Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief.

This is FP Live.

So there have been a lot of flashy proposals about the Middle East recently.

President Donald Trump suggested that the United States would take over Gaza.

Saying he's committed to buying and owning Gaza.

This could be so magnificent, the Riviera of the Middle East.

It is an idea that is illegal, practically impossible, and has been widely repudiated by

Arab countries.

Trump has also promised all hell.

That is, if Hamas doesn't release all of its hostages on Saturday.

But we don't quite know what that means or how it fits into the many other moving parts

in what has been a fragile ceasefire deal.

I, for one, have been trying to find the signal in the noise in these last few weeks,

so I thought today I'd try and take a step back on the Middle East. It has been 16 months

since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and as Israel has prosecuted its revenge,

global opinion on the conflict has been bewilderingly polarized.

It is worth asking why. Why should the United States and South Africa differ so dramatically in

their understanding of what happened? One calls it a justified response. The other, a genocide? What explains the

sharp divergence between east and west, north and south? According to the Indian writer and

public intellectual punkajmishra, it is hard not to layer upon this issue what he calls

the color line. In other words, race. The question then is,

do race and empire adequately explain the cleavage in how this conflict is perceived?

...