʾim are not inventors of meaning; they are its translators, shaping each event so that every generation may unfold its sōḏ (hidden secret).

The verse, however, is not about astronomy. It concerns the stillness that follows tested courage, the equilibrium after exertion when obedience and quiet converge. It speaks of the stillness of biṭaḥon (trust, security) that is sustained by emuna (firmness, reliability).

Radaq (R. David Qamḥi) explains that the root aman (“to be firm, reliable”) forms the basis of emuna. In Sefer haShorashim he writes:

כֻּלָּם אֲשֶׁר הֵם מִבִּנְיָן הַהַפְעִיל, הֵם עִנְיָן הַבִּטָּחוֹן וְהַקַּבָּלָה... עִנְיָן אֱמוּנָה, כִּי הַמַּאֲמִין בְּאֶחָד נוֹתֵן הָאֱמוּנָה וְסָבֵר שֶׁהוּא אֱמֶת. — “All the causative [hifʿil] forms relate to biṭaḥon (trust) and acceptance in tradition. The essence of emuna is that the one who trusts grants reliability and affirms it as true.”

At its root, emuna is covenantal reliability. In Sefer haMiṣwoth (originally written in Arabic), haRambam identifies the first and most fundamental commandment as iʿtiqād (conviction or binding knowledge), not “blind faith.” The Tora never commands belief in God’s existence; it commands leḎaʿa (“to know”). When restating these ideas in Hebrew, haRambam writes in the Mishne Tora, Yesoḏe haTora 1:1. Knowledge is the foundation from which emuna (trust) emerges.

This is the peace of a soul at ease after testing and proven steadiness:
אֶבְטַ֖ח וְלֹ֣א אֶפְחָ֑ד | “I will trust and not be afraid” (Isaiah 12:2).

בִּטְח֥וּ בַׯ עֲדֵי־עַ֑ד | “Trust in YHWH forever” (Isaiah 26:4).

Two verbs in Yehoshuwaʿ’s command describe the moment: dōm and ʿamaḏ — the first “to be silent,” the second “to stand.” Together they hold the key to the stillness at the heart of this revelation.

Dōm, ʿAmaḏ, and the Perfection of Law

The word dōm carries more than stillness. It is the cessation of voice, the holding of breath. Yehoshuwaʿ’s command reaches upward, not only to the rhythm of the heavens but also to the pulse of the warriors beside him.

The verb dōm comes from the root דמם (damam), a word that oscillates between silence, cessation, and death:

דדּ֤וֹם ׀ לַׯ וְהִתְח֢וֹלֵֽ֫ל ל֥וֹ | “Be dōm (silent) before YHWH and wait for Him” (Psalm 37:7).

יָקֵ֣ם סְ֭עָרָה לִדְמָמָ֑ה | “He raised the storm to dōmama (stillness)” (Psalm 107:29).

בִּגְדֹ֥ל זְרוֹעֲךָ֖ יִדְּמ֣וּ כָּאָ֑בֶן | “By the greatness of Your arm they were dōmu (still) as stone” (Exodus 15:16).

Each verse bears the same quiet grammar: something powerful that has stopped moving. To dōm is not merely to hush but to fall silent from awe. Radaq, commenting on וְדֹ֣מּוּ סֶֽלָה (Psalm 4:5), writes:

הַדְּמָמָה עִנְיַן שְׁתִיקַת הַדִּבּוּר וְהַמַּעֲשֶׂה — “Domama (stillness) means the silence of speech and of action.”

The Hebrew root דמם holds a strange duality, for it means both “to be silent” and “to perish.” Silence is kin to death, but also to surrender. In Leviticus 10:3, when Aharon loses his sons to divine fire, the text records simply:

וַיִּדֹּ֖ם אַהֲרֹֽן — “And Aharon was dōm (silent).”

The verb here is not restraint but collapse — the cessation of language before mystery. The same resonance follows Yehoshuwaʿ’s command: “Sun, be silent.” Not destroyed or darkened, but stilled as Aharon was stilled, as seas and storms are when they have said enough.

The second verb, ʿamaḏ, belongs to another field of meaning: firmness, standing, endurance. It is the act of remaining in one’s place, as in עֲמֹד עִמָּדִי, “Stand here with Me” (Deuteronomy 5:28). From the same root come ʿamuḏ (“pillar”) and maʿamaḏ (“standing-place”). The word implies stability rather than stasis, continuity rather than paralysis.

Radaq, in Sefer haShorashim, traces ʿamaḏ from the physical to the moral. It can describe “My feet ʿamḏa (stand) on level ground” (Psalm 26:12) or “All the people ʿamuḏ (stood) in the covenant” (2 Kings 23:3). To stand is to persist, to sustain one’s covenantal position.

When dōm and ʿamaḏ meet in Yehoshuwaʿ, language itself becomes layered. The sun’s motion ceases (dōm); the moon’s place holds firm (ʿamaḏ). One verb softens into silence; the other braces into strength.

For Radaq, the sun does not freeze in defiance of nature. The event is not the undoing of cosmic order. The miracle lies not in the violation of law but in its perfect calibration. The day stretches to its fullest measure, and the world stands in disciplined equilibrium between movement and rest.

Ibn Ezra complements this view:

כִּי כָל דְּרָכָיו מִשְׁפָּט — “For all His ways are mishpaṭ — law, measure, and order.”
שֶׁלֹּא יִשְׁתַּנּוּ רַק הֵם עַל מִשְׁפָּט אֶחָד וְזוֹ הִיא הַתְּהִלָּה — “God’s ways do not change. They follow one mishpaṭ, one law, eternal and just.”

For Ibn Ezra, divine perfection resides in consistency. The laws of creation are not suspended even in miracle; they are its very instruments. God’s works are permanent, unaltered, executed through wisdom.

For both Radaq and Ibn Ezra, emuna and biṭaḥon are not denials of science but its divine grammar.

haRambam refines the same intuition into principle: nature is stable, intelligible, and honored as the expression of divine wisdom.

Before him, Seʿadya haGaʾon (882–942) had already framed the Shemaʿ Yisraʾel not as a call to belief but to knowledge. In his Arabic translation of Deuteronomy 6:4, he renders “שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל” not as “hear” but as “know”:

שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל ׯ ﭏֱֹהֵ֖ינוּ ׯ ׀ אֶחָֽד׃
اِعْلَمْ يَا إِسْرَائِيلَ إِنَّ اللهَ رَبُّنَا اللهُ ٱلوَاحِدُ
Eʿlam ya Yisraʾel, inna Allah rabbuna Allah al-Wāḥid — “Know, O Israel, that God is our Lord, God is Alone.”

For Seʿadya, to hear God is to know Him — through study, perception, and the sciences of creation. True emuna (reliability) is not blind faith but the conviction born of understanding; and from that reliability emerges biṭaḥon (trust), the inner steadiness that follows tested knowledge. Seʿadya and haRambam thus stand on one continuum: both see the natural order as the bridge between intellect and devotion, where knowing the world becomes of utmost importance — what haRambam, as noted earlier, categorizes as the first commandment in Sefer haMiṣwoth.

In Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn (Guide II:29), he writes:

Judeo-Arabic (original)
אלשי כמא ג’על פי טבעה פי אצל מא טבע והד’א אן כאן כמא תראה פאנה ידל עלי עט’מהֿ אלקאיל וכונה אסתצעב כל אלאסתצעאב אן תתגיר טביעה בעד מעשה בראשית או תטרי משיה אכ’רי בעד מא אסתקרת הכד’א פכאנה ירי מת’לא אנה ג’על פי טביעהֿ אלמא אן יתצל ויג’רי מן אלעלו ללספל דאימא אלא פי ד’לך אלוקת אלד’י גרק פיה אלמצריון וד’לך אלמא כ’אצה פאנה ינקסם... ואן ד’לך כלה הרב מן אסתג’דאד שי הנאך קיל אמר ר’ יונתן תנאים התנה הקבה עם הים שיהא נקרע לפני ישראל הדא היא וישב הים לפנות בקר לאיתנו.

Arabic script

الشيء كما جعل في طبيعته في أصل ما طبع، وهذا إن كان كما ترى فإنه يدلّ على عظمة القائل، وكونه استصعب كلّ الاستصعاب أن تتغيّر طبيعته بعد عمل الخليقة، أو تجري مشيئة أخرى بعد ما استقرّ هذا، فكأنّه يرى مثلاً أنّه جعل في طبيعة الماء أن يتّصل ويجري من العلوّ إلى السفل دائمًا، إلاّ في ذلك الوقت الذي غرق فيه المصريّون، وذلك الماء خاصّةً فإنّه انقسم... وإنّ ذلك كلّه هربٌ من استحداث شيء هناك، قيل: «אָמַר רִבִּי יוֹנָתָן: תְּנָאִים הִתְנָה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא עִם הַיָּם שֶׁיִּהְיֶה נִקְרָע לִפְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. הֲדָא הִיא: “וַיָּשָׁב הַיָּם לִפְנוֹת בֹּקֶר לְאֵיתָנוֹ”» (בְּרֵאשִׁית רַבָּה ה:ה).

English translation

“Every thing acts according to the ṭabīʿa (nature) in which it was originally created. If this is so, as you see, it attests to the greatness of the qāʾil (the Creator), that He established everything in its nature from the beginning, and that it is utterly improbable that its nature should ever change after Maʿase Bereshith (the beginning of creation), or that another will should intervene once the decree was fixed. Thus, one may imagine that God placed within the ṭabīʿa of water the capacity to flow downward from above, except that at the time when the Egyptians drowned, that particular water divided. All this avoids positing any istihdāth (new creation) after the beginning [of creation]. Hence the saying: ‘Ribbi Yonatan said, the Holy One, blessed be He, made a condition with the sea that it should split before Israel, as it is said (Exodus 14:27), “And the sea returned at dawn to its strength (leEthano).”’ (Bereshith Rabba 5:5) [The Midrash Bereshith Rabba 5:5, reads ‘to its strength’ (leEthano) as ‘to its condition’ (leThenaʾo) — implying that this was no change in nature, but a preordained feature of creation itself.]

What we call a nes (miracle) is not a breach in nature but its perfection made visible, when creation reveals the intention that has always moved within it.

In Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn (Guide II:29), he writes that everything acts according to the ṭabīʿa in which it was created; even the sea’s parting was written into its nature from the beginning. To imagine a God who suspends nature is to imagine a world without trust. The greatness of the Creator lies not in overturning His laws, but in their endurance.

He extends this truth to Yehoshuwaʿ’s long day (Guide II:35): the sun did not stop, the earth did not turn backward, and no new act was created.

Judeo-Arabic (original)

…ואמא קולהו [שמש בגבעון דום וירח בעמק אילון] פאנה למ יקצר אלשמס מן סירהא ולא תקיפת אלארד ולא זאד מנהא שיי, בל כמא קדם אלתנא אללה תעאלי פי מעשה בראשית עלי אנה יראה לישועא דלך אלמחאלא ולכין סכר עינהם ענ אלכיבאלת והסבב אלנור אליהם חתי תמת אלמלחמה … וקד נבהתך עלי דלך אלמעני פי קולי אן אלאת’אר אלמנכז’ה ליס תגיירא לטבע אלא תצראףא פי אלאבסאר.

Arabic script

وأمّا قوله: «الشمس بجبعون دوم، والقمر بعمق أيلون» فإنّ الشمس لم تُقْصِر من سيرها، ولا التفتت الأرض، ولا زاد منها شيء، بل كما سبق، اشترط الله تعالى في عمل الخليقة أن يُرى ليشوع ذلك الخيال، ولكن حُجِبَت عنهم المقابلة، وصُرِفَ النورُ إليهم حتّى تمّت الحرب. وقد نبّهتك على أنّ هذه الآثار الخارقة ليست تغييرًا للطبيعة، بل تصرّفًا في الأبصار.

English translation

“As for the verse, ‘Sun, stand still upon Gibeon, and Moon in the valley of Ayyalon,’ the sun did not shorten its course, nor did the earth halt, nor was anything added to them. Rather, as I have already stated, God had established at Maʿase Bereshith (the beginning of creation) that such an appearance (khayāl) should be shown to Yehoshuwaʿ. Their vision of the celestial bodies was withheld, and the light was redirected toward them until the battle was completed. I have already pointed out that such extraordinary āthār (effects) are not alterations of ṭabīʿa (nature), but dispositions (taṣarruf) in human perception (al-abṣār).”

The light itself was redirected — a taṣarruf fī al-abṣār, a reorientation of human vision.

The miracle, then, lies not in the alteration of the cosmos but in human perception. For haRambam, the law of nature is not opposed to God but expresses His will in ordered form.

In the Mishne Tora, Yesoḏe haTora 2–3,

ב וּכְשֶׁמְּחַשֵּׁב בַּדְּבָרִים הָאֵלּוּ עַצְמָן, מִיָּד הוּא נִרְתָּע לַאֲחוֹרָיו, וְיִירָא וְיִפְחַד וְיֵדַע שְׁהוּא בִּרְיָה קְטַנָּה שְׁפָלָה אֲפֵלָה, עוֹמֵד בְּדַעַת קַלָּה מְעוּטָה לִפְנֵי תְּמִים דֵּעוֹת, כְּמוֹ שֶׁאָמַר דָּוִיד “כִּי-אֶרְאֶה שָׁמֶיךָ... מָה-אֱנוֹשׁ כִּי-תִזְכְּרֶנּוּ” (תהילים ח:ד-ה).

And when one contemplates these very matters, he is immediately struck backward, and he will yira (stand in awe) and yiphḥaḏ (tremble with fear),
and he will yeḏaʿ (know, in the sense of inward recognition) that he is a small, lowly, and dark beriya (created being), standing with daʿath qalla uMeʿuṭṭa (a light and meager understanding) before Temim Deʿoth (the One perfect in knowledge), as David said: “When I behold Your heavens... what is ʾenosh (a mortal man), that You are mindful of him?” (Psalms 8:4–5). (2:2)

Love and awe arise not from miracle but from understanding the natural order, from seeing that every law of motion, every sphere and star, is already a form of praise.

כָּל הַכּוֹכָבִים וְהַגַּלְגַּלִּים, כֻּלָּם בַּעֲלֵי נֶפֶשׁ וְדֵעָה וְהַשְׂכֵּל הֶם; וְהֶם חַיִּים וְעוֹמְדִים וּמַכִּירִים אֶת מִי שֶׁאָמַר וְהָיָה הָעוֹלָם, כָּל אֶחָד וְאֶחָד לְפִי גָּדְלוֹ וּלְפִי מַעֲלָתוֹ מְשַׁבְּחִים וּמְפָאֲרִים לְיוֹצְרָם כְּמוֹ הַמַּלְאָכִים.

All the kokhaḇim (stars) and the galgalim (celestial spheres) are possessors of soul, knowledge, and intellect; they are ḥayyim veʿOmḏim (alive and enduring), and they recognize the One who spoke and the universe came into being. Each one, according to its magnitude and its rank, praises and glorifies its Creator, just as the angels do. (3:11)

Even the heavens, he writes, עוֹמְדִים וּמַכִּירִים אֶת מִי שֶׁאָמַר וְהָיָה הָעוֹלָם — “they stand and recognize Him who spoke and the world came to be.”

They stand — ʿamaḏ — as Yehoshuwaʿ stood, as Aharon was silent, as the sea once parted: firm within the grammar of creation. To study that order is to serve it; to see it clearly is to know the One who sustains it.

To haRambam, the law of nature is not God’s rival; it is His language. Yehoshuwaʿ’s words, Sun, in Giḇʿōn be dōm (silent), do not demand that the world break; they call it to align, to reveal its inner grammar. The stillness above becomes the stillness within — the biṭaḥon that trusts the Author and the emuna that recognizes His order.

Miracle, then, is not exception but emuna (fidelity). Stillness is not absence but biṭaḥon (trust), knowing that the miracle is ṭabīʿa (nature itself) — the ordered framework established at Maʿase Bereshith.

Yet this order was not revealed to Israel alone. Across Canaan and the broader ancient world, others too sought meaning in the heavens; but where the Amorite saw peril, Israel perceived grammar. The same sky, read by diviners as warning, was read by Israel instinctively as biṭaḥon (trust), the assurance to be ḥazaq weʾemaṣ (strong and resolute).

Postscript

In Part II, we will examine how the words “Shemesh beGiḇʿon dōm” may correspond to an actual solar eclipse dated to October 30, 1207 BCE. What Babylonia recorded as an omen, Israel understood as order, a moment of biṭaḥon through emuna, trust grounded in proven constancy and in the knowledge of God and His sciences.

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If you ask someone in Jerusalem or Cairo what peace means, you’ll hear the same word. In Hebrew it is שָׁלוֹם (shalom). In Arabic it is سَلَام (salām). They come from the same ancient root, Š–L–M (ש־ל־ם / س–ل–م). But the two words grew in different directions, like branches from the same tree. They do not just mean peace, they imagine peace differently.

In Semitic linguistics, every word comes from a root, a shoresh. You can already see how roots diverge when planted in different soils. Take the city of Bethlehem. Its name is debated: Beth Leḥem in Hebrew, the “House of Bread,” or Bayt Laḥm in Arabic, the “House of Meat.” In Hebrew, לֶחֶם (leḥem, bread). In Arabic, لَحْم (laḥm, meat). Both go back to the older Semitic root L–Ḥ–M, probably “sustenance” in general. Among Levantine farmers, bread became the staple. Among Bedouin pastoralists of Arabia, meat and dairy carried life. The same root grew in different directions because the landscapes were different.

So too with Š–L–M.

In the Northwest Semitic world, at Ugarit on the Syrian coast, Šalim (𐎌𐎍𐎎) was the god of dusk, the completion of the day when things came to rest intact. His name derives from the root Š–L–M (“whole, safe, peace”), and he was paired with his twin Šaḥar, the god of dawn. In the East Semitic world of Mesopotamia, Akkadian used 𒊭𒇷𒈬 (šalāmu, “to be well, intact, prosperous”), and the noun 𒋗𒌌𒈬 (šulmu, “well-being, safety”). The Amarna letters, fourteenth-century BCE tablets between Egypt and Canaanite rulers, often end with the formula 𒀀𒈾 𒊭𒇷𒈬-𒆪 (ana šulmi-ka, “for your well-being”).

Already in the Bronze Age, Š–L–M carried a sense of wholeness, safeness, things set right. Hebrew inherited that world, part of the Northwest Semitic family. Arabic, though related, branched differently: shaped by Central and South Semitic developments in the Arabian desert. Same root, different family tree, different soil.

The Hebrew Imagination of Peace

When Leviticus speaks of restitution it says:
וְשִׁלַּ֤ם אֹתֿוֹ֙ בְּרֹאשׁ֔וֹ – “He shall shillēm (make whole/repay) him in full” (Leviticus 5:24). To make shalem is to restore wholeness, to redress imbalance.

Deuteronomy requires:
אֶ֣בֶֿן שְׁלֵמָ֤ה – “A stone shelema (whole/just)” (Deuteronomy 25:15). Completeness here becomes fairness.

And when God offers Pineḥas:
בְּרִיתִֿ֖י שָׁלוֹם – “My berith shalom (covenant of wholeness)” (Numbers 25:12). Peace is covenant kept, integrity of relationship.

The story of the Gibeonites shows how this logic worked in practice. When Israel entered Canaan, the Gibeonites feared annihilation and disguised themselves with old wineskins and moldy bread to trick Israel into making peace:

וַיַּ֨עַשׂ לָהֶ֤ם יְהוֹשֻׁ֙עַ֙ שָׁלוֹם וַיִּכְרֹ֥ת לָהֶ֛ם בְּרִ֖ית – “Yehoshuʿa made shalom (wholeness) with them and cut a berith (covenant)” (Joshua 9:15).

When the ruse is uncovered, the treaty still stands. The Gibeonites are not slaughtered; instead, they are bound to service as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” The covenant holds, but the balance is re-weighted.

Here is the Hebrew imagination of peace: not the absence of conflict, but juridical equilibrium. Even a treaty entered through deception is binding. Shalom is wholeness restored under pressure, covenant reshaped by justice but not abandoned. This is what modern theorists would call positive peace, not merely an end to violence but the presence of justice and right relationship.

The Arabic Imagination of Peace

Arabic bends differently. In pre-Islamic Arabia, سِلْم (silm) did not mean a covenant among equals but a truce of protection. The weaker tribe entered silm with the stronger, yielding in exchange for safeness. This was peace as hierarchy: submission to power as the price of survival.

The Muʿallaqah of Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā, composed at the close of the War of Dāḥis and Ghabrāʾ, a decades-long feud between ʿAbs and Dhubyān, is the pre-Islamic ode most closely tied to peace. Zuhayr was admired for his sobriety and wisdom; the second Rashidun Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb even called him “the poet’s poet.” His ode praises the two chiefs who ended the war by paying immense diyah (blood-money) from their own wealth and binding the tribes by a ḥilf (pact). In this setting, silm meant not covenantal harmony but a truce: vengeance suspended through compensation and pact-making.

Zuhayr captures this in the couplet:

وَقَدْ قُلْتُمَا إِنْ نُدْرِكِ السِّلْمَ وَاسِعًا
بِمَالٍ وَمَعْرُوفٍ مِنَ الْقَوْلِ نَسْلَمِ

“And you two have said: ‘If only we might attain a broad silm (truce/reconciliation);

Through wealth and a gracious word of speech, then shall we naslam (be spared/delivered).’”

Around this verse, Zuhayr explains what such silm required: the wounds of war were “healed by the hundreds of camels in payment, apportioned by those not guilty of the crime.” Even clans uninvolved in the killings had to contribute to the diyah, submitting their wealth for the sake of ending bloodshed. Peace was not justice between equals but collective surrender to necessity: everyone bore the burden of survival, whether guilty or not. He also warns that war, once stirred, “grinds like a millstone” and breeds endless destruction. Against that background, silm was not harmony but negative peace, the suspension of killing by costly submission, upheld by compensation and pact.

The Qurʾān inherits that frame and elevates it. Aḇraham declares:
أَسْلَمْتُ لِرَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ – “I have aslamtu (submitted/yielded) to the Lord of the worlds” (Al-Baqarah 2:131).

Another verse asks:
وَمَنْ أَحْسَنُ دِينًا مِمَّنْ أَسْلَمَ وَجْهَهُ لِلَّهِ – “Who is better in religion than one who aslama (submits/yields) his face to Allah?” (Al-Nisāʾ 4:125).

Later the Qurʾān commands:
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا ادْخُلُوا فِي السِّلْمِ كَافَّةً – “O you who believe, enter wholly into silm (safeness/submission)” (Al-Baqarah 2:208).

The root still carries the sense of being intact or unharmed, but its center of gravity is yielding, safety secured through surrender.

Muḥammad’s Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīnah (Constitution of Medina, 622 CE) made this political. It gathered Muslim emigrants, local Arabs, and Jewish tribes into a single polity under his authority. The turning clause is §23:

وَأَنَّكُمْ مَهْمَا اخْتَلَفْتُمْ فِيهِ مِنْ شَيْءٍ فَإِنَّ مَرَدَّهُ إِلَى اللَّهِ وَإِلَى مُحَمَّدٍ

wa-annakum mahmā ikhtalaftum fīhi min shayʾin fa-inna maraddahu ilā llāh wa-ilā Muḥammad
(“Whatever you differ about must be referred to God and to Muḥammad.”)

This was not peace as covenantal parity. It was peace as hierarchy: all disputes referred upward, binding diverse groups under a single arbiter whose authority was framed as divine. The formula echoes the Qurʾānic command,فَإِن تَنَازَعْتُمْ فِي شَيْءٍ فَرُدُّوهُ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ وَٱلرَّسُولِ – fa-in tanāzaʿtum fī shayʾin faruddūhu ilā llāh wa-al-rasūl (“if you dispute over anything, refer it to Allah and the Messenger”) (Al-Nisāʾ 4:59), rooting the charter in revelation.

To enter salām with Muḥammad was to submit to his judgment and in return to gain safeness. Later arrangements, ṣulḥ (truce) and hudna (armistice), worked the same way: security in exchange for deference. This is what modern theorists would call negative peace, the suspension of conflict under authority, without balance between equals. Historically as in the Qurʾān, salām was never covenantal wholeness but vertical submission, a dominance pact reframed as divine order.

Western Traditions of Peace

In the lands we usually call the West, the imagination of peace followed yet another path. In Greek, Εἰρήνη (eirēnē) meant more than simply “not fighting.” It was harmony, civic order, the state of things “joined together.” She was worshiped as a goddess, often shown carrying Πλοῦτος (ploutos, wealth), a reminder that prosperity depended on stability. Peace was not merely divine gift but social condition, the cohesion of the polis when its parts held together without rupture. In Rome, the word was pax, from pacisci (“to strike a pact”). But here the emphasis shifted. Whereas Greek eirēnē spoke of balance within a community, pax became bound to empire. Treaties were not contracts among equals; they were settlements imposed by the victor. The most famous was the Pax Romana, the centuries-long Roman order maintained by armies, laws, and monumental symbols like Augustus’ Ara Pacis. Peace was stability through domination.

English inherited its word “peace” through Old French pais from Latin pax. At first it meant treaty or settlement, but later expanded. By the modern era, scholars began to distinguish between two kinds: what Johan Galtung called negative peace, the end of war and the absence of violence, and positive peace, the presence of justice, equity, and social flourishing. These categories, born of Western experience, are now standard in peace studies.

But the history of Western peace-thinking did not stop there. Over centuries, new layers were added: the Enlightenment spoke of a “constitutional peace,” where social contracts, rights, and laws would tame conflict; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries added “civil peace,” with movements for equality, labor rights, disarmament, and enfranchisement; and after 1945, international law and institutions consolidated an “international peace architecture.” This framework drew together treaties, aid, human rights, and development into what some call a “liberal peace.” Yet it was never neutral: it reflected the interests of dominant powers, and its failures in Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen exposed its fragility.

Today, Western visions of peace compete with authoritarian and nationalist models, and while international peace agreements still invoke liberal ideals, without power they remain tenuous. The result is a world of “plural peaces,” overlapping and contested visions of order. Unlike cultures where peace is imagined through poetry, covenant, or law, concepts embedded for centuries in religious and social practice, the modern international order often offers abstractions detached from lived tradition. The international peace architecture remains real, embodied in initiatives like the United Nations’ Sustaining Peace agenda, reaffirmed and expanded in 2023, but it is layered, costly, and always vulnerable when it lacks legitimacy outside the powers that built it.

Hebrew, shalom took on the character of its world: contracts, covenants, and justice. It meant wholeness restored, balance redressed, covenant honored even under strain, what modern theorists would call positive peace, not simply the absence of conflict but the presence of fairness and integrity.

Arabic’s salām and the cultures that follow it took another path: safeness through yielding, surrender as the condition for protection, hierarchy as the guarantee of order. This was negative peace, the suspension of conflict under authority, security without equality.

From the same root Š–L–M grew two visions, each shaped by its soil. In Hebrew, peace is justice done and wholeness regained. In Arabic, peace is safeness secured through submission.

Even as other traditions and modern theories add new layers, they still frame how peace is imagined today.

After-Note on Exceptions

Of the 140 occurrences of the root S–L–M in the Qurʾān, only a small handful belong to eschatological contexts rather than political or social order. Paradise is called دَارُ ٱلسَّلَام (dār al-salām, “abode of safeness”) (Al-Anʿām 6:127; Yūnus 10:25). The righteous are said to approach God with a قَلْبٍ سَلِيم (qalb salīm, “sound/unharmed heart”) (Al-Shuʿarāʾ 26:89; Al-Ṣāffāt 37:84). A few other verses invoke salām as divine well-being upon prophets or as the greeting of the Garden, assurances that nothing harmful will touch them. These are not about peace between peoples but about God’s final judgment and the perfected state of the soul. They stand apart as “exceptions:” in human affairs, salām meant safeness through submission; in the divine realm, only God grants ultimate wholeness through submission to Him.

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When my wife and I welcomed our son, Aḇraham Eliʿezer Ben Yiṣḥaq, into the world, I thought not only of his future but of a story from my father’s life, one that began with a simple act of kindness on a Beirut roadside and ended, a year later, with that kindness repaid as a debt.

His name is Aḇraham Eliʿezer Ben Yiṣḥaq, named after my father (and in turn my father’s maternal grandfather, and as fate would have it my father-in-law’s name) and my wife’s grandfather. His path will not be bound by theirs, yet he will draw from them as from deep wells. He will learn from those who have shaped us, the ones I have known, the ones I have not, and those who reside only in the depths of our soul. And like the patriarch of our people, Aḇraham Aḇinu, Padre bendicho luz deYisraʾel, he will carry a name both ancient and alive.

A name is a vessel. It holds memory, aspiration, and blessing. It can weigh heavy, or it can steady the one who bears it. In our home, Aḇraham is more than a name, it is a way of walking through the world: building without seeking gain, welcoming without calculation, moving without losing direction. This story, one my father told me when I was a child, is for my son, for one day he may read it. And it is for others too, so that they might know something of my father’s life, and of the Beirut that once was.

In the spring of 1975, the Lebanese Civil War had just begun. Beirut was still a city in the worldly sense, cafés open, newspapers printed, the Corniche still lined with life. But fissures ran under the surface. The capital, long a meeting point of Arabic, French, and Armenian, of Christians, Muslims, Druze, and Jews, was beginning to come apart along lines that were political, religious, and sometimes only linguistic. Militias armed themselves and took control of neighborhoods. Checkpoints sprouted on major roads, each manned by a different faction: Christian Phalangists with polished boots and crisp uniforms, Palestinian fighters in mismatched fatigues under the umbrella of the PLO, smaller local defense groups loyal to no one but themselves.

At first, the checkpoints were almost informal, a few sandbags and barrels, rifles balanced casually on knees. Soon they became fortified, the questioning more pointed. Your name, your accent, even the wrong answer to “How do you make tabboulé?” could determine if you lived. Certain words became shibboleths. In Beirut and the mountains, Lebanese said banadoura for tomato; Palestinians said bandoora. A single vowel could betray your origin and seal your fate.

One afternoon in 1975, my father was driving back from the mountain resort town of Bḥamdoun to Beirut. Bḥamdoun and its sister town ʿAley were popular with Beirut’s Jewish families, who kept summer homes there for the cooler air. On the roadside that day, he saw a man with a broken-down car. My father stopped and offered him a ride. They exchanged polite words. As the man got in, he noticed the Hebrew lettering on my father’s courracha (the embroidered bag for his ṭalleth and tephillin). My father, moving it from the front seat to the back, noticed in turn the man’s accent and attire: Palestinian. There was no weighing of risk or advantage, just one traveler helping another, as Aḇraham once opened his tent to all who passed. They spoke little. The ride ended. The moment passed.

By 1976, Beirut was no longer one city but a patchwork of armed enclaves. The Jewish quarter, Wadi Abou Jamil, a small neighborhood of narrow streets and low stone houses, was under siege, its once-bustling synagogues shuttered or abandoned. The war had begun in April 1975, just before Pesaḥ. Many Jewish families who had summer homes in the mountains had gone up to ʿAley and Bḥamdoun for the holiday, intending to return when things calmed. Spring became summer. The fighting spread. Some never returned to the city. Others fled to the mountains from Wādī Abū Jamīl, escaping shellfire that now fell daily on the center of Beirut.

My father was one of those who moved between these two worlds, bringing supplies, and sometimes people, between the mountains and the city. It was dangerous work; each road could change hands overnight. Yet he moved without losing his direction, to secure the community, to keep people alive. That year, he drove to Bḥamdoun with an elderly man from the community, frail, confused, and frightened. Let us call him R.M. (as I do not want to reveal his identity). Somewhere on the road, the car broke down. As my father bent over the engine, a group of Palestinian militiamen approached, fighters loyal to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP–GC), then under Ahmad Jibril (known by his kunya Abu Jihad), a hard-line faction aligned with Syria. Within a year, some of these men would follow a different commander, Abu ʿAbbas, in breaking away to form the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF).

The fighters began asking questions. Under the pressure, the old man misspoke, said something that gave them away. The militiamen pulled them to the side of the road, lining them against a wall. My father heard the metallic rhythm of rifles being readied. The elder, in his terror, soiled himself. Back in Beirut, someone from the community had seen them stopped and drove straight to my grandparents’ home. They burst through the door: “Your son is dead.” My grandmother tore her clothes in mourning and sat on the floor, beginning shiḇʿa.

On the roadside, a voice called out. One of the fighters summoned his commander. The leader approached. My father looked up and recognized his eye under his keffiyeh, the man from the broken-down car a year earlier. It was Muḥammad Zaydan, known by his kunya as Abu ʿAbbas. A man who, in later years, would become infamous for the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, stood before my father in the mountain air and said: ed-dinyé doulāb, “The world is a wheel;” sometimes you are on top, sometimes you are at the bottom. He ordered his men to stand down. Quietly, he told my father which routes were safe, which codes to use if stopped again, and even gave the elder fresh clothing. They let him finish repairing the car. They passed through unharmed.

That night, my father walked through the door alive. My grandmother, already deep in mourning, could not believe it. He had been spared, not by affection, not by reconciliation, but by a remembered obligation. In a war where every other bond had been severed, a certain honor code still had force: a debt incurred must be repaid, even to an enemy.

My son, the wheel of the world turns. We cannot control when we are at the top or at the bottom. But we can choose how we move through it. Your grandfather lived because, when no one would have faulted him for passing by, he stopped for a stranger. That was his way of building, not walls but bridges, and of welcoming without calculation. He moved through a broken city without losing his direction, securing those around him and leaving every place stronger than he found it. The men who stopped him a year later could have followed the logic of war, and yet they followed another logic, older than the war itself: the debt must be paid.

Carry your name as he did: not only as an inheritance, but as a responsibility. Build, welcome, and keep your course, not because it will protect you, but because it is the right way to walk through the world. In a world where kindness can vanish, debts and obligations may still endure, and when they return to you, they may come without warning — and change the course of your life.

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The Druze have been in the news again. And as always, where there is attention, there is confusion. But my relationship with their tradition isn’t shaped by headlines. It’s older, quieter, and rooted in something deeper than proximity: recognition. A year ago, I was asked to ghostwrite a letter to Shaykh Mowffaq Ṭaref, the spiritual leader of the Druze in Israel. His reply was brief, but dignified:

“The bond between the Druze community and the Jewish people is strong and unbreakable, built upon shared values and a common vision from ancient times.”

I had met him once before, in the UAE. He carried himself with a kind of warmth that felt less like diplomacy and more like distant family. That line in his letter stayed with me. It echoed something my father said once, with gravity and reverence: "We owe everything to the Druze." He meant the al-Muwaḥḥidūn (what the Druze call themselves), the monotheists, those who trace themselves to Yithro (Shuʿayb), the priest of Midian. "From him," my father said, "Moshe learned the depths of Tora and of God. We’d be nothing without them."

Truthfully, I don’t know if I believe it as a historical fact. But I hold it as something deeper, a myth that gestures toward gratitude, that orients our shared memory through Yithro. It doesn’t bind because it’s “true,” but because it honors a reality we already live.

In Perashath Yithro, the Tora portion that bears his name, Yithro shemaʿ (hears). The verb implies discernment, not curiosity. He hears "kol asher ʿasa Elohim leMoshe uleYisraʾel ʿammo" (all that God had done for Moshe and for Israel His people) (Exodus 18:1). The priest of Midian, the outsider, enters the scene not with skepticism but insight. He is honored not only with a Tora portion to his name, but with one that contains the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) themselves. Before Sinai thundered, Yithro quietly shaped the structure that would hold its revelation.

In Shemoth 18, Yithro critiques Moshe’s overwork and introduces a model of decentralized justice with minor courts and leaders. It wasn't just administrative advice, it was a philosophical corrective. A people cannot be led by the exhaustion of one individual. Authority must be distributed. The judge must never become the god.

וַיֹּ֛אמֶר חֹתֵ֥ן מֹשֶׁ֖ה אֵלָ֑יו לֹא־טוֹב֙ הַדָּבָ֔ר אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַתָּ֖ה עֹשֶֽׂה׃ נָבֹ֣ל תִּבֹּ֔ל גַּם־אַתָּ֕ה גַּם־הָעָ֥ם הַזֶּ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר עִמָּ֑ךְ כִּֽי־כָבֵ֤ד מִמְּךָ֙ הַדָּבָ֔ר לֹא־תוּכַ֥ל עֲשֹׂ֖הוּ לְבַדֶּֽךָ׃ עַתָּ֞ה שְׁמַ֤ע בְּקֹלִי֙ אִיעָ֣צְךָ֔ וִיהִ֥י אֱלֹהִ֖ים עִמָּ֑ךְ הֱיֵ֧ה אַתָּ֣ה לָעָ֗ם מ֚וּל הָֽאֱלֹהִ֔ים וְהֵבֵאתָ֥ אַתָּ֛ה אֶת־הַדְּבָרִ֖ים אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִֽים׃ וְהִזְהַרְתָּ֣ה אֶתְהֶ֔ם אֶת־הַחֻקִּ֖ים וְאֶת־הַתּוֹרֹ֑ת וְהוֹדַעְתָּ֣ לָהֶ֗ם אֶת־הַדֶּ֙רֶךְ֙ יֵ֣לְכוּ בָ֔הּ וְאֶת־הַֽמַּעֲשֶׂ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר יַעֲשֽׂוּן׃

“But Moses’ father-in-law said to him, ‘The thing you are doing is not right; you will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone. Now listen to me. I will give you counsel, and God be with you! You represent the people before God: you bring the disputes before God, and enjoin upon them the laws and the teachings, and make known to them the way they are to go and the practices they are to follow.’” (Shemoth 18:17–20)

In that gesture, Yithro becomes more than Moshe’s father-in-law. He becomes a founding figure in Israelite governance. Or more honestly, we become something because of him. His restraint is its own kind of wisdom. Yithro recognizes the covenant without needing to claim it. He contributes to revelation without entering it. And yet, he does not stay. Yithro arrives in chapter 18, but by chapter 19, before Sinai, he departs. He is not part of the covenant. He offers qorban (a meal to bring one closer to God's reverence), eats with the Israelite High Priest, Aharon, and the elders, even invokes Elohim (God, in malakhim/judgement). But he does not cross the boundary God draws at the mountain. He knows where to stand.

The Druze remember him as Shuʿayb. Jewish tradition remembers him by many names: Reʿuʾel, Yether, Ḥoḇaḇ, Puṭiʿel, Qeini, Ḥeḇer, each reflecting a different aspect of his legacy (Mekhiltha deRabbi Yishmaʾel, ʿAmaleq 3:4). In Judaism, names are not just labels but interpretations. They signify relationship, action, perception:

1. Reʿuʾel | רְעוּאֵל (Exodus 2:18) - "Because he was, as if, a friend to God" (Friend of God).

2. Yithro | יִתְֿרוֹ (Exodus 3:1) - "Because he became outstanding in good deeds" (His Excellence).

3. Yether | יֶתֶֿר (Exodus 4:18) - "Because he added a section to the Tora" (Addition).

4. Puṭiʾel | פּוּטִיאֵל (Exodus 6:25) - "Because he abandoned idolatry" (God is my deliverance).

5. Ḥoḇaḇ | ֿחֹבָֿב (Numbers 10:29) - "For being beloved by God" (Beloved).

6. Qenee | קֵנִי (Judges 1:16) - "Because he was zealous for Tora and acquired Tora" (Smith/Zealous/Acquired).

7. Ḥeḇer | חֶבֶֿר (Judges 4:11) - "Because he became a companion to God" (Associate/Companion).

These aren’t aliases. They’re prisms. Each name encodes how he was seen and what he gave. The Druze describe Shuʿayb as "he who branched toward the right path," a guide, a revealer, a foundation layer.

My family lived for generations in Deir el-Qamar, the historic capital of Mount Lebanon. It was there, in the early 17th century, that the Druze Emir Fakhr ad-Din II articulated a political vision that mirrored Yithro's wisdom, a plural society sustained not by conquest but by cohesion. Under his rule, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were not merely tolerated, they were respected. In 1638, the Deir el-Qamar synagogue was built, an emblem of that trust. My ancestors' home was attached to that synagogue and we prayed there before moving to Beirut in the 1840s, joining a growing Jewish community that included refugees from Iraq, Syria, and beyond.

Relations with the Druze, especially in the Chouf, were marked by quiet loyalty and mutual recognition. In a region often fractured by majoritarian politics, this was something rare: a relationship grounded in boundary and dignity, not assimilation. Like Yithro, Fakhr ad-Din understood that unity required limits. That identity could be honored without being dissolved. And perhaps that is why this legacy, however buried under war and time, still lingers. Not as nostalgia, but as proof that shared survival, rooted in mutual reverence, is itself a kind of covenant.

That legacy is not political. It is not an alliance of convenience. It is a shared ethic of boundaries and memory. A bond of small peoples who never tried to dominate history, only to survive it with integrity. That, too, is covenantal.

The Druze do not proselytize. Their doors are closed. Their texts, sealed. But in every encounter I’ve had, whether with Shaykh Ṭaref or with a quiet village elder, I’ve sensed the same thing: recognition. Like distant cousins who no longer speak the same language, but still recognize the face.

Maybe that’s what a covenant looks like when it isn’t written. Gratitude.

And maybe that’s Yithro’s greatest legacy.

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Preface:
This article will be different from what I wanted to discuss on this platform, but I felt a need to write about it, as it affects many of us. It does touch on aspects of Emeth and Sheqer, and Toḇ vaRaʿ, The Woke Liturgy, and The Word Was Sacred. Now It Scrolls. As all things in life do.

Tucker Carlson recently interviewed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian. What stood out was not the content but the posture. No challenge. No interruption. No discomfort. Just a quiet platform for a regime that jails women, funds proxy wars, and executes dissidents. It was not journalism. It was translation.

In America, the greatness of our press lies in its willingness to ask unfiltered questions. You see it daily in White House briefings: reporters challenging the president, interrupting talking points, refusing to flatter. That’s not disrespect. That’s the American way.

This doesn’t mean we berate foreign leaders. Tact matters. But truth still matters more. An interview is not a photo-op. It’s a moment of friction, especially when speaking across regimes and across values. When interviewing the president of Iran, a man operating within one of the world’s most entrenched theocratic regimes, with a long history of regional proxy warfare stretching from Gaza to Lebanon, through Iraq and Syria, and reaching into Latin America via tenuous partnerships, you are not there to nod politely and feign diplomacy.

Journalism is not friendship. It is confrontation—disciplined, deliberate, and public. A craft built not on performance but on the pursuit of revelation. You sit across from power, listen carefully, and ask what no one else is willing to ask. The journalist's role is to cut through the narrative machine, to move past slogans, myth-making, and propaganda. Not to flatter. Not to comfort. But to clarify. Trust in this setting is not a reward. It is a tool. You earn it to press further, to move beyond the script, to interrupt the choreography. Because what you bring back from that exchange is not just content. It is consequence.

When a public figure offers you their trust—whether it is Vladimir Putin, Ted Cruz, a House of Saud royal like Al Waleed bin Talal, Qatar’s prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, or Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian—you do not pocket it like a gift. You wield it. You ask the questions that break past the talking points. The ones that interrupt performance. The ones that only get answered when the script runs out.

Carlson knows how to do that. We have seen it. He grilled Cruz, a man from a party whose trust he had cultivated through years at Fox News, confronting him about his Cancun vacation during a statewide blackout. He asked whether a senator who left his constituents to freeze was fit to lead. He threw curveballs like, “How many people are there in Iran?”—not to get an answer, but to expose the hollowness of talking-point foreign policy. And when Cruz expressed support for regime change in Iran, Carlson pressed him, asking whether that position had any place in a conservative foreign policy built on restraint.

So what changed?

Why, when seated across from a man who now holds office within a regime that jails women for removing their headscarves, executes protesters, and funds militias across the region, does Carlson become a translator for the narrative rather than a challenger of it?

Is the standard different when the subject does not speak English? Or when the regime’s hostility toward America fits too neatly with your own disillusionment toward the liberal order?

We are not asking for combative theater. We are asking for precision. For intellectual honesty. For the kind of specificity that keeps powerful men from hiding behind platitudes. When someone says that “Death to America” is misunderstood, the obvious question—and the responsible one—is: “Then why do schoolchildren chant it every Jumuʿah (Friday) as part of your national ritual?”

And this is not unique to Iran.

Carlson did the same with Vladimir Putin. He opened with a straightforward question: “Why did you invade Ukraine?” But when Putin launched into a 30-minute historical monologue—starting from the ninth century and drifting into obscure Polish-Lithuanian treaties—Carlson did not steer him back to the present. There were no questions about the invasion's civilian toll. No mention of war crimes. No reference to Alexei Navalny. Just a quiet stage for civilizational grievance. Letting him turn Ukraine into a footnote in a 700-year history lesson. A camera, a chair, and two hours of softly lit empire revisionism.

This is the pattern. And maybe it is strategic. Maybe Carlson sees himself less as an interrogator and more as an intermediary. That is possible. But let us be honest about what that actually means.

One by one, the ideological adversaries of the old American consensus are being reframed—not as threats, but as misunderstood. Iran is just the latest. Before that, it was Russia. Soon, perhaps, Venezuela. These are no longer cast as enemies of liberal democracy, but as sovereign nations resisting globalist overreach. Carlson’s interviews reflect this shift. He has now sat down with Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian. Each conversation offered not interrogation, but invitation. Not friction, but framing. And now, under the symbolic umbrella of BRICS+, these regimes are presented not as isolated outliers, but as part of a rising counter-order—joined by Türkiye, Brazil, South Africa, and others—less a bloc than a theater, where discontent with the West plays out in well-lit interviews and curated grievances.

BRICS is central to this shift in narrative. Originally an economic coordination platform, it has morphed, at least in the rhetoric of its most authoritarian members and increasingly in the West’s disillusioned imagination, into a symbolic counterweight to liberal hegemony. But the bloc itself is deeply fractured. China and India have exchanged live fire. Brazil’s politics swing wildly. South Africa is economically fragile. Russia is isolated. BRICS is not NATO. It is not the EU. It is not a bloc. It is a stage, and authoritarian regimes are using it to perform.

Russia and China inflate BRICS into something it is not: a civilization-sized alternative to the liberal West. And Carlson echoes that inflation almost word for word. He speaks of BRICS as a unified force, controlling trade routes, anchoring global currency, housing most of the world’s population and military power. He frames it not as possibility, but destiny. Not to challenge its contradictions, but to amplify its mystique. As if decline were not a danger, but a prophecy.

This is not journalism. It is choreography. And if journalism is no longer willing to interrupt myth, then it becomes myth’s enabler.

At some point, there will be an interview with China. It will look like the others—carefully lit, unchallenging, framed around the guest’s narrative. No questions about Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, or Taiwan. Just another stage for grievance, left uninterrupted.

The Woke Right: Aesthetic Strength, Moral Collapse

This is the Woke Right—its own moral relativism, its own taste for strongmen, its own machinery of cultural excuse-making. A new ideological architecture built to counterbalance the perceived looseness and bureaucratic sprawl of the technocratic modern left. The same apparatus the right once mocked has now been reassembled, only with different aesthetics.

It does not call itself woke. It calls itself real. Post-liberal. Anti-globalist. Traditionalist. But the patterns are unmistakable. It has its own sacred categories, its own protected classes, its own language codes. Criticizing Putin is seen as betrayal. Questioning the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán is seen as softness. Asking too many questions about Iran’s regime is seen as neocon drift. And if you notice too much Chinese influence, you must be a CIA asset.

It has its own dogmas. Its own slogans. Its own cancel culture.

Only now the litmus test is not race or gender—it is foreign alignment and anti-liberal posture. In this world, strength is morality. Restraint is weakness. Force is clarity. And anyone still asking for liberal principles is dismissed as naive, compromised, or blue-pilled.

The Woke Right does not want to win arguments. It wants to mock the idea of arguments. It replaces moral clarity with aesthetic preference. It is not about whether a regime is just. It is about whether it triggers the libs, humbles the West, or offers the fantasy of order.

What the woke left did with identity, the Woke Right now does with sovereignty. What one did with victimhood, the other does with decline.

It wraps its compromises in the language of realism, but what it calls realism is often just resignation. The belief that the world is run by thugs, and therefore choosing one’s thug is the height of maturity. It celebrates tradition when Putin speaks it in a tuxedo, but mocks tradition at home when it comes from anyone who doesn't flatter their worldview. It condemns drag shows in Tennessee but excuses executions in Tehran.

This is not restraint. It is choreography.

The politics of admiration dressed as analysis. The valorization of force, so long as it humiliates the people you dislike. The right has stopped mocking the contradictions of leftist relativism and started imitating them.

The horseshoe did not bend. It closed. A perfect, seamless circle.

This is no longer a matter of far right versus far left, but something stranger—a shared medium. A bizarro-center where the extremes do not just touch; they align. No names for now, but a nexus is forming. An uncanny ideological center stitched together from fragments of both poles. It is not born of compromise, but of fusion. Disillusioned with liberalism, allergic to restraint, and united by a taste for order over openness, this new worldview does not seek resolution—it thrives on inversion.

And it will not be created by foreign actors. This is not something orchestrated in Beijing, Tehran, or Moscow. It will emerge naturally, from within. A convergence that outside powers may try to exploit, but can never fully control. That is what makes it dangerous. It is not an intrusion. It is an evolution.

Memory Versus Erosion

People will ask what the point of all this is. What is the endgame for those meddling in American politics and discourse? What are regimes like China, Russia, Iran, and Qatar actually trying to achieve?

It could be more than we think. The cost of influence is lower now. The internet, AI, and globalization have collapsed the price of soft power. Buy-in is cheap.

When you are America, it does not need to make sense. The target does not need to be precise. It just needs to be constant.

Interference is ambient now. It moves through donation pipelines to American universities, through think tanks shaped by soft-power incentives, through student programs with quiet funders in Doha or Beijing. It filters through YouTube channels pushing state-framed narratives—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. And it flows through TikTok, a platform whose algorithmic levers are controlled by a company ultimately subject to Chinese Communist Party influence, whether acknowledged or not.

None of it needs to build a coherent worldview. The goal is to disorient. To fracture. To confuse. It is not always ideology being pushed. Sometimes, it is simply instability.

Moral confusion is the rot that hollows a society from within. It does not need to lead anywhere. It just needs to make people forget what they’re standing on.

More Americans today have read polemics about how evil their country is than have ever opened the Declaration of Independence. More have listened to three-hour anti-American rants on YouTube than have skimmed a page of the Federalist Papers. Too few still engage with the country’s founding texts. The Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers—these were not just artifacts. They were arguments. They were attempts to persuade, to bind skeptical states to a fragile, experimental union. They carry within them the philosophical core of the American project: liberty restrained by law, ambition checked by structure. The Framers did not believe man could be perfected. They believed he had to be contained.

Madison put it plainly in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But men are not angels. So they built a system to restrain power, not to sanctify it. To channel it, not to romanticize it. This is not about left versus right. It is about memory versus erosion.

We are now facing a cultural moment where entire generations are unsure whether America should even exist in its current form. And into that vacuum come new models. Imported visions. Managed societies designed not around liberty, but around control. Either we become the bureaucratic hellscape the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) dreams of, a managed society drowning in identity arithmetic and institutional fragility, like much of Europe is drifting toward. Or we slide toward something else entirely.

One model rises from the progressive technocracies of Europe, where freedom is increasingly treated as a liability. Another emerges in parts of the Islamic world, where law and religion are fused into unaccountable power. A third, arguably the most effective, comes from China, where American disarray is not mocked but studied, calibrated, and leveraged.

None of these models require invasion. They only require that we stop believing in ourselves.

That is the endgame. Not destruction, but dependency. Not conversion, but confusion. A country too fragmented to act, too unsure to defend itself, and too divided to even agree on what it once stood for.

You can point to America’s flaws. You can even doubt its beauty. But to dismiss the experiment outright is to ignore what it has achieved. It has inspired millions, lifted billions, and advanced liberty farther than any civilization in history—not perfectly, but measurably.

There is still time to choose differently. But it requires moral clarity. Not a party platform. A spine.

Because the question is no longer, “What do they want?”

The question is, “What do we even remember?”

These are just some of the questions I would have asked. I’m no journalist. But a leading question, with a few follow-ups prepared, just makes sense.

When you sit across from power, you do not bring flattery. You bring friction. Not to perform conflict, but to extract clarity.

Because otherwise, what is the point?

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” is often misread as a triumph of secular liberation. In truth, it is a statement of crisis. Nietzsche was not celebrating the decline of traditional religious belief, but warning of the metaphysical consequences that would follow. The death of God, for Nietzsche, did not mean the disappearance of religion’s psychological, symbolic, or ethical functions. It marked the loss of a shared transcendent framework — a structure of meaning that had anchored Western civilization for centuries. In its absence, he foresaw not rational enlightenment, but a resurgence of belief in displaced forms.

I’ll admit, while I live within the West, I am not fully of it. Judaism has undeniably shaped Western thought, alongside Greek philosophy, Roman structure, and (Judeo-) Christian theology, but the concerns raised here do not fully map onto the Jewish experience. The divergence began when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion. From that moment on, religion in the West became something that could be added to a people or a state — an institutional layer, detachable when no longer convenient.

In Judaism, no such detachment is possible. There is no Jewish people without Jewish law. The two are not parallel entities, but one continuous organism. The Latin religio, once denoting ritual obligation (see Cicero’s De Natura Deorum), was reinterpreted by Christian thinkers as something primarily inward, confessional, and institutional (see Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae). Judaism never underwent that abstraction. It is not a religion, but a civilization. Untethered from the need for statecraft, because it constitutes one in itself — an embodied culture of time, law, and peoplehood.

This is not a claim of superiority, only of difference. The Western crisis arises from a disjunction: a state and culture that no longer carry their foundational religious ethos, yet remain haunted by its moral architecture. Into that vacuum rushes what we now call “wokeism.” It is not merely politics, but a surrogate liturgy. It mimics the structure of faith while denying its metaphysics. The rituals remain. The transcendence is gone.

There is, of course, a parallel crisis within the Jewish world, but it is not this one. I digress.

Today’s cultural and political landscape confirms Nietzsche’s insight. We do not live in a secular age so much as a transposed one. Religious energy has not evaporated; it has been redirected. Political ideologies, activist movements, and digital identities have absorbed the roles once held by religious institutions. The forms persist — confession, judgment, purification, excommunication, eschatology (end times theology)— but they are no longer anchored to transcendence. They operate now through media, algorithms, and collective identity.

This dynamic is especially visible on the so-called woke left. Though outwardly secular and progressive, its internal logic is deeply reminiscent of the Christian moral economy it seeks to replace. Terms like privilege, allyship, and systemic oppression function analogously to sin, penance, and grace. Confession is public, usually on social media. Forgiveness is increasingly rare. Contrition must be performed, but redemption is not guaranteed. Guilt becomes a status, not a transitional state. In this moral universe, sincerity is subordinate to legibility. The imperative is not to become just, but to appear just in the eyes of the digital collective.

The rituals are not new. Only the gods have changed.

Religion and cult are deeply embedded in the human psyche. The far left and far right have not transcended belief; they have simply adopted new liturgies with old intensity.

Their holidays and pilgrimages are protests. They abstain from the “profane” days — Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July — not out of neutrality, but because those days carry the wrong mythos. Their saints are the victims of the system. Their martyrs go viral for acts of defiance against it.

Their vestments are visible: masks, pins, flags, slogans, pronouns in bios — each a badge of moral belonging. Their prophets speak into microphones, leading crowds in chants. Slogans and graffiti function as liturgy. Their scripture is algorithmic — not fixed in doctrine, but shaped by what moves the mob.

Heresy is a poorly chosen word, an unexamined bias, a joke that didn’t land. Excommunication comes through deplatforming, job loss, and public shame. The penitent may return, but only after confession: a notes app apology, a corporate statement, a thread of self-rebuke. Forgiveness is rare. The mob does not absolve. It purifies.

Their eschatology arrives through headlines and hashtags: ‘climate collapse’, ‘systemic revolution’, the ‘end of capitalism’. Their messiahs do not walk on water. They offer blueprints, policy PDFs, bureaucratic redemptions. “This time,” they promise, “it will work.”

Their zeal is intense but untethered, drifting from moment to moment. They reject myth as falsehood, not understanding that myth is how a civilization remembers itself. Nuance can bring us to actual history, but myth helps move us forward. We are not meant to live crushed by detail. We need stories that hold us together.

This logic is mirrored on the political right — what some have begun calling the “woke right.” Its reactionary and post-liberal factions also exhibit re-enchanted moralism. Though cloaked in appeals to tradition, they invoke a mythic past, warn of civilizational collapse, and dream of political restoration as eschatological deliverance. Their figures include national leaders, cultural critics, even AI systems, each imbued with messianic overtones. Their emphasis on hierarchy, purity, and order forms a rival theology, borrowing Christian form while rejecting its humility and universalism.

Both the left and right act out symbolic liturgies. Protests and riots become sacred gatherings. Chants and slogans function as mantras. Activists rise as prophets. Public figures are canonized or anathematized. Identity accessories — masks, pins, pronouns — are the vestments of ideological belonging. Cancel culture serves as excommunication, drawing sharp lines of inclusion and exclusion. Each tribe has its dogma, its saints, its martyrs, its heresies. Argument yields to ritual. Reason yields to purification.

Nietzsche foresaw this transformation. In The Genealogy of Morals, he challenged the assumption that science could fill the void left by religion. Science, elevated into a worldview, becomes what he called “the latest and noblest form” of the ascetic ideal. Even the worship of truth is a metaphysical inheritance:

“We godless men and anti-metaphysicians… still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s: that God is truth, that truth is divine.”
(Genealogy III.24)

The outcome is not Enlightenment’s rational utopia, but a fragmented symbolic order ruled by resonance rather than reason. Visibility becomes the currency of meaning. Virality replaces truth. Ṭoḇ waRaʿ replaces Emeth weSheqer. The digital ecosystem rewards what is emotionally potent, not what is rationally coherent. The central question is no longer “Is it true?” but “Will it land?”

This symbolic disorder extends even to the body. Practices once associated with ascetic monasticism now unfold in digital forms. Public acts of self-abnegation — apologies, ideological disclaimers, moral self-policing — mirror religious flagellation. These are not enforced by state or clergy, but emerge from within, internalized as part of a shared moral imagination. Even irony and ambiguity are subject to theological scrutiny. Every utterance becomes a doctrinal risk.

Eschatological vision has also shifted. Movements surrounding climate change, racial justice, or technological disruption produce secular apocalypses and offer paths to redemption — not through divine grace, but through policy, protest, and purification. Atonement comes through lifestyle, linguistic discipline, and ideological fidelity. Salvation is behavioral.

What these modern faith-substitutes lack is not ritual or moral fervor, but roots. They have no canon, no prophets, no enduring texts. Their sacraments play out not only online but in the streets — through protests, tribunals, boycotts, and chants. They move with sacred intensity, yet mock the very traditions that taught the world how to sanctify. Myth, to them, is a lie we told ourselves to survive, not a structure we inherited to remember. They treat history as something to flatten, rewrite, or discard — a propaganda of the past to be torn down. But without myth, there is no memory. And without memory, no meaning.

This is why, in the midst of moral exhaustion, many are returning — not to trends, but to traditions. Structured Catholicism. Orthodox Christianity. Even Islam. These are not escapes from the modern world, but rebindings to something deeper. They offer what “wokeism” cannot: structure. Not performance, but formation. Not immediacy, but inheritance. Something older than the moment, and strong enough to survive it.

We have not transcended religion. We have transposed it. The hunger to believe, to belong, to be absolved and redeemed — these remain. What is lost is not faith, but the institutional forms that once gave faith structure. Nietzsche’s concern was not just the death of the Christian God, but the symbolic unraveling that followed:

“What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Are we not plunging continually?”

The secular world is not secular. The sacred has not vanished. It has been redistributed. We inhabit a digital cathedral now — crowdsourced, psychologically totalizing, enforced by algorithm. It baptizes with hashtags, ordains through outrage, canonizes the trending. The forms remain. The sacraments continue.

The center is empty, yet the cathedral still stands.

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We live in an age defined by constant moral performance. Our words and our silences are parsed as signals: proof of allegiance, markers of virtue, or evidence of complicity. To speak publicly is no longer to clarify; it is to choreograph. Language becomes liturgy, not for truth but for traction. What matters is not the argument, but how it lands. This endless curation is exhausting, yet we mistake it for engagement. We confuse optics with ethics, and performance with integrity. Our speech does not seek to illuminate; it seeks to position. We aim not to clarify, but to be seen saying the right thing, in the right tone, to the right crowd.

The speed and scale of digital life make this feel like a uniquely modern affliction, an outcome of social media, reaction cycles, and algorithmic outrage. But the deeper grammar behind this symbolic chaos is not new. It is ancient. The logic that governs our feeds was already laid down in a garden, at the foot of a tree, in humanity’s very first choice.

Genesis 3:7 captures the moment of rupture:

וַתִּפָּקַ֙חְנָה֙ עֵינֵ֣י שְׁנֵיהֶ֔ם וַיֵּ֣דְע֔וּ כִּ֥י עֵֽירֻמִּ֖ם הֵ֑ם וַיִּתְפְּרוּ֙ עֲלֵ֣ה תְאֵנָ֔ה וַיַּעֲשׂ֥וּ לָהֶ֖ם חֲגֹרֹֽת׃

“Then the eyes of both waTippaqaḥna (were opened), and they knew that they were naked…”

Their bodies had not changed. Nothing physical had shifted. But suddenly, nakedness meant something. It became charged, not a biological state but a semiotic event. No longer just flesh, it was now exposure, vulnerability, shame. Their first instinct was not apology or reflection. It was performance. “They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings” (Genesis 3:7). The first human artifact was not a tool to reshape the world, but a covering to reshape the self. A garment for image, not for warmth.

This was not the beginning of guilt. It was the beginning of representation: the moment being seen became being read. Nakedness was not hidden because it was private, but because it was now legible. The fig leaf was not just fabric. It was a signal, a gesture, a prototype of the public self. The first costume in the human theatre.

Even the name of the tree is revealing. It is not called the Tree of Sin, nor even simply the Tree of Knowledge. It is Eṣ haDaʿath Ṭoḇ waRaʿ, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But Ṭoḇ and Raʿ, in biblical Hebrew, are not strict moral binaries. Ṭoḇ names what is pleasing, fertile, harmonious. Raʿ describes what is fractured, misaligned, threatening. These are not ontological truths. They are perceptual judgments: what seems good, what feels off, what resonates, what repels. They form the grammar of appetite, not of being. (I explore this further in the extended version of the essay.)

When Eve sees that the tree is “Ṭoḇ (good) for food and a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6), the shift has already begun. The judgment comes before the bite. Desire reframes perception. Reality is no longer received. It is curated. It does not arrive as it is; it is filtered, re-rendered, weighed against longing. Eve does not simply see the tree. She sees it as Ṭoḇ. The interpretive lens has already taken root.

This is the fracture Eden records: a shift from ontology to optics, from presence to projection. From ʾEmeth, truth as structural coherence, to Ṭoḇ and Raʿ, judgments of resonance rather than reality. What once was discerned is now performed. Truth gives way to affect. What is becomes subordinate to what plays. Image takes priority over structure. The world does not need to be understood; only read correctly.

This transformation was not merely psychological. It was civilizational. Adam and Eve did not gain intellect. They already possessed it. As Maimonides insists in Guide for the Perplexed (I:2), “The ʿaql (intellect) which Allah infused into the human being—his final kamāl (perfection)—was already present in Adam before his maʿṣiyya (transgression).” One does not legislate to infants, nor issue commandments to animals. Adam names the animals (Genesis 2:19–20), an act of taxonomic and linguistic reason. He is made beṢelem Elohim, in the image of God, a phrase haRambam equates with the rational faculty itself.

What changed was not intelligence, but epistemic allegiance. WaTippaqaḥna — “their eyes were opened” — not to what is, but to what appears, to what plays. Reality became reinterpreted through appetite. Imagination overtook reason. Symbol replaced structure. ʾEmeth yielded to Ṭoḇ. Truth was not lost, but performance became preferable. The world became not what it is, but how it feels.

Today’s world does not just echo Eden. It industrializes it. Platforms like 𝕏, TikTok, and Instagram do not merely reflect symbolic judgment. They algorithmize it. They take Ṭoḇ waRaʿ and encode it, optimize it, monetize it. Not for coherence, but for performance. Not for ʾEmeth, but for engagement. Alignment replaces analysis. Resonance replaces reason. Feeling overtakes fact. What is true cannot gain traction. What is good does not land. What matters is what plays.

Black Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. Pro-life. Pro-choice. Free Speech. Silence is Violence. End the Occupation. Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself.

These may contain truths, but they are wielded as talismans, not examined as claims. They function not to persuade, but to signal. They are not arguments. They are capsules. Semiotic performances. To post them is not to speak. It is to perform tribal fluency.

Even silence is parsed. “Why haven’t they said anything?” becomes a form of accusation. These statements do not ask, “Is it true?” They ask, “What does it say about you?”

In this economy of signs, the absence of a post becomes its own message. Silence becomes suspicious. The failure to perform the expected signals reads not as neutrality, but as betrayal. And so the question shifts. No longer “Is it true?” but “What does it say about you?”

We call this the post-truth age. But that phrase flatters the past. It suggests truth once ruled, only to be dethroned by screens and scrolls. Genesis says otherwise. The fracture was there from the beginning. What is new is not the fracture, but its speed, its scale, its infrastructure. What was once a moment has become a mechanism.

Maimonides understood this. In Guide for the Perplexed (I:2), he makes a striking claim: Adam already possessed intellect before the sin. What changed was not awareness, but allegiance. The rational faculty (ʿaql) was eclipsed by the imaginative one (al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah). Judgment no longer operated in terms of ʾEmeth and Sheqer — truth and falsehood — but in terms of Ṭoḇ and Raʿ: appearance, affect, alignment. We stopped asking what was real. We began asking what looked right.

And this is the world we now inhabit. Not governed by truth, but by optics. Even ethics has become aesthetic. The good is no longer what endures. It is what performs. The test is not coherence, but traction. Not integrity, but resonance.

There is no more nuance. No more debate for the sake of truth.

Only clips. Reels. Stories.
Truth, edited for engagement.
Ethics, cut to fit the algorithm.
Speech, trimmed for swipeability.
We do not think. We scroll.
We do not speak. We post.
We do not see. We perform.

But Eden offers not only diagnosis. It offers orientation.

The fig leaf was not the end of Eden. It was the beginning of exile. Not a fall from location, but from perception. Not a loss of place, but of clarity. We still wear it. Our feeds are stitched from its fabric. But even now, there remains a path of return.

The return is not a retreat into silence, nor a rebellion of noise. It is not about purity, protest, or withdrawal. It is about clarity: the refusal to confuse visibility with virtue. It is the courage to speak again from ʾEmeth. Not because it flatters your side. Not because it trends. But because it is true.

To speak from ʾEmeth is not to reject beauty or feeling. It is to anchor them. To root the symbol in the real. To let language reflect being, not obscure it. To speak not because it performs well, but because it corresponds to what is.

We are not post-Eden. We are post-fig leaf. We have mistaken the covering for the self. We have confused performance with presence, visibility with virtue. The return begins the moment we see through the image and speak again from ʾEmeth. It begins when we stop mistaking the feed for the world and begin, once more, to live by what is true.

This is a shortened version of the concept of Ṭoḇ waRaʿ. For a deeper dive with more sources and fuller context, I recommend the longform essay this was adapted from.

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Note
This article was originally published in The Bridge Magazine, Issue 8 (June/Sivan 2025/5785), the official publication of the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS). The issue was titled "Courage."

It was written with a different audience in mind, so while it’s more concise than my usual writing here, the themes remain close to heart. I encourage you to explore their publications and learn more about their important work.

Courage is easy to applaud, yet difficult to define.

For Jews, it has never meant a blind leap into the unknown.
It begins in clarity—in knowing.

At Sinai, when our ancestors famously declared Naʿase veNishmaʿ¹ — “We will do, and we will listen” — they were not pledging blind obedience. That moment came after the sea split, after the plagues, after fire and thunder at the mountain. They had already seen too much to pretend this was guesswork. Their “yes” wasn’t reckless. It was rooted in something tested, experienced, undeniable.

Judaism is not a creed. It’s not about professing abstract blind “faith” the way modern language often suggests. The verse Shemaʿ Yisraʾel² — “Hear, O Israel” — is rendered in Arabic by Seʿadya haGaʾon³ (882–942), head of the Yeshiva of Sura, as eʿlam ya Yisraʾel: Know, O Israel. To know is a miṣva⁴ — a commandment. To study, to investigate, to wrestle with reality until one reaches a conviction strong enough to hold firm when crisis strikes.

Maimonides⁵ (1138–1204), in his Arabic Book of the Commandments, described the first commandment not as belief in God, but as iʿtiqād⁶ — a firm conviction grounded in reason. Not believing in something unseen, but recognizing something true and choosing to build your life upon it. First knowledge. Then loyalty. Then the inner steadiness we call biṭaḥon⁷.

That sequence still shapes Jewish life.

Across Europe, and now even in New York, vandals rip mezuzoth⁸ off Jewish students’ doorposts. Wood splinters. Screws hang. A small scar remains where covenant once touched timber. But the real rupture isn’t just physical. It’s in the forgetting of what the mezuza contains.

For many Jews, learning what’s written inside can be a turning point. It’s not just a scroll; it’s a blueprint. Shemaʿ, love God, teach your children, bind these words, write them, live them (Deḇarim 6:4–9; 11:13–21. Bemiḏbar 15:37–41.). These are not mystical instructions. They are a structure for memory, purpose, and resilience.

The blessing for affixing a mezuza uses the word liqboaʿ⁹ — to plant it, to set it firmly. But that strength doesn’t come from the act of placing it on the wall. It comes from understanding what it declares.

In that sense, the mezuza is not a symbol. It is a syllabus. And the courage it stirs comes not from ritual habit, but from grasping what it means. To know what the mezuza says is to know who we are. That knowledge generates a quiet courage stronger than intimidation.

Gather around a Shabbath meal with friends. Ask questions. Learn. Investigate. To learn who you are and who your people are is an act of Jewish courage.

Such firmness often goes unnoticed. None of these acts make headlines. But they echo Sinai’s logic: action rooted in understanding.

The tragedies of our time — including October 7, 2023 — did not begin the Jewish story, and they will not conclude it. They are ruptures, not definitions.

Our lineage stretches back to a people who believed the world is intelligible, that law can refine fear, and that loyalty must grow from understanding.

Jewish courage is not a reaction to catastrophe.
It was forged long before the crises that demand it, and it will outlast any single assault.

Judaism does not require submission, but engagement.
It invites us to wrestle with it: through study, memory, and tradition — tested against the world itself.

Torah → Emuna → Biṭaḥon
Knowledge → Conviction → Security

There is a pattern to Jewish resilience. Knowledge leads to loyalty, and loyalty leads to inner strength. Reverse the order, and conviction collapses. Preserve it, and even the smallest act can ripple through generations.

To remember clearly is already to stand tall.
When we know who we are, and what we have seen, courage follows almost naturally — like fruit follows seed.

In a time of noise, fear, and confusion, the task is not to shout louder, but to remember better.

Because when you know who you are, courage follows.

Footnotes

1. Naʿase veNishmaʿ: Literally, “We will do, and we will listen.” A declaration made at Sinai, often misread as blind obedience; in Jewish tradition, it reflects action rooted in understanding.

2. Shemaʿ Yisraʾel: One of the most important verses in the Bible within Judaism, often translated as “Hear, O Israel.” One of the first verses Jewish children are taught — a declaration of God’s unity and presence.

3. Seʿadya haGaʾon: A 10th-century Jewish philosopher and head of the great Talmudic academy of Sura. He was among the first to translate the Hebrew Bible into Arabic and defend Judaism through reason.

4. Miṣva: Often spelled “mitzva” and translated as “commandment,” but its deeper meaning is sacred responsibility — an act that ties intention to action.

5. Maimonides (Rambam): A 12th-century Jewish philosopher and legal scholar who emphasized reason and clarity in Jewish thought.

6. Iʿtiqād: An Arabic term used by Jewish philosophers writing in Arabic, meaning firm, reasoned conviction — truth built on logic and inquiry.

7. Biṭaḥon: Usually rendered as “trust” or “faith,” but more accurately “inner security” — a steadiness that comes from deep conviction, not surface-level confidence.

8. Mezuzoth / Mezuza: A small handwritten scroll placed in a case and affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes. It contains passages from Deuteronomy that command love, memory, and teaching. Not a charm, but a declaration — the blueprint of Jewish life.

9. Liqboaʿ: The Hebrew verb used when affixing a mezuza — meaning to plant, to root it firmly and permanently.
   

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In 1979, millions of Iranians flooded the streets demanding justice, dignity, and an end to monarchy. What followed was one of the most sweeping revolutions of the twentieth century, carried forward by a coalition of clerics, students, workers, and secular activists. They marched under the banner of self-determination, fueled by memories of foreign domination and decades of repression. But revolutions rarely unfold as their participants imagine. The slogans remained. What changed was their meaning.

This was never really about Palestine.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini knew it. So did the Islamists who seized power in 1979. The target wasn't Israel; it was the Sunni regional order and the pan-Islamic legitimacy Iran lacked as a Shiʿa state surrounded by Sunni powers. Palestine became the bridge, a cause that transcended sectarian divides, a symbolic wound to rally the broader Muslim world.

But to make that strategy viable, Khomeini had to reframe Shiʿa identity fundamentally.

At the heart of Shiʿa historical memory lies the Battle of Karbala, where in 680 CE, Ḥusayn ibn ʿAli (the grandson of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad) was massacred by the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. Karbala is commemorated annually on ʿAshura, embodying mourning, patience, and principled suffering—a trauma that defines Shiʿa self-understanding as the righteous few betrayed by corrupt Sunni power.

Khomeini transformed it. He famously endorsed what he called a “great phrase” (kalima-ye bozorg) in Ṣaḥīfa-ye Nūr, vol. 9, p. 202:

"کلّ یومٍ عاشورا و کلّ أرضٍ کربلاء"

He stripped Karbala of its sectarian specificity and elevated it into a universal symbol of resistance. Ḥusayn became the eternal revolutionary. Yazid, the timeless tyrant. The battle was no longer Shiʿa versus Sunni: it was the oppressed versus the oppressor, the pure versus the corrupt, the people versus empire. He spoke of the “mustazʿafīn,” the oppressed masses, against the arrogant powers of the world. In this way, Khomeini made Karbala into an open script. Anyone could play Ḥusayn. Anyone who ruled unjustly became Yazid (Khomeinism, 1993, p. 45).

He recast the battle not as Shiʿa versus Sunni, but as oppressed versus oppressor. And he wrapped it around the most emotionally charged geopolitical issue in the Arab-Islamic world: Palestine.

This wasn’t just opportunism. It was strategic substitution. By the end of the 1970s, pan-Arabism, the secular nationalist project that had once vowed to liberate Palestine and unify the Arab world, had collapsed under its own weight. Military defeats in the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) shattered the myth of Arab invincibility. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. Jordan followed. Syria entrenched itself in permanent authoritarianism. And the Gulf monarchies, never revolutionary to begin with, retreated into oil diplomacy. The emotional power of Palestine remained, but the Arab states had forfeited the moral high ground. What had once been a civilizational rallying cry became a bureaucratic footnote.

Into that vacuum stepped Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. Iran, non-Arab, Shiʿa, and outside the core Arab-Israeli conflict, seized the narrative. But to make that claim, Iran had to universalize the Shiʿa experience. Karbala, the defining trauma of Shiʿa history, was reframed as a pan-Islamic paradigm: Ḥusayn as the eternal symbol of righteous resistance, Yazid as the archetype of corrupt power. Palestine, too, was reinterpreted through that lens. Betrayed, bleeding, abandoned—it became the modern-day Karbala. The revolution was no longer just Iranian. It became Islamic. And the Umma (the Islamic nation), not the Arab nation, was now the chosen vessel.

His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would later lay this bare. In his December 31, 1999 sermon, he excoriated Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for negotiating with Israel, calling it “one of the ugliest deceptions” ever inflicted on the Palestinian people. He claimed they had been reduced to security subcontractors, charged not with resisting Israel but with suppressing their own people. “Is there a greater betrayal than this?” he asked. Arafat, he declared, was “both a traitor and a fool.” But he also revealed something more damning: the quiet surrender of the Arab world.

"بنده از زمان ریاست جمهورىِ خودم این چالش را با بعضى از این کشورهاى عربى داشتم. حرفى را مطرح کردم، اما دولتهاى این کشورها مى‌گفتند ما از فلسطینیها که فلسطینى‌تر نیستیم! هرچه خود آنها بخواهند، باید انجام شود."

"I, bandeh (your servant), encountered this chālesh (challenge) with some of these Arab states during my own presidency [1981–1989]. I put forward a position [opposing early signs of compromise with Israel that would later culminate in the Oslo Accords], but the dowlathā-ye in keshvarhā (governments of these countries) would respond: 'We are not more felasṭīnī (Palestinian) than the felasṭīnīhā (Palestinians) themselves! Whatever they themselves choose, must be done.'"

That abdication was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s opening. Arab nationalism had failed to deliver liberation, but its Islamic undertones remained dormant. Khomeini awakened them. He retooled the Shiʿa lexicon of martyrdom and divine justice into a revolutionary grammar of pan-Islamic resistance. In that new language, the Islamic Republic could claim not just theological legitimacy but geopolitical leadership. The trauma of Karbala fused with the failure of pan-Arabism, and the Palestinian cause became the altar on which a new revolutionary Umma would be forged.

Drawing from the Qurʾan, Khomeini invoked the language of "mustazʿafīn" (oppressed masses) and "mustakbirīn" (arrogant powers), blending religious eschatology with revolutionary rhetoric borrowed from Marxist class struggle. Abrahamian identifies this fusion as "Islamo-Marxist populism," a unique ideological hybrid crafted to resonate with a wide-ranging revolutionary audience (Khomeinism, 1993, p. 17–19).

The genius of this maneuver was Khomeini's ability to stir deep Shiʿa emotions while appealing simultaneously to pan-Islamic ideals, all around the emotionally charged geopolitical issue of Palestine. Palestine became the modern Ḥusayn —bleeding, betrayed, abandoned—and its liberation became not merely political but sacred. This is how a distinctly Shiʿa theology was turned into the moral engine of a pan-Islamic revolution.

Khomeini institutionalized this ideological framing by declaring Jerusalem Day (Quds Day, in Farsi Rūz-e Qods) in August 1979, designating a night situated among the final days of Ramadan, spiritually connected to Laylat al-Qadr (the Night of Destiny, in Farsi, one of the ayām-e qadr), as a religious-political obligation. “Quds Day is the day of confrontation between the mustazʿafīn and the mustakbirīn,” he declared. He framed Palestine’s suffering through that Qurʾanic dichotomy, oppressed versus arrogant powers, and fused it with the Shiʿa paradigm of Karbala, reinterpreting Palestinian betrayal as a reenactment of Shiʿa historical trauma, with Israel as a modern Yazid and the Palestinian struggle as a living ʿAshura.

Among his first diplomatic acts was embracing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Yasser Arafat was warmly received in Tehran, gifted the former Israeli embassy, and declared Iran his "second home." This partnership lasted nearly a decade until Arafat began negotiating with Israel in 1988, culminating in the Oslo Accords. By the time Arafat died in 2004, Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor, openly condemned him as "a traitor and a fool," shifting support to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Khomeini borrowed anti-colonial and Marxist language such as imperialism, national liberation, and oppression, but without adopting Marxism itself. After 1970 especially, as both Maziar Behrooz (Rebels with a Cause, 1999) and Ervand Abrahamian note, he crafted a radical social vision that recast Qurʾanic concepts through the lens of class struggle. Society was divided between zāgheh-neshinhā (slum dwellers) and kākh-neshinhā (palace dwellers), foqarā (the poor) and sarvatmandān (the rich), mostazʿafān (the oppressed) and mostakberīn (the arrogant). These were not merely religious categories; they were ideological weapons. Khomeini spoke of the downtrodden rising not only against elites, but against what he called the “government of Satan.” This was more than metaphor. It was Islamo-Marxist populism: a fusion of Shiʿa political theology and revolutionary aesthetics, calibrated to resonate across both spiritual and material registers.

This binary defined not just his sermons, but the Islamic Republic's entire ideological project. A revolution that began with calls for democracy and self-determination was ultimately framed as the divine mission of the downtrodden, rising against the arrogant powers of the earth. The language of anti-imperialism, liberation, and revolution was merged with Shiʿi eschatology: Karbala reimagined on a global scale.

Khomeini may not have read Marx, but he intuited the structure: history as a struggle between domination and resistance. His Manichean worldview split the world into the spiritually and materially dispossessed and the corrupt global elite—an Islamic mirror to class war.

This made him legible to the student left. He didn’t need to argue Marx. He just translated its structure into divine vocabulary. The Iranian left marched beside him. The Tudeh Party (Soviet-aligned communists), the Fedaiyan (Marxist guerrillas), the Mojahedin-e Khalq (Islamist-Marxist hybrids)—all believed they were building a just and pluralistic future. Many secular revolutionaries believed Khomeini’s religious appeal was a useful mass mobilization tool, not the revolution’s endpoint. But Khomeini was not a symbol. He was the architect of a new state.

What they got was Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist): the absolute rule of unelected clerics.

In December 1978, between six and nine million Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran. It was one of the largest protest movements in modern history. They marched under banners demanding democratic self-rule. A photo from that day shows a boy raising his fist in front of a sign: “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his own country.”

That wasn’t Islamism. That was democracy—raw, popular, unfiltered, and hopeful.

The revolution was broad: liberals, Marxists, clerics, women, students. What united them wasn’t faith, but opposition. To dictatorship. To the monarchy. To Western domination. They weren’t voting for God. They were demanding sovereignty.

But it was a bait and switch.

In March 1979, Iranians were asked a single question: should the monarchy be replaced with an “Islamic Republic”? There were no functioning political parties, no free press, no constitution, and no real debate. Just yes or no.

99% voted yes. But what they voted for was the end of monarchy and foreign interference, not clerical rule. It was a rejection of dictatorship and colonialism, and a call for sovereignty and justice.

Between June and October, Khomeini’s allies drafted a new constitution. They inserted Velayat-e Faqih, a system of absolute rule by unelected clerics. The Supreme Leader would sit above the president, the parliament, and the courts. They created parallel institutions: the Revolutionary Guard (Sepāh-e Pāsdārān), Guardian Council (Shūrā-ye Negahbān), and Assembly of Experts (Majles-e Khobregān), which had no democratic mandate but ensured clerical supremacy (Khomeinism, 1993).

In December, another referendum was held to approve the constitution. Again, 99% approval: this time under heavy media control, banned opposition, and rising street intimidation. According to Abrahamian, dozens of secular organizations had been outlawed, publications banned, and party offices raided by Islamic Revolution Committees (komitehāye). By then, silence had replaced pluralism.

What the people thought they were reclaiming was Persian dignity: an end to centuries of foreign domination—British control of oil, the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mosaddeq (regardless of how much credit the CIA deserves, the perception of American interference mattered), and decades of the Shah’s repressive police state. What they got instead was a new authoritarian regime, draped in divine authority and revolutionary slogans.

By 1981, the purges had begun. The Tudeh Party was crushed. Liberal voices were silenced. Former allies were arrested, tortured, or executed. Revolutionary courts operated behind closed doors. And in 1988, on Khomeini’s order, thousands of political prisoners—many of them young students and leftists—were massacred in secret. Most had already served their sentences.

Khomeini explicitly stated on March 21 1980, Nowruz (Iranian New Year):

"جنگ ما جنگ عقیده است، و جغرافیا و مرز نمی‌شناسد... ما باید در جنگ اعتقادی‌مان بسیج بزرگ سربازان اسلام را در جهان به راه اندازیم... امروز جهان تشنهٔ فرهنگ اسلام ناب محمدی است... مسلمانان در یک تشکیلات بزرگ اسلامی رونق و زرق و برق کاخ‌های سفید و سرخ را از بین خواهند برد... و چه شادی‌بخش است برای ملت ما، بلکه برای همهٔ مستضعفان جهان که دشمن اول خود را به زباله‌دان تاریخ انداخته‌اند."

“Our jang-e ʿaqīda (war of ideology) does not recognize jughrāfiyā (geography) or marz (borders). We must, in our jang-e eʿteqādī (ideological war), launch a basīj-e bozorg (great mobilization) of the sarbāzān-e Islām (soldiers of Islam) throughout the jahān (world). Today, the jahān is thirsty for the farhang-e Islām-e nāb-e Muḥammadī (culture of pure Muhammadan Islam). The mosalmānān (Muslims), within a tashkīlāt-e bozorg-e eslāmī (great Islamic organization), will eliminate the zarq-o-barq (glitter and pomp) of the kākhhā-ye sefīd va sorkh (White and Red Palaces) [i.e., the White House and the Kremlin, representing the mustakbirīn (arrogant powers)]. And what a joy it is for our mellat (nation)—indeed, for all mustazʿafān-e jahān (oppressed peoples of the world)—that they have cast their doshman-e awwal (primary enemy) into the zubāleh-dān-e tārīkh (trash bin of history).”

This was never meant to stay within Iran’s borders. The revolution had to expand. It was part of a larger war: against colonialism, against the West, against Sunni hegemony, against modern secularism. Palestine became the eternal symbol. Lebanon the first outpost. The Islamic Republic was not just a state. It was a vehicle. A mission.

This is what happened. A revolution born in anti-colonialism was rerouted into theological absolutism. The slogans remained. Their meanings inverted. Justice became submission. Liberation became obedience. The forms of revolution survived. The content did not.

And now, decades later, we are watching that same playbook unfold again—this time in the West.

The slogans are back. The binaries are clean. The words are the same: oppression, resistance, liberation. But once again, they’ve been stripped of context and repurposed by people who do not mean what they say.

On campuses, Palestine has become more than a cause. It has become a symbol. A linchpin that flattens contradictions and elevates moral clarity above intellectual clarity. You hear echoes of revolution. You see the aesthetics of resistance. But ask what they want. Ask what comes after. And you’ll often get empty abstractions, borrowed slogans, or utopian vagueness.

When you blend every grievance into one ideology—climate collapse, environmental injustice, economic inequality, systemic racism, colonial legacies, gender oppression, distrust of capitalism, rejection of tradition—you end up with a worldview that stands for everything and nothing at the same time.

It cannot hold. And so the most eloquent speaker rises. They calm the noise. They name a single point of collapse. “This is the one issue,” they say. Solve it, and the system unravels.

Then they send their coalition to bend every topic back to that single point.

There’s always something new to protest. But today, protest often blurs the line between grassroots movement and coordinated spectacle. An entire economy has grown around the inflation of ideas: social media consultants, professional organizers, outrage metrics. Outrage is now a commodity, traded like a stock, its value driven by clicks and shares.

On social media, it’s the bots who fan the flames. On the streets, it’s often professionals who shape the chants and hold the signs. Yes, there are true believers. But too often, the cause itself is an accessory. A pretext for performance.

Once again, student energy is being weaponized.
Once again, revolutionary language is being flattened.
Once again, slogans are being used to consolidate power quietly, behind the curtain.

The only difference is, this time, we’ve already seen how the story ends.

We just pretend we haven’t.

Starter Books I recommend:

• Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic by Ervand Abrahamian

• Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran by Maziar Behrooz

• Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (1941–1980)

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There was a time when writing was an act of reverence.

To inscribe a word was to bind it to permanence. To commit it to the world, not just for memory, but for judgment. The written word bore witness. It carried intention. It demanded response. Not everything was written. Only what mattered.

The Bible begins not with ideas but with inscription. Moshe Rabenu (Our Teacher) wrote the Tora. Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) had Barukh ben Neriyya write his prophecy. King David’s songs were preserved in scrolls. The Ḥakhamim (sages) debated every letter not because they loved grammar, but because language itself carried the imprint of heaven.

In early cultures, reading was a sacred act. The first literate class read aloud the law. Scripture was not consumed—it was received. With fear. With awe. With covenant.

The written word wasn’t just text. It was a vessel.

It was this reverence that allowed writing to become the bedrock of every serious institution. Law, history, science, journalism—all inherited the gravity of the written word. Even secular scribes borrowed the moral weight of their religious predecessors. The court clerk replaced the kohen (priest). The editor replaced the Sofer (scribe).

And we trusted them.

Not because they were always right. But because they were rare. Writing was curated. Edited. Considered. Behind every published word stood an institution, and behind the institution stood a lineage: of education, of expertise, of accountability.

We believed in the writer because we believed in the wall behind them. We didn’t see the human, only the byline. And the byline bore the weight of a system.

But that wall was always thin.

And eventually, it collapsed.

Twitter, now 𝕏, tore through the veil. Suddenly, the op-ed writer was just a person. The historian was posting memes. The scientist had a side account for political rants. The illusion of neutrality didn’t shatter because someone lied. It shattered because someone spoke.

The same voice that sounded balanced in the New York Times now sounded bitter at midnight. The same academic who wrote carefully footnoted studies casually mocked people in a thread. And the reader, once deferential, became suspicious. Not because the facts changed—but because the mask slipped.

We always knew writers were people. But now we could see them. And they looked nothing like scribes.

This collapse didn’t just damage credibility. It revealed the myth of objectivity as a cultural performance. A curated tone. A trained restraint. But people aren’t neutral. And when the performance ends, trust fractures.

In response, 𝕏 didn’t double down on curation. It exploded the idea of curation itself. If everyone has a voice, then everyone is a scribe. And if everyone is a scribe, then no one carries authority. We traded reverence for access, and authority for algorithm.

Now, everyone is writing. All the time.

Not carefully. Not reverently. Just… constantly.

Threads, takes, captions, comments. Words are everywhere. But they no longer signify permanence. They no longer point beyond themselves. They no longer bear witness.

They just… scroll.

The irony is unbearable: we are now more written than ever and it means less than ever. More recorded, less remembered. More published, less preserved.

And the tragedy is that the more the written word spreads, the cheaper it becomes.

Especially with AI.

The last trace of human discipline, authorship, is dissolving. What we see now is not a person’s intention fixed in language, but language auto-shaped into the performance of intention. AI generates. We skim. We post. We forget.

This isn’t evolution. It’s erosion.

It mirrors something older, something the rabbis knew intimately.

When we translated the Tanakh into Greek, it entered the public domain. No longer protected by community or context, it was now open to critique, misreading, and reframing. And it happened again: with journalism, with science, with every form of written authority.

They entered the public square.

And once they did, they became spectacles.

Scripture was once Divine. News was once sacred. Science was once institutional. Now, all of it is content. Competing in the same feed as comedy, porn, propaganda, and noise.

The town square used to be oral. Now it’s written. But without any of the reverence that writing once required. It’s faster. Louder. Permanent but forgettable.

We used to write to remember. Now we write to perform.

And so the fall is complete. Not from truth to falsehood, but from ʾEmeth to Ṭoḇ: from reality to resonance, from what is objectively true to what merely feels right (an idea I will unpack in another post). From reality to optics. From fixed meaning to projected feeling. From word as witness to word as weapon.

This isn’t a call for nostalgia.

But it is a mourning.

We do not need to resurrect gatekeepers. But we do need custodians. Not of institutions, but of intention. Writers who remember that the word still matters. That language still bears weight. That truth is still possible.

Not curated neutrality. But rooted responsibility.

Write less. Mean more.

Scroll less. Witness again.

Because words still shape the world.

But only if we treat them like they do.

Postscript: This post only scratches the surface. I’m still finding my balance, with you, the reader, and with my peers.

There’s so much more to say—especially about the shift from ʾEmeth to Ṭoḇ, the role of the Oral Law in preserving reverence, and what the Greek translation of the Tanakh (LXX, Septuagint) meant for Jews at that period.

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I’ve spoken in many settings, with diplomats, religious leaders, friends, enemies, and all walks of life. My adventure in writing began years ago with a few scattered articles, many of which remained in drafts. But in the wake of October 7th, I felt pressed to write more on that social media cesspool known as 𝕏, not to “fight anti-semitism” or combat hate, but because I felt the Jewish people, publicly, did not know themselves.

That may sound pompous, but I pride myself on our ʿAmiyouth (Nationhood), a concept many shout as a slogan, “ʿAm Yisraʾel Ḥai,” at rallies, in homes, and in synagogues. This phrase was first recorded during the horrors of the Shoah (the Holocaust, as rendered in English). But the vast majority don’t know what ʿAmiyouth actually means.

I hope that, through my essays, I can discuss these things and more from History to current events, in the process, enlighten others and myself, as I remain always a student, learning and honing my craft. Not for myself, but for the betterment of my people. Those who know me well know that I don’t live for myself.

I will be honest with my readers from the beginning: I sometimes use terms I don’t necessarily agree with to describe certain elements because I find that providing a glossary before every essay is unappealing. Instead, I leave notes, crumbs, and hints for the reader to discover along the way. At times, I will hold myself back, as there is too much to say, and I need to stick to the topics at hand. I hope to explore all ideas when time allows me, and I will make mistakes in my writing along the way when meandering on tangents or not knowing when to keep an important detail. This only improves with your queries on my work; it enables me to refine myself and learn where the audience is at. I am still a terrible writer; I am still learning to converge my thoughts and my writing in an eloquent way to become a more legible writer.

There are terms I hate in relation to the Jewish people: faith, belief, religion… and more. These are charged words imported from a Western ethos, and yes, I write to you in the common tongue of English. But I think with a very Eastern mind, formed by my parents, my grandparents, my legacy, Judaism itself. I hope to explain these terms and reshape your thinking to align with the ways of old, as you realign yourself with the inheritance you were bestowed at Sinai, from Moses, our teacher.

My hope is to introduce Hebraic and other Semitic terms, from Aramaic to Arabic, that have always been part of our tradition, to reframe your minds and, ultimately, your hearts.

Because as culture shapes language, so language molds culture.

Ḥakham Yiṣḥaq Chouʿa ben Aḇraham (Isaac Choua)

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