RescueRanger
Meme Lord
So again, who have we to blame? There’s an amazing book called “How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs” by Elizabeth Thompson that describes a constitutional convention held in Damascus in 1920 that was composed of delegates — all men — from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine.
They hammer out a compromise among the different groups represented, forging a pluralistic constitutional monarchy. They declare independence and name Faisal, who had partnered with T.E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt during World War I, king of this nascent Arab Kingdom. That summer, the French sent an army into the kingdom and defeated it. Faisal was forced to flee from Syria to British-mandated Palestine.
The legacy of the resistance encountered by the British and the French continues to shape the region. Since the Arab uprising in 2011, we’ve seen the reemergence of fracture points in places where people have pushed to achieve a new post-Ottoman identity that had been suppressed by the British, the French, and, in some cases, by the Turks.
The Kurds are at the nexus of this reemergence as they continue to fight for their own nation state. There is the ongoing civil war in Syria. That’s a country where various groups were vying for power during the 1920s. Of course, the Israel-Palestine issue remains unresolved. The situation in Libya remains unresolved.
These are echoes of conflicts from a century ago that are resonating again in the present. It shows that the situation in the Middle East is the result of local interactions and conflicts, not Western diplomats sitting in Paris and drawing lines on a map.
