The story of Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the fight for Arab liberation

British and French colonialists drew the borders of the modern Middle East. It is this dispensation that is collapsing today in Iraq and Syria. But history could have taken a different course.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, a group of Arab soldiers fought to establish an Arab state in the area that was to become Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. The story of their resistance to European imperialism is barely known in the West. And their defeat by colonial armies helps explain the tragedy that is now playing out in Syria and Iraq. 
Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Sykes-Picot agreement, the secret territorial blueprint that Britain and France would impose on the Arab Middle East following the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in 1918.
Few in Europe and North America are familiar with Mark Sykes or Georges Picot, but the pact the two men signed is infamous throughout the Eastern Arab world.
Recently, ISIL has invoked Sykes-Picot as a symbol of western interference in Arab and Muslim affairs. When ISIL fighters tore down a border post between Iraq and Syria, they proclaimed that they were destroying the "Sykes-Picot fence".
There is much talk today about the long-term effects of these cartographic incisions. If the mapmakers’ surgery had been more precise, would the region have suffered so much turmoil? Would Syria have collapsed into civil war, if a separate Alavi enclave had been created alongside a Sunni one? Was Iraq doomed from the start, since it should have been divided into three individual states, one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Kurdish?
Questions like these ignore the alternative future that many Arabs struggled for in the 1920s and 1930s: a single Arab state that would encompass the lands that became today’s Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon. In the West, what most people know about the Arabs in the First World War is that a charismatic British officer T E Lawrence persuaded them to join the British campaign against the Ottomans, an account made famous by David Lean’s 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia. But the more important story about the Arabs in the First World War – the story that is not retold in a Hollywood blockbuster – is that the majority of Arab soldiers and officers stayed loyal to the Ottoman army and fought hard to defend the Ottoman state against British and French occupation.
After the Ottoman army disbanded in late 1918, Turkish soldiers and officers used what was left of the Ottoman army’s equipment to battle against the European occupation of parts of Anatolia for four more years. This four-year war – the Turkish War of Independence – was in fact the continuation of the First World War in Anatolia. The Turks’ ultimate victory against the Europeans resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 under the presidency of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Inspired by these events, ex-Ottoman Arab officers led a series of rebellions against European occupation of the Arab lands south of Anatolia, in Greater Syria (today Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine) and Iraq. Like the Turkish officers to the north, these Arab officers also continued the struggle of World War One, trying to wrest control of their land from the occupying armies of Britain and France. They rejected the new borders imposed on the Middle East in the post-war settlement, and they battled against British and French troops by moving from place to place as if the borders did not exist: in Iraq in 1920, in Syria from 1920-1927, and in Palestine in 1936 and 1948. Their aim was to establish a unified, independent Arab state in the Arab provinces of the former Ottoman Empire.

Source : The National