7.9: The Post-War Middle East

The Middle East

After more than six hundred years in power, WWI brought an end to the supremacy of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. When the war began in 1914, the Ottoman Empire, at the behest of Enver Pasha, its Minister of War, entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers. The Ottoman Empire’s participation in the war against Britain, France, and Russia was directly tied to the Empire’s close military alliance with Germany, a power that had aided in revitalizing the Ottoman military against British economic colonialism in the region.

Territorial losses in North Africa and the Balkans also served as motivation to join the Central Powers in what had been deemed a “European war.” More than half a million men served in the Ottoman military, presenting a huge risk to Britain because of its positions in the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. The Ottomans were prepared for British maneuvers. Upon the British attack on Iraq, an Ottoman holding, the Central Powers attacked the British in Egypt, starting a drawn-out conflict between the British and Ottoman empires in the Middle East.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "The Imperial Camel Corps Brigade outside Beersheba, 1st November 1917," George Westmoreland, in the Imperial War Museum, CC BY-NC-SA.

The Ottoman military’s successes against the British led to the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16. Initially, the British attempted to subdue the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, by sending the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles. Defenses on the Ottoman side, led by individuals like Mustafa Kemal – the military leader who would at the end of the war found the Republic of Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire – were able to stave off the British advance.

As the Gallipoli campaign came to an end, Britain redoubled its efforts against the Ottomans in Iraq. Figure 7.9.1 shows Sir Stanley Frederick Maude leading 150,000 well-equipped soldiers on camels into the region to build up the infrastructure of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, setting the Central Powers back in their attempts to prevent further British incursions into Ottoman territory.

The Great War transformed the world. The Middle East, especially, was drastically changed. Before the war, the region east of the Mediterranean had three main centers of power: the Ottoman Empire, British-controlled Egypt, and independent Iran. As early as 1916, the French and British had already agreed to a plan to partition Ottoman territory after its defeat. The Sykes-Picot Agreement (named after British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and Francois-George Picot) established spheres of influence for each nation and was ratified by their respective governments in May 1916 (figure 7.9.2). By 1918 the situation had become far more complex as a result of President Wilson’s call for self-determination in the Fourteen Points. That promise appealed to many under Ottoman rule, especially the Arabs. In the aftermath of the war, Wilson sent a commission to determine the conditions and aspirations of the people. The King-Crane Commission found that most favored an independent state free of European control. However, the people’s wishes were largely ignored and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire were divided into several nations created by Great Britain and France with little regard to ethnic realities and still largely based on the secret agreement of 1916. The British in particular wanted to continue to control the Suez Canal which was their route to India, and to monopolize the oil of the Persian Gulf to fuel the diesel engines of their navy and merchant marine.

The Arab provinces of the Ottomans were to be ruled by Britain and France as League of Nations “mandates” and a new nation of Turkey emerged in the former Ottoman heartland in Anatolia. According to the League of Nations, mandates were necessary in regions that “were inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Though supposedly established for the benefit of the Middle-Eastern people, the mandate system was essentially a reimagined form of nineteenth-century imperialism. France received Syria; Britain took control of Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan (Jordan). The United States was asked to become a mandate power but declined.

To consolidate their power over the Arabs, the British supported Hussein Ibn Ali (related distantly to the Prophet Muhammad) as king of Hejaz on the Arabian Peninsula, including the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, in 1916. His sons Abdullah and Faisal were chosen to be kings of Transjordan and of Syria, where Faisal was rejected and so instead became the king of Iraq. The Iraqi dynasty ended in violence with the murder of Faisal’s grandson in 1958, but Abdullah’s dynasty still rules Jordan, under Abdullah II and Queen Rania. In Hejaz, Hussein Ibn Ali was overthrown in 1925 by Ibn Saud, a tribal leader from eastern Arabia. Through strategic marriages with other tribes, Ibn Saud established Saudi Arabia. He had so many children that the current king is still one of his many sons.

The disposition of the Middle East was complicated by the increasing importance of its oil resources. Oil had been discovered in Iran in 1908, and during the period when petroleum was becoming the most important commodity of the twentieth century, it was also becoming clear that some of the world’s largest reserves were located in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum or BP) was established in 1908 to control production in Iran. After the war, British-controlled businesses that had been licensed by the Ottomans to develop oil discovered in Mesopotamia spurred British interest in creating the new Kingdom of Iraq under British mandate in 1920. The British-controlled multinational, TPC (Turkish Petroleum Company, established in 1912), received a 75-year concession to develop Iraq’s oil.

However, in 1933 when enormous deposits of oil were discovered in eastern Arabia, Ibn Saud turned to the Americans rather than the British to exploit these oil deposits, fearing renewed British meddling in his country. U.S. oil companies have been there ever since.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "Theodor Herzl on board a vessel reaching the shores of Palestine, 1898," in the Public Domain.

Zionism

The movement to establish a Jewish Homeland—Zionism—was begun in the 1890s by Jewish Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl. Figure 7.9.2 is a photograph from 1898 of Theodore Herzl. He is wearing a cap and standing against the railing on board a ship near the shores of Jaffa. Shocked by how Jews were being persecuted throughout Europe, even in liberal France, Herzl concluded that Jews would never be fully accepted as citizens anywhere and that they needed to establish a separate Jewish homeland. It was by no means a forgone conclusion that Israel would become the destination for many Jews fleeing persecution. Over 2.5 million Jews fled Europe and went to the USA. Portugal sought to strengthen its rule in Angola by enlisting Jewish leaders to establish a colony there. Many Jewish leaders wanted to create a Jewish homeland in Angola.

After some debate, Herzl's movement decided to begin buying land in Palestine, the site of the ancient Hebrew kingdom. In the heat of the war, in 1917, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour promised that Palestine would be recognized as a “Jewish homeland,” in an attempt to gain the support of Jews among the belligerents. In 1918 there were 618,000 Muslims, 70,000 Christians, and some 59,000 Jews in Palestine.Of course, the British also promised to respect Arab sovereignty in Palestine; setting the stage for conflict in the region that has continued to today.

It is hard to overstate how destabilizing the post-war settlements in the former Ottoman territories were to the rest of the 20th century. There is a straight line between many of the decisions made so quickly and thoughtlessly in 1919/1920 and current issues in the region today. To choose one example, the boundaries that were drawn for the new British Mandate of Iraq were almost guaranteed to create tension among the populations involved. Roughly two-thirds of the people in British-mandate Iraq were Shi’a Muslims while Sunni represented much of the remainder. Despite the numerical dominance of Shi’a by 1921, the British would install a Sunni monarchy. This reflected an all too familiar colonial pattern. In many European colonies in Africa, for instance, certain ethnic groups were selected out of the broader population to receive greater economic and political opportunities. They would then become staunch allies of the colonizer while also earning the enmity of less favored groups. This divide-and-rule strategy was very much alive in the Kingdom of Iraq. Under first the British, then the British-backed monarchy, and even under the authority of the secular Ba’athist Party, the majority Shi’a population would be economically disadvantaged while also underrepresented politically and culturally in the country.

Correctly feeling that living under a League of Nations Mandate was little different than being a colony, many Iraqi Shi’as (along with some Sunni tribes) were in revolt by 1920. With the war now over, the British army was in the process of demobilizing and there was little public interest in fighting a new war in a faraway location. Instead, the British unleashed their recently discovered air power against the rebels. These bombing campaigns were more cost-effective than traditional military operations and easier too. The British considered the entire Iraqi population as potential fighters and therefore potential targets of their bombs. Writing in 1946, George Orwell described the kind of colonial warfare that was being pioneered in the Middle East: “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” (Orwell) Iraq was indeed “pacified” with the help of this aerial terrorism, but even when the revolt ended the planes remained. As Priya Satia has written, “Bombardment was used routinely even for tax collection. As a wing commander explained, in Iraq they did ‘with explosives what should be done by policemen and sticks.’” Although casualties numbers were not officially collected, Satia suggests that “A hundred casualties were not unusual in a single operation, besides those lost to starvation and the burning of villages; homes, crops, and livestock were also targeted.” This loss of life was dismissed by authorities in Britain based on the idea that “these tribes love fighting for fighting’s sake…They have no objection to being killed.” All this is to say that current conditions in the Middle East do not represent the basic nature of the region, the people, or the culture. Instead, they are the result of this particular history of imperialist interference, violence, and economic exploitation that came about as a result of a postwar settlement that was based on many of the same failed imperialist assumptions that had hastened the coming of war in the first place.

Primary Source Articles: Emir Faisal at Versailles, 1919

At Versailles, Arab leaders like Emir Faisal arrived to seek the formation of independent Arab nations in the Middle East.

Discussion Questions

• What kind of relationship is Emir Faisal seeking between Arabs and Europeans?
• What is the perception of the Jews?

The aim of the Arab nationalist movements is to unite the Arabs eventually into one nation. As an old member of the Syrian Committee I commanded the Syrian revolt, and had under me Syrians, Mesopotamians, and Arabians.

We believe that our ideal of Arab unity in Asia is justified beyond need of argument. If argument is required, we would point to the general principles accepted by the Allies when the United States joined them, to our splendid past, to the tenacity with which our race has for 600 years resisted Turkish attempts to absorb us, and, in a lesser degree, to what we tried our best to do in this war as one of the Allies.

The unity of the Arabs in Asia has been made more easy of late years, since the development of railways, telegraphs, and air-roads. In old days the area was too huge, and in parts necessarily too thinly peopled, to communicate common ideas readily. The various provinces of Arab Asia — Syria, Irak, Jezireh, Hedjaz, Nejd, Yemen — are very different economically and socially, and it is impossible to constrain them into one frame of government.

We believe that Syria, an agricultural and industrial area thickly peopled with sedentary classes, is sufficiently advanced politically to manage her own internal affairs. We feel also that foreign technical advice and help will be a most valuable factor in our national growth. We are willing to pay for this help in cash; we cannot sacrifice for it any part of the freedom we have just won for ourselves by force of arms.

Jezireh and Irak are two huge provinces, made up of three civilised towns, divided by large wastes thinly peopled by seminomadic tribes. The world wishes to exploit Mesopotamia rapidly, and we therefore believe that the system of government there will have to be buttressed by the men and material resources of a great foreign Power. We ask, however, that the Government be Arab, in principle and spirit, the selective rather than the elective principle being necessarily followed in the neglected districts, until time makes the broader basis possible. The main duty of the Arab Government there would be to oversee the educational processes which are to advance the tribes to the moral level of the towns. The Hedjaz is mainly a tribal area, and the government will remain, as in the past, suited to patriarchal conditions. We appreciate these better than Europe, and propose therefore to retain our complete independence there.

In Palestine the enormous majority of the people are Arabs. The Jews are very close to the Arabs in blood, and there is no conflict of character between the two races. In principles we are absolutely at one. Nevertheless, the Arabs cannot risk assuming the responsibility of holding level the scales in the clash of races and religions that have, in this one province, so often involved the world in difficulties. They would wish for the effective super-position of a great trustee, so long as a representative local administration commended itself by actively promoting the material prosperity of the country.

The powers will, I hope, find better means to give fuller effect to the aims of our national movement. I came to Europe, on behalf of my father and the Arabs of Asia, to say that they are expecting the Powers at the Conference not to attach undue importance to superficial differences of condition, and not to consider them only from the low ground of existing European material interests and supposed spheres. They expect the powers to think of them as one potential people, jealous of their language and liberty, and ask that no step be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government.

In laying stress on the difference in the social condition of our provinces, I do not wish to give the impression that there exists any real conflict of ideals, material interests, creeds, or character rendering our union impossible. The greatest obstacle we have to overcome is local ignorance, for which the Turkish Government is largely responsible.

In our opinion, if our independence be conceded and our local competence established, the natural influences of race, language, and interest will soon draw us together into one people; but for this the Great Powers will have to ensure us open internal frontiers, common railways and telegraphs, and uniform systems of education. To achieve this they must lay aside the thought of individual profits, and of their old jealousies. In a word, we ask you not to force your whole civilisation upon us, but to help us to pick out what serves us from your experience. In return we can offer you little but gratitude.

David Hunter Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris (1924) vol. 4, in the Public Domain

Review Questions

• How did the particulars of the post-war settlement in the former Ottoman territories help create instability in the region?
• Why did the British prefer aerial warfare for their pacification campaigns rather than using traditional armies?