The Syrian regime has become a byword for intransigence and monopolistic authoritarianism. Neither the growing number of dead, the prolonged fighting and the grudges that grow on its sides; nor Syria's transformation itself into a playfield for regional and international forces – or other disasters of the kind – has pushed the regime, or will push the regime, to offer any serious concession that may limit the extent of its monopoly of power. It is no longer a novel thing to recall and compare the conduct of this regime with the two previous ones that beat it to collapsing, that is, the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, not to mention the Shah's regime in Iran in 1979. These regimes all showed their willingness to recognize the facts on the ground and the emerging balance of power, and backpedaled from the prohibitive costs their intransigence would have produced, had they taken the path of the Syrian regime's intransigence. This, unfortunately, has made the battle with this regime a life-or-death battle without any possible compromise. What is also unfortunate is that the Jordanian regime today is following in the footsteps of its older brother in Damascus. Jordan insists, government after government, on raising prices, and clutching on to unacceptable policies – at times with respect to the electoral law, and at others, with respect to corruption. Although an astronomical distance separates the conduct of the Syrian regime and that of the Jordanian regime, as well as the costs involved in the two cases, it remains that persisting in this intransigence and monopoly portends bad things for Jordan in the future, at the level of both politics and society – that is to say, following a line that extends from bloodshed and that does not stop with fragmentation. There are examples that are much better than the Syrian example that the Jordanian regime can learn from. But until further notice, all such appeals are falling on deaf ears. In turn, the Likudnik administration in Israel is inherently intransigent and monopolistic. If the assessment that links the brutal strikes on Gaza at present with the upcoming general elections in Israel, or with the need to divert attention away from the political battle for the Palestinian state at the UN, is true, then one may say that the Israeli monopolistic penchant is only exceeded by its abhorrent supremacist and racist attitudes. Indeed, this supremacist worldview, which reared its ugly head many times before, allows Israel to turn “the others'", human beings and children, into a means to any end the Israeli rulers may have in mind. This is not to mention the fact that Israeli intransigence and monopolistic conduct, time after time, reaffirm that the leaders of the Hebrew state are completely out of touch with the transformations and future possibilities taking shape around them. For them, only barbarians reside outside the walls, and thus, everything that the barbarians do is barbaric! But Hamas, whether it is in the Mumanaa camp [the axis comprising Iran, Syria and Hezbollah] or not, insists, too, upon its intransigence and monopolistic conduct, not only in terms of clinging to its rocket strategy, albeit intermittently, but also and more importantly in terms of clutching to its administration in Gaza. That administration is breaking the back of Palestinian policy and unity, and makes every victory on the battlefield a pure delusion that cannot be diluted by the cheering for Hamas's missiles, coupled with the denunciation of what the Israeli death machine is doing. Do we even need to invoke Iraq here, under both Saddam and the post-Saddam rule, when it comes to intransigence and monopoly, to come to the conclusion that the Middle East is deeply infected with this cancer? History and reality attest to this, as well as the fear of various communities of one another, and the history of ideas that prevailed and were never defeated.
