Holiday From History · Part One · The Myth of Order · Chapter 3
“In the drawing of boundary lines absurd complications have arisen through failure to conceive the practical geography of a region. Under some general formula like self-determination statesmen have at various times drawn lines on maps, which, when surveyed on the spot, ran through the middle of a factory, down the center of a village street, diagonally across the nave of a church, or between the kitchen and bedroom of a peasant's cottage. There have been frontiers in a grazing country which separated pasture from water, pasture from market, and in an industrial country, railheads from railroad. On the colored ethnic map the line was ethnically just, that is to say, just in the world of that ethnic map.” (Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922) - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)
About the book. On October 7, 2023, Israel paid the bill for thirty years of Western complacency in a single morning. Holiday From History is the forensic account: how the post-Cold War West convinced itself history had ended, why the warnings did not break the spell, and what the collapse now reveals about the institutions meant to defend free nations.
Read the book from the start: Holiday From History on Guerre & Shalom
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About the author. Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute and publisher of Israel Brief. He is the author of Rooted Truth, serialised here on Guerre & Shalom, Rooted in Judea, and Letters Across the Table.
Chapter 3: Maps and Masks
In 1915 a British official traced a neat line across a wartime map and proposed a border “from the ‘E’ in Acre to the last ‘K’ in Kirkuk.” A finger flick. A future. Imperial cartography worked like that: rulers and pens in London and Paris, peoples and consequences somewhere else.
Europe had long confused states with nations. A state is a government with borders. A nation is a people with shared identity. In Europe the two brawled their way into rough alignment. In the Ottoman East, officials tried to conjure nations by decree. They assumed identities would kindly grow to fit the lines.
They did not.
In 1916 Britain and France signed Sykes–Picot, a secret plan to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.1 Oil, canals, rails, prestige — those were the motives. The lines cut across tribes and sects with cheerful indifference. After 1918, San Remo and Cairo turned the sketch into mandates. Britain took Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. France took Syria and Lebanon. These were administrative inventions wearing national costumes.
Ottoman Iraq had been three provinces: Mosul, Baghdad, Basra. London fused them into one kingdom to secure Mesopotamian oil and a land bridge to the Mediterranean. The result bundled Sunni Arabs, Shi‘a Arabs, and Kurds under one flag. A Sunni monarchy sat atop a Shi‘a majority and a large Kurdish minority. The state functioned when force was abundant and identity suppressed. When Saddam fell in 2003, the mask slipped. Civil war followed. The Kurds moved toward de facto independence. ISIS thrived where the map had never matched the people.
France split the Syria mandate into sectarian and regional mini-states — Damascus, Aleppo, an Alawite enclave, Jabal Druze — then stitched them back together. The military became a ladder for rural minorities. In 1970 Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, seized power. The regime spoke Arab nationalism but ruled through sectarian networks and security organs. In 2011, when authority cracked, the country fractured along the lines the French once drew. The Kurds carved an autonomous zone. Iran and Hezbollah armed the regime. The map held only where force returned.
Paris carved Lebanon from coastal Syria in 1920 as a Maronite-led state and added Muslim hinterlands to make it viable. Independence in 1943 froze sectarian balance in law: Maronite president, Sunni prime minister, Shi‘a speaker. Demography shifted. Refugees arrived. The fiction collapsed into civil war in 1975. Syria occupied. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah entrenched as a state within the state. Today a militia outweighs the national army. The confessional pact survives on paper. Power lives elsewhere.
