How the First World War Created the Middle East Conflicts (Documentary)

The modern Middle East is a region plagued by war, terrorism, weak and failed states, and civil unrest. But how did it come to be like this? The map of today's Middle East was largely drawn after World War I, and the war that planted many of the seeds of the conflict that still plagues Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Syria and even Iran today. When World War I began in 1914, the map of the Middle East was very different from today. Most of the region was part of the Ottoman Empire and had been for centuries. Britain controlled Egypt and some strategic points in the Gulf, and a weak Persian state was informally under the influence of Britain in the south and the Russian Empire in the north.

After the war ended in 1918, the Ottoman Empire disappeared and was replaced by a series of new states, states whose borders were decided in distant capitals and whose people were trapped in the chaos and uncertainty of an unstable new order influenced by ideas. such as nationalism, self-determination and Zionism. For some, the new order offered hope for a better future; for others, just fear. Even before 1914, the Middle East was a vital strategic region. Germany built the railway from Berlin to Baghdad to extend its influence, Russia wanted Constantinople and saw itself as protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, France felt the same about the Catholics of the Middle East, and Britain was concerned about the security of the Suez Canal route to British India.

The Ottoman fear of the Russians, British, and French is part of the reason the Empire joined Germany and the Central Powers when World War I began. Over the next four years, fighting raged in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Sinai, and Palestine along with widespread famine and the Armenian genocide. As the war dragged on, both the Central Powers and the Allies sought to undermine each other's empires: the Germans and Ottomans appealed to the Muslims under French, British, and Russian rule, while the Allies appealed to the Christian minorities. and to the Arab nationalists who lived under the Ottomans. The great powers also made secret agreements with each other to divide the spoils of war if they won.

All of these agreements had one thing in mind: win the war as soon as possible and benefit from that victory. The contradictions and

conflicts

of wartime agreements could be resolved later, or so they thought. One of these wartime agreements was between the British Empire and the powerful Hashemite family of the Hejaz region, part of present-day Saudi Arabia but then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Hashemites were led by the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, who agreed to lead Arab tribes loyal to him in a revolt against the Ottomans. In return, the British promised that the Hashemites would rule a future independent Arab kingdom, but the agreement was vague about borders.

Hussein hoped that if the British won, his family could claim new territories and power, and the way to legitimize this quest was through Arab nationalism. The Hashemites claimed that they represented the Ottoman Arabs' desire for freedom and their own national state, ideas that some Arab intellectuals and nationalist societies had been calling for, although not necessarily under the rule of the Hashemites. This worked for the British, who positioned themselves as liberators: “Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom, at the hands of those foreign rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. These Arab nobles will not have suffered in vain.” (Provence 65) So, from 1916 to 1918, the Hashemites led the Arab revolt against the Ottomans with British help through T.E.

Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. There is some debate about the military effectiveness of the uprising, but politically it raised high expectations for peace, expectations that would be disappointed. The British knew that their agreement with Hussein violated a 1914 agreement with the French and Russians, which stated that any postwar territorial agreement would involve all the allies. They also knew that the French had their own interests in the Middle East and might not be very interested in Arab independence. In late 1915, French diplomat François-Georges Picot made France's case clear: “France would never consent to offer independence to the Arabs, although at the beginning of the war she might have done so. “It was unthinkable that the French people would agree to place the Christians of Lebanon under a Mohammedan ruler.” (Karsh and Karsh 223) Picot then met with British diplomat Mark Sykes, resulting in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916.

Once the Ottomans were defeated, each ally would gain its own sphere of direct and indirect influence in the Arab provinces. and part of Anatolia: the French in the north and west, and the British in the southwest and south. Palestine was to be administered internationally, and previous agreements gave other areas to Russia and Italy. Any future Arab kingdom would be under French and British influence. But there were skeptics, such as British Brigadier General George Macdonough: “It seems to me that we are rather in the position of the hunters who divided the skin of the bear before killing it.

Therefore, I think that any current discussion about how we are going to divide the Turkish Empire is primarily of academic interest.” (Karsh and Karsh 225) So the British had promised the Hashemites an Arab kingdom, and the British and French had then divided the same region between them. Palestine was the exception: there the British made another controversial agreement to aid their war effort. The Zionist movement existed since the 19th century and promoted the idea of ​​a Jewish state. Zionist thinkers such as Theodor Herzl considered several possible locations, but most were established in Palestine, which was the ancient homeland of the Jews and still home to a Jewish minority.

Even before the war, Zionist Jews had been moving to Palestine, creating tensions with the Arab majority: “a nation threatened with disappearance by the Zionist tide in this Palestinian land… a nation that is threatened in its very essence with expulsion from their homeland.” .” (Khalidi 26/27) In 1917, the Allies were still fighting to win the war and Russia withdrew after the Revolution. At the same time, some members of the British government, such as David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, were sympathetic to the Zionist idea, an idea that was lobbied for by prominent British Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann. London hoped that by supporting Zionism, the Jewish diaspora around the

world

could join the British cause.

Some British politicians such as Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu (who was Jewish but anti-Zionist) opposed the idea, but in November 1917, Balfour sent a telegram to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain: “His Majesty's Government welcomes the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will do everything possible to facilitate the achievement of this objective, it being clearly understood that nothing will be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities existing in Palestine , or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” (Mahler 77) This was a dramatic but vague compromise, as it was unclear whether “national home” meant “state” and what the situation of the non-Jewish majority would be in practice.

So, to win the war, the British had reached an agreement with the Hashemites for Arab independence, the British and the French reached an agreement to divide most of the Middle East, and the British promised to support Zionism. As if this were not complicated enough, in 1917 the United States joined the war and the tangle of contradictions began to unravel. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson released his 14 Points for Peace. Wilson's points included the concept of self-determination: that each people who identified themselves as a nation should determine their own future. This seemed simple in principle, but it did not match the reality of mixed populations and identities on the ground.

There were Arab nationalists, but most Middle Easterners were still unfamiliar with the relatively new concept of national identity. They typically identified more with their religion, tribe, extended family, or region of origin. Yes, some tribes joined the Hashemite revolt, but most did not question Ottoman rule and remained loyal to the existing system, whether they were enthusiastic about it or not. Those who felt a drive for national self-determination, whether Arab, Zionist, Kurdish or other, now felt that there would be a state for them after the war: high expectations that would be very difficult to meet. After successful British offensives in Palestine and Mesopotamia, the war finally ended with an Allied victory in November 1918, and a strange interlude began.

The armistice had stopped the fighting, but it would take time to sort out the postwar order. British and French troops occupied the Ottoman Arab provinces and parts of Anatolia, Americans brought humanitarian aid to feed the hungry, and politicians discussed the fate of Europe and the Middle East at the Paris Peace Conference. Delegations of nationalists traveled to Paris to plead their case, although most would return without any concrete promises. Lebanese Christian Patriarch Elias Hoayek was an exception when he pressed the French government to assume a clear role in Lebanon: “All my efforts will be directed to obtaining, in accordance with the Lebanese national will, the complete independence of my country with the help of France." (Daily Le Temps) The resulting peace treaty, signed at Versailles in June 1919, not only formally ended the war between the Allies and Germany, but also

created

the League of Nations, an international organization to keep the peace.

The League would play a key role in the fate of the Middle East, especially since the British, French and Americans began arguing about how to implement the war agreements The British felt that, since they had fought for most of the. fight against the Ottomans, they deserved a greater share of the loot. The Americans opposed secret wartime diplomacy and insisted that the League should oversee the gradual independence of the peoples of the Middle East through the so-called Mandates. This meant that a “developed” state would be responsible for “advice” and “assistance” until the new states could function on their own (in theory).

In practice, it was not at all clear that the mandate would work in practice, even for the would-be Hashemite rulers of a new Arab kingdom: “What does the word mandate mean? We don't know exactly. I only wish to say that the nations on whose behalf I speak intend to remain free to choose the Power whose advice they will seek. Their right to decide their future destiny has been recognized in principle. Very good! But a secret agreement has been prepared to dispose of these nations, about which we have not been consulted. I ask the Assembly whether this state of affairs should exist or not.” (Provence 69/70) As heated discussions raged, the United States Congress changed its mind, and although the League was President Wilson's idea, the United States refused to sign the peace treaty or join the League when This officially came into force in January 1920.

For the British and French, this was an opportunity. At the San Remo conference in the spring of 1920, they formalized the military reality on the ground. France became the mandatory power for Syria and Lebanon, while Great Britain did the same for Mesopotamia, Transjordan and Palestine. This allowed them to rule indirectly without officially assuming them as imperial possessions. In the words of historian Michael Provence: “The populations of the mandated territories thus assumed all the responsibilities and none of the benefits of national sovereignty.” (Provence 69) One issue the conference did not resolve was borders: they would have to wait until a peace treaty could be signed with the Ottomans, who still ruled in name only.

The League did say that France and Britain should consider the wishes of the population, but British and French administrators mostly ignored local requests. The American King-Crane Commission survey received mixed results: some people wanted democracy, some wanted a Greater Syria that included Lebanon and Palestine, some wanted British supervision, some French and some American, and some wanted a Hashemite king. The majority did not want the Mandates at all and 99% opposed the Zionist settlement in Palestine. After all the hardships and sufferings during the war, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the lack of a new stable order, it is not surprising that there was widespread violence in the Middle East after the Great War ended.War.

Egypt rose in a failed revolution against British rule in 1919 and there were clashes between religious and ethnic groups in Lebanon. There was a major war in Anatolia between Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal and the mostly Greek allied troops, which resulted in the creation of the Turkish Republic and the formal dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. In Persia, the British wanted to counter Russian Bolshevik influence and secure access to oil, so they supported a coup by the future Shah Reza Pahlavi, who took control of the country in 1921. But violence that was more intractable and possibly affected the troubled The future of the region occurred above all in Palestine, Syria and Iraq.

In Palestine, the British Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration and British authorities encouraged Jewish settlement: some 35,000 Jewish settlers arrived between 1919 and 1923 in the hope of a better life. International Jewish organizations often helped settlers purchase land, some (but not all) of which was previously infertile. Some also declared their desire not only for a Jewish homeland, but for a Jewish state, which stoked tensions with the Palestinian Arabs, as did the British administration working closely with Zionist groups. Some British and Jewish officials wanted to stop the settlements, but when the enthusiastic Zionist supporter Herbert Samuel became British High Commissioner to Palestine, British support for the settlements became more explicit.

The British and some Zionists argued that the solution would benefit the Arabs through economic improvements, but most Arabs saw things differently. The writer Musa Kazim al-Husseini complained to colonial minister Winston Churchill in August 1921: “they depreciate the value of land and property and at the same time manipulate a financial crisis. Can Europe then expect Arabs to live and work with such a neighbour? (Cohen in Cohen 162) In response, Churchill reiterated his support for Jewish settlement. Things turned deadly with the Arab riots in Jerusalem and an organized shootout in Tel Hai in 1920 that claimed the lives of a handful on both sides.

Tensions fully erupted in May 1921 in the city of Jaffa. A fight between rival Jewish socialist groups near a mosque spiraled out of control and sparked deadly riots between Jews and Arabs. Arabs killed 47 Jews, and the next day Jewish groups and British police retaliated and killed 48 Arabs. A British commission blamed mainly the Arabs, but admitted that their complaints stemmed from the “political and economic consequences” of the settlements and the “perceived pro-Jewish bias” of the British. Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky felt that the time had come to build a metaphorical wall around the settlers: “Zionist colonization can continue and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population, behind a wall of iron, which the native population "ge (Jabotinsky) French rule in Syria and Lebanon also had a violent beginning.

Faisal, Hussein's son, had led Arab forces into Syria in 1918 and had announced his claim to the throne of a Syrian kingdom. But the French did not relinquish control, so French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and Faisal agreed that Syria would become a de facto state under French rule Faisal's Arab nationalist allies of the Syrian National Congress. However, they wanted complete independence and control over Lebanon and Palestine. The nationalist society informed Feisal of their position: "We are prepared to declare war on both England and France." (Fromkin 437) Faisal's priority was to become king, so he reluctantly agreed to cancel the agreement with the French and was crowned king of Syria on March 7, 1920.

France threatened to invade, so Faisal agreed to their terms , but his answer came. A French army later invaded Syria anyway from its base in Lebanon and defeated the ragtag Arab army at the Battle of Maysalun in July. Feisal fled to Mesopotamia, but Maysalun became a symbol of Arab nationalism and resistance to European imperialism, as has Ali Allawi. written: “It was a military disaster, but his name has gone down in Arab history as a synonym for heroism and desperate courage against enormous odds, as well as betrayal and betrayal.” (Allawi 291) Feisal's position among the French and the nationalists, and the ambitions of his own family, have sparked many historical debates about whether he was a power-hungry opportunist, a sincere pan-Arab nationalist, or both.

They were fighting: his army was scattered across the region, bureaucrats were waging departmental turf wars, and politicians were arguing over how much independence Mesopotamia would have and whether it would be one, two, or even three states. The population was divided. Some members of the urban elite were not against British control, while the association of former Ottoman officers and much of the tribal camp were. In June 1920, a local Arab politician warned British administrator Gertrude Bell: “You said in your statement. that you would establish a native government that would base its authority on the initiative and free choice of the people concerned, and yet you proceed to make a plan without consulting anyone.” (Fromkin 451) That same month, the Iraqi Revolt, also known as the Iraqi Revolution, began.

After a local tribe resisted British troops and imprisoned one of their own, unrest spread throughout the Middle Euphrates region and besieged several British garrisons. captured Najaf and Karbala and defeated multiple British relief columns. It took the British until November, and 450 deaths, to quell the revolt, and the agreement included a vague promise of an independent Arab kingdom that had not yet been defined. although it caused some in Britain to question the Mandate: “How long will valuable lives have to be sacrificed in the vain effort to impose on the Arab population an elaborate and costly administration that they never asked for and do not want?” (Fromkin 452) The British defeated the Iraqi tribes, but they did not understand them.

Bureaucrats wrote reports that blamed the revolt on a conspiracy between Turkey and Faisal, a conspiracy between Germans and Turks, and possibly the Bolsheviks as well. the machinations of the American Standard Oil company, Pan-Islam, or the Jews (Fromkin 453), tribal leader Sayyid Muhsin Abu Tabikh, was more pragmatic: “The British hastened time by their ignorance of the proud personality of the Iraqis and the numerous. political mistakes they made throughout the country.” (Khadim 71) There is also a historical debate about the Iraqi revolt or revolution. Some see it as a rebellion by different groups who were upset with British rule because it was foreign and heavy-handed.

Others emphasize the role of former Ottoman officers. who supported Faisal as future king. Others consider it a national revolution that laid the foundation for a modern Iraqi identity and eventual independence. The shape of the modern Middle East became clearer in 1921, although formal peace did not come until 1923. At the Cairo Conference, the powers agreed that Faisal would rule the Kingdom of Iraq, his brother Abdullah would become king of Transjordan and that Britain would continue to support the Zionist project in Palestine. Although Britain would still have significant influence, the new country. The kingdoms enjoyed more autonomy than the British had intended thanks to the Iraqi revolt;

However, independence would have to wait. The French soon divided Syria and Lebanon into five separate states, which they would rule for years to come. They also decided to create Greater Lebanon by uniting several Muslim, mostly Christian districts of Mount Lebanon, creating an unknown and volatile mix. And so, World War I ended centuries of Ottoman rule and

created

a new Middle East. It was a region of fragile new states, supposedly on the path to independence thanks to the League of Nations, but in reality under British and French imperial control. There was violence between religious and ethnic communities, and there was violence against foreign domination.

And in Palestine, there was the uncertainty of the Zionist project: would it result in the creation of a Jewish state, or would it provoke perpetual tensions in Palestine – or perhaps both? The roots of the Middle East conflict were planted after World War I, but really intensified during the Cold War, when superpowers became involved and several wars were fought in the region. At its core, Israel sought to acquire nuclear weapons in much the same way that the United States and the USSR had done during and after World War II. And as nuclear arsenals expanded, the Soviet Union also pursued its vision of nuclear-powered communism by rapidly increasing production. of nuclear reactors.

Entire cities were built to accommodate a new atomic elite that would help produce unlimited energy. I bet you have the name of one of these cities: Pripyat. If you're interested in learning more about the Soviet nuclear program from its origins in World War II to the Chernobyl disaster and beyond, you can watch our new

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