The Middle East
World War I profoundly affected the whole of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iran. The fall of the Turkish Empire created the conditions for new states, new colonies, and new conflicts throughout the region. There was little agreement among the powers that had taken over Turkey’s role in the region or the local peoples themselves on the form that the new order should take. Thwarted ambition, contested territory, and thinly disguised imperial self-interest dominated the region’s political future.
The Turks had held sway over most of the Middle East for centuries. Their empire’s collapse led to conflicting demands for Arab independence, a new Jewish homeland, and a claim on the spoils of victory by Britain, France, Italy, and Greece. Britain and France were the main short-term beneficiaries. Both received mandates from the League of Nations to guide the peoples of the region to independent statehood in Syria (France) and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Britain). This carve up was the result of the prearranged Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which flatly contradicted promises made by Britain during World War I to the Arabs as part of Britain’s attempt to turn them against their Turkish masters.
Both Britain and France behaved irresponsibly and dishonestly in their new mandates. France arbitrarily carved a new country, Lebanon, out of Syria to create an artificial future state for the local Christians, who were barely in a majority within the new borders. The French subsequently had to face and put down various Arab risings. Britain was happy to concede independence to the Arab tribes of the barren interior of central and southern Arabia, which had few resources and limited strategic significance. This area became an independent Arab kingdom (Saudi Arabia) under Husein, who was the sherif of Mecca. Conversely, in Mesopotamia and near the Persian Gulf, the strategic importance of the region’s oil reserves and nearby India to Britain and others complicated the picture.
Britain established Husein’s son, Feisal, as a puppet ruler in Mesopotamia (Iraq) to maintain control of its vast oil fields, as well as the strategic overland connection to India. Feisal had wanted to rule in Syria, but this land had been given to France. His brother, Abdullah, was proclaimed emir of Transjordan (Palestine east of the Jordan River), but again under British supervision. This British betrayal of their Arab allies led to an ongoing conflict with Arab tribes. The British also faced a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq during this period. In both cases British bombers were used to destroy villages suspected of holding rebels as a new method of "cheap" imperial policing. When combined with considerable concessions in Persia (Iran), Britain emerged from the war in control of huge new oil reserves.
Palestine, where there was no oil and little strategic importance, was divided along the Jordan by the British to create a possible future homeland for the Jews west of the river. By encouraging a Jewish national home in Palestine and promising independence to the Arabs, the British had effectively offered the same territory to two different groups, but then remained in charge themselves. The consequences were predictably problematic and often violent. Many European Jews, supporters of the cause of Zionism, advocated the creation of a wholly Jewish state in Palestine. Clashes between Arabs and Jews followed.
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POLITICAL WORLD |
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ZIONISM In the two decades before World War I, Zionism emerged as a powerful force among European Jews. Its main aim was the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine beyond the reach of European persecution. Zionism was a reaction both to increasing anti-Semitism and to the fear that assimilation into the national cultures of Europe would destroy the distinct Jewish identity. In the late nineteenth century, pogroms (Russian for "devastation") were encouraged by Czar Alexander III in Russia and Russian Poland. Pogroms killed thousands of Jews, destroyed their property, and drove over two million to emigrate, mainly to the United States. Anti-semitism was widespread throughout Europe, although less severe in western European countries like Italy and Britain, which both had Jewish leaders before 1914. Theodor Herzl was the founder and leading advocate of Zionism until his death in 1904. A highly assimilated Hungarian Jew who had once urged the mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his latent Jewish identity was roused by the anti-Semitism he witnessed in France. In 1896 he published The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, which was the founding document of Zionism. The other key figure in early Zionism was Chaim Weizmann, who helped to persuade the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Weizmann became leader of the World Zionist Organization in 1920 and eventually presided over the realization of the Zionist dream when he became the first president of the new state of Israel in 1948.
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The ideals of nationalism endorsed by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, encouraged the peoples of the Middle East to expect independence after the war. This hope was especially high among the Egyptians, who had existing traditions of independent statehood. Egypt had long been a semi-independent province of the Turkish Empire until creeping British influence had undermined its sovereignty in the 1880s. Because of the Suez Canal, a "friendly" Egypt was deemed essential to Britain’s lines of communication to India. By World War I it had become a British colony in all but name, a position that was formalized when Egypt became a British protectorate on the outbreak of war with Turkey in 1914. Seeking real independence from Britain, many Egyptians rebeled in March 1919.
The rising was sparked by the deportation of leaders of the nationalist Wafd (Delegation) movement in March 1919, including their leader Said Zaghlul. This was the movement of the educated class and students that demanded the expulsion of the British and Egypt independence, but poor city dwellers from Cairo, the capital, and Bedouin tribesmen also participated. This national uprising saw rioting, sabotage, and violent mobs in the streets. Britons and other Europeans were attacked all over Egypt. In reaction, 1,500 Egyptians were killed in two months of ferocious policing by the British, who still had considerable numbers of troops in Egypt.
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Palestine |
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At the end of World War I, Britain took charge of Palestine, formerly part of the Turkish Empire. The region was home to a large Arab population but was also claimed by European Jews as their ancestral homeland. Friction between the two groups steadily grew. Palestine is a narrow strip of land bounded by the Jordan River to the east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Lebanon to the north, and the Sinai Desert to the south. It roughly corresponds to the ancient Holy Land and includes Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth. Part of the Turkish Empire before and during World War I, Palestine was given to Britain as a mandate after the war. In 1918, it was inhabited mostly by Palestinian Arabs, some 700,000. However, the area was also the ancient homeland of the Jews before they were scattered in the Diaspora during the second century C.E. By 1918, 56,000 Jews remained in Palestine. Inspired by Zionism, the Jewish movement to reestablish their ancient homeland, Jews began emigrating from Europe to Palestine well before World War I, and their plan received the unexpected support of the British government in 1917. The Balfour Declaration favored "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," while also promising that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, made the promise partly out of a genuine sympathy for the plight of the Jews, partly in an attempt to gain U.S. Jewish support for the war effort, and partly to encourage revolutionary Russia’s continued participation in the conflict. The United States had a small but influential Jewish community, while several Russian Jews were key figures in the Russian Revolution. As a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to the displacement of local Arabs from land they had occupied for centuries, conflict was inevitable. Jewish settlement in Palestine continued as a small but steady stream in the postwar years, but the Arabs, who wanted independence after helping Britain defeat their former Turkish rulers, had also developed a strong sense of nationalism. They rejected British rule and began attacking Jewish settlements in 1920. The Jews formed their own self-defense force, the Haganah, in response, and a cycle of intercommunal violence was established. The combination of Zionism and confused British signals to both Arab and Jewish nationalists had created a conflict between an increasingly dominant minority immigrant group and a dispossessed indigenous people that continues to the present day.
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Racial contempt for Egyptians, by both ordinary British soldiers and by their officers, was strong in postwar Egypt and further heightened tensions. The attitude was summed up by General Walter Congreve, who wrote of the Egyptians: "When you talk politics to an Easterner you may be sure you will get the worst of it. Kick him and he loves and respects you." In short, many Egyptians received rough treatment, and the uprising was only fully quelled by the return of Viscount Allenby of Megiddo, who, as General Edmund Allenby, had defeated the Turks in Palestine during the war. Allenby allowed four Wafd leaders back from exile in a gesture of compromise. He also organized Egyptian "independence" in 1922, but it was subject to British control of the country’s defenses and the Suez Canal.
