Thrust out of their Ottoman embrace, Arabs and Jews followed Turks in filling the vacuum with a notional ethnic nationalism.
In the empire’s twilight years, Istanbul was abuzz with lawyers and students from across the region, imbibing the nationalism of the Young Turks and applying it to their own kind. Like the Young Turks, they were Westernized, secular, and overwhelmingly anti-religious. They aspired to supplant the empire’s religious-based hierarchies with new exclusively ethnic ones, give their religious communities a territorial base and thereby assume power. In the secret societies they formed they plotted the dissection of the empire, creating new societies from old, and crafting Zionism out of Judaism and Arab nationalism out of Islam. Before he took the name of Ben-Gurion, David Grün attended the law schools in Salonika and Istanbul where Turkish ideologues were fashinoning the new nationalism. Studying with him were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s future second president, and Israel Shochat, the founder of the second Zionist movement’s militia arm, Hashomer, and together they studied in Ottoman Turkish and developed a young Jewish variant of the Young Turks’ program. Though charier of dismantling the world’s last major Muslim power, Arab nationalists formed al-Muntada al-Adabi, or the literary forum, with branches in Syria and Iraq.
Western powers gave them succor, wise to the advantages of fostering dependencies in the former empire. Drawing on the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, which had championed the defense of minority rights in Europe, they encouraged indigenous populations to slough off the yoke of occupying Turks. Britain gave sanctuary to Arab nationalists in Cairo, and France hosted the Arab Congress in Paris in 1913. Having conquered the Middle East in the final throes of the First World War, the two powers began demarcating the former Ottoman Empire along sectarian lines. Syria’s French governors divided Syria between the Sunnis in the country’s central spine running from Aleppo to Damascus and a host of other minorities on its fringe. Lebanon was hived off from Syria and entrusted to Christian rule in 1920. The Alawites were assigned a state in the mountains above Latakia, and the Druze their fiefdom in their mountain, Jebel Druze, in the south. Britain promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine.
The paradox is that while the Second World War exposed the danger of unfettered nationalism and resulted in the creation of anti-national, federal models in Europe, it precipitated the opposite in the Middle East. The Zionist movement’s transfer of the Palestinian population fell short of the Young Turks’ level of violence, but, combined with the chaos of war, it led to a similar change in the ethnic balance. By the end of the 1948 war, around 80 percent of the Palestinian population had left the new state of Israel. The new prime minister, Ben-Gurion, herded most of the remnants into demarcated enclosures and kept them under military rule until most of their land had been appropriated and their historic towns and villages reduced to rubble. Israeli leaders denied Palestinian loss and criminalized commemoration of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, in public places. They promoted the mass ingathering of their co-religionists from across Europe and the Middle East to consolidate their majority.
Arab nationalists, too, forcibly sought to establish new nation-states, replacing the Ottoman reality of a diverse and composite empire with the monochrome ideal of “an Arab world.” For the most part, they preferred to achieve unity through assimilation rather than expulsion. They rewrote the histories of non-Arabs, renamed their towns and hills, and treated non-Arabic languages as alien. History textbooks celebrated a classical golden age of Islam that only began to rust when incoming Turkish mercenaries diluted Arab armies under the ninth-century Abbasid caliph al-Mu’tasim. Iraq’s Ba’ath Party launched successive campaigns of Arabization, called al-Anfal (the spoils), replacing Kurds with Shias from the south. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi branded the Berbers “mountain Arabs” and banned their language, Tamazight.
Like the Young Turks, Arab nationalists were initially inclusive of other religions. Michel Aflaq, the secular intellectual who founded the Ba’ath Party, was Christian. His call to replace the confessional basis of statehood with ethnic Arab kinship appealed to non-Muslims, particularly those entering the armed forces, which tradition and Islamic legal codes deemed an exclusively Sunni domain. As they rose through the military ranks, minorities in Syria and Iraq captured the core of the state. “The state for all, and religion for God,” ran the slogan of the Ba’ath Party, which sought to restrict religion to the personal sphere.
But that religious inclusivity faced challenges from the first. Aflaq had noted the overlap between religion and ethnicity. “The strength of Islam, which in the past expressed that of the Arabs, has been reborn and has appeared in a new form,” he once remarked: “Arab nationalism.” The Arab response to the Jewish conquest of Muslim land exposed and exacerbated the sectarian impulse lurking behind the new nationalism. While they quickly withdrew their armies from the battles in Palestine, the new Arab states turned on their own Jewish communities, imposing increasingly harsh conditions until the Jews surrendered their citizenship and left. Seventy years on, much of the Arab world still bears the scars. Before 1948, Jews comprised a quarter of Tripoli’s population, concentrated in the Old City’s Jewish quarter. Today the neighborhood lies crumbling alongside the towering edifice of the Corinthia, Africa’s largest hotel. Much like the northern reaches of Jaffa, neighborhoods have been flattened to make way for car parks. The roof of the main synagogue has collapsed, its sides are propped up with wooden slats, and two tablets inscribed in Hebrew with the Ten Commandments and two Stars of David wobble on its facade. “Shit, it’s gone,” bemoaned my guide, a conservationist, when he failed to find the chief rabbi’s house. The makings of a gray garish villa stood in its place, the cement still wet on its walls. “We were a cosmopolitan Mediterranean city, once,” he said.
The exodus of some 700,000 Jews from cities across the Arab world sounded the alarm bell for other religious minorities. “After Saturday, Sunday,” Christians told each other across the region.