After Convivencia
What Al-Andalus Teaches Us About Palestine, Iran and the Collapse of Coexistence
The memory of convivencia is often invoked as nostalgia—a soft—focus image of Córdoba’s libraries and Toledo’s translators—yet its harder truth sits uncomfortably alongside today’s Middle East. It was never a perfect harmony; it was a negotiated order, structured, unequal, yet functional.
That distinction matters now, as Gaza burns, the West Bank fractures, and regional tensions stretch from southern Lebanon, including Beirut to Damascus and increasingly towards Tehran. What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of violence but the steady unravelling of any remaining architecture of coexistence.
The humanitarian reality in Gaza alone demands clarity. More than two million people remain effectively sealed within a narrow strip of land, where access to water, electricity, medicine, and food has been drastically curtailed. United Nations reporting as of March 2026 describes conditions as ‘catastrophic’, with aid restrictions driving a systemic collapse across health and sanitation systems. Prices surge while basic goods vanish. This is not a temporary emergency; it is the normalisation of deprivation.
When infrastructure becomes a pressure point, and civilians become leverage, the line between security policy and collective punishment dissolves.
Beyond Gaza, the geography of fragmentation expands. In the West Bank, more than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live alongside over two million Palestinians under a dual legal regime. Israeli civil law governs one population; military law governs the other. Reports from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights indicate over 36,000 Palestinians were displaced in a single year, alongside 1,700—plus recorded incidents of settler violence. This is not an incidental disorder. It reflects a system that entrenches separation while making meaningful sovereignty for Palestinians increasingly implausible.
Over time, this entrenched legal asymmetry does more than govern the present—it quietly forecloses entire political horizons, shaping a future where equality becomes unimaginable, and separation feels permanently inscribed.
The conflict’s regional spillover reinforces the sense of strategic overreach. Southern Lebanon remains volatile, with cross—border exchanges threatening escalation. In Syria, repeated strikes have deepened instability in an already shattered state. Tensions with Iran—whether through proxy confrontations or direct signalling—introduce an additional layer of risk that extends far beyond bilateral conflict.
The Middle East is no longer a series of contained theatres; it is an interconnected security web where actions in Gaza ripple outward to Beirut, Damascus, and beyond.
Against this backdrop, the comparison to al—Andalus is not romantic indulgence but analytical provocation. The dhimma system—often mischaracterised as tolerance—was in fact a structured social contract. Non—Muslim communities paid a tax and accepted political subordination in exchange for protection of life, property, and religious practice. Churches and synagogues were preserved; communal autonomy was maintained. It was hierarchical, certainly, but it created incentives for stability. markets functioned, scholarship flourished, and multiple identities coexisted within a single Political framework.
That model cannot be transposed wholesale onto the 21 century, nor should it be idealised. Yet its underlying logic—that plural societies require enforceable guarantees and mutual obligations—is precisely what is absent today. Instead, the prevailing paradigm has been shaped by an exclusivist nationalism that prioritises demographic control and territorial consolidation. In such a framework, coexistence is not managed; it is deferred, often indefinitely.
In this frame, demography is no longer a social reality to be governed but a strategic variable to be engineered, where population itself becomes policy and identity is recast as a question of numerical survival.
The consequences are visible in the legal architecture itself. Where convivencia relied on parallel systems that acknowledged difference while maintaining order, the present system produces asymmetry without reciprocity. Palestinians experience restrictions on movement, land access, and political rights, while no equivalent constraints apply in reverse. International human rights organisations have increasingly described this as a form of structural discrimination, if not outright apartheid.
Whether one accepts that terminology or not, the empirical reality is difficult to contest: inequality is embedded, not incidental. There is also a deeper ideological divergence. Convivencia emerged from imperial pragmatism—a recognition that diversity could be governed if properly institutionalised. Modern nationalism, by contrast, often treats diversity as a threat to sovereignty.
This is not unique to Israel; it is a global pattern. But in Palestine, where populations are interwoven, and histories overlap, the costs of exclusion are magnified. For generations before the modern state system took hold, Jewish communities lived among Palestinian Arabs—in shared cities, sometimes even within the same homes—as part of a lived, if imperfect, social fabric. Many living witnesses have said that they regard themselves as Palestinians first, regardless of race or religion, which reflects a deeper failure of Israel’s policies to build a truly inclusive civic identity.
A one—state reality without equal rights entrenches permanent instability. A two—state solution, meanwhile, recedes further into the realm of abstraction as settlements expand and territorial continuity erodes.
Regional dynamics have been deeply affected, with Israel’s policies contributing to the expansion of what was once a local conflict into a broader regional confrontation. Iran’s growing involvement—through rhetoric, proxies, and strategic positioning—reflects this shift. Lebanon’s fragile balance faces renewed strain with each escalation, while Syria has become a theatre of overlapping interests marked by recurring strikes and counter—strikes. In such an environment, military dominance does not yield political resolution; at best it sustains deterrence, and at worst entrenches a cycle of enduring tension.
Across the Gulf, a quiet unease lingers—that each escalation from Gaza to southern Lebanon, from Damascus streets to the shadow lines with Iran, redraws not just battlefronts but the fragile map of regional stability on which their own futures precariously rest.
Given this viewpoint, as of April 2026, Spain has stepped into an unexpectedly strong role within the European Union, transforming from a marginal voice to a moral and diplomatic outlier willing to confront Israel’s actions not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, Syria, and the widening arc of tension with Iran.
Following its 2024 recognition of Palestinian statehood, Madrid has escalated its position into tangible policy—enforcing a legally binding arms embargo, downgrading diplomatic relations after the attacks linked to Iran, and openly calling for the suspension of EU—Israel agreements, moves that Israeli leadership has decried as a ‘diplomatic war’.
Yet beneath this rupture lies something more ambitious: an attempt to revive a modern language of convivencia—not as nostalgia, but as strategy—through the so—called ‘Madrid Group’, which seeks to align European and Arab actors around legal accountability, humanitarian relief, and a viable two—state framework with territorial continuity and East Jerusalem as its capital. Spain’s reopening of its embassy in Tehran, coupled with its rare Western condemnation of strikes against Iran, signals a broader recalibration—one that prioritises de—escalation and international law over traditional alliance reflexes.
This posture has not come without cost, as tensions with Israel deepen and symbolic clashes spill into public life, but it reflects a growing fracture within the West itself: between those willing to absorb political risk in defence of legal principle, and those still anchored to the language of strategic inevitability.
Global policymakers believe the conflict’s persistent failure is due to a narrow perspective. The classic binary—security vs rights, sovereignty versus survival, deterrence versus diplomacy—has solidified into a type of policy inertia that is duplicated in both the North and South.
In the Global North, strategic alliances and domestic political calculations have too often reduced the conflict to a matter of managed stability, where periodic crisis is tolerated so long as it does not spill beyond controllable bounds. In the Global South, where memories of colonial partition and imposed borders remain raw, the conflict resonates as a symbol of unfinished decolonisation, yet even here, responses are fragmented, filtered through competing geopolitical alignments and economic dependencies.
Across multilateral institutions, the language of international law persists, but its application falters, creating a widening chasm between principle and practice. The result is a world where Gaza’s devastation is simultaneously hyper—visible and politically paralysing—seen by all, resolved by none. This is not merely a regional impasse; it is a global failure of imagination, where inherited frameworks are repeated long after their explanatory power has withered.
To move beyond this paralysis requires something far more demanding than incremental diplomacy; it requires a reorientation of how coexistence itself is conceived in International relations. The lesson drawn from convivencia is not its romantic veneer, but its insistence that plural societies do not stabilise through goodwill alone—they are constructed through enforceable guarantees, asymmetries managed by accountability, and shared systems that make interdependence unavoidable rather than optional.
Imagine a policy architecture where resource sovereignty is replaced by co—governance regimes spanning borders, where water aquifers, energy grids, and trade corridors bind adversaries into reluctant partnership; where legal equality is not deferred to final—status negotiations but embedded from the outset as a non—negotiable baseline; where regional powers—including Iran, Turkey, and Gulf states—are integrated into a security compact that prioritises human security alongside territorial integrity.
Such thinking must extend beyond the Middle East, drawing lessons from Northern Ireland’s painstaking institutional balances, South Africa’s negotiated transition, and even the European Union’s post—war reinvention of sovereignty as shared rather than absolute. Without this level of conceptual ambition, policy will continue to orbit the same exhausted choices, managing symptoms while deepening causes.
That framework should demand an enforcement mechanism far more resolute than today’s UN, whose repeated inability to impose meaningful consequences has deepened a crisis where violations persist without fear and accountability remains painfully out of reach. The cost is no longer measured only in regional instability, but in the erosion of a global order that claims to value dignity, equality, and the fragile possibility of living together without domination.
Moreover, this would require concrete shifts. Legal equality cannot remain aspirational; it must be operationalised. Resource—sharing—particularly water and land—must be structured as joint stewardship rather than unilateral control. Cultural and religious sites should be governed through internationally guaranteed arrangements that remove them from zero—sum contestation. None of these ideas is novel, but their consistent abandonment has been costly.
There is also a moral dimension that cannot be sidestepped. Prolonged occupation, blockade, and displacement erode not only the lives of those directly affected but the credibility of the international system itself. When norms are selectively applied, they cease to function as norms. The erosion of trust extends far beyond the Middle East, shaping perceptions in the Global South and complicating alliances in an already fragmented world order.
The story of al—Andalus does not offer a blueprint. It offers a warning. Even its fragile coexistence eventually collapsed under pressure, giving way to expulsion, forced conversion, and homogenisation. The lesson is not that pluralism is doomed, but that it requires constant reinforcement. Without institutional commitment and political will, it unravels.
What remains today is a stark choice. Continue along a trajectory defined by fragmentation, escalation, and humanitarian crisis, or attempt the far more difficult task of constructing a shared political reality grounded in rights, accountability, and mutual recognition.
History suggests that coexistence is possible. Present conditions suggest it is slipping further out of reach. The longer that gap persists, the harder it becomes to bridge.
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