Ethnostates are not the problem, they're the solution!
The civil war in Syria ended but the atrocities persist. This is because Syria doesn't exist. Just like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq don't exist.
All these are arbitrary entities created by Western empires to serve Western needs. The only way to maintain such unnatural creations is through the constant use of force, just like holding together magnets with the same poles facing each other.
It's natural for different nations locked within arbitrary borders to fight, either for supremacy or survival. Even brotherly nations like the Czechs and the Slovaks couldn't share a state, so what hope do warlike nations like Kurds and Arabs have?
Israel is the model of how this violence can end.
To demonstrate this, I’d like to delve into the histories of two states that share many similarities: Israel and Lebanon, both nations whose creations were fueled by traumatic events in the 20th century and the machinations of European empires.
Unlike Israel, there has never been such a state as Lebanon. The term has always been geographical and vague. The modern borders were drawn under the French mandate in 1920, the same year as Mandatory Palestine. Prior to that, Lebanon referred to the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a predominantly Christian and Druze region of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1919, a Lebanese delegation led by Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek asked for a significant extension of the frontiers of Lebanon, arguing that the additional areas (which were previously associated with Damascus rather than Beirut) constituted natural parts of Lebanon. France agreed.
This was rather shortsighted of the Maronites, as it resulted in the Christians losing their majority. However, this was not without reason. Just like the Jews in Palestine were inspired to have a state with as many Jews as possible due to the tragedy of the Holocaust and centuries of prejudice, the Lebanese were motivated to have as much land as possible by the Great Famine of 1915-1918.
During the famine, almost half the population of Mount Lebanon died, creating an existential fear of not having enough land to independently feed the population—a national policy driven by PTSD.
As a consequence of this border shift, the demographics of Lebanon changed. Sunnis increased X8 and Shias increase X4. Christians became barely half the population.
On November 8, 1943, the new Lebanese government voted to abolish the mandate. The last French troops withdrew in 1946, one year before the British left Palestine.
Once again, the histories of the two nations reflected each other in opposite ways: The creation of Lebanon led to a civil war while a civil war in Palestine led to the creation of Israel.
The war in Palestine saw the creation of a state that had an absolute Jewish majority, a state whose borders were shaped by events on the ground and the will of the people rather than by the decisions of clerks, who envisioned Israel as something similar to Lebanon, with Jews being barely half the population.
The war in Lebanon didn't result in the creation of new states with a clear ethnic or religious majority, producing an endless conflict in an attempt to maintain an unnatural entity that reflects no one’s needs.
The same story is true with slight variations for every Muslim nation in the Middle East, with Syria being the most painful example.
The region will not have peace until the artificial countries are replaced by organic states that reflect the ambitions of the people rather than the machinations or misguided ideas of clerks on the other side of the planet. This is true now more than ever. Land stopped being of major importance in the 21st century. People are any state’s main asset.
In some cases, replacing the false Western borders with true Middle Eastern borders will require population transfer. This may seem harsh, but it's certainly better than the alternative; horrific dictatorships and endless sectarian wars.
