Between 1918 and 1920 Britain and France
the war's victorious powers seized
occupied and colonized
the former lands of the 700-year-old
Ottoman Empire
no one asked the people of the
region what they desired.
British and French colonial civil
servants drew all the borders
and arranged all the governments for the
countries that emerged.
All the political struggles, All the parties,
and All the conflicts of the region
from that time to the present
have their roots in the colonial
settlement of 1920.
Britain and France divided the region
between them
Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, 
the states of the Persian Gulf
and Istanbul went to Britain which was
the stronger power.
British politicians like 
Winston Churchill
sought to monopolize actual and
potential oil resources
and dominate the lines of communication
between the Mediterranean
the Persian Gulf and India.
Churchill wanted
Egypt's Suez Canal and the corridor from
coastal Palestine
through Jordan and Iraq
to the oil fields of 
the gulf and Iran.
Most of the oil was already under
British concessions with a company that
would come to be called
British Petroleum or BP.
Winston Churchill had himself purchased
controlling interest to make the
British government the majority
shareholder of BP.
British control of Istanbul
limited Russian access to the Mediterranean
through the straits.
France received the scraps left,
in compensation
for the destruction of the war,
fought, on the Western Front.
Syria,
including the coastal region
that came to be Lebanon,
would be the French Mandate
there was no oil but France had become a
military power
on the northern, southern, and eastern
shores.
Sections of Anatolia, today's Turkey, 
were set aside for
Italy, Greece, Britain,
and France.
News of the partitions met with immediate
opposition and eventual armed revolt by
all the peoples of the region.
The Turkish Republic emerged independent
when Mustafa Kemal
rallied former Ottoman military forces
to fight against the partition.
First France then Greece and Britain
decided to leave Turkey
rather than fight another war
the British public would not stand to
have the young men who survived the
Great War
again drafted to fight in
distant colonies
also in 1920 revolt broke out in Iraq as
the population rose to expel the
British forces from the new colony.
Winston Churchill himself
engineered the Counter-insurgency
offensive
using the new labor-saving technology
of air-power and poison gas.
Egypt, Syria, and Palestine
were also embroiled in armed revolt
which were suppressed
at appalling human and financial cost.
Nationalism in the
Arab world begins
as a response to the intrusion of
Western colonial powers
it has a different nature in each
country partly because
the colonial experience was different
so in Algeria
starting in the 1830s you
had one kind of colonial
adventure which produces
one kind of response in other countries
you have different kinds
of colonial intrusion, Egypt for
example
or in the countrys of the Arab East,
so-called,
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon,
Jordan, Palestine
were taken over after "World War 1" by the
British and French, so there's
a different process in each place
so to generalize in every case these
responses
were nationalist in the sense that
people wanting not to be ruled by
outside forces, but,
In many cases they took a religious form,
in many cases they took a secular form
in some cases they combined the two
or there was, there was, there was
a process of evolution and change.
In Egypt for example there were periods in which
the national movement
had a religious coloration 1890s
for example
under Mustafa Kamil and
the "National Party",
it was a secular national party but it
had a certain religious
balance to it and
other times
the period of the left after "World War 1"
when the national movement was
explicitly about the secular, with
Muslim and Christian leaders and
almost no religious rhetoric to it.  A lot
of discussion of Egypt as a country that
went back to the Pharaohs,
back to the "pre-Islamic" past.
The same is true in Algeria were you
have a resistance movement that is both
led by Abdelkader which is both
religious and secular.  It is a
nationalist response to
colonial occupation but it also
involves
elements of religion same is true in the
response to the Italians in
Libya where you have both religious and
secular elements
and the same is true in the Sudan with
the "Mahdist" response to
British colonialism where
it was largely a religious movement but
it can also be seen as nationalist
I guess it would be in the eastern
Arab world in countries like Lebanon
Syria, Iraq, Palestine
that you had the least
balance, the least weight
of religious elements in the initial
reactions
to European imperialism after
"World War 1"
and there this national movement.
was avowedly secular
and religious elements were
secondary if they
if they existed at all so
there were varied responses with
the religious element really only
coming back where, where had, where it had
disappeared really only coming back in
the
latter part of the second half of the
20th century, in the seventies,
nineteen seventies and eighties
really was when religion began
religious movements political movements
inspired by religion
began to ~complete~, compete seriously with
secular nationalist movements.
In the aftermath of
the "First World War" Ottoman Turkey
was dismembered
and that whole empire was divided up
amongst the victorious Allies in a way
that was extremely cynical
of course the colonial powers had earlier
divided
Africa up, the interior of the whole
African continent
amongst them in 1885 in a single
conference
in Berlin so it was nothing new for the
West European colonial powers
to suddenly, you know, get a huge new chunk
of land and divide it up amongst them
the way that it worked in the
eastern Mediterranean area between the
Mediterranean lets say and Iran
which was an independent country, is that
the British
and the French were the two powers
and they simply drew lines on the map,
sometimes the lines were a little blurry,
and they said,
this goes to England and this goes to
France
and that was it.   There were two guys
who did it
Mark Sykes and George Picot and that's
why the lines were
called the Sykes--Picot Agreement
and what happened is interesting because
these were majority Arab areas
obviously the Turkish Empire had
been ruled by Muslims
who were ethnic Turks
these were ethnic Arabs and they were
given a number of different states
but, so they had you know,
Saudi Arabia
which was largely independent anyway
its independence was, was ratified
if you like
as part of that whole post
"World War 1" period.
then you had Iraq
was you know, the borders were
delineated and it became Iraq
Syria was delineated and became Syria
Palestine and Jordan, Lebanon
of course was carved out in a special
way to please the French
and those lines didn't correspond to
previous national boundaries there had
been no national boundaries
So what happened was that you had
state administrations
that were built there by the
colonial powers
in each of those emerging nations.
The British got Iraq and Jordan
and Palestine.
The French got Syria and Lebanon
and they were given kind of
control over these countries by
the League of Nations which gave them
something called a mandate
because of course this was after
President Wilson's 14 points,
one of which was, That all nations
have the right to self-determination but,
you know, in their patronizing
paternalistic way
the governments in London and Paris
decided that the Arab people were
not ready for independence or
self-governance
and so they, therefore they had to be
kinda of, you know,
nannied along by the British and French
colonial powers
of course oil interests were key
especially for the British they
needed to be able to extract oil
and to be able to protect their sea
lines of communication with the
Empire in India so if you look at the way
the boundaries were drawn
for example there is one little portion
that goes up from Jordan
Northwest no, Northeast toward Iraq
that exactly follows the pipeline that
the British had built
from Iraq that took the oil from there
west-ward to the Mediterranean and
in fact
if you drive along that portion of
Jordan
you pass through several little towns
kinda of small places in the desert
you're driving
essentially along the top of the the oil
pipeline
and the towns are called H1 and H2
and H3 because those were the pumping
stations that the towns grew up around
I mean it's very blatant
how it was all done
just for the oil interest and of course, you know,
then you had the Suez Canal and all that.
The sea lines of communication with the
Empire in India
Where was America?
America was a victorious power too,
but at the time not a particularly
imperialistic one
American Imperial designs were focused
on Latin America & the Pacific.
Meanwhile Britain and France
enjoyed more or less
free rein to reshape the Middle East to
suit their respective goals and policies
and adding more countries to their
extensive empires.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was
concerned that European nationalism
and imperial competition had contributed
to the outbreak of the World War
and he determined to dull the edges of
the Imperial scramble
for the Middle East.  Wilson dispatched
the King--Crane Commission to discern the
wishes and desires of the people of
the Middle East
it was named after its two principal
members Henry King
and Charles Crane.  The Commission
traveled to Anatolia,
Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon in 1919
speaking with hundreds of people
from elites to the most humble.  They
concluded that the people of the region
desired independence.  British and French
colonial governments
were the two least favored options.
In 1920
America was seen as
a benign and non-imperialistic
power by the people of the region
but when Wilson was incapacitated by a
stroke
colonial lobbies in London and Paris
divided the region
and British and French military forces
occupied the cities, towns, and villages.
Now the mandates
were supposed to be
temporary you know until these nations
were so-called
ready for self-governance and
in the course of the Second World War
the French
obviously had problems because you had
Petain-ism that
worked with the Nazis in Germany
and so the British
supported to some degree the movement
of the Syrians
and the, and the Lebanese for
independence from France
in those days until of course De-Gaulle
came back
and and was you know a big buddy of the
British and the French
and the western allies in 
the Second World War
but what had happened in that whole
period you had a sort of
birth of some kind of
identification of people with being
Syrian or with being Lebanese
or with being Jordanian but it was it
was very
fragile and infant in the
pre-Second World War period because you know
people still thought of themselves
primarily as as Muslims primarily as
Arabs there was you know a lot of
pan-Islamic and pan-Arab feeling in
those days
or else they would feel identification
with, you know, the local Big Town
it might be Nablus, it might be a Aleppo,
it might be Damascus
they didn't necessarily think of themselves
as you know, a citizen of Syria
or a citizen of Iraq or whatever.
The partition of this region that
that is that is sketched out
in the Sykes--Picot Agreement in
1915 and 1916
is the basis for the ~governments~
the states and nations and
governments of countries like
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and
Israel, Palestine all of these states
were carved out of a group of provinces
that were part of the Ottoman Empire
by European powers that were acting entirely
in their own self-interest
on the basis of rivalry between them
Britain and France
and and that
created frontiers that reflected in
almost no cases
the actual wishes of the people
involved so you have these long straight
lines running across the desert
between what is today Saudi Arabia and what is today Jordan or
between Saudi Arabia and Iraq or between Syria and Jordan or whatever
and they're just, you know,
hundreds and hundreds
of miles of straight lines
What's on one side.
What's on the other side.
That didn't concern Sykes and Picot
and the other
British and French diplomats and 
strategist who drew up these lines.
So the first thing is that these are in
some measure artificial states.
There may of been a 
state of Lebanon or Iraq
that might have developed in a different way
but as they are, as they are today
in terms of the frontiers that were
established by these partitions and
later deals between the European powers,
they are artificial States.
The second impact of this was, so the
creation of states is the first,
the second impact of this
was to create a sense of grievance among
peoples who probably would've organized
their political life somewhat differently
had they been given a chance to do that
and so Sykes--Picot and the partitions
imposed by the European powers as a
result of those agreements
have been since the 1920s
since they were pretty much carried
out
a source of deep anger and
and a sense of grievance that
that you know, has diminished over time
because these nation states have taken on
a reality of their own.
They are all now real nation-states
but there is still a sense of grievance that, you know,
what might of been a more cohesive whole might or might not of
but the imagination of people is it might of
Was divided up by these imperialist
map makers.
Theodore Herzl,
the founder of Zionism, believed that
the only way to solve the problems
of the Jews 
was to create a Jewish homeland
after several options were considered it
was decided that the location could only be
Palestine
the biblical land of Israel
few of the Zionists consider the fact
that Arabs
were already living there
as the first Jewish settlers began to
arrive the Arabs of Palestine gradually
awoke to the fact that the Zionists were
aiming to settle the country.
Various Zionist Congresses said
what, what European
newspapers reported
Zionist leaders as saying
and it was very clear what they intended
to do, they intended to replace an Arab
population with a Jewish population
and turn an Arab country into a Jewish
country in the long term
as soon as they could do that in the
interim they said other things to the
Arabs, they said other things to others
but
there's unmediated transmission from
the German
of what was being said in Europe in
the pre-WW1 period
through the Arabic press,
to people who could read,
so that was a political level.
There was a clear consciousness
that this was a political movement
intended to replace the indigenous
population with a foreign European
settler population.
People who would be coming to
recreate or create a Jewish state
in Palestine on the basis of this national
movement that had developed among
Eastern European Jews.  At another
level there was resistance
to the process of dispossession of the
peasantry because
what the Zionist movement was trying to do
was not to come in like a classical
movement and exploit
the native population they were coming in to
replace the native population
not in other words to take over the land
and
take the surplus that would be created
by
peasant  Arab cultivators but rather to
replace these cultivators with Jewish
cultivators as a result there was a
kind of friction
from an early stage with people
who are dispossessed
from the very few colonies
that were established there
were only a few dozen
by "World War 1"
but there was, a clear, a history of
tension around these first
settler colonies, between the
population
the indigenous native population which
in many cases had land rights that were
being ignored as modern
private, private property relations were
established by the Ottoman state.
Cultivators who had indefinite and, and
permanent right of "Usufruct" under the old system
were being told, you don't own the land, the
owner has sold it, get off.
So there was a great deal of unrest as a
result of this and
this increases through the twenties and
thirties and it fuels various
Palestinian revolts, and
and riots, and uprisings against the
British
coming in "World War 2" and against
the Zionist movement
and this is the beginning of
Palestinian
reaction to Zionism which has nothing
to do with anti-semitism or even really
political anti-Zionism
as one Palestinian wrote,
I mean this is a perfectly fine movement
but the problem is
you're doing it here
the problem is you wanna take
as your country, our country.
This reaction was not just a reaction
of peasants to being dispossessed
it was also a reaction of people who are
increasingly conscious of the actual
aims of the Zionist movement which were
to replace
the Arabs with Jews and replace an Arab
society with a Jewish society.
In Palestine the revolt continued into
the late 1930s until
the British government resolved to
abandon it's troublesome commitment to
Zionism and finally the mandate over Palestine itself.
Independence only came to the region when
the colonial powers
exhausted and bankrupt by the cost of
another European World War
were forced to leave the region in the 1940s.
Also by the 1940s
armed opposition to foreign intervention
and colonialism
had been fully established.  The desire
for true independence
and opposition to intervention,
colonialism, and imperialism
remain potent among the people of the
region till today.
Next time we will explore how the search
for independence,
justice, and dignity animated politics in
the nineteen fifties and sixties.
