The tragedy of the modern Middle East is that no solution has been found for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire, which imploded in the wake of the First World War, controlled a vast geographical region known as Greater Syria. Greater Syria had no legal basis but everyone was able to identify it. It was the sprawling territory south of the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey and north of the Nefud Desert in Arabia. It included the present-day countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and part of Iraq. There were relatively few arguments or battles over who controlled what territory since everywhere in Greater Syria was part of the Ottoman Sultan’s domain. Thus, the Ottoman Empire, while it lasted, solved a problem that would bedevil the entire 20th century into the 21st.
The problem of Greater Syria still hasn’t been solved. With the recent collapse of an Alawite regime thanks to Sunni Islamist groups – sectarian factionalism the Ottomans assuaged by their imperial control – it remains to this day at the root of modern Syria’s dilemma.
The immediate solution to the Ottoman collapse was the British and French colonial mandate systems over Greater Syria, with the French creating a truncated Syrian state after Lebanon, essentially given over to the French-speaking Maronite Christians, had been carved out from it. The British created and controlled what became Israel/Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. Though today’s academic and journalistic elite may consider all of this rank imperialism that denied subject peoples their right of self-governance, the reality was that the French and British provided a semblance of order where before there had been none in the immediate wake of the Ottoman demise. Syria, especially in the interwar decade and despite French efforts, was a place of armed local groups and little real governance outside of the capital of Damascus. Without the French, there might have been sheer anarchy.
The aftermath of the Second World War brought independence for much of Greater Syria. But rather than democracy or even enlightened dictatorship, there was the dismal reality of newly born banana republics, prone to repeated coup d’états. In the first quarter-century after independence in 1946, Syria experienced 21 changes of government, almost all of them extralegal, and ten military coups. It would take Hafez al-Assad’s coup in 1970, ushering in an altogether brutal and systematised regime, backed by Soviet and East German security and torture technology, to establish order.
In Iraq in 1958 the Hashemite royal family, its servants and the prime minister were murdered in the most bestial fashion, ushering in a series of violence-prone, incompetent dictators culminating in Saddam Hussein in the 1970s. Lebanon collapsed into civil war in 1975, and recovered for a time only in the 1990s thanks to the overlordship of Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. There was never any middle ground for normal politics in these countries. It was either rule by the imperial master from outside, by the sword and torture chamber from inside or outright anarchy. And all this was before the grinding years of blood-curdling chaos in Syria and Iraq in the 21st century.
What did change the Middle East in these malignant decades was the Iranian Revolution. Iran is not Arab. It is descended from historic Persia, an urbanised, culturally contiguous and geographically coherent civilisation. Likewise, in 1979, Iran did not experience some desultory and ramshackle coup mixed with chaos, as occurred so often in Syria and Iraq, but a world-historical revolution that replaced a long-standing and absolute monarchy with a clerical dictatorship replete with an ideology of its own that took absolute power the moment the Shah left the country. Iran in time proceeded to create a proxy military complex, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, even as it exercised imperial influence over Iraq in the wake of the ill-conceived American invasion. Iran also played the role of imperial overseer in Syria in the latter years of Hafez al-Assad’s rule; an influence that only deepened under the rule of his son, Bashar al-Assad, who, counterintuitively, was as weak-minded an individual as he was murderous.
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 unwittingly began a process to change all this. The ferocious, intimate violence of the attack itself, the worst on Jews since the Holocaust, was emblematic of the fascistic minds that had ruled Gaza. And the fury that Israel has unleashed since 7 October has gone a long way to ending Iranian imperialism in Greater Syria. Gaza has been reduced to rubble. Lebanon in the wake of Hezbollah’s near collapse is somewhat relieved of a burden but barely exists as a state. Meanwhile, the West Bank is riven by extremist gangs, reacting in turn to the violence of Jewish settlers, beneath the carapace of the Palestinian Authority’s sclerotic rule. Iraq, though it has been slowly recovering from two decades of violence, still barely functions. And Jordan is a tenuous, albeit longstanding fiction: propped up by American political support, by the Israeli intelligence establishment and by Gulf Arab money, since nobody in the Arab world wants a long border with Israel – that is the real function that Jordan serves, even as it goes unspoken. Add to all this the weakening of the Iranian regime itself: with the defeat of its imperial proxies, with critical damage inflicted on it by Israeli military attacks, and with the overwhelming unpopularity of clerical rule.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Colonial Britain and France once filled that vacuum. So have the Iranians in their malevolent way. But Iran, as we all know, is weakening, thanks to relentless Israeli military aggression. Russia is also weakened and China is mainly interested in trade not military occupation. The American people have no appetite left for Middle East policing, and located half-a-world away, have little national interest in it. There is only tragically Israel, which has the military means and a vital national interest to patrol its region.
If the past years and decades are any measure – and, in fact, it is the only measure we have – there will probably be an Israeli military presence of some sort in Gaza and the West Bank for many years to come. Lebanon, moreover, may never be able to defend its territory, leaving the Israelis to, in some fashion, militarily control and/or monitor the country’s south. The recent Sunni jihadist conquest of Syria does not necessarily herald democracy or perhaps not even order in Syria – it is simply too soon to tell – but it is only the latest chapter in a sectarian and regional struggle that has engulfed Syria since the French left almost 80 years ago, with the elder Assad’s regime providing a decades-long armistice at a horrific price in terms of human rights. Israel will not occupy these vast territories. But it may very well militarily intervene in them through air and intelligence operations to protect its interests, even as it remains the dominant military force in Gaza and the West Bank. A new, democratic Iran down the road could fundamentally help this Israeli project.
A Greater Israel will not necessarily calm the violent confusion of historical Greater Syria. But it could provide a semblance of order where it would not otherwise exist. I say this with a sense of deep sadness. Occupation and imperial meddling is not healthy for societies. It will coarsen Israeli public life even as it puts untold burdens on its citizen military. Human rights violations on the part of the Israelis will become the normal part of the imperial process, and anti-Semitism in the West will be further entrenched as a result. But, in geopolitical terms, the historical record points towards a Greater Israel. It would not be a replacement for the Ottoman Empire, surely, but it may be Greater Syria’s only alternative to a new age of anarchy.
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