A Lost Future for the Middle East

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On the one hand, Ottoman secular nationalism was clearly an attempt to overcome sectarian and national differences in order to create a new notion of being Ottoman; on the other hand, it was also an attempt to preserve Ottoman sovereignty. Thus, whenever circumstances dictated, the darker, chauvinistic, statist side of Ottoman nationalism overwhelmed the discourse of equal Ottoman citizenship. In addition, the pluralist hallmark of the Ottoman Empire was cynically weaponized against it by European powers, as Britain, France, and the Russian and Hapsburg Empires all claimed the right to “protect”—that is, to intrude upon—what the Ottomans insisted were their internal affairs. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion and defeat of the Ottomans in 1877–1878, the empire was forced to cede huge swaths of its territories in the Balkans. When the Armenian Christians attempted to emulate the Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians in a bid for independence in the 1890s, they were ruthlessly crushed by the Ottoman state—not because they were Christians per se but because, as a newly identified nationalist minority concentrated in the eastern Anatolia provinces, they were increasingly viewed by Ottoman officials as an existential threat to the state.

Arab Christians in this same period, by contrast, thrived in the late Ottoman Empire and in British-occupied Egypt. They were heavily and intimately involved in the elaboration of the Nahda, a renaissance of ecumenical Arab identity that transcended sectarian differences. They helped bring forth a new Arab identity that included Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Butrus al-Bustani’s National School, for example, was founded in 1863 to imbue in students of all faiths the idea of common belonging to a single multireligious nation. The ecumenical Arab Nahda was a faithful reflection of its secular Ottoman milieu. It was national in the sense of bridging religious differences, but it was not nationalist in the sense of trying to carve out an independent state: the Arabs subscribed to the project of Ottoman modernization, and it was only in the empire’s final years that any discussion of independent states began to emerge. This ecumenism was evident in major national conferences, such as the French-tolerated 1913 Arab Congress in Paris that called for Ottoman decentralization.

This sense of possibility, though, could not last. The practical toleration of the Ottoman Turkish rulers was eventually overwhelmed by their nationalist xenophobia: in 1915, during World War I, the ruling Committee of Union and Progress perpetrated the Armenian genocide while crushing the nascent expressions of Arab nationalism in the Levant. The subsequent European destruction and partition of the defeated Ottoman Empire introduced European-dominated state structures into the Arab East in 1920. The so-called mandate system throttled Arab self-determination and ended the politico-geographic unity that had once tied the Arab East together under Ottoman sovereignty. There was one short-lived exception to this general trajectory—namely, the Arab state in Syria. Based in Damascus between 1918 and 1920, this post-Ottoman Syrian polity was premised on the idea of separating religion from statecraft and citizenship. It was staffed by men who had lived in, and often served, the Ottoman Empire in its final decades, and who aspired to build a modern constitutional kingdom that rose above religious differences. It was a bold political experiment. But it ended abruptly when France, with British connivance, destroyed it in July 1920.

In the wake of these ruptures, European colonization operated on the assumption that Arab unity against mandate partition was little more than a cover for an allegedly unchanging and medieval Muslim fanaticism. British and French Orientalist rulers and colonial officials, such as Arthur James Balfour and Robert de Caix, maintained that nationalism was inherently unsuitable for the East, at least without European tutelage. They claimed that, like Indians, Africans, and other Asians, the Arabs of the Middle East were in thrall to their sectarian identities and thus needed more “civilized” Europeans to help acculturate them into the rules of good government.

It was in this context, and according to these premises, that Britain and France encouraged the creation of divided and subordinated Arab polities in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, ostensibly in the name of helping their populations achieve eventual self-determination. During this very period, however, Britain encouraged colonial Zionism in Palestine through the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Zionism offered European solutions to European problems. In 1897, two decades before this declaration was issued, Jewish nationalists in Russia, France, Austria, Germany, and England united to work toward the creation of a Jewish nationalist state that would mirror its European nationalist counterparts. At the same that they advocated for such a state to address the widespread antisemitism in Europe, they adopted, exemplified, and expressed racist attitudes toward the native people of Palestine and the wider Arab East. After the Balfour Declaration and the British occupation of Palestine, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann informed Balfour in 1918 that the Zionist Jews were more faithful to the British than the Arabs, whom he said had a “treacherous nature” and who had to be “‘nursed’ lest they should stab the [British] Army in the back.”

The bitter irony of this variant of nationalism, well suited to the new post-Ottoman Western colonial order, is that not only was it alien to the history of the Middle East, but it also powerfully fused ethnicity and religion just as a new ecumenical Arab nationalism (and its regional variants in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria) sought to dissociate the two strands. In principle, Arab nationalism strove to unite Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Arabs. Colonial Zionism, by contrast, was predicated on totally severing any possible national connection between being Jewish and being Arab. These two political visions for the past and future were utterly antithetical. In 1948, the well-organized Zionist movement, rooted in Western power and backed by Western political support, began by force to remake multireligious Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state. The Nakba of 1948 created Israel, but Israel itself shattered Palestine and expelled the vast majority of Palestinians from their lands. It later invaded even more Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese soil.

In the long aftershock of 1948, and amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the question of Palestine serves as a stark reminder of the danger that ethnoreligious nationalism poses to a multireligious world. It is also a reminder that the militarily weak Arab states, which have dismally failed to reverse the Nakba, are themselves a legacy of European imperialism. The end result has been sheer catastrophe throughout the Levant—to people, first and foremost, but also to the religious and ethnic richness of the region itself. To reclaim a better future, one must first acknowledge how the setting up of a perpetual ontological enmity between “Arab” and “Jew” is a reflection not of the long and variable history of coexistence in the Middle East but of a European-spawned nationalism predicated on Europe’s antisemitism, Orientalism, and colonialism, one that has always worked to divide and rule across the non-Western world. In the face of this cataclysmic ethnoreligious nationalism inherent to colonial Zionism, the obdurate reality of Palestinian pluralism offers the only possible antidote—that is to say, a countervailing ecumenical political project that is far more in harmony with the history of the Mashriq.