Every year November 11 arrives with its familiar ritual quiet: ceremonies, wreaths, silence, the thin cry of the bugle. The date marks the armistice of 1918 – a ceasefire, not peace. The guns were ordered to stop. Men climbed out of trenches, dazed, wounded, uncomprehending. But history did not conclude; it merely inhaled.

Armistice is not reconciliation. It is an interruption, a breath between convulsions. And with time, we see more clearly that what we call “the end” of the First World War was only the first breath between ruptures. The war did not end. It reconfigured itself, seeping into borders, ideologies, migration streams, religious tensions, and the interior lives of nations and people. It continues to shape the world — not only as memory, but as unfinished process.

For in 1918, empires did not merely fall. The very architecture of history cracked. Ancient structures of authority – dynasty, sacral legitimacy, inherited temporal order – collapsed in a single generation. Thrones emptied, altars trembled, and political imagination was forced into improvisation. The modern nation-state emerged not through slow organic growth but through necessity, drafted quickly onto the ruins of sovereignty and faith.

Thus began the twentieth century not as a time of secure progress, but of profound rupture and anxious reinvention.

Where Europe eventually layered institutions upon its ruins, the Middle East never left that moment. The collapse of the Ottoman world created not stability, but a wound of disorientation. Sacred geography – Jerusalem, Mecca, Damascus, Anatolia – found itself rearranged not by memory or pilgrimage but by exhausted imperial hands drawing new lines on tired maps. Borders emerged from fatigue more than from history.

Sykes–Picot. Balfour. San Remo. These terms sit in textbooks as diplomatic facts. Yet they hover like labels over a deeper truth: ancient nations do not vanish because modernity demands simplicity. The return of Jewish sovereignty, after millennia of prayers and dispersion, was treated by many as a colonial clause or post-Holocaust concession, when in truth it was – and is – the re-emergence of covenant and ancient memory into modern history, a unique model of “human grafting back home” over ages of constant hope and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)