Warternity

Once again, the troubles in the Middle East are everybody's problem and prove that nobody can live in a bubble. Eleven billion dollars blown in a few days, oil resources, data centers, desalination plants, the world's economy all being hit.

Imagine humankind being observed by a curious alien civilization whose inhabitants each live for millenia and for whom a century passes by in an instant. It would seem to them that Europeans and peoples to their east were constantly sparring, colonizing one another and spilling across into each other's territories: Syrian migrants, Zionists, European colonizers, Ottomans; Crusaders; Byzantines; Ummayads, Sassanids, Romans, Parthians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Scythians and Pannonian Avars: all shuffling back and forth and pushing against one another. And that's only as far as we, with our historical amnesia, can remember.

Footnote: "The Middle East", as "westerners" (including Israelis) like to call it, is not a geographical definition but reflects a particular perspective.