Israel and a Palestinian State: Redrawing Lines?

In the last few years a growing number of academic works have analyzed the past and the present of the Eastern Mediterranean region arguing that Western powers ‘created artificial nations’ and that most of the modern states in the area are deprived of peculiar historical legacies. The narrative of the Islamic State (IS) that is now trying to erase the ‘Sykes-Picot order’ – reproduced in Western media and discourse – is largely based on similar assumptions. The present article challenges these arguments and contends that, if not considered in the proper way, the ‘process of simplification’ suffered by the region between the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries can itself trigger problematic misunderstandings and longstanding consequences. The cultural and political evolution of most of the countries in the region shows a much more complex historical development than what the Sykes-Picot (and the related IS) narrative would suggest: most of the states in the region are not simply “artificial creations” and old maps should not be used, once again, to cover a complex local reality.