Resistance matrix: How a narrative was forged to remake the Middle East

TO understand the conflict in Palestine today, you must look beyond the headlines of the latest explosion and what's happening in Gaza, because Gaza is the result but not the ultimate goal. You must trace a decades-long project—a deliberate and powerful reframing of a struggle for land into a battle against terror. This is the story of how a national liberation movement was systematically recast in the costume of a global existential threat, and how that narrative became unshakable dogma in the halls of Western power.

- By Sohan Harsha Fernando

The central framing battle is this: is a Palestinian firing a rocket an act of "terrorism" or an act of "resistance" against a military occupation?

The story begins not with a gun, but with a book. In the late 1970s, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a rising star in Israeli diplomacy, was a key figure at the Jonathan Institute, a think tank named after his brother, a fallen war hero. The institute's mission was to redefine terrorism for the Western world, and its success lay in masterfully aligning its goals with the dominant geopolitical paradigm of the era: The Cold War.

The central argument presented at the Institute's 1979 conference was that the Soviet Union was the chief architect of international terrorism. In this framing, groups like the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were not independent nationalist movements but proxy forces in a Kremlin-directed campaign to destabilise Western democracies and their allies. This was a strategic masterstroke. By tethering the Palestinian struggle to the West's primary existential threat, the Institute's narrative accomplished two key things: it delegitimised Palestinian nationalism as a mere Soviet tool, and it solidified Israel's position as an indispensable "strategic asset"— the democratic front line in the Cold War struggle for the Middle East.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a strategic vacuum. The West, and particularly the vast US national security apparatus and the defence industry that supplied it, faced what commentators called a "peace dividend" or a "threat deficit". The institutional machinery built over decades for a global confrontation required a new, compelling rationale for sustained high levels of military spending and global engagement.