Liberal Rhetoric and Colonial Violence, 1920–1939

The third chapter looks at the imposition of European colonial rule via the mandates system in the former Arab provinces. It focuses particularly on the League of Nations’ formal legitimization of European colonial rule across the region and Zionist settlement in Palestine, and the subsequent creation and enforcement of new communal and ethnic identities through new colonial legal and political systems across the mandate territories. Though many varieties of nationalist resistance to colonial occupation and mandate authority emerged during this period, the successes of the Zionist movement in Palestine and the ethno-communal legal and political structures of all the mandate states served to encourage the emergence of communally based political organization as a primary mode of anti-colonial resistance.

The Violence of World War, 1914–1920

This chapter investigates the unfolding of the war in the Arab provinces, examining how imperial reforms morphed into extreme violence as the Ottoman state enacted genocidal campaigns against Armenians and practiced political repression against Arab activists while European forces invaded, blockaded, and occupied the famine-stricken Levant. It focuses in particular on the rather sudden delegitimization of Ottoman authority in the Mashriq as a consequence of the multiple Allied invasions; the Committee of Union and Progress’s emerging policies of mass conscription, material requisitioning, and political repression in greater Syria and the Iraqi provinces, symbolized particularly by the public executions in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916. It also articulates how the Allied military campaigns in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine aimed not only to defeat the Ottomans but also to establish the outlines of a postcolonial absorption of these territories and their resources into the British and French Empires.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the main question of the book: how did mass violence come to be a primary—perhaps the primary—mode of making political claims in the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East? It asks when mass violence became a constitutive aspect of the political landscape of the region, why it took precedence over other strategies of state building and establishing political authority, and how governments, armies, and civilians alike came to think of mass violence as a viable and legitimate mode of claiming political space and national rights. Drawing on several different and largely separate historiographies, this introduction argues, makes it possible to produce a synthetic account of violence in the twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean that takes account of regional developments as much as individual national histories.

Violence and the New Internationalism, 1988–2003

This chapter looks at the first intifada—a grassroots resistance movement that emerged in the West Bank and Gaza in late 1987 and showed considerable promise before being crushed by Israeli military might. Its collapse also coincided with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, marking the beginning of a new American tactic of supposed humanitarian concern for ethnically or communally defined victims of a regime as a pretext for military action intended to ensure resource access, especially to oil. These arguments for and practices of occupation not only invigorated and intensified internal ethnic and communal tensions within the Iraqi state, but also fueled new forms of Islamist opposition that had never before flourished in the Mashriq.

Money, Arms, and the New Sectarian Violence, 1967–1988

This chapter looks at the international channeling of money and weaponry into local and regional politics in the context of the Cold War and the ways these Cold War formulations articulated and defined new identitarian blocs. It focuses on two regional phenomena: first, the sectarianization of the nominally Ba‘thist regimes in Syria and Iraq, their search for external partners as they sought control over state resources and expanded their military capacities, and their delegitimization of political opponents through domestically and internationally directed narratives of sectarian and Islamist resistance to their authority; and second, the violent intensification of ethnically and communally based political blocs in Israel and Lebanon in the late 1970s, as the United States moved beyond indirect influence to thoroughly involve itself in the affairs of each of these states as a way to maintain strategic access to the region as a whole and especially its oil supplies.

The Late Ottoman Practice of Violence, 1878–1914

This chapter surveys developments within the late Ottoman state. It begins by exploring communal relations during the period of tanzimat reforms, going on to investigate how the takeover of the Ottoman state by a group of military politicians from Salonika, their attempted centralization and territorialization of the Ottoman state as a response to the Balkan losses, and the European ethnicization of imperial intervention—not yet fully evident in the Arab provinces but certainly becoming clear in the Balkans and the Caucasus—served to shape the consciousness of Arab political elites and formed the backdrop to later expressions of political violence in the Mashriq.

Epilogue The Triumph of Violence in the Middle East

This final chapter offers the opportunity to think about the ways in which external powers have repeatedly and consistently made use of the Middle East to declare their participation in discursively liberal political formulations whose practice on the ground emerged as illiberal, antidemocratic, and focused on the extraction and exploitation of material resources. This long history of simultaneous appropriation of and violent opposition to liberalizing political agendas, from both within and without, serves as an important backdrop for contemporary developments—for instance, the slide from broadly based pro-democracy demonstrations to the violent reassertion of authoritarianism in the recent “Arab Spring.”

Militarization and Violence in the Postcolonial State, 1949–1967

The end of the 1948 war marked a new era across the Mashriq in which postcolonial actors from Israel to Iraq to Syria consolidated their gains through the creation of forms of state rule centered on violence, increasingly directed against internal enemies. Despite their mutual antagonism and their very different—indeed, actively oppositional—paths to nation-statehood, Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in many ways followed similar trajectories during the subsequent two decades: they all became ethnically and communally defined nations in which postcolonial administrations enforced boundaries of citizenship and political belonging through the deliberate deployment of state violence against particular communities—defined both ethnically and politically—within their borders. This institutionalization of violence at the heart of the postcolonial state unfolded in a context of continued British, French, and, increasingly, Soviet and American intervention in the economic and political life of the Mashriq.

Violence and the Ethnic Nation-State, 1939–1949

In the Mashriq, the Second World War saw not only the British reoccupation of territory as insurance against Axis expansionism, and the French doubling down on colonial claims to land, resources, and people, but also an ongoing battle—sometimes literally—between these competing European concepts of postwar empire, both of which made use of local iterations of ethnicity, religion, and nationhood to bolster particular visions of ongoing imperial possession. This appropriation of communal identities for imperial purposes culminated in the war for Palestine in 1948, which resulted in the mass dispossession of the Palestinians and the foundation of a Jewish state of Israel—a confirmation of the ethno-national state as the primary mode of political organization in the modern global order.