Alina Kreynovich
Sectarian conflict plays a significant role in the conception of the Middle East, which is notably not exceptional in world history. On the geopolitical level, the manipulation of territory by imperial forces is among the foremost causes of the ills of the Middle East in the 20th century. This is particularly evident in the repercussions of the Sykes-Picot agreement; apparent in Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration “This blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy” after bulldozing the border between Syria and Iraq in 2014. This agreement rearranged the geographic plane of the Middle East, but the state of the region is the byproduct of several other factors.
The disputes and warfare ensuing in the Middle East exist only as the consequences of an intricate combination of nationalism, religion, ethnicity, politics, and several other facets of identity politics with which geography is imbued. This article demonstrates the multidimensional ramifications of imperial geographic strategy as well as the other influences on civil conflict through the analysis of the Arab – Israeli conflict, the Civil War in Lebanon, and the condition of the Kurdish people.
The Sykes-Picot agreement exemplifies imperial influences as a proponent of sectarian conflict. After the First World War, diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were assigned to divide the carcass of the Ottoman Empire into French and British “spheres of influence.” They did so with no regard for those that would be affected by such boundaries; arbitrary borders and leaders came to misguidedly redefine the territories of various groups of people. The borders created by Sykes and Picot did not come into fruition as originally established, nevertheless, the agreement functions as a “historical analogy” to understand the mechanics of the multiplayer geopolitical landscape. Within Middle Eastern discourse, the agreement signifies “European imperial betrayal and Western attempts more generally to keep the region divided, in conflict, and easy to dominate.” By creating individual and fragile states, Sykes-Picot allowed the colonial powers to continue their imperial domination. Furthermore, this disseminated the Western perception of the Middle East; a region viewed “as irrevocably divided into mutually hostile sects and clans, destined to be mired in conflict.” The weakening of Arab authority enabled France and Britain to retain control over the lands by destabilizing Middle Eastern society and inflaming strife.
The conception of Anglo-French pacts to fracture the Middle East furthers the historical analogy and exemplifies Western duplicity. An Arab Kingdom was promised to Shariff Hussein of Mecca by Sir Henry McHahon should the Ottoman Empire fall. Instead, the 1920 San Remo agreement represents the Middle Eastern boundaries recognized today and the imperial powers that controlled them. The amalgamation of the Ottoman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra defined Iraq’s borders. The League of Nations granted mandates to France in Lebanon and Syria, and to Britain in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. Arab nations fell into imperial subversion entirely unbeknownst to their leaders.
A fatal byproduct of this pact is evident in the conflict between Arab nations and Israel. In November 1917 Britain passed the Balfour Declaration, and, on its premise, the British Mandate of Palestine was established. The declaration, and subsequently the mandate, was “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while not impeding on the rights of non-Jewish communities. This pivotal geographic, political, and religious shift intended only to protect Jews from rampant antisemitism has evolved into decades of deadly engagements. The 1930s witnessed a surge of Jewish immigrants to mandatory Palestine which the Arab nations detested along with the Zionist cause. “As soon as the British Mandate expired and David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of Israel,” historian David Tal recounts, “Arab Armies crossed the international boundary into Palestine.” Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon fought for the Palestinian cause; the avowed goal was to displace Jews from Israel and prevent the implementation of the UN Partition Resolution. Again in 1967, with the Six-Day War, the Arab nations attempted to abort the Jewish state. Historian Efraim Karsh speculates that this was an inevitable conclusion spurred by pan-Arabism and the total rejection of Jewish statehood. Some suggest a primordial argument for the cause of the war – that Jews and Arabs simply cannot coexist peacefully – or a matter of nationalism and territoriality. Fundamentally, a multifaceted case is to be made about the reason for this prevailing antipathy.
The essence of the Arab – Israeli conflict stems from a desire to claim the ‘holy land,’ but it has evolved far beyond a matter of geography. In the Six-Day War, Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and seized the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s status is among the most contentious issues in the conflict, influenced by politics as much as emotion, due to East Jerusalem’s holy sites which belong to the three Abrahamic faiths. This boundary was the root cause for terror, leaving victims from every party. Similarly, the frontiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas respectively, are the scenes of gruesome encounters with the Israeli Defense Forces.
External intervention influenced geography as well as the fabric of society. For instance, Britain established the Peel Commission in 1937 which formulated the partition of Palestine into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and an international zone containing Jerusalem. Only two years later, a limit on Jewish immigrants in Palestine was installed, thereby complicating the precedents they had already made. Furthermore, a conflict six years later enabled Egypt and Syria to attempt reclaiming their own land, “with the Palestinian issue coming a poor second in terms of strategy and objectives,” demonstrating an ongoing territory dispute. The authority over territory is a substantial explanation for the turmoil in Israel and Palestine, but not more so than Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, division on religious terms, and the power-hunger from various entities. This conflict’s many faces represent the complex ideologies in the Middle East and their proponent’s zealous actions. To say imperial machinations are the sole reason for such conflicts is reductive and dismisses the individual actions of every actor, thus the role of religion and the ambition of power cannot be undervalued.
The French mandate of Lebanon ended in 1943 and Lebanon was reconstructed from Sykes and Picot’s ‘Geographical Syria.’ The new territory was much larger than its predecessor which complicated the sectarian diversity; Christians comprised 79 percent of the populace, reduced to just 53 percent. This became an “inbuilt fault line – both ethnic and religious” also evident in Israel, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. France retained a neo- imperial power within Lebanon, erroneously governing as though the Christian majority remained. Beginning in 1975, Lebanon became engulfed in a gruesome and destructive war, enlacing Syria, Israel, Iran, the West, and the UN into Lebanese disorder. This conflict also facilitated Lebanon as a significant actor in the larger Arab – Israeli dissension.
The explanation for this war involves a quagmire of political and societal turmoil. One perspective poses that it was mainly a battle for Maronite dominance over other religious blocs within the Lebanese political landscape. This could have been compounded by the 300,000 largely unwelcome Palestinian refugees on Lebanese soil, begetting strife with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Ambassador Peter Hinchcliffe and Professor Beverley Milton-Edwards posit that many believe the fifteen-year war was initially ignited in April 1975 with clashes between Christian Phalangist forces and Palestinian fighters. They describe that “this led remorselessly to a general free-for-all, with the collapse of the government, the disintegration of the army and widespread conflict.” In essence, the initial schism in Lebanese society and political model began with the restructuring of the territory, uniting a nation that desperately sought division.
The dictatorial distribution of the Ottoman Empire also obscured the Kurdish people’s demand for self-determination and statehood. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres proposed an autonomous Kurdish state, regrettably rejected by Turkey’s new leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and was replaced by a treaty with no mention of a Kurdish homeland.
Thus, the Kurds were scattered across the artificial borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Regimes emerged which struggled to sustain their authority within the newly demarcated boundaries. Simultaneously, the desire for statehood among the Kurdish people contributed palpable pressure on the vulnerable administrations, resulting in unsuccessful and tragic attempts for a seemingly elusive ethnic entity.
Geography was the pillar of the Kurdish ideology, and their cause coalesced in tribal loyalty. In Turkey and Iraq, this was answered with “policies of enforced population transfer at one end of the scale of state-organized oppression to ethnic cleansing and wholesale massacre at the other.” The establishment of the Republic of Mahabad in 1946, with the support of the Soviet Union and the nationalist leadership of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, briefly realized Kurdish ambitions.
However, the USSR only used the Kurds “as a lever with the Iranian government” and soon Iran reoccupied Mahabad after the Soviet withdrawal. The oppression of the Kurdish people persisted, evident in Syria’s Al-Hasakah Governorate’s policy of depriving Kurds of their citizenship if they had not lived in Syria prior to 1945. In more recent memory, the Anfal campaign carried out by Iraq’s Ba’ath Arab Socialist Party killed or disappeared approximately 182,000 Iraqi Kurds in a genocidal, ethnic cleansing crusade. The case of the Kurds is one of geographic aspiration, rendered hopeless by both Western and Arab nations’ influences.
Contentions over borders and territories have wrought havoc throughout the 20th century in the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot agreement had an immense role in the formation of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Consequently, the agreement as well as other imperial activity massively influenced the internal disputes in the region following the reconfiguration of the territory. The civil conflicts, such as the Arab – Israeli confrontation, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Kurdish state are heavily impacted by variable facets of society. Geography is a significant proponent of distress, but it is not disjointed from nationalism, ethnicity, religion, politics, and several other characteristics of society that have also defined the conflicts in the Middle East.