Syria submits: they want the state of Allah, not a nation state

Many years ago, in the streets of Ramallah, two men were looking for a place to hide from tear gas. A local, Tzahor Peyia and Galbiya, invited them to his home, treated them to coffee and sweets, and gave them a piece of advice: “Beware of Arabs, please only believe in Muslims.”

The guests smiled awkwardly. They were in Ramallah to express opposition to the re-closing of Bir Zeit University by the military government. It came back and was closed because it was a nationalist hotbed, a place where the inspiration of the Popular Front, or some front, served.

This was the time when Israel waged its existential struggles mainly against leftists, Marxists, agents of Moscow. Religious campuses did not particularly bother her. If anything, they were a welcome counterweight. By the way, not only her. The US then invested millions of dollars, unknowingly, in the creation of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. It did so for the benefit of the struggle (just in itself) against the Soviet occupation.

The tear gas refugees in Ramallah did not know that in the Palestinian territories, or in fact in the entire Middle East, a long-standing enmity of pure Islam towards (more or less) secular nationalism is bubbling under the surface. Even if they knew, it is doubtful whether they would be able to draw practical political conclusions. They acquired their political education at a time when Israelis considered Gamal Abdel Nasser the greatest source of existential danger. Finally he wanted to unite the whole ‘Arab nation’. The words ‘Pan-Arabism’ threatened Israel and the West at the time in much the same way that Islamism threatens the inhabitants of the 21st century.

The martyr and the nation

The meeting described above in Ramallah, in 1981, was almost forgotten by its participants. An association awakened the memory: the instruction of the Syrian Ministry of Education, the one that serves the revolutionary government in Damascus from the foundation of al-Qaeda. The ministry ordered the textbooks to be purged of the “Syrian nation” and to replace the “nation” with “Allah”. The martyr, according to the new text, is not the one who fights for the good of the nation and falls in its defense, but rather the one who sacrifices his soul for the good of God Almighty.

I am using ‘nation’ here in its Hebrew sense, not ‘nation’ in Arabic, which refers to the community of believers, between which and ‘nation’ there is almost nothing. The concept of ‘national’ belonging is a foreign import, which began to seep into the Middle East on the occasion of the meeting with European imperialism, at the end of the 19th century. All the classifications that seem national to us were until then geographical.

Islam’s hand fell short in stopping the West, and a debate arose about the nature of the necessary reform to forge its opposition. Does Islam need reform? Does this reform involve ‘innovations’, which are prohibited from Daurita (by the prophet himself)? Or maybe modernization requires wholesale borrowing from the winners?

The entire building collapsed in 1918, along with the Ottoman Empire. She was first of all a Muslim. Throughout its existence it avoided national identification. In the Sultan’s court, ‘Turkish’ was a derogatory word. But when the European victors of the First World War brought out the cutlery to carve out the empire and swallow its guts, the Muslim generals, the longtime miracle bearers of jihad, returned and revealed their hidden nationalism.

The defeated empire shrunk to the urban area of ​​Istanbul. Anatolia was about to be divided between Armenians, Greeks and Italians. The jihadists therefore shed the multi-national glorification of their predecessors, gave up the pretensions of being a light to the heathen and caliphs to the believers, and decided to settle for a Turkish nation-state, without Damascus and Aleppo and Baghdad and Mosul. They were incredibly successful. Instead of God Almighty they had Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

“Seeds in pit soil”

A prominent Egyptian intellectual of the middle of the 20th century, Muhammad Hossein Haychel, spoke of the heart of the Egyptians to follow the path of Atatürk, and adopt the Western tools. in vain “Despite all my efforts,” he later wrote, “I realized that I had sown seeds in pit soil. Even when the soil absorbed them, they did not bear any fruit.”

Arab military officers actually responded to the early temple. Atatürk’s likenesses arose in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Libya. The surge of nationalism swept everything away. In May 1967, there was a step between ‘Pan-Arabism’ and the realization of their destiny. The Arab nationalists did not give up, even after their victorious defeat to Israel, but their retreat began.

Israel did not notice this change. She added looking for Muslim allies in the region. In the 1960s, it supported the Shiite monarchists in the civil war in Yemen, against the Nazarite nationalists. It’s hard to believe, but until the mid-1980s Israel even believed that Iran would relent, and return to the de facto alliance against the common Arab nationalist enemy.

20 years later, Eric Sharon considered the advantage of the destruction of the Palestinian Authority much greater than the disadvantage of the rise of Hamas. He reflected a sharp misunderstanding, since a long time ago he tasked Prof. Menachem Milson with finding an alternative to the PLO in the West Bank villages. Sharon deserves special credit for evacuating Lebanon from the PLO, for the benefit of Iran’s strategic interests.

An enormous blindness struck Israel. Even though the terrible folly of the Galilee Peace War has already faded, even for its initiators and approvers, here is its genetic code working its way into the national bone marrow, on the way down to a ‘deterred Hamas’.

Arab nationalism has ceased to be a serious option in some part of the Middle East. Ironically, the aforementioned Ramallah is the last place in the entire Middle East where there is any chance of a non-Islamist option. Israel is working to eliminate it.