Dear reader,It might not surprise you. But it did surprise me.When I first heard the Hebrew greeting Shalom aleichem, properly spoken during a visit to Israel a few years ago, I unmistakably heard it as Salaam Alaykum, the Arabic greeting familiar from my childhood in central Kerala, where Muslims, Christians, and Hindus live alongside one another. Salaam Alaykum was a part of the landscape. So when the Jewish organiser of the Indian journalist delegation I was part of in 2018 greeted me with Shalom, I instinctively said I’d heard Salaam. His face paled. He quickly clarified that the two were “very, very different”. I apologised. But the moment stayed with me, how languages and gestures that sound and feel alike can be drawn into the service of separation.That sense of familiarity strained into estrangement is something many of us recognise while observing West Asia—from India to Africa, or even in the enduring conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Shared pasts are splintered. Common ground becomes contested. It’s not an exaggeration to say that West Asia—to speak from an Asian rather than colonial cartographic vantage—is a geography defined by such paradoxes. Its long, layered histories—histories that could build empathy—are time and again turned into geopolitical weapons. Neighbours become enemies. Cultures are distorted. Loyalties talk economics and business.Edward Said wrote in Orientalism that the Orient is not just an other, but something systematically othered. His argument still holds. The violence we see today is not a sudden eruption, but a controlled burn, stoked by strategic interests. The West—former colonial powers and the United States foremost among them—remains deeply embedded in the region’s instability for now-explicit reasons. Military bases, oil routes, arms contracts.Nowhere is this more evident than in Palestine. We know now that the Nakba of 1948—the mass displacement of over 7,00,000 Palestinians—is not past tense. It continues in evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, in the blockades of Gaza, in the fragmented autonomy handed out in place of freedom. The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi calls it a “Hundred Years’ War”. That naming resists the framing of Palestinian struggle as reactive or recent. But even a basic acknowledgment of this history invites suspicion. Sympathy itself is policed—by mass media, social media debates sponsored by the interested parties (read Israel and America). As a colleague reminded me during our trip, strategic realism demands aligning with Israel. The moral cost of that realism is absorbed elsewhere.The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were held up as a turning point. But for many Palestinians, they marked the beginning of a different kind of occupation—managed, administrative, but still fundamentally colonial. The journalist Amira Hass described Oslo as a system “built to maintain Israeli dominance... wrapped in the language of peace”. That framing captures the bind: even the peace process becomes a cover for dispossession.But this pattern does not begin or end with Israel-Palestine. Wherever power demands control, division is created. We know how the partition of India and Pakistan—executed with imperial haste—transformed neighbours into adversaries. Bangladesh’s emergence in 1971 carried forward the violence embedded in those arbitrary lines. In Rwanda, colonial administrations shaped the categories of Hutu and Tutsi, which later became tools of mass violence. Europe is not immune either. The war in Ukraine reveals how shared histories are twisted into justification for conquest and control.Why does it keep happening? Because conflict is profitable. Arms are sold, alliances recalibrated, and reconstruction is turned into industry. As a wry saying among foreign correspondents goes, “When armies cross borders, the people in suits count dollars.” In Iraq, Libya, Syria—interventions wear the mask of humanitarian concern, but the calculations are always geopolitical.So we return to the present, where Israel and Palestine remain locked in a long war of narratives. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued by Britain, promised Jews a “national home” in a land already lived in by Palestinians. Europe’s reckoning with its own anti-Semitism was offloaded onto Palestinian soil. The consequences are still unfolding. To name this injustice is not to deny the right of Jewish people to safety, history, or self-determination. But too often, criticism of Israel’s state policies is dismissed as anti-Semitic. The result is a silencing of real debate. And yet, voices within Jewish communities—Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Avraham Burg—have long argued that Israel’s current path betrays the very moral lessons Jewish history has taught. These perspectives rarely influence public discourse.Violence doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It is taught, constructed, disseminated through media and even inherited. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asked: “Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” That question lingers—urgent, unanswered. Geopolitical shifts have only deepened the crisis. Israel’s strategic partnership with the US, its growing ties with the UAE and Saudi Arabia—brokered through American diplomacy—have come at a clear Palestinian cost. These “normalisations” leave Palestinian aspirations outside the room. Dialogue, if it occurs, is already rigged.Iran is cast as the region’s chief threat. But this too is a simplification. Iran’s actions—especially in Syria—reflect both ambition and anxiety. Isolation, sanctions, and decades of threats have bred aggression. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003, carried out on the fiction of “weapons of mass destruction”, destabilised the entire region. That war not only empowered Iran and created a vacuum for the Islamic State, but also entrenched rivalries that continue to devastate Yemen today.One of the cruellest truths is that peace in the region might well emerge if foreign powers simply stepped back. But that would mean giving up contracts, leverage, and control. So the cycle remains: crisis is managed, not resolved. For many of us, watching from afar, this can be overwhelming. The news loops between horror and hollow truce. Every new generation is asked to carry forward old wounds. I remember an Israeli journalist in Tel Aviv once told me, “One day, Israelis and Palestinians will realise we have been fighting over a piece of land that will outlive us all.” That day feels distant. With each round of violence, positions harden. Victims become aggressors, and memory becomes ammunition.So what now? To rephrase Jean-Paul Sartre, are we condemned to helpless observation? Perhaps part of the answer lies in naming what has been concealed. These divisions are not natural. They are constructed. And they benefit a very small group. Even the feeling of helplessness deserves scrutiny. To see and understand, to reject false choices, to affirm dignity over dominance—these are not minor acts. They matter. Supporting Palestine should not require justifying violence. Rejecting anti-Semitism should not mean endorsing occupation. Ethics demand more than allegiance.What future awaits West Asia under Benjamin Netanyahu’s unrelenting campaigns—in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran? The outlook is grim. And yet history offers small openings. Apartheid fell. European wars found uneasy peace. These shifts came when those in power lost their grip, and when pressure built from below. Until that pressure builds, we watch. And we remember. Not for the spectacle of suffering, but for the people who go through it.That is why Frontline returns to West Asia in our latest cover. Writers Bashir Ali Abbas, Deepika Saraswat, Anwar Alam, and Amit Baruah trace the region’s power alignments and internal contradictions—not to explain away the violence, but to insist that those most affected by it are not forgotten. For them, and for all of us, Shalom and Salaam must remain more than greetings. They must be the starting point for a future we are still waiting for.Read the pieces and as always, write back to us with your comments, rejoinders and more!Wishing you a peaceful week ahead,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor, FrontlineWe hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.inCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS