The establishment of mandate territories in the Levantine provinces of the Ottoman Empire was accomplished in part by the demarcation of borders – hard lines that separated Palestine from Lebanon and Syria from Iraq. These borders determined the contours of new national entities.: Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Transjordan, which were placed under the jurisdiction of equally new political, economic, and social institutions anchored in now-national capitals. Yet even as these borders set up political barriers and bureaucratic institutions that encouraged residents to orient themselves internally - to align themselves with new nation-states – they also generated new opportunities for economic and social trans-border activities, on an individual as well as collective level.
For people residing near the border, historically connected by familial, trade, and other ties, the new boundaries created borderland regions, which were at times recognized by national governments in the form of by residents’ exemption from travel restrictions and certain taxes. Such negotiations oriented residents across the border rather than within, and aligned their behavior in ways that complicated the workings of national institutions and the development of national identities. Indeed, they also facilitated activities that national governments sought to suppress, like smuggling.
For business owners and investors, often located closer to the capital, borders brought higher taxes for those engaged in regional trade, but a quasi-protectionist boost for those whose enterprise remained within the national borders. It also brought economic activity into the political sphere, through calls to support particular home industries or boycott others. For members of external organizations – foreign corporations, European governments, religious professionals – borders were at times an obstacle, to be negotiated or ignored when possible. Finally, to many Arab nationalists, new borders were illegitimate, and their careers often spanned a variety of countries throughout the Levant. In sum, this panel highlights findings from current research, filling a gap in recent MESA conferences: the need to focus on state and community actors’ use of borders during the Mandate era and after. Although scholars and politicians alike invoke the memory of the creation of Levantine borders to highlight their arbitrariness, there is a need for careful studies that consider the impact of these recently instituted borders on particular communities or spheres of activity, as the papers in this panel do. Its regional focus promotes comparative analyses of the short- and medium-term economic and socio-religious impact of the establishment of the Levant’s political borders, highlighting common trends as well as distinct historical trajectories. The case studies presented each reflect in some way upon the tensions that Levantine borders generated with respect to centralized and centrally located political, economic, social, and religious institutions; yet they also highlight the various opportunities that these borders produced for private citizens, business owners, and government or other leaders.
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Dr. Laila Parsons
Many histories of the post-WW1 period in the Levant have presented the imposition of borders as a moment of rupture in which the inhabitants of the region were suddenly forced to reconfigure their politics and their movements. This paper builds on recent scholarship that argues that this early post-war period is sometimes better understood through the lens of Ottoman continuities than through the lens of new nationalisms (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Turkish). It will show that the Franklin-Bouillon line between Republican Turkey and French Mandate Syria meant little or nothing to some Arab Ottoman officers, who had been disbanded from the Ottoman army in 1918. Focusing on the experiences of Fawzi al-Qawuqji (but also drawing on other examples) the paper will examine how al-Qawuqji was accustomed to moving across the region mainly through his participation in the Ottoman military system: going from home in Tripoli to school in Damascus and then to the military academy in Istanbul; being posted to Mosul to encourage reluctant tribes to pay their taxes; being mobilized in war to defend Gaza against British advances. It will show how old links between Ottoman cities and towns, not new lines on colonial maps, marked his geographical and political worldview in this early post-war period. He (and others like him) continued to look north to Istanbul for guidance and relied on old Ottoman army networks and friendships for help in their political and military actions against colonial occupation. Some ex-Ottoman Arab officers fought with the Kemalists against foreign occupiers of Anatolia (1920-1923), others--like Fawzi al-Qawuqji--tried to procure support from Anatolia for the Arab Revolt against the French in Hama and al-Ghouta (1925-1927), traveling from Aleppo to Ayntab or Hama to Istanbul in much the same way that he had during WW1 and before.
In addition to soldier's memoirs, the paper will draw on letters, diaries, and reports from private collections and the Center for Historical Documents in Damascus.
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In 1925 Musa Naddaf shot and killed a rival village youth in Saydnaya in the Syrian-Lebanese mountains. A village feud between the two leading families, both Christian, and the outbreak of the Great Syrian Revolution the same year, led Musa to flee the village and live as a rebel fighter against the French mandate. He lived as a fugitive under threat of death sentence from his village rivals and the French mandatory government for 12 years, sheltered by nationalist activists on both sides of the Syrian-Lebanese border. In 1937 the mandatory government pardoned most revolutionaries including Musa but he was still jailed for the shooting of Elias Ahmar. His family hired nationalist lawyer Sa‘id al-Ghazi to defend Musa, and he served a short prison term, after which he immigrated to West Virginia. The story of Musa Naddaf provides a lens to examine a period of intense change in regional identities, communal relations, and anti-colonial struggle in Syria and Lebanon.
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Dr. Cyrus Schayegh
In February 1935, a French intelligence officer reported a plan, by smugglers from Aleppo, to transport ca. 188kg of hashish from Turkish Aintab to their Syrian hometown. From there, the suspects intended to bring the drugs, by car, to Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. Once the drugs had arrived, an accomplice was to place a telephone call to the Palestinian port city of Haifa to ask a drug smuggler, ‘Abud Y?sin, to come to Lebanon and organize shipment via Palestine to Egypt. Although this plan came to naught, it illustrates how, with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, innumerable people became involved in the smuggling of hashish and opium across and beyond the new borders of French Mandatory Lebanon and Syria and British Mandatory Palestine, most often to Egypt.
Although not only drugs, but arms, people, and a variety of legal goods, too, were trafficked, trans-border movements have remained a step-child of research on the Mandate period. A focus on political protest has obscured the existence, also, of wide-spread clandestine routines of evasion. More fundamentally, scholars have tacitly assumed that social realities corresponded to the ink on newly drawn maps. Taking single polities – Lebanon, Palestine, etc. – as frameworks of analysis, they have ignored the Levant’s ‘Abud Y?sins. The underlying claim of this talk, then, is that the Levantine Mandates cannot be adequately comprehended one by one, and that drug smuggling allows us to re-think the history of the Levant as an area characterized by the interplay of local and regional factors.
This claim is showcased by the trade chains characteristic of regional drug smuggling across the Levant. Professional smugglers worked with (sometimes politically active) large-scale hashish or opium growers; poorer people who happened to live in neuralgic places – typically near a border or in a city with a transport hub – traded small amounts of drugs over short distances. Together, they formed a complex regional system of narcotics demand and supply. Using colonial archival sources, newspapers, and oral history, I will show in this talk how that system, pre-dating World War I, continued to exist despite the new post-World War I reality of separate countries and their new borders, administrative practices, and political economies. More crucially, the social patterns, geographies, and economic and political root causes of that regional system changed because of these separate local realities, which were in turn affected by the regional setting.
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Prof. Andrea L. Stanton
This paper examines the evolution of Palestinian tourism to Lebanon during the Mandate period, from a ‘mixed’ practice to one largely limited to Arab Palestinians. It describes how this tourism was integrated into governmental, business, and nationalist discourses of state relations, economic impact, and identity. Further, it analyzes the impact of this integration and its impact on broader developments occurring within and between Lebanon and Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s.
By the time that the English-language, pro-Zionist Palestine Post began publishing in December 1932, tourism from Palestine to Lebanon had been deeply integrated into the political, social, and economic workings of the two Mandate states. A “Council for the Development of Travel” gave subventions to Lebanese towns and villages to make infrastructural improvements to encourage tourism, and Lebanese and Palestinian travel agents advertised package trips to Aley, Bhamdoun, and other summer resort areas in the Palestine Post and other newspapers. These investments seem to indicate that Lebanon’s physical beauty brought economic benefits to its private and public sector alike.
Yet as the mandate wore on, economic became increasingly intertwined with political concerns, on both sides of the national border, because so many Palestinian tourists were Jewish immigrants. By 1935, the Zionist press and community leaders had begun echoing the calls from enterprising businessmen in Egypt and elsewhere around the region to create new resorts at home. Recognizing Lebanon’s success, they hoped to develop the “Judean hills” and other spots for tourism so that “Palestinians will not have to go across the border”. Keeping Jewish tourism domestic would benefit the country economically, but it would also, they hoped, encourage Palestinian Jews to develop a stronger national affiliation with Palestine’s land.
By 1938, and perhaps in recognition of the fact that trans-border tourism continued, commentators suggested another approach: that Palestinian Jews make use of their economic clout in Lebanon by pressing for warmer relations and an end to Lebanon’s support of the Arab boycott. World War II’s intervention hastened what might have been a natural decline: between political tensions with Vichy Lebanon, petrol restrictions, and travel pass requirements, trans-border tourism from all communities suffered. But by 1945, the “Social and Personal” columns alone make clear that the only Palestinians traveling to Lebanon for holidays were Arab.
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Dr. Tsolin Nalbantian
Scholarly work examining the implications of the demarcation of borders between Palestine and Lebanon has largely ignored their socio-religious and socio-political impacts upon Armenian religious pilgrims, officials, and their affiliated national religious institutions. These readings depict Armenian communities in different geographic locations as individual units, without taking into consideration their interconnected ties based on economic, religious, social, political, and historical connections.
This paper will examine how the members of the Armenian Patriarchal Sees of Beirut and Jerusalem operated under and circumvented the installation of national borders. In so doing, this paper will investigate the connection of these borders to the development of Armenian national awareness in an effort to broaden the scope of what is considered national. In addition, it will consider whether this geographical engineering was successful and explore the relation between acquiescence to this border and prevailing historical circumstances.
The Armenian Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Cilicia share historical and religious bonds- the former even serving as a temporary home for the later until a permanent home could be secured in Antelias, Lebanon after the Genocide of 1915. Religious pilgrims traveled from one holy site to the other, while both seminaries served to provide generations of ecclesiastical figures to each other’s headquarters and parishes.
The bitterly contested election of the Armenian Patriarch of Cilicia in Antelias, in 1956, complicates this story. The atmosphere before and after the elections was marred by emotional demonstrations of thousands; calls for the resignation of church officials, physical attacks on the acting Patriarch, and worldwide press attention. Even the Patriarch of the See of Echmiadzin in Soviet Armenia was dispatched to invalidate the selection.
When this spectacle did not freeze the process, “The Right Hand of St. Gregory” relic, associated with ecclesiastical authority and legitimacy, was discovered missing from within the walled compound in Antelias. Mysteriously “found” a year later within the confines of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, it was triumphantly brought back to Antelias.
This paper will examine the development of the relationship between the two Sees in Beirut and Jerusalem and will explore how the implementation of borders affected their exchange in ideas, worshippers, and figureheads. By looking at the disappearance, resurface, and recovery of the relic, I will focus on the permeability of these imposed borders. Through this exploration, the manipulations and shapings of identity, legitimacy, and authority can further be isolated, contributing to larger questions of identity and national construction.
