Last year, in an English-language interview with Sky News Arabia, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Iraq and Syria Tom Barrack made headlines by arguing that the Middle East is destined for perpetual conflict. The issue, he claimed in a rather puzzling statement, is that there is no word in Arabic for “submit.”
The Arabic subtitles to the interview itself provided a translation for “submit.” Moreover, as many viewers were quick to point out, the word “Islam” is derived from an Arabic root that can be rendered as “to submit.”
This gaffe revealed a larger problem. Rather than relying on facts and history, policymakers often reach consequential conclusions based on unfounded assumptions and cultural stereotypes.
What Barrack failed to explain to his viewers is that nationalism is one of the most consequential and complex developments in our recent history and that this sociological phenomenon, not any purported linguistic deficiency, is the primary driver of conflict in the modern Middle East.
From its origins in early modern Europe, nationalism has forged states and shattered empires the world over. It was a major factor in both World Wars, along with the myriad other conflicts that killed tens of millions of people in the bloody 20th century. It led to messy partitions from Ireland to India, sundering populations that had lived side by side for centuries.
And it remains a critical dynamic in geopolitics today. Indeed, without nationalism it would be difficult to explain the resilience of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the face of sanctions, blockade, and withering bombardments by the most powerful and technologically advanced military in human history. More than religious devotion alone, attachment to the nation, and the desire to protect the homeland in the face of threatened civilizational extinction, have led many Iranians to rally behind a regime they might otherwise have opposed.
Nationalism also helps explain the difficulty of resolving the Israel-Palestine dispute. Clearly, here too something more than Arabic vocabulary is at play. The Palestinian people, on the one hand, and the Jewish people, on the other, belong to imagined communities that view the same land as essential to their respective political destinies.
A bit of history here is helpful. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 proposed the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The British intentionally kept the declaration vague—it did not promise the establishment of a Jewish state, nor provide that such a homeland should encompass all of Palestine—but conflict quickly arose between newly arrived Zionists, who wanted a Jewish state, and the native Arab Palestinians. The British government, responsible for the administration of Mandatory Palestine, repeatedly attempted to create a compromise arrangement, but it was unable to stem the ongoing violence between Jews and Palestinians.
By 1947, it was increasingly clear that neither the nationalist vision of the Jews nor that of the Arabs could be realized at an acceptable cost, and the United Nations proposed partition. Dividing the metaphorical baby—the land—was the more humane option, allowing both sides a nation and state of their own. Today, partition remains the only framework with any prospect of producing a lasting peace, precisely because it reduces the existential fear of one side’s nationalism being consumed by the other.
Now, as Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and others (including, oddly, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair) work to realize a lasting peace plan for Gaza, this essential point must not be ignored. No amount of luxury hotels, weapons-confiscation efforts, economic incentives or governance reforms will prevent future wars unless the basic nationalist aspirations of both peoples are addressed in a meaningful way.
As one of the principal architects of the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair, in particular, would be wise to review his own diplomatic history. Seven and a half centuries after the Norman invasion of Ireland, the island was formally partitioned in 1920; the subsequent Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 reinforced that divide through the establishment of the Irish Free State while leaving Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The treaty split the nationalist movement itself, helping produce the Irish Civil War of 1922–23. Decades later, competing claims of national identity, sovereignty, and political rights catalyzed the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But ultimately, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 built on the reality of partition to provide a framework in which British and Irish identities could coexist, while making consent—not force—the basis for determining Northern Ireland’s constitutional future.
There are striking parallels here to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: tragic history, the demand for a state, the bitter internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah, and the reality that a minority of Palestinians already live either as full citizens or permanent residents of Israel. The lesson of Northern Ireland is that partition can become the starting point for a political framework in which competing national identities, territorial claims, and questions of sovereignty can be negotiated rather than fought over.
Today, we can still find inspiration for the Middle East in the Irish experience. To quote the words of a 19th-century English poet associated with the cause of Irish emancipation: we must continue “to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Hope alone will not resolve the Middle East conflicts. But soberly understanding nationalism and building peace around it, may be the best way forward for a region that, despite everything, still hopes.
And yes, there are words in Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi for that.
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