How did the Middle East get so screwed up?

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:  

1. The assassination of  Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria 
2. World War l 
3. The discovery of huge amounts of oil in the Middle East 
4. 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.