A few days ago, an Israeli website quoted what it called a source "close to Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa" as saying that Syria had demanded that Israel cede control over at least a third of the Golan Heights. One of the two potential scenarios for this "deal" would see “the Lebanese city of Tripoli, close to the Lebanese-Syrian border, and possibly other Lebanese territories in the north of the country and the Beqaa Valley, handed over to Syria.”
A Syrian "writer and politician" named Kamal al-Labwani shared his thoughts soon after the report emerged. "Tripoli has always been Syrian, so why wouldn’t we reclaim it, along with the city of Sidon, and make greater Lebanon smaller Lebanon again?"
The report is extremely flimsy and lacking in credibility. Nevertheless, the question of the national territory and borders of Levantine countries has resurfaced and become the subject of vigorous debate.
As we learned from the reporting by the Jerusalem Post and the Wall Street Journal, notables in the city of Hebron are calling for the establishment of a "Hebron Emirate" independent of the Palestinian Authority. We know that the terms "federalism" and "partition," regardless of their distinct definitions, are being increasingly demanded, and that, across the Levant, officials and non-officials are increasingly responding to such demands.
More than a few of us were surprised when US envoy Tom Barrack weighed in on the Sykes-Picot Agreement, stressing that it “divided Syria and the broader region for imperial gain- not peace. That mistake cost generations. We will not make it again.”
While Barrak borrowed from the discourse of early Arab nationalists, there remains, nonetheless, a significant distinction between the historical denunciations of Sykes-Picot and the new ones: the agreement's past critics' objections stemmed from their aspiration for a larger country home to the "Arab,Islamic," or “Syrian” nation. Now, however, the popular mood favors smaller countries that would become vessels for sects, religions, and ethnicities. Similarly, the previous critique was voiced before the existing states had been sufficiently tried and tested, while the contemporary criticism comes after trying these states for an extended period has led more than a few to conclude that they have been a failure.
While the states’ founding is associated with the outcomes of World War I, and their independence (or the finalization of their independence) with those of World War II, perplexity in the face of problems, global disregard, and seeking quick and localized solutions for its protuberances prevail today.
In any case, it can now be said that positions on "the land" have significantly shifted in the Levant, and the latest/current war pushed them out into the open. Today, without any planning, land is casually being toyed with, and by extension, so are its inhabitants. In this sense, it has become easy to see it- as in Gaza- as real estate and confusing property rights with sovereign rights.
While famous German-French disputes over Alsace-Lorraine were intertwined with intellectual debates around identity and whether the will of the inhabitants or their origins and language took primacy in determining identity, our territories, be they ‘stolen’ from us or not, have never known such debates. While the Russian revolutionaries had an immensely rich and acrimonious debate over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany at the beginning of the last century, and whether ceding territory to consolidate political authority could be justified, any public debate based on practicalities regarding our land would be an absolute abomination.
The element of surprise in this major shift is confined to its newfound overtness. Recent decades have paved the way for this openness to manifest itself in several ways. For example, Syria’s Golan Heights were occupied in 1967, and the territory was then formally annexed by Israel in 1981; the Assad regime behaved as though life proceeded seamlessly with or without the Golan Heights. In practice, the "no war, no peace" formula, coupled with "Hafez al-Assad’s compliance with his commitments" (as laid out in the 1974 disengagement agreement), pushed the Golan Heights into the category of a territory that is not sought by its owners- as though it too were "immortal," but "eternally" out of our hands. As for "Lebanese ownership of the Shebaa Farms," most of the Lebanese people saw it as a bomb over their laps that blows them and their country up on a daily basis.
In all likelihood, none of that would have happened if it were not for the position we had already had on land, which manifested itself in political structures that rendered the land of the other sect its land alone, without their "partners in the nation." Meanwhile, the "nation" that Arab political thought sought, opposing Sykes-Picot, never became anything more than play dough. With Najib Azroui, for example, the "Arab nation" was limited to the Asian segments of the Arab world. With Satii al-Husri and Michel Aflaq, it expanded to include the African segments as well. Antoun Saadeh took his farce so far as to seek the annexation of Cyprus to the "Syrian nation," with Iraq and Kuwait added once oil was discovered there. Finally, the Islamists came calling for us to forget all nations but the "nation of believers."
This has been the case for a long while though we have long desperately needed, and still need, stable territory in nation-states.
