The Middle East: Ottoman collapse to the Arab-Israeli conflict
From Ottoman partition and the Sykes-Picot/Balfour settlement to the Arab-Israeli wars, tracing how mandate-era promises produced the modern Middle East.
The Sick Man's Last War
The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in November 1914 on the side of the Central Powers, a decision that doomed the dynasty that had ruled since 1299. By the 1918 Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918) the empire was prostrate; the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) attempted to dismember Anatolia itself, only to be overturned by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's national resistance and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), which fixed modern Turkey's borders and abolished the caliphate in 1924.
The Arab provinces were carved up by a tangle of wartime promises that examiners love because they openly contradict one another.
Three Incompatible Pledges
First, the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence (1915-16): Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, pledged Sharif Hussein of Mecca British support for Arab independence in exchange for the Arab Revolt (launched June 1916), though the geographic reservations remained deliberately vague.
Second, the Sykes-Picot Agreement (16 May 1916): a secret deal in which Mark Sykes (Britain) and François Georges-Picot (France) partitioned the Levant and Mesopotamia into zones of direct control and influence. Britain took Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Palestine's ports; France took Syria and Lebanon. The Bolsheviks published the text in November 1917, exposing the duplicity.
Third, the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917): Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild that His Majesty's Government viewed "with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," while pledging not to prejudice the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities."
The Mandate System Formalised
The San Remo Conference (April 1920) allocated mandates under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. Britain received Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq; France received Syria and Lebanon. The Balfour Declaration was written into the Palestine Mandate's preamble, confirmed by the League Council in July 1922, giving Zionist aspirations the force of international law.
Britain installed the Hashemites as a consolation: Faisal, expelled from Damascus by the French in July 1920, was made King of Iraq in 1921; his brother Abdullah received the Emirate of Transjordan in 1921. The modern state boundaries of the Arab East—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan—are thus largely artefacts of European imperial cartography of 1920-22, a fact the rise of ISIS rhetorically invoked when it declared the "end of Sykes-Picot" in 2014.
The Saudi state followed a separate trajectory: Abdulaziz ibn Saud, allied with the Wahhabi movement, captured Mecca in 1925 and proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932; the 1938 discovery of oil at Dammam transformed the region's strategic weight.
