Comparing and Contrasting 4 states in Middle East - Essay Example

Crane was in favor of a Palestinian state, and made several declarations in contra of the Balfour Declaration, which called for the creation of the Jewish state. Israel was actually the brainchild of Theodore Herzl, “…who founded the Zionist political movement.”2 “On 29 November 1947, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly voted in favor of [Partition Resolution (UN Res. 181)]…replacing the British mandate with two independent states…The UN partition resolution laid down a timetable for the termination of the British mandate and for the establishment of [both] Jewish [and] Arab state[s]…”3 Relations between the West and the Middle East were not always entirely contentious.

In the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon (the British High Commissioner in Egypt) and the Sharif of Mecca (Hussein bin Ali), the two men discussed the political future of the Middle East—McMahon encouraging an Arab revolt within the Ottoman Empire, since it had sided with Germany as an ally. Speaking of the Middle East, the Masjid-e-Suleiman was The Mosque of Solomon—the site where a large amount of oil was located. Palestine was a former British colony. Lebanon was a former French colony.

The Druzes migrated due to the civil war in Lebanon in the 1860s. The Maydan Quarter of Damascus and the Druze was basically a riot over grain that led to a rise in Arab nationalism in Syria. In Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt—there were a bunch of “Accommodationist Notables”, wealthy prominents who were considered to have stakes in controlling mandates in the Middle East. With the advent of the Bombing of the King David Hotel (carried out by Irgun, which, like Lehi was a Zionist paramilitary organization), there were Britons, Arabs, Jews, and others killed.

What had happened was that Irgun had been given a mandate by a man named Moshe Sneh. He ordered his men to dress up—one man as a Sudanese, other men as Arabs—in order to pass security. Someone warned the Palestine Post that the bombing was about to occur. Also, the French consulate was apparently warned in advance. However, the appropriate warnings did not go off in the Hotel, which was owned by Jewish nationals. The bombing lit off a firestorm in Britain. The bombing was decried, and Irgun was called a terrorist organization.

This was done partly because Zionist Jews wanted to make a statement against a Nazi-British alliance. Anti-Jewish sentiment was also strong in Britain, and Britain’s occupancy of the Palestinian state only served to deepen the divide between Britain and what would one day become Israel. In fact, the Irgun organization would one day have their members absorbed into the state of Israel’s Likud party, which has somehow been involved in every major election in Israel since the early 1950s. Speaking about divisions of land in the Middle East, The Sykes-Picot Agreement was basically an Anglo-French agreement post-World War I that followed a previous agreement which carved Syria, Kurdistan, Acre, and Haifa between Russia, Britain, an unnamed Arab state, as well as Palestine.

The pilfering of land would not be unique to the Middle East, however. Operation Barbarossa was Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Union territory in 1941, Hitler claiming that his people needed more space. Hitler would continue to invade most of Western Europe and a large part of Eastern Europe. However, when he tried to march against Russia, his soldiers found themselves not