A Brief History of the Middle East by Catherwood Christopher

Author:Catherwood, Christopher [CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849018074
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Carving up the Middle East: the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration

As we saw from the earlier bin Laden statement, the Arab sense of betrayal, stemming from the First World War, remains acute to this day. In discussing this part of Middle Eastern history, we are entering a historiographical minefield! Who said what to whom has become part of the debate on the foundation of the state of Israel, since without the decisions made by British and French soldiers and politicians in this period, the very existence of a Jewish state might never have taken place.

Efraim and Inari Karsh, in their highly influential (and thus equally controversial) Empires of the Sand show that the sequence of events leading to the Arab Revolt, and the actual fighting itself, was also very different from the popular version. Their argument in a nutshell is that the key Arab players were not betrayed pawns, as David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia and Arab myth would have us believe, but active participants in a complex series of games in which they won some and lost some. In other words, they argue that the powerful Arab/ Islamic sense of victimization that has permeated the Middle East for decades is from this perspective unjustifiable.

This is what has made their work so debatable, and in reality a step too far. The situation, while easy to explain, was actually more subtle than that, and the Arabs do have good cause to feel at least some grievance at what happened next.

When the British found themselves at war with the Ottoman Empire, they also found themselves with two major problems. In some ways the less important was the geographical/security issue – the protection of the Suez Canal route to Asia. This was the vital artery to the Raj, the Jewel in the British Crown. It had to be defended, and so holding on to Egypt became vital.

(Two British historians, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, argued in their book Africa and the Victorians that this also led to the decision to colonize vast swathes of Africa in the late nineteenth century. While debatable, it does show the critical importance of the Suez Canal route to India, something that obsessed the British imperial class for many decades, right down to the Suez crisis of 1956. This was nine years after the granting of independence to India, but still at a time when Britain had a large presence in East Asia.)

Procuring the safety of the Suez Canal in 1914 proved easy. Nominal Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt was replaced with a British Protectorate, which made the country into the British-ruled state it had been to all intents and purposes for the previous thirty years. All Ottoman attempts to seize both Egypt and the canal failed – the British position remained safe throughout the war.

There was, however, a much bigger problem that worried the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. This was the presence in the British Empire of tens of millions of Muslim subjects.

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