From 1973 to 2036: The Arab World’s Clocks Are No Longer in Sync
On October 6, 1973, Egypt crossed the Suez Canal and breached the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line. The lesson was larger than a military victory: resources become power only when they are coordinated and brought into step. Fifty years later, October 7, 2023, offered a grim reminder of the cost of leaving conflicts unresolved and allowing the clocks of nations to drift apart.
The next crossing will require neither a canal nor a sand barrier. Its obstacle is less visible, but no less formidable: time lost, backwardness normalised, and the acceptance of a world divided between societies advancing through the 21st century and others still struggling at the dawn of civilisation.
In October, two dates sit side by side on the calendar like twins, yet each was born into a different age. On October 6, 1973, we crossed water. On October 7, 2023, no canal was crossed; instead, a chasm opened.
The present interests me less. Its verdict has already been delivered. The future is what concerns me, because it is the only question still under deliberation. That is why I write from the road to 2036.
I carry questions I cannot leave unanswered. Were those who made the decisions in 1973 different from those who make them today—or simply better at reading the future than we are? Are we victims of a plan unfolding in stages, or unwitting participants in carrying it out? And where did this enfeeblement begin?
But one stranger question comes before them all: what year are we really living in? Not according to the calendar, but in reality. While some people are composing messages to machines that will think alongside them, others in our region are writing the names of those they await on the walls of shelters.
Both groups read the same history on their phone screens. They do not, however, inhabit the same century.
This is not an essay about politics. It is an essay about time: who gets to possess it, and who is cast out of it.
The Division of Time
Old maps divided the world by latitude, into north and south. Economics divided it by income, into rich and poor. The divide now taking shape appears on no map. It is a temporal boundary, rather like the International Date Line across the Pacific. But those who cross it neither gain nor lose a day. They gain or lose centuries.
That line runs through our region. On one side, cities are building data centres and testing new forms of energy. On the other—sometimes no more than an hour’s drive away—neighbourhoods are relearning humanity’s oldest lessons, from 200,000 years ago: finding water, making fire, finding shelter, and surviving.
The numbers bear witness to this fracture. The World Bank projects that per-person water availability in the region will fall below 500 cubic metres a year by 2030—the very resource over which humanity’s earliest communities fought. Youth unemployment stands at about 24.2%, against a global rate of 12.8%, according to the International Labour Organisation. Millions of young people are left standing at the threshold of the future, unable to enter.
We need a new term for this condition: the “temporal refugee.” Such a person is displaced not merely from a place, but from an age. An engineer who emigrates does not simply move from one country to another; he moves from one century to the next, leaving behind the investment in education that made his departure possible.
The Paradox of Two Existences
Human beings now have two existences: one made of flesh and blood, and another made of data. Much of the developed world is preoccupied with protecting the second. Governments hold summits on the risks artificial intelligence may pose to consciousness, privacy, and employment. They draft rules for machines that have not yet fully arrived, worried that they might one day harm people who have not yet been harmed.
In our region, the first existence is being destroyed without a summit or a charter: the body, the home, the meal, and the school. In one part of the world, the fear is that machines will take a person’s job. In another, war has taken the person and the job together. One side debates the right not to have one’s data monitored; the other searches for the right to find one’s name on a list of survivors.
This is more than a development gap. It is a reversal of development itself. A person who should be asking how to use the technologies of tomorrow is being forced back to humanity’s oldest question: how do I stay alive until morning?
There is a harsher paradox still. Those who lack the infrastructure of the future—data, computing power, chips, and models—may not even become autonomous users of it. They risk becoming its raw material instead. Their data will be collected, their choices shaped elsewhere, and their digital lives governed by rules they had no hand in writing.
Meanwhile, their physical existence may be determined by forces closer to home.
The danger is not merely that some societies will arrive late to the future. It is that they may arrive in it without having had a hand in designing it. A future built elsewhere can turn technological dependence into a new form of subordination.
Why Did Our Time Split Apart?
In 1973, the Arabs were hardly united in the romantic sense. Their disagreements existed before the war and continued after it. But they managed to set their clocks to the same time: land was to be recovered, and resources were to be committed to the battle. Shared timing became a source of power.
Today, each capital keeps its own time. The reason, I suspect, is not that yesterday’s rulers were made of purer stuff. It is that the machinery through which decisions are made has changed.
The world has narrowed. During the era of two superpowers, the space between the blocs offered room for manoeuvre. Today, security, investment, and supply chains are tightly intertwined. Strategic autonomy has become an expensive commodity.
The nature of the threat has fragmented. The enemy once appeared as a common adversary, while the occupied territory was understood as a shared Arab cause. Today, each capital draws its own map of threats, with its own fears and priorities.
The state has grown tired. Many countries emerged from the past decade preoccupied with repairing their own walls. A country busy rebuilding its house has less capacity to help build the road.
The weapon has changed. Oil could once be used as a weapon when the world was thirsty for it. Today, energy sources are more diversified, and Arab wealth is deeply entangled with global markets. Using that wealth as leverage against the world can therefore mean turning it against its owners.
The costs are no longer local. In April 2026, the World Bank cut its growth forecast for the region, excluding Iran, to 1.8% from 4%. In Palestine, an issue that has never left the Arab heart, the United Nations recorded 1,697 Palestinians displaced in the first quarter of 2026 alone—more than the total recorded throughout 2025.
So, is this a plan?
Powerful countries have interests, and they will invest in the cracks wherever they find them. But the crack comes before the hand that widens it.
The world is increasingly organised into blocs that negotiate as blocs. UNCTAD points to stronger regional integration in advanced economies and East Asia, while we continue to negotiate one country at a time.
Our weakness is neither a fate written abroad nor a sin born entirely at home. It is what happens when the two meet.
The Temporal Mandate
After the First World War, Arab territories were placed under mandates, often justified by the argument that their peoples were not yet prepared to govern themselves under the conditions of the modern world. It was a form of tutelage justified by geography and politics.
I fear that the next form of tutelage could be justified by time.
No one would openly declare these peoples are incapable of governing themselves. The argument would be different: that this is a region living in another age, unable to protect its people or properly safeguard its water, energy, minerals, and strategic passages at a moment when the advanced world needs all of them to power its own future.
Even our sunlight could become an energy source for data centres we do not own.
It would not arrive in the form of armies crossing borders. It could come instead as “good governance” of resources, “partnerships” to secure strategic passages, and “standards” that determine who is allowed into the club of the future.
An occupation without soldiers, its papers signed in the name of saving humanity.
Whether such a course is deliberate or not, the danger is the same. The most damaging thing we could do to ourselves would be to provide, with our own hands, the evidence from which the indictment against us is written.
2036: When People Get Used to the Wrong Time
I am not making a prediction. The future cannot be read from an equation. But it is possible to draw a straight line from where we stand today. If current trends persist, the gaps between the region’s clocks are likely to widen. The drain of talent will continue, the cost of reconstruction will rise, water scarcity will deepen, and the divide between those who build the machines and those whose lives are shaped by them will grow wider. The region’s cities will need to create millions of jobs, while the private sector remains constrained by the weak productivity and dynamism identified by the World Bank.
But the real catastrophe cannot be measured in numbers.
It begins when people set their clocks to lateness and stop noticing that they are late.
A child born under bombardment in 2026 will turn ten in 2036. By then, he may regard power cuts as a season, emigration as another name for success, and war in the neighbouring country as little more than a weather report.
At that point, being behind is no longer a condition we pass through. It becomes an identity we carry.
And a person who grows accustomed to living in a delayed age does not demand to return to the world’s time—because he may no longer know that another time exists.
A Pact for Time: What I Put Before Decision-Makers
I am not asking for unity that dissolves national borders, or for agreement on every issue. I am asking for something smaller—and more consequential: an agreement to protect time itself.
I propose an Arab Pact for Time, built around two principles.
- The neutrality of temporal infrastructure
Just as international norms seek to protect hospitals during war, Arab states should commit to protecting schools, universities, water and power facilities, and data centres from attack and disruption, regardless of who is fighting whom.
These are not merely facilities. They are among the few remaining bridges between people and their age.
- A sanctuary for minds
An Arab network for computing and research, financed by Arab capital, could provide a home for scientists from countries caught in conflict, so that leaving their country does not have to mean leaving their century.
The scientist remains connected to the technological frontier, while the value of that knowledge remains connected to the region that produced it.
This is not a dream of political unity. It is a calculation of self-interest: every country that protects its neighbour’s time is protecting its own temporal frontier.
The Second Crossing
Two Octobers, half a century apart, left very different lessons. The first showed what can happen when resources, purpose, and timing are brought together. The second showed the cost of leaving conflicts unresolved while the clocks of societies drift further apart.
What lies before us is not another crossing of a frontier, but a race against becoming accustomed to standing still. The danger is not simply that some societies will fall behind. It is that, after enough time, falling behind will cease to feel like a temporary condition and become the natural order of things.
None of this is inevitable. But time, like debt, compounds: every year we postpone the crossing increases its eventual cost.
The question put to us in 2036 will not be, “Why did we fail to win?” It will be: “Why did we allow the world to move into the future while we remained behind, relearning how to make fire?”
This is my contribution to that crossing.
A stone of thought.