The Middle East in Modern Times

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The modern Middle East was shaped by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, when Britain and France divided the region into mandates under the Sykes-Picot agreement and drew new borders for Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. Britain had also made promises to Arabs and, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to support a Jewish national home in Palestine.

After the Holocaust, the UN proposed partition, and Israel declared independence in 1948, leading to the first Arab-Israeli war and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, called the Nakba. Further wars occurred in 1956, 1967 (Six-Day War), and 1973, and the Camp David Accords (1978) brought peace between Egypt and Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict over land, security, refugees and Jerusalem remains unresolved despite the Oslo Accords.

Oil, discovered in the early 1900s, made the Gulf region strategically vital; OPEC's embargo in 1973 raised prices worldwide. Other major events include the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which toppled the Shah and created an Islamic republic, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War of 1991, the 2003 Iraq War, the Arab Spring in 2011 and the Syrian civil war. Misconception: the region is not one people or religion; it includes Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds and many faiths. Conflicts have political roots, not simply ancient hatreds.