TBD
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, and the worldwide moral outrage that that day’s savagery generated were only paralleled by a gleeful schadenfreude that overtook many European capitals and other places around the globe, from the Arab world to the United States to American university campuses outright celebrating the greatest loss in Jewish life since the Holocaust. What is the root cause of such stark, vile dichotomies when it comes to Israel, pitting on the one hand a camp of empathy and on the other one of resentment? How is it that alongside Western sympathizers there are always those depicting Israel as the eternal offender, forbidden from defending itself, even at the risk of being depicted in the most hideous of antisemitic tropes? Conversely, why is it that among Arabs and Muslims, Palestinians are consistently, uncritically, portrayed as eternal victims, beatific casualties of Israeli Apartheid who can do no wrong, and whose own brutality is the justifiable result of grievances long unheeded and a righteous legitimate expression of self-defense? What follows is an attempt to understand the intractable nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the divisiveness that it generates around the world. I will try to explain not by taking sides, not by passing a sentence on who is right and who is wrong, not by drawing Manichaean fault lines between Good and Evil, and not by proceeding from the premise of the militant Zionist or the Arabist activist. In this, I shall assume the role of a historian recounting a complex story, probing its details, interrogating its players, exploring their languages and their languages’ connotations, and interpreting the whole in an intelligible voice devoid of the prevailing Wokeist frills of our times. I shall do that while remaining mindful of this story’s challenges, avoiding its ideological partis pris, and steering clear of the tendency to discard nuances and realities for the sake of soothing emotions and mythologies. In the end, there are “origin stories” to this conflict that ought to come to the fore, ones that are often scorned in favor of resentments, platitudes, political correctness, and the human condition’s natural urge for settling scores. One Origin Story Let us begin with the lay of the land of today’s theater of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, a quick, oversimplified lesson, as it were, in the history, geography, and toponymy of what is commonly referred to as the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the eve of the Great War, the Levantine political entities known today as Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine did not exist as distinct geographic, national, or administrative units. All were territories of the Ottoman Empire (1516-1918); all had inhabitants who were subjects of that empire; all flaunted no distinct identities of their own besides being on the one hand privileged Muslim members of the Umma (the “nation of Islam”) and on the other hand underprivileged Millets, which is to say non-Muslim Dhimmi peoples or “lesser nations,” living on sufferance in the “the abode of Islam.” Those Millets, in the main Christians and Jews, were subject to the Dhimma system: an institutionalized complex of legal, social, political, and cultural handicaps—“institutional racism” in the language of today’s virtuous bien-pensance, a form of “legal discrimination”—that guaranteed the Millets’ physical safety and ability to keep pre-Muslim traditions in return for fealty and submission to an otherwise hostile, predominantly Muslim, universe. Under this Dhimma arrangement, a “system of protection” as it is often described in tidy academic terminologies, Christians and Jews in the world of Islam were “tolerated” peoples denied political and cultural rights, disenfranchised in their own homelands, lands from which they’d been dispossessed by seventh-century Muslim conquerors—"colonial settlers” in the normative language of our times. Describing this system in the late Ottoman period, Lebanese historian Zeine Zeine noted that Christians and Jews were “tributary people whose life and property were safe only by the good pleasure of the Turkish authorities”; that they lived in “an inferior and humiliating position compared with the Muslims”; that they were forbidden from bearing arms or entering civil service; and that they had to be “outwardly distinguished by the colors of [their] dress, [their] headwear and [their] shoes.”[1] Zeine noted further that national identities as we understand them in the West did not exist in the Ottoman world: All the ties, relationships, and loyalties were denominational and religious, primarily Muslim [Jewish] or Christian ... National unity was impossible under the circumstances … The Arab Muslim, speaking of the Ottoman Empire, could say “it is also my Empire,” for it was a Muslim Empire and the Muslim felt at home in it. But the Christian [and the Jew] was conscious most of the time that he was only one of the ra‘iyyah.[2] But this system of unequal relationships between Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims would come to an end in the Great War’s aftermath. Alongside its tragedies and losses, the War’s conclusion would also conduce to the “emancipation” of non-Muslims in Muslim lands. Having chosen wartime’s “losing team,” the Ottoman Empire was dissolved in October 1918, leading to the abrogation of the Millet system and the redesigning of the eastern provinces of the former Empire by Britain and France, the war’s “winning team.” This task was guaranteed by a regime known as the League of Nations Mandate system, the purpose of which had been to shepherd the former Ottoman subjects into modern “citizenship” and shape their newly redesigned territories into modern states. Thus, based on this arrangement, and under the auspices of the League of Nations (predecessor of today’s United Nations), France was given “Mandate” over the former Ottoman Provinces (Vilayets) of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and the Sanjak of Mount-Lebanon, creating out of them what became known as Syria and Greater Lebanon (later tout court Lebanon). Concomitantly, Britain was assigned the former Ottoman Vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, stitching them together into today’s Iraq. Britain was likewise assigned the former Ottoman Sanjak of Jerusalem and the southern parts of the Vilayets of Beirut and Damascus, creating out of them what became known as Mandatory Palestine. Mandatory Palestine would undergo an additional makeover in 1921, creating from its eastern flank the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, today’s Jordan. Therefore, prior to this arrangement, none of the states mentioned above existed. There was no Syria nor a distinct Syrian national identity to speak of, no Palestine nor a Palestinian national consciousness among Arabs, and, as modern Iraq’s travails keep reminding us, no distinct, unified Iraqi history, memory, or esprit de corps. What is more, most of these newly Mandated entities were assigned “national names” owed not to their own histories or languages, but to European (Anglo-French) toponymic and geographic habits, Western traditions not only reflecting a tenuous local authenticity but also affirming the origins of modern Middle Eastern states as Western spawns adhering to Western political models and national assumptions. There were of course notable exceptions. Egypt had always been Egypt. In Lebanon, or to be exact in Mount-Lebanon, there were Maronite Christians who had long viewed themselves as Lebanese with a separate non-Arab identity, members of a “Lebanese nation, distinguished by a … culture dating back to the Phoenicians.”[3] Finally, in the Holy Land, there were also local Levantine Jews who dreamt of the redemption of the Jewish people and their restitution to their ancestral homeland in the former Ottoman Sanjak of Jerusalem and the southern Vilayets of Beirut and Damascus.[4] But those were exceptions that confirmed the rule, the rule being that Palestine, among others, was a Western concept, a Western toponym, yielding a Western demonym that Europeans used in pre-modern times to mean “Jews,” not Arabs, and to which Arabs themselves would remain indifferent until 1948 at the very earliest. Onomastics of the Story To the points above, Bernard Lewis reiterates that modern Near Eastern political entities like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and the rest all owe their names (and often their “national histories”) to Classical Antiquity or Biblical tradition, not to Arab or Muslim tradition. In this sense, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon are names issuing from the Bible; Syria is of classical Greek provenance; Palestine is a Roman term assigned to Roman Judea after the AD 70 destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. All five place names are spawns of
