The last chapter of the post-Ottoman order will not be completed until Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine co-exist as states. If not all four live in peace, none of the others will.
The Arab Revolt of 1936 in Palestine has recently made its return to the stage. It provides the historical backdrop of an eponymous motion picture, and it will reach an audience that may never have heard of this violent episode of the unresolved Palestine question. One that might arguably be the true point of no return, a decade prior to the creation of Israel and the Nakba. Less known beyond expert circles than the Arab Revolt are the secret talks that were held between two protagonists of the Ottoman world, David Ben- Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv in British Mandate Palestine, and George Antonius, a Syro-Palestinian cosmopolite and advisor to the Mufti of Jerusalem, at the eve of the uprising.
During these negotiations, Antonius suggested that the Jews in Palestine could live under an Arab leadership or join some sort of a Jewish-Arab confederation, if they were willing to limit Jewish immigration. Ben-Gurion argued that, while the entire Levant offered a home to the Arabs of Palestine, the Jews only had the Holy Land. And that he could not commit himself to any limitation because he had to consider the aspirations of all the Jewish people in the world who would one day – or not – decide to come to Zion. The talks did not lead to any peaceful settlement, and the consequences are well known.
Often overlooked is the fact that that those clashing, seemingly irreconcilable visions of a nation, Jewish/Israeli and Arab/Palestinian, were still rooted in an Ottoman reality where religious, ethnic, and national identities at times became ambiguous and interchangeable. As long as one was not forced to draw borders, ambiguities could coexist.
Over time, the old Arab maps of the Middle East that simply did not mention Israel, turned from symbols of persistence to such of political delusion
The Ottoman world may have ended with the Empire’s defeat alongside Germany’s during World War I and the transformation of its remains into the Turkish Republic in 1923. But in the Levant, at the fertile Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the post-Ottoman era has never been completed. Or as Antonio Gramsci put it: The old world may be dying, but the new one is not yet born. The ongoing post-colonial debate may provide ample space for projections and identity politics. However, it often eclipses the true legacy of the imperial age and the way it shapes geopolitical realities today.
The end of Ottoman rule and the interregnum of European (French and British) colonial power in what the Arabs commonly referred to as Bilad al-Sham, entailed the birth of four nation states that, until today, struggle with their unfolding maturation. And while, incontestably, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine find themselves today in very different stages of development, another inevitable reality emerges: Their respective destinies depend on each other. And if all four nations do not live in peace and prosperity, none of the others will.
At least three of these four sisters share the experience of struggle for recognition, partly because they were seen as artificial creations of the imperialist/colonial era by others. Israel was able to force this recognition on its neighbours. Its sovereignty could no longer be ignored and, over time, the old Arab maps of the Middle East that simply did not mention Israel, turned from symbols of persistence to such of political delusion.
In the case of Lebanon, it was still decades after its official independence in 1943 that Arab and Syrian nationalists challenged Lebanon’s borders and identity. The Syrian occupation (1976-2005) – officially sold as a stabilising force – revived such claims.
It was the occupation that created an almost unbreakable and irreversible Palestinian identity
Palestine, for its part, is confronted with an overwhelmingly powerful adversary whose current leadership chooses to ignore that it exists. Ironically, the self-assuring words of Israeli politicians, like Netanyahu, who reiterate that there would never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan river, sound more and more like incantation spells. As if they wanted to scare away the very demons of which they claim that they do not exist beyond the world of superstition.
No doubt the case of Palestine as the last and most contested case of becoming-a-nation in the Levant, is special. Rather than a national Palestinian movement, it was the occupation that created an almost unbreakable and irreversible Palestinian identity (though it was designed to do the opposite, of course).
Syria, a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society, has undergone drastic changes but remained territorially cohesive since its inception (with the exception of the occupied Golan Heights). Syria’s post-Ottoman problem is not one of uncompleted borders, but of internal fragmentation. And while some of the followers of Ahmad Al-Sharaa’s Sunni revivalist project aspire to connect themselves to the ‘golden age’ of Islam – in fact, they even call him ‘light of the Ummayyads’– one should rather look at the early years of the Syrian Republic to find points of historical reference which will allow to reverse-engineer Syria and repair the root cause of its ethno-sectarian fragmentation.
Unlike Syria, Lebanon seems to have found its – albeit sometimes contradictory – national identity. What it lacks is the elements of a state, until today. During Ottoman times, no part of the Empire could have boasted a more complex and complicated system of administration, one of constant trial and error (with the errors mostly coming out on top). And you may hardly find a Middle East expert who can spell, let alone convincingly explain, today’s Lebanese model of consociationalism. It is improvised and based on ‘gentlemen’s agreements’, with not too many gentlemen left to live up to them.
The fact that Israel had not defined its borders when Ben-Gurion proclaimed the country’s independence in 1948 might have been a strategic advantage then. It inevitably turns into a liability today
Today, Lebanon’s territory is under assault, its population used as bargaining counter. But history has shown that whatever good and bad things happen between the shores of Tyre and the plain of Akkar will affect the entire Levant with ramifications for security, economy, ecological hazards, and migration of the Mediterranean basin.
Israel may pride itself a democracy, a military giant, a technological powerhouse with global reach. But its faultlines indicate that its nation-building has not yet been completed either. Today, a strong national identity that was always privy to the country’s Jewish population is showing cracks. Facing hypernationalist, religious and revisionist ideologies, Israel is thrown back to the initial question of its social contract. How Zionist, how democratic, how Jewish and how Israelist do Israelis want to be? The fact that Israel had not defined its borders when Ben-Gurion proclaimed the country’s independence in 1948 might have been a strategic advantage then. It inevitably turns into a liability today.
Hence all four nations are tied by geography, geopolitics, ethnicity, and a tragic history. This history can be read as a continuous 80 years-long war of mutual attrition. They share resources, culture, and people. The reality and the answers given to domestic questions inescapably affect the others.
The respective processes of nationhood in these four sisters of the Levant may have been decelerated, derailed, or temporarily aborted over time. However, they have become even more inevitable in recent years of turmoil, during which so many other perennial assumptions about power, politics, and predictability of actors in the Middle East have been crumbling away. And yet it seems that, while such vertiginous, fast-moving developments blur the analytic grid, the broad lines of history reemerge and come to light like the remains of a sunken city from which I can only draw one conclusion: If not all four nations live in peace and prosperity, none of the other three ever will.
