The Fourth Quarter — Post-Zionism
In the course of a medical trip to Basel, I visited the hall where the First Zionist Congress convened in 1897. It was there that Theodor Herzl posed the question: Can a people without a state become a state? History has already answered that question.
I lingered for a moment before leaving. The building remained behind me. The second question walked out with me, accompanied me through the streets of Basel, and has never left me since.
I found myself reflecting on President Isaac Herzog’s interview with Al Arabiya, in which he suggested that the dialogue between Jerusalem and Mecca should become the essence of what comes next, presenting the Abraham Accords as its model. I take that invitation seriously enough to offer a serious reply.
Israel has entered its fourth quarter.
Among Israelis, the phrase is used as a warning against internal division—a reminder of a house that twice collapsed from within before any enemy reached it. I understand it somewhat differently. I see it through a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion. Asked after Israel’s establishment whether he was satisfied with what had been achieved, he reportedly replied: “Ask me when Israel reaches seventy-five.”
The legitimacy of a founding does not renew itself indefinitely.
Every state eventually reaches the moment when its conduct, rather than its founding, becomes the source of its legitimacy. Nor is that judgment rendered only from within. It is rendered by the world as well.
That is what I mean by post-Zionism.
Not the end of Israel.
Not the denial of Jewish security or the right of the Jewish people to exist.
Rather, the end of the belief that the legitimacy of a state’s founding can forever justify the conduct of the state itself.
Rahm Emanuel, a potential candidate for the American presidency, chose Tel Aviv to say it plainly: neither Greater Israel nor from the river to the sea. When those words can be spoken in Tel Aviv, the boundaries of political possibility have already shifted.
The Foreign Minister of the Sultanate of Oman—the Gulf’s principal mediator with Iran—wrote in Le Monde that the greatest threat to Gulf security comes from decisions taken outside the Gulf, above all in Tel Aviv.
He was not making an accusation.
He was placing the invoice on the table.
Since February, our refineries have burned, our airports have closed, and our skies have carried the fire of a war that no Gulf capital chose, yet every Gulf capital has paid for.
As for Gaza, the argument no longer unfolds merely across social media. It now stands before the International Court of Justice in proceedings alleging genocide. A peace board has been created, but it does not govern.
Here lies the difficulty with President Herzog’s proposal.
The Abraham Accords invokes the name of a shared patriarch and displaces Jerusalem, the ecumenical space, within a framework of security and commerce. Extending that same framework toward Mecca merely repeats the substitution: it offers a religious dialogue where what is required is a strategic answer.
Mecca is neither Jerusalem’s religious counterpart nor its replacement.
Mecca is a trust.
Its legitimacy rests upon service before sovereignty. It receives the pilgrim from a hostile state exactly as it receives every other pilgrim.
A trust is borne; it is not owned.
It is not exchanged for a photograph, an investment, or a ceremony on a distant green lawn.
Nor has Mecca remained silent.
In 2002, Saudi Arabia presented the Arab Peace Initiative to the Arab states, and they unanimously adopted it: full recognition in exchange for what had always been requested.
In November 2024, the Joint Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh reaffirmed that same initiative before the broadest gathering yet convened on the question.
Its terms have not changed in twenty-four years.
A state that publishes its conditions and refuses to alter them is not bargaining.
What is not offered for sale cannot be bought.
Many continue to await another Sadat moment: an aircraft descending from the sky, a speech delivered before history, and the belief that what came before can simply be washed away.
But that moment has already occurred.
Anwar Sadat came with territory to recover and a file to close. Sinai returned. Palestine remained. He paid for that decision with his life.
Today there is no Sinai to recover.
What is sought from Mecca is a gift, not an exchange.
The awaited flight is not politics.
It is the expectation of redemption.
Jerusalem cannot be bypassed, and Mecca cannot be summoned to bestow legitimacy upon what it did not create.
What politics establishes can be sustained only by politics.
No political redemption awaits anyone—there or here.
Whoever waits for a redemption that excuses him from justice today has misunderstood religion before misunderstanding politics.
Discipline that is not practiced at home is not discipline at all; it is merely a weapon.
States are not rescued.
States are preserved.
Security prevents the next war.
Legitimacy prevents the conditions that make the next war inevitable.
In Basel, the question was how a state is born.After Gaza, the world asks a different question:
How does a state endure?
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and in the world it is tested.
Educational Note
The expression “the Fourth Quarter” entered Israeli public discourse through the movement of that name, founded by Yoav Heller in 2022. Its central argument is that Jewish sovereignty collapsed twice during the final quarter of its first century—first under the Kingdom of Solomon and later under the Hasmonean state—because internal division preceded external destruction.
The movement also draws upon a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion. When asked after Israel’s establishment whether he was satisfied, he reportedly answered: “Ask me when Israel reaches seventy-five, when the rightness of its path must be redefined not by what has been, but by what is yet to come.”
This essay accepts the chronology but differs on the diagnosis. The fourth quarter does not end because of internal division alone. It ends when a state’s conduct becomes the measure by which it is judged.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.