From a New York Times column by David Brooks headlined “Searching for Humanity in the Middle East”:

We’re living through an era of collapsing paradigms. The conceptual frames that many people use to organize their understanding of the world are crashing and burning upon contact with Middle Eastern reality.

The first paradigm that failed this month was critical race theory or woke-ism. Yascha Mounk has a good history of this body of thought in his outstanding book “The Identity Trap.” But as it applies to the Middle East the relevant ideas in this paradigm are these: International conflicts can be seen through a prism of American identity categories like race.