How did the Middle East get so screwed up? That is a question that I’m asked more and
more these days.
In just the past few weeks we’ve seen the
murders of three Israeli teens by Palestinian terrorists from Hamas and the
murder of a Palestinian teenager by young Israeli terrorists, while rockets and
mortars are again hitting Israel from Gaza as the IDF destroys Hamas military
infrastructures both in Gaza and the West Bank.
We’re watching as large parts of Syria and
Iraq morph into an Islamic jihadist caliphate, led by a man nicknamed “the
butcher from Baghdad “, who heads ISIS, the biggest and most dangerous
terrorist organization in the world that is now marching on Jordan. At the same
time Iran is building nuclear weapons, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria are disintegrating…and
Hezbollah is watching the World Cup soccer matches from Israeli broadcasts.
Now that’s screwed up.
How did it happen? How did the cradle of
civilization and the birthplace of the three great monotheistic religions reach
this volatile point in time?
Numerous books and scholastic research
papers have suggested several explanations.
Some experts blame the Sunni-Shiite rift that dates back to the eighth
century. But while that has a lot to do with what’s happening today, it’s not
the only cause. Others blame the
establishment of Israel in 1948, and while that is true regarding the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has nothing to do with the current civil wars
in Syria and Iraq, the creation of ISIS or the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
As for me, I like to pinpoint the current
Middle East mess to a singular event that happened on June 28, 1914, at 10:45am
in Sarajevo – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which
led to World War l, which led to the break-up of the Ottoman empire (AKA the
last Muslim caliphate), which led to the arbitrary creation of hybrid countries
that never existed until 1922, which is the real cause of today’s crisis.
Here’s
why:
We know that there were nation-states in the
Middle East from biblical times onwards, some small – virtually city-states
like Jaffa, Tyre, Ashkelon, etc. Others were larger, like the kingdoms of Judea
and Israel, Canaan and Pleshet, while others like Rome, Greece, Egypt, Parthia,
Media, etc. grew to become empires. In
general, the citizens of these countries, or nation-states, proudly identified
as: “Jews”, “Philistines”, “Romans”, “Greeks”,” Egyptians”, etc.
However all that ended with the Muslim conquest
that started in 635 CE.
The notion of any national and/or religious
identity or loyalty other than Islam is frowned upon, and heavily taxed
(Jizya). Once one has converted to Islam
he or she ceases to be “French” or “American” and becomes a member of the “Ummat
al-Islamiyah” (or “Ummah”) , the collective
global community of Islamic peoples.
Therefore, as the armies of Mohammed and his
successors (“caliphs”) conquered country after country in the Middle East,
North Africa, Southern Europe and Southwest Asia, they abolished the concept of
national identity, converted the ruling classes to Islam and declared all territories
to be part of a single “Islamic State”, ruled by a single “Caliph”
(“successor”) and governed by Sharia law and customs.
So with few exceptions, from the end of the
Muslim conquest in the 11th century until the end of WWl, the model of nation-states
did not exist in the Middle East, which was a vast area made up mostly of deserts,
high mountains and precious little water. It was sparsely populated by tribes
of desert nomads or Bedouins, and centuries old towns or cities on major land
or sea trade routes. Each town or city was ruled by a clan or tribal leader,
usually with the title “Malik” (king, chieftain, village head, etc.), “Emir”
(prince) or “Sheikh”, who pledged loyalty to the Caliph and submitted revenue
to the Islamic State from the Jizya tax levied on non-Muslims.
As for the nomads, while there were no
borders, each large tribe, or confederated groups of tribes, had their own
territorial roaming or trading area, with sufficient water sources, that they
guarded fiercely from other tribes. The caliph was responsible for overall
security for the entire Islamic State, regardless of where his capital was.
The main caliphate dynasties over the last
1300 years were:
- The Umayyad dynasty
in Damascus (661–750),
- The Abbasid
dynasty in Baghdad (750–1258), and later in Cairo (1260–1517),
- The Shi'ite
Fatimid dynasty in North Africa and Egypt (909–1171).
- The Ottomans in
Constantinople (1299–1924).
For over 600 years, as caliphs of Islam, the
Ottoman Sultans ruled over the largest empire in history.
Then four things happened:
- The assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
- World War l
- The discovery of huge amounts of oil in the Middle
East
- The Sykes–Picot agreement
Even before the war
started it was clear that the Turkish Empire would be split up between the victors.
The discovery of huge deposits of oil in parts of the Middle East made the
division more contentious.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 was a
secret agreement reached during the war between the British and French
governments regarding the partition of the Ottoman Empire among the Allied
Powers.
Essentially it gave Britain control over
what is today Israel, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula,
France got what today is Morocco, Tunisia,
Syria, Algeria and Lebanon, and Italy got Libya.
But these countries never intended to rule
their new colonies – just to guarantee supplies of oil (and in the case of Great
Britain – also sovereignty over the Suez Canal).
One of the first things they did was to
divide their huge mandates into manageable regions. They then identified and
recruited suitable leaders from among the local tribal warlords, and paid them
absurd amounts of money and weapons for their loyalty. Usually they looked for
the head of the largest tribe or the fiercest warlord and made him governor of
the region, often with a newly minted royal title.
The problem is that in creating these
artificially drawn “regions” the colonial powers did not take into account the
fact that many of these “regions” include diverse ethnic, religious, racial, cultural
and tribal groups that rarely interacted before, didn’t always speak the same
language or dialect, were not of the same religion (Christians, Muslims, Jews, Animists,
etc.), or branch of a religion (Sunnis, Shiites), or had tribal wars going back
centuries. They didn’t care. As long as
the appointed “Governor” guaranteed the oil supplies or other national
interests of the colonial power, as well as domestic tranquility, they rarely
questioned how it was done, who was favored, who was persecuted, which tribes
were annihilated or removed from their ancestral land or which religions were
forcibly converted to Islam.
Within a few years, once the administrations
were working and the relations between the colonial power and the loyal
appointed governors were established, the patron countries started granting
independence to the regions, creating states and countries where none existed
before, ruled by newly established “royal dynasties” of kings, emirs and sheikhs
who by then had established systems of patronage, favoritism and corruption, while
still being paid for their loyalty to their colonial master.
The problem is that nobody bothered to ask
the different groups of people in these “countries” what THEY wanted. Many of them didn’t want to be bundled into a
new “nationality” with people that prayed differently, that looked differently,
that spoke differently or had different traditions.
Three generations ago they were afraid to
speak out, but they passed their frustrations down to their children, who
passed them to their children, who today have added problems like unemployment
and substandard education, while the elitist descendants of the “governors” now
live in palaces and villas.
That is what brought about the “Arab Spring”
which toppled the dictatorial regimes but created an “Islamist Summer”, which
spawned ISIS, and now empowers it, together with Hamas and Hezbollah…not to
mention reawakening the irreparable 1300 year old Shiite-Sunni conflict.
Many factors contributed over the years, and
World War 1 would have inevitably started anyway, but I still like to think
that the Middle East today is screwed up because of a bullet fired in a
Sarajevo street by a 19 year old Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip on
June 28, 1914, at 10:45 am.
