Rebirth of the Middle East

September 9, 2024

by: Kate Norman, BFP Staff Writer

 “My grandmother is older than Israel.”

That’s a common buzz phrase for the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian establishment, who point to the 1948 rebirth of the modern State of Israel as if the country had spawned out of nowhere. While it’s true that Israel as we know her today celebrated her 76th birthday this year, her rather recent official formation is actually not an anomaly in the region. Israel’s neighbors like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq were all born around the same time as the Jewish State. Moreover, all these nations owe their formal formation to a similar set of circumstances.

But to understand the modern Middle East, we need to trace history back to antiquity.

Rise and Fall of an Empire

The Ottoman Empire was birthed around 1299 by Turkish chief Osman I in Anatolia or Asia Minor, a large swatch of land in what is now Turkey. Osman’s name in Arabic was “Uthman,” from which the term “Ottoman” is derived.

From the 1300s to the 1700s, the Ottoman Empire spread across multiple continents, as the sultans expanded from Anatolia to a large portion of Eastern Europe, North Africa and part of the Middle East.

In 1453, Mehmed II, known as “Mehmed the Conqueror,” overthrew Constantinople, then the capital of the Byzantine Empire. He renamed the city Istanbul and established it as the new Ottoman capital, ending the 1,100-year Byzantine Empire’s reign.

The Ottoman Empire continued growing. The land that comprises the modern-day states of Syria, parts of the Arabian Peninsula, Israel and Egypt came under Ottoman control in the 1500s under Sultan Selim I.

By the 1600s, however, the Ottomans fell into the fate of all great empires, and their power began to wane. The Turks’ attempt to capture Vienna failed and the amount of land under their control began to shrink instead of grow. By the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the Ottoman hold in Europe was all but gone. However, a stronghold remained in what is today the Middle East.

World War I put the nail in the Ottoman coffin when their army entered the fighting on the side of the Germans. When the war ended in 1918, what remained of the Ottoman Empire was divvied up between Britain, France, Russia and Greece.

The rule of the sultans formally came to an end in October, 1923, and the modern-day republic of Turkey was born.

The Dismantling of the Ottoman Empire

 Under the Ottoman Empire, there was no Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq or Israel. The Middle East was comprised of Anatolia, Syria, Arabia and the Hashemite kingdom of Hejaz (today Jordan and a western strip of modern-day Saudi Arabia). The land that now comprises Israel, Lebanon and even parts of Jordan were simply southern Syria, with loosely defined borders based on clan affiliation.

Following the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the victorious British and French set about dividing the land into smaller nation-states, according to previous agreements they had set forth during the war.

The British and French had both sent troops to fight against the Ottomans during Word War I. Anticipating victory, they agreed during the Sykes–Picot Agreement in 1916 on how they would later carve up the land of the Ottoman Empire. Imperial Russia had been part of the agreement, but when the tsar was overthrown and Moscow withdrew from the agreement, it forfeited its potential acquisition.

Under the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the geographic area of Palestine was set to fall under international jurisdiction as the home of so many holy sites. However, the landmark 1917 Balfour Declaration changed the course. In a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour expressed support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

This declaration is credited as a major catalyst for the rebirth of the modern State of Israel, though it didn’t happen until much later in 1948—after Word War II and the death of six million Jewish people in the Holocaust.

The Mandates and New States

The League of Nations was formed in 1920, following World War I. This international body, headquartered in Geneva and a forerunner of the United Nations, gave Britain and France mandates to transform the post-Ottoman Middle East into modern states.

Competition and cooperation between Britain and France led to the way they went about ruling their new charges and ended up shaping the borders of the Middle East as we know it today.

France took control of Syria beginning in 1919—and Syrian nationalists began rebelling almost immediately. The French government tried to divide and conquer by splitting Syria into mini states, including what would become the modern state of Lebanon.

The Syrian National Congress rejected the French mandate and proclaimed a Syrian king, Faisal I bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi. Faisal and Chaim Weizmann, then the president of the Zionist Organization, famously penned the Faisal–Waizmann Agreement for Arab–Jewish Cooperation, in which Faisal accepted the Balfour Declaration and thus the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel.

Yet the French stamped out Faisal’s brief, unofficial reign in Damascus and expelled him from Syria. Meanwhile, in their own mandate, Britain took the exiled Faisal and placed him in charge of Iraq, and then opted to place Faisal’s brother, Abdallah, in charge of the newly created Emirate of Transjordan.

But Arab demands for sovereignty only increased over the next decade. Britain acquiesced and granted Iraq independence in 1930 and Egypt in 1936. The kingdom retained its grip on the mandate of Palestine, however, insisting that it mediate the rising tensions between the Arabs and Jews.

World War II all but ended the mandates, as France and Britain had their hands full closer to home.

The Ripple Effects

Following World War II, France tried to reestablish its rule in Syria, sending troops to quash the Syrian nationalists. International bodies and leaders demanded a ceasefire and a sovereign Syrian state. In 1946, the last of the French troops withdrew from Syria and Lebanon, leaving them free, independent states.

A mere two years later, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, head of the World Zionist Organization, declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The British mandate came to an end at midnight following the declaration of independence.

This brings us back to the common buzz phrase for the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian establishment, boasting, “My grandmother is older than Israel” in an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish state. Yes, grandma might be older than the modern State of Israel, but she is also older than Israel’s Arab neighbors.

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