The worst thing that happened to the MENA over the last 200 years was colonialism, and the absolute worst effect of colonialism was the ideology of the ethnic nation-state and the various nationalisms that it produced. We have been bleeding for over 100 years.

The majorities are afraid of the minorities and think that suppressing them is the best way to avoid their "separatism". Meanwhile the minorities are afraid of the majorities and think that keeping them living under a boot is the best way to avoid their hegemony.

The result is over a century of nationalisms and counter-nationalisms, of hatred and counter-hatred, of ethnic cleansing and genocide, of creating hierarchies for human worth among children of the same region who had lived side by side since the beginning of written history

Our region was never truly egalitarian, but everyone coexisted somehow or another. The solution isn't to separate us further, the solution is an egalitarian coexistence that looks to the future and addresses the injustices of the past.

Some people are really badly misreading this thread. Colonialism isn't just about what the colonialist does but about what the colonized do in response to pressure from the colonialist. Here's a thread about that. https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi/status/1275806031193538563

When we adopted the ideology of the nation-state, that's an act that "we" did. But we did it in the context of a struggle to compete with, adapt to, and survive a colonizer who had developed that ideology. "We" aren't innocent, and the colonizer isn't uninvolved.

There's this either-or thinking that makes it appear like if we talk about colonialism we're saying we aren't to blame, and if we speak about our own mistakes then that means colonialism isn't to blame. This as simplistic as it is annoying.