On ‘The Arab Levant,' ‘The World,' and Israel

Asharq Al-Awsat

18-03-2025

The relationship between "the Arab Levant" and "the world," in modern times, has not been a friendly one. 'The world," here, refers the West and its states- that is, the Atlantic World, while "the Arab Levant" primarily refers to the Palestinian cause as it was manufactured by military and security juntas, and for many years (since the late 1960s), the Palestine Liberation Organization.
True, this binary is reductive of both notions: "The world" is not just the West, while "the Levant" is more than the aforementioned Arab forces and their sole declared cause. Nonetheless, it is also true that "the world," to the Arab world, was the politically influential West, which also had its impact on our economy, education, and technologies- and there is also the region's colonial past or the lifestyles and cultural images its people find desirable. As for the struggle with Israel, it has been the ultimate driver of our stated approach to questions that are not necessarily linked to this struggle. Thus, the theory of "dealing with the world based on its position on the Palestinian cause" prevailed for decades, not just in the Levant but throughout the Arab world. The most significant material translation of this theory was the oil embargo imposed on the countries that supported Israel during the 1973 October War. Indeed, this consensus reading was engendered by a mix of sympathy for the victims of the Palestinian tragedy, lingering pan-Arab nationalist jargon, and acquiescence to various armed factions' blackmail of violence and terrorism. To many Arab states and vast segments of their population (at the very least those who believed nascent states' policies should primarily revolve around their internal), the centrality of the Palestinian cause has always seemed somewhat bizarre.
This troubled relationship between 'the world' and 'the Levant' reminded many of how polities' sons had rebelled against the father who had established these polities. After World War I, the former rejected the notion of European mandates over their territory, the Balfour Declaration, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, concluding that the promises of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence had been nothing but a ruse. After World War II, they were outraged by the suffering of the Palestinians and rejected the partition of Palestine that both the Eastern and Western blocs had endorsed. While the Arabs' nationalist uprising had been reprehensible in the eyes of "the world,' it was placed in the same category as similar uprisings in Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of Latin America, which were all absorbed into the framework of the Cold War. After the eventual disintegration of Nasserism and its subsequent degeneration into Assadism, Saddamism, and Qaddafism, figures like Bin Laden and his many brothers became rising stars; this radical rebellion, which was presented as unique to Muslims alone, became incomprehensible. At this stage, the frame of rebellious sons and fathers was no longer fit for purpose, as the new insurgents regressed to the distant past of their forefathers, making a clean break with the world that had been set up by the Western father and challenged by a failed Levantine father.
Nonetheless, the "Middle East crisis" remained intractable over both phases of the rebellion, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 failed to turn the page on a dark chapter and open another that had been qualified white.
Today, in any case, almost nothing is the same, and this is a moment when successive shifts are redefining the very original and primordial notions of things. The "world" now includes China, though its presence remains piecemeal and limited relative to the West. More importantly, the Atlantic universe, especially with Donald Trump's in power, is splitting in two: a populist, nationalist US and the European struggling to defend their liberalism as strange, and unfamiliar custom ways of doing and seeing things, including international relations, take shape...
In turn, the "Arab Levant" is also being torn apart which might not be new but is certainly unfamiliar. The Palestinian cause is not what it once was, and more consequently, the Maghreb, the Gulf, the Levant, Egypt, and Sudan have each taken their own path. These paths may intersect at some points, but they are nonetheless independent and self-contained, with each continuing to reassert its distinction.
It seems that the discord between the "world" and the "Levant" has not negated a shared alignment behind the ascendency of the nineteenth century. Since Trump's inaugural address, a lot has been written about his admiration for President William McKinley, who governed the United States from 1897 to 1901, when he was assassinated. McKinley, a tariff enthusiast whom Trump called a "great president," is famous for, among other things, waging the Spanish-American War and pursuing an expansionist policy that led to the annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hawaii.
In the Levant, with the explosion of minority issues that are tied up in regional and international politics, recollections of the "Eastern Question" have flourished. Triggered by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the race to obtain what it left behind, the Eastern Question rose to the fore following the Greek uprising of 1820, before peaking with the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Balkan Crisis (1875–1878), and then culminating in the Balkan Wars (1912–1913).
If parallels with the past are depressing in general, one painful outcome remains highly likely: Israel will benefit most, reaping equal gains whether from the "world" and the "Arab Levant" grow further apart or more similar.