ARAB IDENTITY SYNDROME: ARAB IDENTITY, ISRAEL, AND THE COURAGE TO REWRITE A STORY Paperback – Large Print, February 17, 2026

I remember a scorching summer afternoon in Marrakech during the Second Intifada. Iwas fifteen. My father kept Al Jazeera on constantly, and that day we watched coverageof an attack in Israel framed not as tragedy, but as heroism. In that moment, somethingfrightening took root in me: admiration instead of horror, longing instead of grief. Iwished to be the figure on the screen—not from political understanding, but because Ihad been taught whom to hate and how to measure worth. That impulse was not innate;it was given to me. I needed only direction and approval. That realization still terrifiesme, and it is why I cannot absolve the media and institutions that shaped us soirresponsibly while calling it resistance.As I grew older, the story’s contradictions began to surface. I traveled beyond theMaghreb, read histories excluded from our libraries, and listened to voices absent frommy upbringing. Most importantly, I met Jews and Israelis whose humanity andcomplexity shattered the caricatures I had inherited. I came to see that what I was givenwas not history, but mythology—a political mythology born of defeat and sustained bycensorship, fear, and humiliation. It reduced Palestinians to symbols and woundedArabs by denying us self-critique, trapping us in performative outrage that enrichedautocrats while sacrificing generations.This book was born from a deep and persistent unrest. For years, I sensed thatsomething rigid had lodged itself in the marrow of Arab identity: a hardened narrativerepeated until it passed for truth. As a Moroccan Arab Muslim, I absorbed iteverywhere—classrooms, Friday sermons, state television, political speech. It was astory about Israel—what it was and what it meant—but more profoundly, a story aboutus. It defined our virtue through their vice, our victimhood through their villainy,demanding allegiance rather than understanding. To question it was moral treason. Iknow its power because I once lived inside it.This book is an attempt to reclaim dignity. I write with deep affection for the Arabworld and growing respect for Israel’s tenacity and complexity, not as a detachedhistorian but as someone shaped by the same emotions and illusions as millions ofothers. I once believed Israel was the source of all Arab misfortune. I now see howdearly that belief has cost us.I cried throughout the writing of this book—for the loss of Arab Jews, an amputatedlimb of our society we refuse to name; for Arab youth sacrificed to fantasies thatyielded only graves and stagnation; for futures unbuilt and possibilities abandoned; andfor the irony that Jews, an indigenous people of the region, were cast as eternaloutsiders. This book does not absolve Israel of its mistakes or deny Palestinian pain. Itseeks to restore a narrative distorted by regimes that feared their own people more thanany enemy, and to free Arab identity from a single, negative definition. Read more