[ENGLISH.AAWSAT] After the First World War, the states in the Arab Levant were established. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed during that war, and the winners had to organize these immense numbers of people and territories by establishing new states. The British and French mandates made some good and bad decisions here and there. They gave primacy to their interests at some junctures and bowed to the reality on ground at others. In all of this, the most important thing was that we became part of nations and states. It is only through them that we can exist and function in the world; without them, the path to modernity is closed to us.Many knives were drawn to stab this major development: those whose pride prevented them from accepting a foreign rule, those whose memories refused to forget the Ottoman era, those whose attachment to their familiar lives compelled them to refuse a different way of life, and those whose fanaticism drove them to reject the principle of equality among citizens. All of them rejected the newly established countries, oblivious to the will of the First World War’s victors and that of the League of Nations they had formed. Making things worse, no alternatives were offered by those who despised these artificial states while the Sherifian state in Damascus was withering and rotting.
Nevertheless, the rejection of those states and the call to merge one with the other shaped the souls of the political parties that sprang and the discourse that prevailed in the Arab Levant. The establishment of Israel in 1948 intensified this opposition: the sum of states- as those with a mere arithmetic awareness saw it- is more capable of crushing the newly established entity than divided states.