Thus the Arab revolutions that consumed the Middle East in 2011 \u2013 forget the \u201cArab Spring\u201d, a creature of Hollywood origin \u2013 did not demand democracy. The posters on the streets of Cairo and Tunis and Damascus and Yemen called for dignity and justice, two commodities that we had definitely not sought for the Arabs. Justice for the Palestinians \u2013 or for the Kurds, or for that matter for the destroyed Armenians of 1915, or for all the suffering Arab peoples \u2013 was not something that commended itself to us. But I think we should have gone much further in our investigation of the titanic changes of 2011.<\/p>\n
In my own reporting of the uprisings, I attributed them to increased education and travel by the Arab communities throughout the Middle East. While acknowledging the power of social media and the internet, something deeper was at work. The Arabs had woken from a deep sleep. They had refused any longer to be the \u201cchildren\u201d of the patriarchal father figure \u2013 the Nassers and the Sadats and the Mubaraks and the Assads and the Gaddafis and, in earlier years, the Saddams. They awoke to find that it was their own governments that were composed of children, one of whom \u2013 Mubarak \u2013 was 83 years old. The Arabs wanted to own their towns and cities. They wanted to own the place in which they lived, which comprised much of the Middle East.<\/p>\n
But I think now that I was wrong. In retrospect, I woefully misunderstood what these revolutions represented. One clue, perhaps, lay in the importance of trade union movements. Where trade unions, with their transnational socialism and anti-colonial credentials, were strong \u2013 in Egypt and Tunisia \u2013 the revolutionary bloodshed was far less than in the nations that had either banned trade unionism altogether \u2013 Libya, for example \u2013 or concretised the trade union movement into the regime, which had long ago happened in Syria and Yemen. Socialism crossed borders. Yet even this does not account for the events of 2011.<\/p>\n
What really manifested itself that year, I now believe, was a much more deeply held Arab conviction; that the very institutions that we in the West had built for these people 100 years ago were worthless, that the statehood which we had later awarded to artificial nations within equally artificial borders was meaningless. They were rejecting the whole construct that we had foisted upon them. That Egypt regressed back into military patriarchy \u2013 and the subsequent and utterly predictable Western acqiescence in this \u2013 after a brief period of elected Muslim Brotherhood government, does not change this equation. While the revolutions largely stayed within national boundaries \u2013 at least at the start \u2013 the borders began to lose their meaning.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHamas in Gaza and the Brotherhood became one, the Sinai-Gaza frontier began to crumble. Then the collapse of Libya rendered Gaddafi’s former borders open \u2013 and thus non-existent. His weapons \u2013 including chemical shells \u2013 were sold to rebels in Egypt and Syria. Tunisia, which is now supposed to be the darling of our Western hearts for its adhesion to \u201cdemocracy\u201d, is now in danger of implosion because its own borders with Libya and Algeria are open to arms transhipments to Islamist groups. Isis’s grasp of these frontierless entities means that its own transnational existence is assured, from Fallujah in Iraq to the edge of Syrian Aleppo, from Nigeria to Niger and Chad.<\/p>\n
It can thus degrade the economy of each country it moves through, blowing up a Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh, attacking the Bardo museum in Tunis or the beaches of Sousse. There was a time \u2013 when Islamists attacked the Jewish synagogue on Djerba island in Tunisia in 2002, for example, killing 19 people \u2013 when tourism could continue. But that was when Libya still existed. In those days, Ben Ali’s security police were able to control the internal security of Tunisia; the army was left weak so that it could not stage a coup. So today, of course, the near-impotent army of Tunisia cannot defend its frontiers.<\/p>\n
Isis’s understanding of this new phenomenon preceded our own. But Isis’s realisation that frontiers were essentially defenceless in the modern age coincided with the popular Arab disillusion with their own invented nations. Most of the millions of Syrian and Afghan refugees who have flooded into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and then north into Europe do not intend to return \u2013 ever \u2013 to states that have failed them as surely as they no longer \u2013 in the minds of the refugees \u2013 exist. These are not \u201cfailed states\u201d so much as imaginary nations that no longer have any purpose.<\/p>\n
I only began to understand this when, back in July, covering the Greek economic crisis, I travelled to the Greek-Macedonian border with M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res. This was long before the story of Arab refugees entering Europe had seized the attention of the EU or the media, although the Mediterranean drownings had long been a regular tragedy on television screens. Aylan Kurdi, the little boy who would be washed up on a Turkish beach, still had another two months to live. But in the fields along the Macedonian border were thousands of Syrians and Afghans. They were coming in their hundreds through the cornfields, an army of tramping paupers who might have been fleeing the Hundred Years War, women with their feet burned by exploded gas cookers, men with bruises over their bodies from the blows of frontier guards. Two of them I even knew, brothers from Aleppo whom I had met two years earlier in Syria. And when they spoke, I suddenly realised they were talking of Syria in the past tense. They talked about \u201cback there\u201d and \u201cwhat was home\u201d. They didn’t believe in Syria any more. They didn’t believe in frontiers.<\/p>\n
Far more important for the West, they clearly didn’t believe in our frontiers either. They just walked across European frontiers with the same indifference as they crossed from Syria to Turkey or Lebanon. We, the creators of the Middle East’s borders, found that our own historically created national borders also had no meaning to these people. They wanted to go to Germany or Sweden and intended to walk there, however many policemen were sent to beat them or smother them with tear gas in a vain attempt to guard the national sovereignty of the frontiers of the EU.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Our own shock \u2013 indeed, our indignation \u2013 that our own precious borders were not respected by these largely Muslim armies of the poor was in sharp contrast to our own blithe non-observance of Arab frontiers. Saddam was among the first to show his own detestation of such lines in the sand. He cared nothing about international law when he invaded Iran in 1980 \u2013 with intelligence help from the Americans \u2013 or Kuwait in 1990, when he tore up the old frontier of the emirate and claimed it as an Iraqi province. But the West has now launched so many air strikes across the Middle East’s borders since the 1991 liberation of Kuwait that we scarcely need to search for precedents now that Arab air forces are regularly criss-crossing the Middle East’s national boundaries \u2013 along with our own fighter-bombers.<\/p>\n
Quite apart from our mournful Afghan adventure and our utterly illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, our aircraft have been bombing Libya, Iraq and Syria along with the aircraft of various local pseudo-democracies for so long that this state of affairs has become routine, almost normal, scarcely worthy of a front-page headline. The Saudis are bombing Iraq and Syria and Yemen. The Jordanians are bombing Syria. The Emiratis are bombing Yemen. And now the French are bombing the Syrian city of Raqqa even more than they bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa two months ago \u2013 when President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande did not tell us that France was \u201cat war\u201d. The point, of course, is that we had grown so used to attacking Arab lands \u2013 France had become so inured to sending its soldiers and air crews to Africa and the Middle East to shoot and bomb those whom it regarded as its enemies \u2013 that only when Muslims began attacking our capital cities did we suddenly announce that we were \u201cat war\u201d.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThere were no code reds or code oranges in Arab capitals. They existed in a permanent state of code red, their people cringing beneath \u201cemergency laws\u201d imposed by dictators supported by the West, legislation even more iniquitous than those our European political masters now wish to impose on us. Of course, since the Iraqi catastrophe, we like to use local militia forces to do the dying for us. So the Kurds become our foot soldiers against Isis, or the Iraqi Shia militias or the Iranians or \u2013 though we must not admit this \u2013 the Syrian army and the Lebanese Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
Isis has weirdly replicated this gruesome policy. However many atrocities in Europe have been committed by men who have supposedly been \u201cradicalised\u201d in Syria, the killers have usually been local proxies; British Muslims in the UK, French Muslims who were citizens of France or residents of Belgium. The significance of this \u2013 that Isis clearly intends to provoke a civil war within Europe, especially between France’s huge Algerian-origin Muslims and the police and political elite of France \u2013 has been spoken of in whispers. Indeed, much of the media coverage of the Paris massacres has often avoided the very word Muslim.<\/p>\n
Just as any incomprehension we express about the borderless world into which the Arabs think they are moving carries no reference to that most borderless of Middle East nations, Israel. Arthur Balfour’s declaration, which gave the UK’s support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine during the same war that Mr Sykes and M. Georges-Picot were plotting to divide up the Arab world, anticipated new frontiers within Palestine itself, borders which, to this day, are largely undefined. Israel’s internationally recognised frontiers are ignored by the Israeli government itself because it will not even say where its eastern border lies. Is it along the old Jerusalem frontline? Is it along the grotesque Israeli wall that has effectively stolen West Bank Palestinian land? Does the state of Israel include every Jewish colony built on land thieved from the Palestinians of the West Bank? Or does it run along the entire length of the Jordan river, thus destroying any Palestinian state that might ever exist? When Israelis ask their critics to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, they should be requested to state which particular Israel they are talking about: the legal one recognised by the UN \u2013 or \u201cIsrael proper\u201d as we call it \u2013 or an Israel that includes the entire West Bank, or \u201cIsrael improper\u201d as we assuredly do not call it?<\/p>\n