This past week, as guest of a veterans’ group, I travelled to Iowa to deliver remarks on Armistice Day, on November 11, the day commemorating the end of the First World War in 1918.
Instead of offering comments typical of the day, focusing on those young soldiers who served, fought and died, my remarks dealt with the impact of that war – in particular on the people of the Arab world, and on 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 19th 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 club house for the Lebanese-American community in Peoria, Illinois, there are framed group photos of that community’s members who served in the military in America’s wars. There are photos from the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, as well as the wars in 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. The same sorts of photos can be seen in Italian and Greek centres around the US.
But the truth is that the very same patriotic fervour that the war generated in these new immigrant communities morphed into a wave of xenophobia that ultimately victimised them.
It began with the targeting of German immigrants, but it grew to strike out at those who were “more foreign” than the majority population of northern Europeans. Italians, Greeks and Syrians (that was 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.
This exclusion of new immigrants from these countries lasted for a generation resulting in family separation, fear and hardship for hundreds of thousands of immigrant families.
There were many disastrous decisions made by the victorious allies at the end of the First World War. Most noted by historians were the crippling and humiliating reparations imposed on Germany that paved the way for Nazism and the next world war.
But what must never be forgotten are the actions taken by the victorious European countries that had devastating consequences for the Middle East.
Most important was their betrayal of the commitment made to the Arabs to recognise a unitary Arab state in the Levant if the Arabs joined the Allies’ effort and opened a southern front against the Ottoman Empire. Instead, the British and French connived to divide the region among themselves.
They dismembered the Arab East into “states” with borders that never before existed, with the British making a separate promise to the still fledging Zionist movement to reward them with Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Arguing that the Arabs were not ready for self-rule, the British and French arranged to receive mandates to design and impose governments in the areas they had carved up to meet their needs.
The US administration countered this British-French scheming by arguing that the Arabs should have a say in their own future. And so, then-president Woodrow Wilson commissioned a huge survey of Arab opinion, which found that absolute majorities opposed the partitions, opposed the mandates, and opposed a separate Jewish homeland. The British rejected the findings saying that the opinions of the Arabs were not important to them.
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 First World War.
Far from being “the war to end all wars”, as it was called, the British and French literally created the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as other sectarian and regional conflicts.
There is a famous newspaper headline from Armistice Day in 1918. It calls November 11 “The Greatest Day in Human History”. I don’t know if current US President Donald Trump was thinking of that headline when he declared the signing of the Israel-Hamas peace “the greatest day in human history”. Whether or not he did, there’s more than a bit of irony here precisely because 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 ought to be clear: war doesn’t end conflict. Only justice can do that. And the Trump plan and Israeli behaviour, like the European plans and actions at the end of the First World War, are destined for the same fate.
I often think back to the proud faces of those young boys in that Peoria picture. They were faultless in their patriotism. But their sacrifices were betrayed.
