The Antithesis of History

To those who reject easy thinking,
and to those who know that history
It doesn't follow history textbooks.
— Hermínio Cerqueira
"History is a prophecy turned backward."
— Friedrich Schlegel
"In the Levant, nothing ever begins: everything continues."
—Amin Maalouf

There are books written to answer a question. Others, to confess that the original question was the wrong one. This one, in its second life, belongs to the second family.

When the first edition of The Antithesis of History arrived in bookstores, the Eastern Mediterranean chessboard seemed, to many, a mere conjunctural arrangement: Israel had drawn closer to Greece and Cyprus for reasons of gas and deterrence, Turkey oscillated between NATO and its own imaginary neo-Ottoman kingdom, Iran accumulated sanctions and missiles, and the Kurds—eternal patients of history—awaited a window of opportunity that, it was assumed, might never come. The work proposed a simple and uncomfortable intuition: what was called a conjunctural arrangement was, in fact, the visible face of a structural constellation. Israel, Greece, Cyprus, and the Kurds were not merely coinciding; they were each occupying their place in a geometry that long historical duration had drawn in the background.

The years that followed did not disprove the intuition. They deepened it. The tripartite summit of December 2025, the internal collapse of Iran between 2024 and 2026, the decapitation operation that opened the year 2026, and the dizzying recomposition of the Iranian Kurdish space transformed what could be read as a prospective essay into something more serious: a cartography of a present that was no longer a hypothesis. Hence this second edition.

I confess that, in this second volume, I changed much more than I expected to. Not in terms of the conclusions—which remain essentially intact—but in terms of the structure. The first edition was, strictly speaking, a long geopolitical-literary essay. This one, without losing its literary quality, has transformed into a scientific-political treatise. Each chapter opens with an explicit research problem, engages with primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, distinguishes fact from interpretation and both from foresight, and ends with the humility of someone who recognizes the limits of the exercise. The reader familiar with the first edition will find here a slower-paced, more documented, and, I hope, more time-resistant book.

The guiding principle remains the same: to read the present in the light of the long term. There is no serious understanding of the Eastern Mediterranean without comprehending the Ottoman collapse, the Treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne, the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the Kemalist project and its late mutation, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the long Kurdish silence that covers the 20th century. But there is also no honest reading of the long term without the courage to descend to the short term—to the gas discovered in the Levant, to the joint military exercises, to the Mahsa Amini protests, to the plane that changed course one January night. This edition remains faithful to this ebb and flow between historical tides and the froth of the weeks: it accepts the paradox, lives within it, rejects the comfort of pure abstraction and the sterile noise of journalistic news.