Holy Lands. Nicolas Pelham

gutting of the state apparatus that followed first America’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein and then of much of Syria following the uprisings of the Arab Spring cleared the ground for the Wahhabi expansion out of Saudi Arabia across the Sunni parts of the Fertile Crescent. The Middle East’s compartmentalization into homogeneous units that began with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire found fresh territory to dismember. Much as in Yugoslavia, another corner of the former empire, the post-Ottoman order fractured into its rival religious parts. Out went the totalitarian nation-state; in came a centrifugal patchwork of bickering one-confessional millet states. As in the creation of Turkey and Israel, minorities left behind posed a question or problem best answered by their removal. The transformation of the non-territorial millet into the territorially demarcated millet-state precipitated mass population exchanges, torpedoing what remained of the region’s pluralist past.

      From world religions with universal values, the region’s creeds contracted into local cults clinging to parcels of land. The history of the past century is in many ways a history of ever contracting horizons, ever more fortified border controls, and ever tighter permit regimes, as governments bent on exclusive control erect their defenses around the territorial patches where their power extends. While Europe dissolved its borders, the Middle East crisscrossed its once open expanse with ever more insurmountable barriers.

       Creating a Jewish State

       Part Two