League-of-Nations Arab states largely had fabricated identities unnamed for centuries.

Evidence

Lebanon is a classical example of Middle Eastern identity problems. Lebanon is more than just another Middle Eastern state. Among the numerous new states that were fashioned out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire in Asia at the end of the First World War, it was the only one with a real and deeply rooted historic identity. Most of the others were artificially constituted and arbitrarily defined; they were given new names, exhumed and reconditioned either from classical antiquity, like Syria and Palestine, or from medieval Islam, like Iraq. These names had not been used for centuries in the area and at that time had no real roots in the consciousness and loyalties of the inhabitants of the countries which they designated. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1396

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the invented-nationalism debate (Hobsbawm-Anderson line) and to how the region’s states were externally legibilized by the West — fits cluster’s knowledge-production theme.
• QUESTION: Contestable claim — Syria, Palestine, Iraq did have continuous local usage of their names; Lewis leans on classical reconditioning. Worth verifying against historiography.