Some in the Arab world have loudly deplored the concern about the ongoing Russian Ukrainian war, particularly concern for the Ukrainian people’s suffering. We Arabs, they argue, have our own tragedies in Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen (Syria and Lebanon are often disregarded, as accusing America, Israel and the Gulf countries of being responsible for their suffering is difficult).
And so, with an abundance of melodramatic self-righteousness, they ask, why care about tragedies that are so far away?
At first glance, we put the divergence in our political assessments about the war aside. This war, as a global event, concerns us in itself, but it is particularly relevant to us because it is being fought in Europe. The wars of 1914 and 1939, which also erupted in that continent and were first waged among its peoples, became the World Wars as we know very well. The pessimistic among us speak of a “Third World War” that could end up unfolding because of the conflict in Ukraine, that is, in Europe. As for those who are even more pessimistic, perhaps wiser and more knowledgeable as well, they have begun warning us that this could be a nuclear war.
Although Asia and China have seized some of their centrality over the past two decades, Europe is still the center of the world. As for us, we are more affected by what happens in Europe than other regions and peoples: the First World War created most of our countries. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was closely tied to that war. World War Two propelled most of our countries’ independence. The Battle of El Alamein, fought on Egypt’s border with Libya, was among its central and consequential battles. The founding of Israel itself would not have been possible without the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews… A list of examples of how the events that transpire in this continent and its wars affect us would not fit in several volumes. Though that does not negate, of course, the fact that what happens here also affects Europe: it suffices to recall the ramifications of the spike in oil prices in the mid-seventies and the strong link between waves of asylum and immigration and the reinvigoration of populism in Europe... This is without mentioning older historical events like the Crusades, conflict over Spain, and Ottoman-European battles, and before all of those, the role that Arabs and Muslims played as mediators between ancient Greek culture and Europe.
All of this should go without saying, but that is not how those parochial voices preaching isolationism see it.
The fact is that this line of thinking is nothing more than the culmination of a long historical process that saw places around the world coming closer together and a single, linear (after it had been cyclical) timeline unite it, whereby human action was given a function that had been exclusive to the change of seasons and the rotation of the orbit. Thus, through this process, change replaced stability and the certain became uncertain.
Later, with the scientific revolution and industrial capitalism that united the world, through conquest of course, but also through railways, water channels, schools, and the like, came the major shift of seeing the world as a single universe with a single timeline. Time and space were condensed by trains, cars, airplanes, televisions, and radios. Indeed, that was before the digital revolution and economic globalization made their own contributions, from the fax machine to the internet and submarine cables to satellites. In all of this, trade played a crucial role, facilitating exchange and shaping our lives, tastes, and needs...
In contrast to all of this, politics, in the broadest sense of the word, constituted a theater of conflict hindering the world’s path to unity. This clash, though it was given more than a small push by unevenness and violence that this path to unity implied, was exploited by the nationalists and populists, be it in the West or the East, not only to impede unity with the other but also to prevent us from knowing more about this other, let alone sympathize with them when they are hit with tragedies.
The “Europe’s suffering doesn’t concern us” theory faced its biggest test when it overlooked facts as important as the Holocaust, arguing that we didn’t perpetuate it and that we, the Arabs, paid the price for it. These are arguments that could partially explain this disregard, but it does not justify it in any sense. As for the tests we failed one after the other, they were very many and share one thing: seeing the world from the lens of “our causes,” which are “central priorities” sometimes and “our compass” in others. While this narrowed our view of the world, more dangerously, it contributed to our causes’ defeats and let-downs. That is because “their suffering doesn’t concern us” is actually a declaration of complicity with those causing the suffering, Fascists one time, Communist Soviet another, and Putin’s Russia today. They did not win in the past, and they won’t win in the future, for many reasons, among them is that the world doesn’t concern them. This brings us to our apathy as a prelude for sharing in the defeats of the vanquished after having turned our back to the world with them.
