The great modern-era defeats of the Levant have never raised the issue of these countries’ territorial integrity or questioned it. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.
As these recently established countries had been basking in their nascency and independence, military coups brought to power - following the defeat of 1948 - officers claiming that they sought to correct course and render these states too powerful to defeat. In parallel with these coups, there emerged, particularly in Syria, ideas and parties whose proponents championed states that would empower and enlarge their own, and, as part of this course, liberate Palestine.
Following the subsequent defeat of 1967, many alternatives to the status quo were proposed, including "religious revival" and transforming regimes’ social leadership. However, the countries themselves remained above suspicion, neither their inter-communal relations nor their physical borders contested or deliberated.
But, unlike the first, the second defeat created a swiftly expanding hole in the wall of nominal national unity. As a result, the foundational developments of this trajectory, embodied by the 1969 Cairo Agreement that compartmentalized Lebanon’s sovereignty and territory, began to emerge.
Then came the civil wars of Jordan and Lebanon in 1970 and 1975 respectively. In a sense, these two conflicts were the daughters of Nasser and the Baath Party’s hyperbolic promises that ended in scandalous disappointment. Then, in a second wave of national cleavages, the opposition's response to Baathist tyranny in Syria and Iraq took the same sectarian colors that had marked the tyranny of these two countries.
Since 1979, Iranian Khomeinism, with its sectarianism and its notion of "exporting revolution," has been the canvas for the broad atomization of the Levant. In parallel, the erosion of countries and sovereignties that Baathist Syria had initiated in Lebanon developed into Baathist Iraq’s full-scale invasion of Kuwait.
Year after year, the suffering of religious and ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, Assyrians, and Arab Jews, moved from the peripheries and margins toward the center and core, becoming either explicit or implicit "national policy."
One might argue, and rightly so, that this trajectory fed on a global shift that did not favor nation-states, preceded by the conclusion of the Cold War, which had previously guaranteed the stability of some maps, if not all of them. Nevertheless, the fundamental issue is the failure of these particular countries when they were immersed in radical politics. Their peoples were burdened with more than they could bear, ferociously testing their fragile unity. After Israel had been the only country conjoined with erasure and elimination in the political Arab language, we now find erosion and severance, if not erasure and elimination, menacingly knocking on the doors of our countries.
Accordingly, a revision of these historical episodes remains absolutely necessary. Without it, we cannot rectify the existing polities that are wobbling today, thereby maintaining them, nor can we ensure that breaking them apart is done in the most civilized and least bloody way possible. It is apparent that, unless it notes the crucial fact that has largely been overlooked by the mainstream political culture of the Levant, this reassessment will remain inadequate.
Indeed, the many forms of state collapse in this region were achieved in the name of various "causes," at the hands of ideological police states, both nationalist and religious, who worked hand in hand with armed factions that competed with the existing authorities and aspired to replace them.
The more bitter pill to swallow is that state collapse and indifference to national communities’ unity were aspects of the broad popular mood for a long time. In 1958, for example, Syria was gifted to Nasser, and when it regained its independence in 1961, its "secession" was broadly seen to be deeply embarrassing. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003, decisions of Iraqi sovereignty were handed to Iran. As for the genocidal acts that ISIS subsequently perpetrated after having merged Syrian and Iraqi territory, they were not condemned any more broadly than the genocidal acts that the Baathists had perpetrated against Iraqi and Syrian communities.
The colonial era and the years of notable rule that followed independence were the two foundational stages of states and homelands. These two historical phases had many errors and flaws, but the process of disintegration and fragmentation that has taken hold of the region cannot be placed into them. This allows us to conclude, as countless cases have shown, that the very existence of states and homelands hinges on the rule of conservative - even if they are colonial - regimes. Meanwhile, the threat of erosion, severance, or perhaps even annihilation, is left to so-called "national liberation" politics.
Today, it seems more than a little telling that the Gaza Strip, even before having fully emerged on the other side of genocidal hell, finds itself facing domestic strife that has aggravated the obscurity that had already surrounded the Strip's future. It is as though everything being said about a shared destiny born of camaraderie in battle against a shared enemy amounts to nothing more than a deeply harmful myth.
In this way, stressing that Israel seeks to seize territory from neighboring countries and form a broad security belt has come to seem like a competition to seize no man’s land with no political content - a race between a selfish and ferocious state, and selfish authorities projecting ferocity. Caught between the two, civilian victims are crushed.
