The new Middle East

Meeting with Giovan Battista Brunori, organized by Anavim

The Anavim cultural association organized a truly rich and intense evening online on Wednesday, February 18, accompanied by RAI correspondent Giovan Battista Brunori from Jerusalem, based on his recent book The New Middle East: The Decline of the Shiite Crescent (Belforte Editore, 2025). A large and engaged audience, though unfortunately not particularly numerous from Turin, attended the event, discussing the highly topical and, for us, central theme of the book with the author and journalist Fiammetta Martegani, who served as interviewer. (I might note, incidentally, that when it comes to cultural and critical information events, we truly need to move beyond the sterile logic of reciprocal political closures within our community.) Prompted by Martegani’s intelligent reading and candid questions, Brunori shed light not only on the tangled and bleak situation in the Middle East, yet one open to new geopolitical scenarios, but also on the burdensome limitations and one-sided visions that much of the information system appears to be trapped in. Clearly outlining the meaning of the non-strictly chronological path of his analysis (which starts from the “twelve-day” war with Iran in June 2025 – an epochal clash with the true instigator of the Gaza war – to then focus on the previous conflict with Hezbollah – its Lebanese offshoot –, going back to the terrible day of the pogrom on October 7th by Hamas which generated everything and finally focusing on the phases of the conflict in the Strip), the journalist led the listeners – and the readers of his valuable essay/reportage – to grasp the lines of the victory achieved by Israel on the military-strategic level (hard-fought, questionable in its methods, partial and full of after-effects, but a victory nonetheless) and the contours of the defeat of the Iranian project of domination over the entire vast Middle Eastern region (the Shiite crescent, precisely), a disturbing theocratic construction which has fortunately disappeared today with the evident crisis of the Ayatollah regime: beyond the outcome of this epic From this clash, substantiated by the Mossad’s targeted executions against Hanyeh and Nasrallah and by the spectacular “walkie talkie operation”, the profile of a new geopolitical order in the Middle Eastern area emerges, in which the Abraham Accords could take a breather, Israel acquire a new stable (?) security, a rational balance replace the Islamist fanaticism aimed at the annihilation of the “Zionist entity”.
The crux of Brunori’s speech, a rigorous professional of rare intellectual honesty, was his uncompromising criticism of much of the mass media and the theatricality of Italian political commentary. These, regardless of the actual and proven facts, appear tainted by the acceptance of partial and falsified sources dating back to Hamas itself, by a pro-Palestinian ideological bias, and by a widespread anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli orientation. The TG2 report, in which the journalist demonstrated, with his very presence alongside the delivered and now tampered-with food supplies, Israel’s willingness to allow food supplies to pass through Gaza, and the UN’s fatal abandonment of these resources just as the world accused Israel of starving Gazans, is a prime example of what has happened (and is happening) and of the uncommon courage of this RAI correspondent. As is his clear denunciation of the fabrication of the Israeli bombing of Al-Shifa Hospital, just days after the invasion of the Strip began. That said, the expert reporter certainly doesn’t hide, and doesn’t hide from us, the fact that—perhaps also because of this prejudicial hostility toward him to which he hasn’t been able to respond—Israel, despite winning the war of arms, has lost the war of information. But it’s also the world of information that, by losing the rules on which it is founded, risks losing its own identity.
And this, according to Brunori, also applies to the current political and diplomatic outlook and the way it’s discussed. Regarding the role of Trump’s much-maligned Board of Peace, without giving in to naive enthusiasm, Brunori concretely and pragmatically states that it’s appropriate to support the only effective peace effort that seems to be emerging today; an attempt supported, moreover, by some important Arab countries in the region, while “many Solons” in Italy and Europe (politicians and journalists alike) disdainfully and superficially disdain it in the name of principles of international law that the UN itself is unable to enforce.
The evening organized by Anavim thus opened significant horizons, contributing to geopolitical understanding, providing valuable support for the criticism of dangerous information biases, and fostering confidence in the power of lucid and objective journalism.

David Sorani