" This file was produced as part of the activities of the Independent Media Network on the Arab World. This regional cooperation brings together Maghreb Emergent, Assafir Al-Arabi, Mada Masr, Babelmed, Mashallah News, Nawaat, 7iber and Orient XXI."
Léonard Sompairac*
The yellow line. Such is the name of the delimitation laid down as a part of the Gaza « cease-fire » in October 2025, following two years of genocide and a continued blockade. This « line » which establishes a unilateral division of the Palestinian enclave, still largely occupied by the Israeli army, functions in fact as another shifting separation. It is also a border between life and death, since anyone daring to go beyond the yellow blocks of concrete will be immediately gunned down. This is the case at Rafah, that city on the edge of the Sinai whose historic evolution the Egyptian media Mada Masr has just re-traced in detail.
It Is Not Just About Gaza and Palestine
18-01-2025
Regionally, the choice of bright colours to define border lines offers a striking contrast with the imperialist expansion of Israel, a country claiming the authority of the Bible’s vague geography, has never defined its borders. Green line in the West Bank, blue in South-Lebanon, violet by the occupied Golan heights, one may well wonder what the next colour will be, considering that the last two years, with Israel’s wars on seven fronts, have been marked by its determination to make territorial conquests? The new Israeli ground offensive, launched on 3 March in southern Lebanon, possibly extending as far as the Litani River, is evidence of this logic.
In 1916, colonial rivalries between England and France paradoxically favoured their division of the Ottoman Empire into zones of direct administration and zones of influence, as per the Sykes-Picot accords. The following year, the Balfour declaration was favouring “The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” which was legalised in 1948, with Israel’s declaration of independence, on three quarters of the territory under British mandate. More than 75 years later, and after some ten offensives launched against its regional environment, the country continues to reshape the region’s borders. With constant support from the West, especially the United States, reaffirmed since the turn of the century by a neoconservative administration, determined to reorganise (or rather to de-structure) the region in accordance with US interests. Starting with Iraq. And, not surprisingly, the pretext was “democracy, liberal economy and the war against terrorism” as Georges Corm had already specified a decade earlier in La nouvelle question d’Orient, denouncing the West’s double standard and its hubris in the region. The latest example, the current Israeli-American war against Iran, including against its state structures, embraces this logic of chaos against peoples and international law. Yet none of this is predetermined or inevitable.
Whether at the beginning of the 1st century AD, under the Roman Empire in its expansion to the South of the Mediterranean or at the beginnings of Islam, with the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate accomplished by a semi-nomadic cavalry from the Atlantic to the Indus, the evolutions of the battle lines have always transformed territories, transformations sometimes embodied by defensive structures like the Ribats, still to be seen in the Maghreb. With consequences for the flows of people, goods and ideas, following the example of the famous trade route through pre-Islamic Arabia. On this subject, the Jordanian media 7iber delves into the effects of political changes on cross-border trade by studying the development of trade between Jordan and Syria after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad.
A Westphalian concept par excellence, this notion of “border” does not correspond to any natural reality, but reflects a political construction meant to delimit the power wielded over a given territory. While the nation-State is still a model validated in international law by virtue of the principle of Uti possidetis juris, which implies a preference for the stability of borders inherited from the colonial era to any revision regarded as destabilising, we may nonetheless question the historic relevance of that model in the light of the sociology of the Arab World. In particular because of the pre-existence of other logics, nomadic or unifying, such as the asabiyya (social cohesion), or resulting from the co-existence of mosaics of ethnic groups and religions independently of existing borders, some of them very ancient such as the one separating Morocco and Algeria. In fact, the attempts at federation have never met with Great success, whether in the Kabyle region, in Iraq or in Syria as is to be seen from the present situation of the Kurdish Rojava or the Jabal Al-Druze. The fact is that nowadays disrupting established borders seems a dangerous thing to do.
There is no lack of examples in the region of conflicts, irredentism and territorial disputes between States: whether it be the issue of the Sanjak of Alexandrette between Damascus and Ankara before 1950, the “war of the shifting sands” between Algeria and Morocco in 1963, the war between Iran and Iraq in 1980, when the Shatt al-Arab River, a strategic water-way for international trade was prominently at stake, or the outright annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990, with its well-known consequences. All of these quarrels have left the regional sub-space even more divided than before. Borders have also been the object of pan-Arab experiments, as we are reminded by the 1958 United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria. In 2011, after a referendum, South-Sudan became the latest sovereign State to declare itself independent, while today Sudan is still a war-torn country. Finally, while Yemen was reunified in 1990, it has been ravaged by a bloody conflict for over a decade, in which the front line is identical with the former border between North and South.
This calling into question of borders, and especially their symbolic meanings – for they are indeed “symbolic markers”, according to geographer Michel Foucher – no doubt peaked in the summer of 2014, when the Islamic State Organisation took centre stage in Syria and Iraq in the name of the Caliphate, burying in the sand the maps drawn by the European conquerors, a way of reminding the world of the artificiality of present-day borders and its effects in terms of exacerbated confessionalism.
For its part, the Pan-Arab media Assafir Al-Arabi re-examines the tragic crossings of that border by the Yazidis and its latest security installations.
For a century now, modern boundaries have favoured the closure of spaces which were previously open to those (males) who could afford to travel. The great travellers like Muhammad Al-Idrisi and Ibn Jubayr in the 12th century or Ibn Battuta over a century later, exploring in particular North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Arabia, then Iraq and Persia, were not isolated figures. The latter’s Rihla (travels) inspired both a new literary genre and a sense of being free to travel within Dar al-Islam, where Mecca was already a tourist attraction. Until the end of World War II the development of the railways made it all the easier to travel in Turkey, in Syria, in Iraq, in Arabia, in Lebanon or in the Sinai, by crossing through Palestine – today dotted by checkpoints and other military obstacles when the highways aren’t simply segregated. Those journeys enabled the traveller to better appreciate local particularisms and mixtures, including religious ones, before the pervasiveness of nationalism and the fortification of the edges. The French website OrientXXI publishes a rare account stressing freedom of movement prior to 1948, when the Jordan River was neither a political nor an administrative border.
Today, the militarisation of borders is reinforced by technologies of surveillance and control, very lucrative if not experimental, at the expense of freedom of movement, of the dignity of migrants and of regional integrations. While travel between region’s countries is far from easy – many journeys require preliminary visas - and everything is even more complicated for Palestinians (as one of our fellow journalists found to his dismay), the caesura is even greater between the North and South shores of the Mediterranean. Since 2014, 40,000 people have drowned trying to cross; the annual budget of the European border patrol agency, Frontex, rose during that same period from 100 million euros to over a billion. QED. And at the same time as the deadly fences around the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco were being erected, the externalisation of the European Union’s borders to the Southern shores of the Mediterranean was being accomplished. An article in the Mediterranean media Babelmed reveals how the different mafias take advantage of these border arrangements everywhere in the Mediterranean basin. Dubai, one hub of the financialised and globalised capitalism, is seen to be a permissive offshore paradise for these activities.
Is a different form of integration conceivable in the region? Could the 22 nations of the Arab League increase their cooperation, especially in terms of mobility? At least in its sub-regions, following the example of the Arab Maghreb Union, an empty vessel now on account of the Western Sahara crisis? Profiting from the absence of any religious or linguistic borders? This is what the Tunisian media Nawaat tells us with its account of what happened to the Sumud convoy, from Tunisia to Libya in support of the Palestinians. And with the conclusion that sometimes it is not borders which separate peoples. Which only confirms what the Algerian media Mahgreb Emergent uncovered in its on the spot investigation at the Southern edge of the Sahara.
After two previous dossiers on the theme of migrations, this new initiative by the Network of Independent Media on the Arab World, which marks its tenth anniversary this year, means to be totally available on-line, in Arabic, French and English, so as to break through all barriers, both physical and mental.
Translated from French By Noël Burch
*Member of the editorial board of Orient XXI , and coordinator of the “Network of independent medias about the Arab world”.
