7.9: The Post-War Middle East

The Post-War 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. Sir Stanley Frederick Maude led 150,000 well-equipped soldiers 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 (figure 7.9.1).  

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.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "Map of Sykes–Picot Agreement showing areas of control and influence agreed between the British and the French. Signed by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, 8 May 1916," in the Public Domain.

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.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): "Ibn Saud (right) and Iraqi King Faisal (left) in the mid-1920s," in the Public Domain.

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 \(\PageIndex{4}\): "Theodor Herzl on board a vessel reaching the shores of Palestine, 1898," in the Public Domain. 

 The movement to establish a Jewish Homeland—Zionism—was begun in the 1890s by Jewish Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl. 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. After some debate, his movement decided to begin buying land in Palestine, the site of the ancient Hebrew kingdom. Originally, most Jews around the world, especially more religious Jews, rejected the movement because they believed that Jews were not to return to Israel until the Messiah came. The arrival of Zionists in Palestine often led to tension with their Arab neighbors, who looked upon these new arrivals as Europeans trying to take over their country.

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—not realizing that Zionism was hardly the majority view at that time within Judaism. 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: Excerpts from Theodor Herzl, On the Jewish State, 1896 

Excerpts from Theodor Herzl, On the Jewish State, 1896

Some Jewish leaders called for the return of the Jews to Palestine for decades before Theodor Herzl (1860­ 1904) wrote his influential pamphlet, The Jewish State. But Herzl's work pushed the formation of a political movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The first Zionist Congress, convened by Herzl, was held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Herzl was less attached to Palestine than some other "Zionists", and considered at one stage the creation of a Jewish state in what is now Uganda. 

. . .

The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish State. 

The world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea. 

. . . 

We are a people-one people. 

We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow­ citizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering. The majority may decide which are the strangers; for this, as indeed every point which arises in the relations between nations is a question of might. I do not here surrender any portion of our prescriptive right, when I make this statement merely in my own name as an individual. In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace... 

. . .
[However,] oppression and persecution cannot exterminate us. No nation on earth has survived such struggles and sufferings as we have gone through. Jew-baiting has merely stripped off our weaklings; the strong among us were invariably true to their race when persecution broke out against them... 

However much I may worship personality-powerful individual personality in statesmen, inventors, artists, philosophers, or leaders, as well as the collective personality of a historic group of human beings, which we call a nation-however much I may worship personality, I do not regret its disappearance. Whoever can, will, and must perish, let him perish. But the distinctive nationality of Jews neither can, will, nor must be destroyed. It cannot be destroyed, because external enemies consolidate it. It will not be destroyed; this is shown during two thousand years of appalling suffering. It must not be destroyed .... Whole branches of Judaism may wither and fall, but the trunk will remain. 

The Jewish Question

No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!" 

Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys-for example, their exclusion from certain hotels-even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecutions varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur... 

The Plan

Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves. 

The creation of a new State is neither ridiculous nor impossible. We have in our day witnessed the process in connection with nations which were not largely members of the middle class, but poorer, less educated, and consequently weaker than ourselves. The Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want. 

The plan, simple in design, but complicated in execution, will be carried out by two agencies: The Society of Jews and the Jewish Company. 

The Society of Jews will do the preparatory work in the domains of science and politics, which the Jewish Company will afterwards apply practically. 

The Jewish Company will be the liquidating agent of the business interests of departing Jews, and will organize commerce and trade in the new country. 

We must not imagine the departure of the Jews to be a sudden one. It will be gradual, continuous, and will cover many decades. The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan, they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own dwellings; their labor will create trade, trade will create markets and markets will attract new settlers, for every man will go voluntarily, at his own expense and his own risk. The labor expended on the land will enhance its value, and the Jews will soon perceive that a new and permanent sphere of operation is opening here for that spirit of enterprise which has heretofore met only with hatred and obloquy.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1896herzl.asp

Discussion Questions

• What were the circumstances in Europe that convinced Herzl that an independent Jewish state was necessary?
• What was the basis of his plan?

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?