William Tyler
Dividing Up the Spoils of War

William Tyler | Dividing Up the Spoils of War

- Okay, thank you very much and welcome to everyone. Before I begin, just a little note, those of you who read my blog in advance with the synopsis will have already read this note. But just to say to everyone, this lecture and next week’s lecture will cover much of the same ground of the post-war period in the Middle East, the immediate post-war period, but they will look at different aspects of it. Trudy will also be covering some of this period as well, and in particular, she’s going to present a rather detailed analysis of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. So they all sort of interrelate, obviously, like a jigsaw we’re putting together. Now, I’m going to begin by saying this, it’s good for us to remember as the American historian, Jonathan Schneer, reminds us in his book on “Balfour Declaration,” this, he begins the book in this interesting way. “The land called Palestine gave no indication, early in the 20th century, that it would become the world’s cockpit. Rather, if anything, the reverse. The remote, sleepy, backward, sparsely populated southwestern bit of Syria was still home to foxes, jackals, hyenas, wildcats, wolves, even cheetahs and leopards in its most unsettled parts. Loosely governed from Jerusalem in the south and from Beirut in the north by agents of the Ottoman Empire.” And had been since the Ottoman Empire took control in 1517. “Palestine’s borders were vague at the beginning of the 20th century under the Ottoman Rule. it was also a small area, fewer than 200 miles long and 50 miles wide, it was not much bigger than present-day Massachusetts in an American context and about the size of Wales in a British context.”

This often neglected part and neglected by the Ottomans themselves, part of their empire was home as it had been for centuries to Arab and Jew alike. But towards the end of the 19th century, the population expanded as many Jews from Eastern Europe, particularly from Russia and from Poland, sought in Palestine both a spiritual home and a home free from persecution. It was part of course of the Zionist movement beginning in 1881. And Schneer writes of this in the following way. He says, “Zionism, began to take shape in 1881, when Russian revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II. His son, Alexander III, blamed the Jews. Immediately he reimposed the anti-Semitic policies his father had relaxed, most notoriously the law confining Jews to settlements of ten thousand inhabitants or more. The Tsar’s adviser, his former tutor was now chief procurator of the Holy Synod.” That is the body, the government body that runs the Russian Orthodox Church. “He vowed that one-third of Russian Jews would convert to the Orthodox Church, one-third would emigrate, and one-third would starve to death. Here was the stimulus for the great late-nineteenth-century Jewish exodus from Russia.” And then Schneer goes on to say, “Russian and Russian-Polish Jews headed mainly west but secondarily for various regions in the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was the favourite. 7,000 reached Palestine in 1882,” one year after Alexander III had taken the Russian throne. “The 7,000 sought a peaceful life, not a place to die in peace; and the most energetic and idealistic among them were determined to practise the trade that was barred to them in Russia.”

And that trade was the foundation of what is to become the modern state of Israel in the second half of the 20th century because that trade was agriculture. It’s also true that Romanian Jews came and added to this agricultural push in what Schneer regards as Palestine. The word Palestine is such a difficult word, but you understand what he’s talking about. He’s talking about that area that is a coastal area, including Jerusalem and including Beirut where Arab and Jew live. Now, we shall see a different definition of Palestine as we reach the mandate of Palestine given to Britain post 1918. The most important city pre 1914 in this area was of course Jerusalem. Now, if you look at Jerusalem’s population on the breakdown of its population, that is a very great interest. We have a survey from 1,911 which says that 60,000 people lived in Jerusalem. 7,000 of the 60,000 were Muslim and staggeringly 9,000 of the 60,000 were Christian. But, and this is perhaps an important figure, 40,000 of the 60,000 were Jews. And just stating that and knowing what we know now that the Ottoman Empire is to collapse seven years after this survey was undertaken in 1911. In 1918, the Ottoman Empire collapses at the end of the First World War, and we know the problems that ensued from its collapse.

So let me go back to 1914 and the outbreak of war. I’m not going to repeat what I’ve said in an earlier lecture about the war itself, but just to say that it was a war, which is to see the old Ottoman Empire swept away. And with conflicting views as to how the Middle Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, including Palestine, is to be divided up between the winning powers and ruled. In fact, the Arabs, led by Hussein of Mecca, didn’t want it broken up at all. They sought one Arab kingdom for the whole region, but the allies, principally France and Britain, had different ideas. They had no desire whatsoever to create a large Arab political entity in the Middle East, and they sought rather to carve up the area into smaller pieces, smaller kingdoms ruled by Hussein’s family, the Hashemites, but under the benevolent, as Paris and London would say, under the benevolent eye of these two Western allies. And this approach was finally to be endorsed by the newly formed League of Nations when the league established a mandate system for the Middle East, which meant that France and Britain were to be given mandates over these new Arab countries. Until the moment when basically France and Britain decide with the League of Nations that these Arab countries are advanced enough, because they were looked down upon at the time as unadvanced, are advanced enough to be given their independence and recognised as fully independent states, national states by the League of Nations. But of course, by that time, both France and Britain hoped that they dug in strongly enough to be able to influence events inside the Middle East, to pull the strings, if you like, of those that they previously held mandates for. Now, in theory, you may say this sounds a sensible solution, but, there’s always a but and it’s a very big but in this case.

Now, as we shall see in more detail next week, and many of you will see and hear in Trudy’s talk, the problems were these, the boundaries of the new states were arbitrarily drawn. There were a lot of straight lines. And so people who had no relationship with other people in a begiven state found themselves locked together. Sunni and Shia Muslims, Kurds, and others found themselves lumped together in a way that really didn’t make sense ethnically. Secondly, the newly appointed monarchs, all of Hussein’s Hashemite family who lived in Hijaz, part now of Saudi Arabia, were looked down upon by the Arabs of the coastal regions in particular, as well as rather inferior, the Arabs of the desert, whilst the British regarded them as, in this quaint phrase, the pure stock of Arabs as against the trading Arabs in other parts of the Middle East. It was all sort of nonsense. What isn’t nonsense is that countries, well, take a country like Syria, had lumbered onto them. Members of the Hashemite family that had nothing to do with the region at all. Their region became part of Saudi Arabia after their First World War. They had nothing to do with these more advanced areas of the Middle East, these great trading ports and cities of the Middle East. And some peoples, as I’ve already indicated, found themselves lumped into these states. And in particular, the Kurds found, who are not of course Arab or indeed Turkic, the Kurds found themselves lumbered by being divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

And far worse was the difficulty of dealing with Arabs and an increasingly Jewish population in what became the British mandate of Palestine, an issue that we are still desperately trying to resolve today with its origins at the end of the First World War. I will say more next week, Trudy will say more, but before I leave it today, I want to add two things. One, Kurdistan. Stan is simply a word meaning country. Country of the Kurds. In article 62 to 64 of the Treaty of Sevres signed by the Allies in 1921, it outlined there a new Kurdish nation state to be called Kurdistan. It would be stuck only after a referendum had been hailed and it had gained the approval of the League of Nations. The Kurds though this was merely a rubber stamp, but two years later, in the Treaty of Lausanne, which we will look at, it simply dropped off the agenda of the allies and the French and the British shrugged their shoulders, need to worry about the Kurds, they’re not important. And the Kurds themselves, of course, surprise, surprise, were not represented at the Peace conference that led to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Significant, yes, because there are conflicts in the region ever since between the Iranians, the Arabs, particularly the Syrians, and the Iraqis, and of course Turkey itself and the Kurds. I happen to have my barber up the road, they happen to be Kurdish refugees here in Britain. They’re very good barbers. They have to be Kurdish. And it’s very interesting to talk to them about this. They live in Britain, but they and their families back in the Middle East still blame Britain for the fact that there is no country that they can call their own. They have no love for the Arab nations or for the Persian nation of Iran or indeed for the Turkish nation.

They simply want what had been promised them by Britain and France in 1921 at Sevres, a Kurdistan. I am a bit careful of what I say in case the clippers were to sort of go mad and I’d lose half my hair during the visit, but so far so good. And it is interesting if you can get them to talk. And if you know something about it, they’re much more willing to talk. Now there’s a second little detail I wish to put in. That is up to 1917, Tsar Nicholas II in Russia was an ally of France and of Italy, and in a secret agreement called the Constantinople Agreement of 1915. Britain and France promised Russia what Russia had always dreamt of having. It promised Russia that at the end of the war, it could have Constantinople and sea access from the Black Sea to the eastern Mediterranean. That was like worth gold dust to Nicholas as it would be worth gold dust today to Putin. It’s what the Russians have always wanted. And Nicholas got it from France and Britain in 1915. Remember in 1915, America isn’t in the war. So there’s no question of America agreeing or disagreeing. It’s simply isn’t there. It’s an arrangement between Britain, France, and Tsarist Russia. But of course Tsarist Russia falls in 1917, and Lenin realises that he can only keep his revolution going if he makes a peace with Germany, which he proceeded to do. And thus at the end of the war, the end of 1918, Russia is no longer a combatant. And as it’s no longer in the war, then Russia isn’t in the peace negotiations and all question of it getting Constantinople and sea access in Eastern Mediterranean is buried very deep because France and Britain and now America have no intention whatsoever of honouring the promise to the Tsar to Lenin.

Quite the reverse because of course in those years following the end of the First World War, there are allied armies operating in Russia, mainly in from Siberia westwards into Bingham. Russia joined the Russian red and white civil war. That doesn’t concern us. What concerns us is the fact that Russian hopes were dashed in 1918. Whilst Russian hopes had been met fully in 1950, such as the world of rail polity. Secret wartime deals were not only struck with Russia, but with Arabs and Jews as well. And that is deeply important to the situation today. And as you all know, many of those deals were conflicting deals. And as I’ve said before, Trudy will talk in detail about the Balfour Declaration. The French historically have always talk and when talking about England have referred to Perfidious Albion, and the British don’t trust the French either. But when the French and the British are allied together as they were at the end of the First World War, the level of duplicity from the French and the British together and during the war with the negotiations, in this case I’m talking about Arab and Jewish negotiations, you could say that duplicity reaches new levels. In a book which I don’t think I brought to your attention before, It’s on my blog called “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East,” which is edited by Rose O'Brien and McKenzie Maddox. Now it’s on my blog so you can look it up. It’s simply the fall of the Ottoman and the emergence of the modern middle east. What an easy book to read, but it is a fascinating one. And in it I read the following. If I can find the right place, I’ll certainly do it. When British forces did not interfere on behalf of the Hashemites in Syria, we hoped to put a Hashemite king into Syria, but he was thrown out, and allowed the French instead to retain control of the country.

The predominant narrative retained that Britain and by extension the West as a whole, and in particular that means America Post war, is not to be trusted in the eyes of the Arabs. The narrative was confirmed when the details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which we’ll talk about next time and which Trudy will talk about, were leaked providing evidence of Britain’s contradictory promises. These narratives have had lasting effect in the post Ottoman Middle East, which became increasingly defined by opposition to foreign rules. In other words, the Arabs experience of the settlement of the Middle East following the First World War was one of you can’t trust the French and you can’t trust the British. And you couldn’t. And Arabs were right in 1918 to see this as part of the imperial outlook of both Paris and London, and they saw themselves as victims of that imperialism. After all, they’d only just escaped the imperialism of the Ottomans only to be subjected to the far more rigorous imperialism of France and Britain. The Ottomans had a light touch in the Middle East, not France and Britain. Today, in the Israeli-Hamas war, we’ve had comments made on the Arab pro-Hamas side, which goes something like this. This is from a report in the Middle East itself. “Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories motivates charges of present day colonialism.

This includes continued settlement construction in the West Bank and control of the ingress and egress of people and goods, most notably humanitarian aid into the Gaza script.” So Israel has inherited the narrative that the West, and remember, they categorise Israel as European, that they use the narrative against Israel. Israel is a colonial, imperial, occupying power. Now that’s very serious, of course for Israel, but of course also it applies post World War I to the United States of America, and in particular post 1945 when France and Britain are basically a blown flush, if you like, with Britain exiting Egypt finally over the Suez Canal in 1956, but actually leaving Egypt to Farouk in 1922, that we draw our, Britain and France are bust after World War I. Britain and France are completely bust after 1945, but fortunately, after 1945, there is a different view politically in America about what should happen post-war. In 1945, as we go almost immediately into a Cold War period, America does not withdraw from international affairs either in Europe or wider, and thus America itself becomes embroiled in the Middle East, which France and Britain were embroiled in between 1918 and 1945. And as a result of all this influence of France, Britain, and post-second World War America, Israel is branded as a colonial power, as an imperial power. It’s difficult for us who are not Arab to understand why that accusation is made. We disagree with that accusation.

But if you understand where it comes from, which is the betrayal by France and Britain as the Arabs see it, of the Arab cause post 1918 by the establishment of these mandates. With France and Britain controlling the Middle East and with the Hashemite kings put in charge of these states who had nothing to do at all with the people that live there, you can see how they become embittered. I’ll come back to that, but before I do, I want to bring us up to date with the end, the final end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence in the Middle East of a new country, Turkey. This is a bit of a story in the Middle East that’s missed out. And you all know how important Turkey is to the region and indeed the wider world in the 21st century. You certainly know about it in if you are living in Israel in terms of how Turkey has moved around in terms of supporting and not supporting, of how Turkey is involved and isn’t involved with Russia, how Turkey has been involved with Syria. It’s all quite confusing, especially as Turkey remains a member of NATO. So we need to know a little bit about how Turkey came about. And to begin that final story, final chapter in the history of the Ottoman Empire, I have to go back to the year 1,909. In that year, the movement called the Young Turks Movement, mainly young officers in the Turkish army deposed assault when the key figure of Mustafa Kemal, later to be known as Ataturk the Father of Turkey and the winner over the British and allied forces at Gallipoli.

In 1909, he led an army against the Sultan in Istanbul and Richard Stoneman describes it in this way. “The army were met by a large number of parliamentary deputies and it was agreed to depose assault. Martial law was introduced, and three days later, the Sultan Abdul Hamid was sent on a train to Salonika. The sultan’s rule was at an end.” His rule may be then, but the Young Turks put in a replacement sultan, if you like, a man called Mehmed Vahdettin. He was a mere puppet of these revolutionaries. He reigned until the end of the First World War 1,918, but his constitutional powers were severely curtailed by a new constitution. Andrew Wheatcroft says this, “Asked what the difference was between the old regime of Abdul Hamid and the new regime of the Young Turks. A German armed salesman,” remember, they were supplying arms to the Ottoman Empire prior to 1914, “a German armed salesman confided nothing changed except the bribes required were larger.” Before the First World War even began, the Ottomans were involved in the Balkan Wars of 1912, 1913. It was, if you like, the penultimate disaster for the empire. And Richard Stoneman goes on to say this, “As a result of the Balkan Wars, 1912, 1913, all Turkish European territory was lost either to the Albanians, the Greeks, or the Serbs. The Bulgarians even advanced in the gates of Adrianople, today’s Edirne. On the European side of the Bosphorus, which is today Turkey still, Thrace is where it is. Furthermore, Tripoli in North Africa and the Dodecanese Islands were occupied by Italy.

In the Treaty of London, which marked the end of the Balkan Wars, in the Treaty of London, Turkey was granted Thrace including Adrianople, modern day Edirne, but lost Crete and the Dodecanese Islands. The loss of territory acted as a spur to ideas of Turkish nationalism, which were now vigorously promoted.” Now that is really important. The Ottoman Empire would undoubtedly have ceased to exist even if World War I had not happened in my opinion. And the reason is that these young men wanted, and indeed the old Ottoman Empire never really wanted the Middle East part of the empire. European part was different and so was North Africa, but the Middle Eastern part was poor and they didn’t really want that to be lumbered with that as they lost their European and North African empires. What they wanted was a rebranding, hence how the Young Turks had rebranded themselves from the old revolutionary title of the Young Ottomans, which we’ll remember from a few lectures ago, the Young Ottomans and now the Young Turks. They are talking about a modern state and it’s going to be Turkey, and in a sense just accepting the loss of North Africa and Europe, although they still have Thrace, and not being really, to all intents and purposes, bothered about the Middle East. By 1918, as the First World War moved towards its conclusion, the Ottoman territories of the Middle East in the Ottoman territories of the Middle East, a final sultan term was installed. This is the last final act. And Wheatcroft writes this. He writes, sorry, “The Turkish Republic was born out of the First World War in the old Ottoman Empire. It abandoned the dreams of the ruling Ottoman class and vested sovereignty in the people of a national state. Ataturk destroyed the transnational Ottoman state and created a new Turkish nation, once more rooted in the Anatolian heartland once the Ottomans had come centuries before.

As the Turkish Republic developed, power again centred on a single individual, Ataturk himself. The old Ottoman order had been destroyed, the Ottoman way was reborn as a Turkish way and as a Turkish nation state. And Ataturk rejected the path of mimicking Europe, taking only what he wanted from the west.” A new state is born. However, it’s not born without war. I’m sure there’s a whole series of lectures on states that have to be born out of war, not least the United States of America born our of war, and indeed Israel. But here, we have a strange war. A war again, if people don’t know about the end of Turkey, they also don’t know much about this particular war, the Greek-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922. The war began when the Greeks saw an opportunity of advancing into Turkish territory. They crossed the sea from Greece to mainland Turkey and they invaded the city of Smyrna, S-M-Y-R-N-A, which is today Izmir. Some of you may have been to Izmir on holiday. It’s on the Aegean Sea opposite Greece. They invaded in May, 1919. The Treaty of Sevres in 1921 said the Greeks would control the city for five years and then there would be a referendum. So the powers of France and Britain and America, so well, no, no, that’s fine. And Smyrna has a large Greek population. Remember the Ottoman Empire was multicultural, multinational, so it has a large Greek population. And the allies shrugged their shoulders and said, that’s fine, the Greeks are fine, let them occupy Smyrna. But they didn’t only occupy Smyrna, they began now to advance deeper into Anatolia aiming for Constantinople, which you’ll remember was Greek under the Byzantine Empire until the Ottomans took it in May of 1453.

They also invaded Thrace on the opposite side of the of the Bosphorus. So they’re advancing towards Thrace from Greece, across the sea to Smyrna, and they’re advancing north towards Constantinople, across Anatolia. By the sum of 1920, the Greeks had occupied a very large part of Western Anatolia. That’s a lot of the places that many of you may have been on holiday. Now, at the time, a number of these places had large proportions of Greeks and Christians, not necessarily Greek, but Greek and Christian populations. And many of these people greeted the Greek invaders as liberators. So it wasn’t cut and dried that Ataturk could hold on to Anatolia, to modern day Turkey, if you like, because the Greeks had some claim to it. In 1921, the Greeks continued to attack the Turks and the Turks were being thrown back battle after battle. And the Greeks had proceeded to the north east of Istanbul, Constantinople, and to the southwest. They were closing in and advancing through Thrace. For a time, it looked as though the Greeks would win. And after all, they were being supplied with arms, not leased from Britain. Think of Ukraine today. We weren’t going to get involved, but we were going to supply them with arms. It’s a problem. Ataturk’s military junior showed itself.

He didn’t face the Greeks in a major set battle because he knew he wouldn’t win. So he seeded territory, but in seeding territory, he kept his army together. And as the Greeks further advance, their supply lines back to Greece became longer and longer. And if any of you were ever in command of an invasion, make sure your supply lines are right. Russia is experiencing a little bit of this in the war with Ukraine. The Turks also built solid defences. Think again Ukraine. And in the end, the defences that the Turks had placed approved a stumbling block for the Greeks with their long line back, a supply line back to Greece itself. Eventually, in the late summer of 1922, the Turks went on the offensive and basically beat the Greeks back to the sea. Today, memories of that Greek-Turkish War still hover around. There are still incidents in the Aegean Sea between Turkish ships and Greek ships. It is an unresolved, basically an unresolved problem. You might say, well, don’t sound stupid, William. It’s never going to happen again. Really? Yes, it could happen again. It could easily happen again given administrations who were more fundamentalist in both Athens and Istanbul. But there is another side to this story of the Greek-Turkish War and it’s played out one and a half thousand miles away in London. Britain’s wartime prime minister David Lloyd George remained in power at the war’s end in a continuation of the wartime coalition with the conservative party. Lloyd George made a big mistake. He backed, encouraged, and supplied the Greeks during this war.

Why? Well, it’s the old British love affair with ancient Greece blinding them until the fact that modern Greece is nothing like the ancient Greece they learned at school. Lloyd George was also naive in not realising soon enough that the conservative backbenchers, not in the coalition government itself, were increasingly worried that Lloyd George might even take them to war on behalf of the Greeks, something they could not contemplate after the horrors of the First World War. A general election in Britain was held in November, 1922. The conservative part of the coalition gained 344 seats. Labour for the first time became the second party with 142 seats. And the liberal party was divided between Asquith and liberals, those who followed Asquith and Lloyd George’s liberals. And between them, they had a 115 seats, less than Labour’s 142, and well short of the conservative 344. The newly elected conservative MPs, at the end of 1922, began to make moves towards withdrawing the conservative party from the coalition and ruling themselves. Hence, those of you are British, the origin of the conservative 1922 committee of backbench MPs, which still meets today. Bonar Law was forced to go along with his backbenches and form a majority government, but he was an ailing, sickening man.

And in May, 1923, ill health made Bonar Law resign and Stanley Baldwin who’d been involved in this plotting of the conservative backbenchers. Stanley Baldwin became prime minister in May, 1923. The liberal party went on arguing amongst itself. Labour became the opposition later 1924 to become a government, and the liberal party from having been a major force in British politics since the days of the Whigs in the 18th century is now swept to the sidelines of politics. There’s only emerged once in the conservative liberal coalition of David Cameron between 2010 and 2015, and that led the liberals to even further disaster. So the liberals from having dominated British politics in 1906 have been brought finally to their closure, basically, by the Greek-Turkish War. It’s strange how sometimes things a long way away can affect, it’s like the butterfly effect, if you like, could have affected the liberal party. I won’t say anything about the British election in just over two weeks time, except to say that many people think the conservatives could land up in the same way that the liberals did in 1922. Well, maybe they will. We’ll just have to wait and see. Final note about Turkey. Turkey is proclaimed a republic in 1920 by Ataturk. And in 1924, the last office held by the sultan, the sultan having been abolished, the last office is the caliphate. He held the title of caliph. That is also gone. Technically, according to Turkish war, the caliphate is held by the Turkish, the Constitution says the caliphate is today held by the Turkish people. It’s meaningless. Except it’s very dangerous to say anything is meaningless in the topsy-turvy world we live.

If somebody was to create a Islamic Turkey and resurrect the caliphate, that looks very unlikely, but nothing, nothing is impossible in this world. Now, we’ve looked at the situation right across the Middle East. We’ve looked at how the Ottoman Empire was failing. The sick man of Europe was failing before the First World War, and it had lost its European possessions before, and North Africa, before the First World War took place. It lost its Middle Eastern possessions as a result of the First World War. And Russia is not party to the negotiations for the Middle East. The League of Nations appoint Britain and France with mandates over those territories, which I’m going to look at next week and it may well be that they’re looked at by Trudy prior to that. The Turkish nation becomes a secular Islamic state, the only secular Islamic state there’s ever been. And the control, it’s the oddity about it. It’s the army who’s always protected democracy and it’s the politicians who’ve swerved away. And Erdogan as we know, although Turkey is a member of NATO, his foreign policy is well changes day by day and many regard his government as both authoritarian. It’s a presidential. It’s not quite the democracy it was in the gradings of democracy. It isn’t up there with Britain and America and Canada and Australia and Israel, it’s a presidential democracy. And also its record in human rights, not least against Kurds, has been at times appalling. But it is our ally. And why do we need Turkey?

We need Turkey because it keeps Russia out of the Middle East. And once Russia to attack Turkey, NATO is by treaty obliged to defend Turkey. If on the other hand, Turkey can be a barrier to the worst excesses of the Arab world. In particular, the possibility of Turkey becoming Islamist, we would want to support it. If that means supporting Erdogan, it means supporting Erdogan. We live in times which are complex. I suppose all times are complex, but we seem particularly so as the world has become globally smaller. And just imagine that one of you was to enter the White House later this year or to unenter number 10 Downing Street, what do you do? You could say, well, I listen to William’s lectures about it and I think Turkey is an appalling place. I got nothing to do with them. And first day in the Oval Office or in number 10, the message comes through, Russia is mobilising on the borders of Turkey. What do you do? Do you wash your hands of Turkey as the conservative sought to do with the Greeks, or do you like Lloyd George, want to become involved? And what does NATO think? How do we deal with this? These questions are not easy ones. I’m emphasising this to say that the Middle East as a whole and not simply the Israel-Palestine question. There are lots of difficult issues in the Middle East in addition to the Israel-Palestine question, which has been the core theme, if you like, of these series of lectures. I want to read from the book that I mentioned at the beginning, if I can. I’ve gone and put it down the simple. Now here it is. This is O'Brien, “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East.” I thought this was the quickest way I could find of absolutely finishing up about Turkey.

And in the book it says, “Ataturk’s government was an enhanced position in the world order. The Greeks had been defeated, peace had been brokered with Russia, and the allies no longer had interest in maintaining any control of Anatolia or the Straits. Furthermore, it was clear military conflict with Ataturk’s armies were no light endeavour. And after nearly a decade of war, motivation was lost. From disposition of power, Ataturk negotiated a treaty with the allies. As a result, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in July, 1923, which established basically modern day Turkeys borders. By doing that, there was a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which meant that added Turks, Turkey was no longer Ottoman, Anatolia, but now was Turkified. Because lots of Turks moved from Eastern Europe to Anatolia and Greeks in Anatolia moved to Greece.” They go on to say, “The Allies severely underestimated the resiliency of the Turks. After Germany and Turkey and Austria had lost the Great War and the formers Empires territory lost, Ataturk was able to stoke a nationalist spirit in the face of adversity. Although Ataturk declared the new Turkish be for those who helped create it, the territory was much more ethnically homogeneous than previous years as a result of territorial losses, genocide, remember the genocide of the Armenians, and nationalism, and immigrations.

Ataturk’s ability to squash descent within Turkey while keeping his outside enemies at bay created a conflict that the allies no longer wanted to wait, endangering territories they did not want to lose, in other words, in the Middle East. Under Ataturk’s nationalist regime, the previously destroyed Ottoman Empire was reborn as the Republic of Turkey, and as one historian has written, ‘like a phoenix from the ashes.’” Ataturk’s, achievement was enormous to have created this vibrant, homogeneous, modern, secular society in the ashes of the centre of the Ottoman world, which had dominated so much of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for centuries. What an achievement. I’ve got to look at the time. My clock’s battery, I failed to attend to. I’ve got time. I want now to move away from that to a conclusion of my own. That was the conclusion of O'Brien’s book about Turkey. So I hope that story of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of Turkey is clearer to you, and you carry in your head the fact that the solution in Turkey has also created problems for the present day. The end of the First World War created enormous problems in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, which many historians will argue is the cause of conflict today, that remember the Yugoslav civil war, for example, in Eastern Europe. You remember at the beginning, I read a description of Palestine in 1914. Now, I turn to a book I’ve used before, “A Short History of the Middle East” by Gordon Kerr. And Kerr says this, “It had all been simple before the outbreak of the First World War. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Middle East was controlled by three entities, Egypt, Egypt stroke Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran.”

Iran, Persia always separate. “Gradually, of course, the rapacious European powers,” France, Britain, “had begun to make inroads.” While also before the first war, Germany remember had made inroads. Germany is now a busted flush. “The rapacious European powers had begun to make inroads, but power remained in the hands of those governing from Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran. Following the war, the Ottoman Empire is broken up into six states, Turkey and the five new Middle East and Arab states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and later rival Transjordan,” more next week. “Saudi Arabia and Yemen were now also seen as distinct political entities, but European influence remained all powerful. Indeed it could be said that of the 10 most important Middle Eastern states, only four, Turkey, Iran, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, operated as fully as sovereign states between the wars.” Because those Arab states were controlled by the mandates of Britain and France. That’s why. And Britain wasn’t interested or France in Saudi Arabia because they didn’t realise oil was there. Had they realised oil was there, the story would’ve been very different. “In fact, Yemen and Saudi Arabia,” says Carr, “were allowed to function as sovereign states largely because Britain and France regarded them as remote and unimportant.” Big, big mistake. “Turkey will be the only new state that,” by the way, the Saudi Arabian story is not only that we didn’t get our dirty little hands on the oil, it is because we allowed the Hashemite Kings installed there to be overthrown by the House of Saud, the current kings and rulers of Saudi Arabia, and they of course belong to an extremist Muslim sect, which they still do.

They are the ones who gave sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden. Different story, but I’m just marking up that we failed, the Britain, if you like, failed. But to understand the potential, maybe no one could have foreseen the potential to be a benefit oil and to be a frightening place in terms of fundamentalist Islam. “Turkey,” Carr says, “will be the only new state that managed to steer its own path in foreign and domestic affairs during this time.” You could say with some reason why was there such a mess, and why when it was set up, the mandate system that is, were the League of Nations and indeed France and Britain basically so incompetent. When the failure of the League of Nations is talked about today by historians, they refer to the fact that the League of Nations didn’t stop Hitler between 1933 and 1939. Now that’s an argument you could have of which are many different answers. But there is another failure and this affected the issue in the Middle East. Remember that the League of Nations was entirely an American idea, sold to the allies who weren’t particularly keen at the time, sold to the allies by American President Woodley Wilson. Wilson returns to America not in the best of health and he’s opposed and the view of having a League of Nations is opposed by many Americans. One of the most valuable of which was the Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge.

In Henry Cabot Lodge’s case, he made a famous speech, now called the League of Nation speech in 1919. Now, I’m not going to read you the whole of speech, it’s an extremely good speech I have to say in terms of how it’s constructed, but the content is impressing. Cabot Lodge says, “I am as anxious as any human being can be to have the United States render every possible service to the civilization and the peace of mankind. But, ‘cause he doesn’t agree with the League of Nations which France and Britain believe is going do that. "But,” says Cabot Lodge, “I am certain that we can do it best by not putting ourselves in leading strings,” referring to a leading horse, a leading a string on a horse, “in leading strings or subjecting our policies and our sovereignty to other nations.” That is exactly the argument in Britain over Brexit. The Brexiteers would’ve agreed completely with Cabot Lodge subjecting our policies and our sovereignties to other nations. We want to do it ourselves. And Cabot Lodge says, “Not only don’t we want to do that, but we can do it better on our own.” He goes on to say this, this is the final part of the speech. “I have never had but one allegiance; I cannot divide it now. I have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a league. Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike, provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive.

National I must remain and in that way I, like all other Americans, can render the amplest service to the world. The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interest through quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her powerful good, and endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come, as in the years that have gone. Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty. For if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.” It sounds almost Churchillian from the 1940s, but the end result was that America largely withdrew into isolationism. It was not party to the League of Nations, it was not party to the settlement of the Middle East. And I have written here just a sentence. So this is me. It’s not copied from anybody or changed from somebody else’s. I’ve written, this is the last thing I’m saying tonight or today, if you’re listening in the daytime. The League of Nations had not solved the problem of the post Ottoman Middle East, but rather they had created a new set of problems. Thanks very much for listening. I’m sure if I can look, I’m sure I’ve got questions and comments.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, that’s not, I love it when people say that. Good morning from Arizona. I still cannot believe, Myrna, that I’m sat here at what, six o'clock at night with the sun out today by the coast in Southern England and you are listening from sunny Arizona. It’s amazing to me the technology we have.

Q: Can you tell us who could conduct survey on population, where we’d find it or report it?

A: No, Simon, I can’t do that. I’d have to look up the reference in the book that I had. But if you were to Google it, you might find it. Jonathan, for background, I recommend Paris 1919, the magisterial book by Margaret McMillan, the great Canadian historian who is the great granddaughter of Lloyd George. That is a very good book. All those books are great by Margaret McMillan. This is 1990, “Paris 1919.”

And Michelle recommends another book, which is actually just beyond my reach there, James Barr’s “A Line in the Sand.” I should probably use that book in later lectures.

Arthur, it is my possibly incorrect understanding that England and France chopped up the Ottoman Empire and stored local leaders. No, not local leaders, but Arab leaders with zero knowledge of the local ethnicities, religions, and peoples and of all those Arabs there, because all the family were Hashemites. They came from the Hijaz, which is now part of Saudi Arabia. They were what the British called pure Arabs. But in fact they were called by the Arabs of the trading cities of the Middle East, they were called desert Arabs as a derogatory term. And so that was also going to lead to trouble. It wasn’t as though in Iraq, we chosen Iraqi to lead it. We chose someone from the Hijaz. In fact, Iraq is the only country today, which still has a Hashemite king.

Sorry, Jordan is the only country today which has a Hashemite king. Iraq lost theirs. Simon says, “Great, because that’s the point I was trying to make. Hardly surprising the West is not popular in the Middle East precisely.”

You know, my favourite frame from Robby Burns, “Give us the grace to see ourselves as others see us.” You must try hard to understand what other people, how other people see you, even if they are wrong to see you in that light. If you understand why, then you can deal with it when you have to negotiate. The Kurds and Turks are ethnically quite different. They’re all different ethnicities. If you are saying today they retain their different cultures, the Sunnis and the Arabs are basically Sunni. The Kurds are both Sunni and Shia. And of course there are Shias in the Arabic world. There are Shias in, it’s complex. But the most important thing to say is they’re culturally very different. There is even Christian Kurds. Excuse me. They are all very different. Their civilization are very ancient. Their culture is different. And so it’s like saying, look, the French, English and the Italians are all the same. No, we’re not. We have similarities. We live in the same continent. We may say that follow the largely in the past, the Christian faith, but in different ways. And our our cultures are distinctly different. That is the same in terms of Kurds, Turks and Arabs.

You’ve asked, sorry, Shelly, you went on say, is it religious? No. Is it ethnic? Yes. Is it linguistic? Yes. The Kurd speak Kurdish. Turk and Arab speak, as we know, in Arabic.

“Yana, all of the above,” says Alfred. Thank you Alfred. I should have read your rep first of all.

Arthur, there’s a wonderful book on the subject, I highly recommend “A Peace to End All Peace,” absolutely, by David Fromkin, “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.” My copy is on its way to me from Amazon. I had a copy, and in my move here five years ago, when I went to search for it in my reserve library in the garage, I could not find it. So I’ve had to order it, but it will be on my list next week. It’s on its way to me. The Kurds are generally very pro-Israel. Yes, because they’re very anti-Arab. Absolutely right. Because they’ve been treated so badly by Iraqis and by Syrians as well as by Persians, Iranians. Yes, they are pro-Israel. And it’s not surprising that they are so.

Was there any discussion what to do in Armenia, Armenians at the time? No, but largely not. That’s a different issue. That’s a complex issue, which with all the love in the world, I can’t do in two minutes. There is a big story to say about Armenia. I’d have to do that separately. It best not to involve Armenia in this story when we’re talking about Middle East.

Thank you Judy. Williams blog. Thank you, Rita.

Yes, Mitzi, you are right. Palestine is the name the Romans gave to punish rebellious Jews. The word comes. All of that is absolutely right. The problem is, well, we will come to the problems in subsequent lectures, but not. This word Palestine is a nightmare word. And the word Palestinian is a nightmare word as well. That we will come to. I’m not sure there are any easy answers to that, but I will try and explain as we go through later. Jacqueline, even if 80% of the Israeli population were from the Maghreb or Ethiopia, and therefore not white. Yarus would still want to destroy Israel because Israel is part of the umma land, which was once more said. Yes. Yes, of course that’s true. In the same way that that southern Spain is, and middle Spain is part of the umma land as well. But what I’m saying is that the way that the Arabs were treated by France and Britain largely and led to this resentment of mistrust of Imperial Britain and Imperial France has led to this problem of casting Israel in the same light. And it makes no difference. Facts bear very little relationship to the propaganda of the Arab world. As you everyone listening to this knows full well in terms of the Israeli Hamas war.

Ed, Israel’s actions since 1948 have nothing to do with any inheritance of British colonialism. Of course it doesn’t. In fact, the Jewish inhabitants were fighting against British colonialism. Yes, but that doesn’t matter to the narrative that set up. Narratives are not political narratives need not be set up on fact, but are set up on the facts as you would want them to be. Those of you who are British and are following the British general election know that facts seem to play a very small part in the narrative being constructed by both the conservative party and the Labour party in this general election, and the same applies in the Arab world.

You’re absolutely right. Of course, you are Michelle, William did not say Israel’s actions inherited, oOh, well, yes, that’s fine. I’m happy with that.

Ed says, oh, you heard different sentences. Hang on then, Ed. No, I didn’t say that Israel’s actions were inherited colonialism. If you got that message from me, that’s quite wrong for the reasons that you state. I’m saying that because of their experience with Britain and France, the Arabs now interpret Israel’s actions in that same light. Seeing Israel as a European country in the Middle East, I know that may not accrue with all the facts about population. It doesn’t matter what the facts are. If you’ve got a narrative, you twist the facts to fit the narratives. That’s what I meant. No, Ed, you are quite right. You’re pushing against a door which is wide open. Of course I know all of that about Israel. I’m saying that Israel is not a colonial power. I’m saying that the Arabs use that narrative against Israel in the same way that they use that narrative about imperialism against France, Britain, and today principally the United States.

Oh, thank you Alfred. Did I say it again? Yeah, you are right. I love it.

Who is this? Jacqueline. I’m really pleased you mentioned the Kurds. We trade and forgotten and they deserve a state. I’m a Jew born in Iraq. The Kurds help the Jews to escape from Iraq, which makes us great supporters of them. Yes, Jacqueline. That is something I know because I also have Jewish friends who were Iraqi Jews. Yeah, I knew that. And it’s important to remember that.

Q: Shelly, why did the population exchange in 23 work and neither Turkey nor Greeks talk about the rights of return on refugees. Did this exchange leave both countries primarily one religion, one ethnic group?

A: Yes. It’s a simple answer to that. Yes.

Alpha, another point. The history of Greeks on the Mediterranean coast goes back to the late Bronze Age, while the Turkish presence arrived after thousand AD. Right, that’s of course right. From the Greek point of view, these new people out of the Asian sets no business moving into the historical domain. Absolutely correct. But they’re also, remember the Byzantine Greek Empire and their wish to have Byzantium restored to Greece in the same way that Russia wants Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul to be Russian, because that is where the Russian Orthodox Church began.

Thanks very much Arlene and Rita.

Oh, what is the, Sue, that’s a very good question, what is the significance of the recent official name change from Turkey to Turkey I? You did not say. No, I didn’t. Well, that is part of the new form of nationalism forming in Turkey, which wants to appear less European. But it is very difficult to forecast where Turkey is going. But the message in the name is, we are not European.

Q: If Britain and France only joined the League of Nations because of Wilson, why didn’t they bow out after the US just didn’t join?

A: Because Britain and France believed everything that Wilson said at Versailles. They believed it. And the American withdrawal was something that they would never have agreed to. This is America following its normal withdrawal from European affairs, EG, after the revolution when it comes to the American Revolution, the American War of Independence. After the Napoleonic Wars, it wasn’t involved. It didn’t want to get involved. It wasn’t involved afterwards. It wasn’t involved with Europe after the First World War. After the Second World War is different. Is different because it couldn’t withdraw given its responsibilities A, in Japan and B, in Germany.

Just picked up a copy of Myrna, “A Path Out of the Desert.” I’ve not read the book. I can’t answer that question. If you look up reviews on Amazon, you’ll get both good and bad reviews and you can sort of make your own judgement . Well, the best way to make a judgement , actually to read the book. I often buy books and read them and think I don’t agree with this at all. I think this is poorly written. I don’t think it’s accurate. On the other account, I read a book which I’m really staggered by, and one of those I put on my next general book list on my blog, which was kindly given to me by, I think a lady on lockdown from Canada, whose name I can’t quickly bring to the front of my mind. But there are fantastic books available and I will produce, and you know, I try and produce one each week. But I will produce a, I’ve produced a general book list recently and I will produce another general book list in the not too distant future.

Thanks for listening. Hope to see, well, see, inverted commas, to see you all next Monday. Whatever time you are listening, I will be there talking a little bit about Churchill, because he was the colonial secretary in Britain who got deeply involved in the Middle Eastern Affairs with the conference in Cairo. And some people, the anti-Churchillian say that Churchill is to blame for everything that went wrong subsequently in the Middle East. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that I don’t believe that. But we’ll meet next week. Thanks for listening.