This past week, I travelled to Iowa to deliver remarks on Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the First World War. Instead of comments typical of the day, focusing on those young soldiers who served, fought and died, my remarks dealt with the impact of that war – on the people of the Arab world and the Arab American community. I titled my speech: “How ‘the war to end all wars’ planted the seeds for a century of conflict.”
Beginning in the last half of the nineteenth century, the US experienced a flood of immigrants from Europe and the Mediterranean regions. Many found the freedoms and opportunities this new land had promised, but it was the First World War that gave many a sense of belonging, of being fully American.
In the lobby of the clubhouse for the Lebanese American community in Peoria, Illinois, hang framed photos of that community’s members who served in the military in the two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The Lebanese of Peoria are proud of their service to America, and you can see that pride in the faces of the young boys in the photos. Similar photos can be seen in Italian and Greek centres around the US.
But the truth is that the very same patriotic fervour the war generated in these new immigrant communities morphed into a wave of xenophobia that ultimately victimised them. What began as targeting of German immigrants expanded to those ‘more foreign’ than the majority population of northern Europeans. Italians, Greeks and Syrians (the generic term used to refer to Arabs from the Levant) were especially targeted. There were attacks and lynchings, and legislation passed to limit and then eliminate immigration from the Mediterranean region. (The senator who led this effort famously said, “We don’t need any more Syrian trash in America”).
This exclusion of new immigrants lasted for a generation, resulting in family separation, fear and hardship for hundreds of thousands of immigrant families.
Many disastrous decisions were made by the First World War’s victors, including crippling and humiliating reparations imposed on Germany that paved the way for Nazism and the next world war. But we mustn’t forget the actions of victorious European countries that had devastating consequences for the Middle East. Most important was the betrayal of their commitment to the Arabs to recognise a unitary Arab state in the Levant if the Arabs joined the Allies’ effort, opening a southern front against the Ottomans. Instead, the British and French connived to divide the region among themselves, dismembering the Arab East into ‘states’ with borders that never before existed. The British made a separate promise to the still-fledging Zionist movement to reward them with Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Arguing that the Arabs weren’t ready for self-rule, the British and French arranged to receive mandates to design and impose governments in the newly carved-up areas.
The US administration countered this British/French scheming by arguing that the Arabs should have a say in their own future. President Wilson commissioned a massive survey of Arab opinion, finding that majorities opposed the partitions, mandates and a separate Jewish homeland. The British rejected the findings saying that the Arabs’ opinions were unimportant.
One hundred years later, the world is still living with the consequences of those arrogant and self-serving European decisions that so disastrously transformed the Middle East. When politicians in the West ask: “Why is the Middle East a cauldron of conflict?” The answer is in the way the region was manhandled after the war. Far from ‘the war to end all wars’, the British and French literally created the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as other sectarian and regional conflicts.
A famous newspaper headline from Armistice Day in 1918 calls November 11th ‘The Greatest Day in Human History’. President Donald Trump’s declaration that the signing of the Israel/Hamas peace was “the greatest day in human history” is more than a bit ironic. This recent war, like the First World War, and the ‘peace agreement’ that followed may also lead not to peace, but to another century of war.
The lesson is clear: War doesn’t end conflict. Only justice can do that. The Trump plan and Israeli behaviours, like the European plans and actions at the First World War’s end, are destined for the same fate.
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