West Asia conflict: A colonial legacy

Dr Sudhir Kumar Das

(dasudhirk@gmail.com)

The unjustified and unnec-essary attack on Iran by Is-rael and America since 28th February and the latter’s retaliation against the American bases and civilian targets in Gulf countries have not only shaken the whole world but also hurled the economies of many countries into a tailspin. The world is anxiously watching the fragile ceasefire, which has been maintained by the thinnest of threads and could break at any moment, either due to an unpredictably temperamental Trump or a hothead from the ranks of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). War, as the old proverb goes, affects most those who do not die instantaneously on the battlefield. The West Asian war is no exception. The present war is being fought in faraway Gulf countries between the powerful US and Israel on one side and oil-rich Iran on the other, but it has affected the lives of common people the world over, just like the mythical snake Basuki endured the process of Sagar Manthan. Fuel rationing has started; long queues can be seen for LPG cylinders; factories running on natural gas have started either to scale down production or have completely shut down, forcing migrant workers to return home to an uncertain future; remittances from Gulf countries have started to dry up; and economies of even rich countries have started to falter. In the midst of this ordeal, one is forced to trace the genesis of this never-ending West Asia problem. A cursory study of the colonial history of the region throws up some very disturbing facts about the perfidy indulged in by colonial powers like Britain and France in the first five decades of the last century. The Middle East, a colonial expression to denote West Asia, has remained a hotbed of turmoil and political instability in the oil-rich region since the beginning of the last century. The region has been held hostage to the whims of Western power centres all through the colonial history.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the region has been fragmented into nations not on the basis of religious, linguistic, or ethnic contiguity of the inhabitants but according to the geopolitical and geoeconomic needs of the western powers. The complete disregard for ethnic, religious or cultural sensibilities of the people living there is one of the basic reasons for the present turmoil in West Asia. Two years prior to the conclusion of World War I, in May 1916, the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (derived from the names of the British representative Sir Mark Sykes and French representative Francois Georges-Picot) between Britain and France, with the assent of Russia (the triple entente), for the fragmentation of a declining Ottoman Empire was signed. Russia would have been an active partner to this process of fragmentation, but the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917 forced it to withdraw from becoming a signatory to this secret agreement. According to the provisions of this arbitrary, colonial Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria and Lebanon went under the colonial control of France, and Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan came under British rule. The newly formed League of Nations legalised the French and British claim over the West Asia region through mandates at the end of World War I. The Mandate System was an arrangement by the newly formed League of Nations to legalize control over the land of the erstwhile Ottoman Empire by France and Britain. This makes the international body of that time an equal partner to this perfidious act of creating nations without ethnic, religious, or sectarian congruity in West Asia. The newly drawn borders created widespread discontent among the local communities but were brutally suppressed. However, the administrative control over these territories was given to France and England on the promise of preparing these nations for independence. But during World War I, Britain had made utterly contradictory promises to different forces to gain their support and also as a part of its sinister plan to extend its sphere of influence over the region and control its oil industry. For instance, the McMahon-Hussain Correspondence (ten letters exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in 1915-16 during World War I) promised the Arabs an independent Arab state in return for revolting against the Ottoman regime. On the contrary, in November 1917, Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, raised a diametrically contrasting contentious issue of a homeland for the Jews to be carved out of Palestine, a British mandate at that time, in a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. This 67-word letter later became the famous or notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917, laying the foundation of an exclusive Jewish homeland and dividing Palestine. The world, especially the people of West Asia, still suffer today because of this pusillanimous act of the colonial British. The Balfour Declaration gave a death blow to Arab aspirations for freedom from imperial rule. Rebellion against this decision erupted in Egypt (1919) and Iraq (1920) against the British rule, but these rebellions were put down with an iron hand. Similarly, the rebellion against the French imperial rule in Syria from 1925 to 1927 was crushed by the French forces.

The formation of the state of Israel in 1948, carved out of the British Mandate of Palestine, opened a Pandora’s Box of territorial claims and counterclaims. In 1948 Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt invaded Israel, rejecting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It is reported that about 6,373, almost 1% of Israel’s total population of 650,000, laid down their lives defending their nascent nation. Although a ceasefire brought cessation to hostilities, the intensity of hatred of Arabs for the Jews and vice versa remained indelibly etched in the collective psyche of both the warring sides, and it remains undiminished, as is proved in the 7th October 2023 ghastly terror attack by Hamas against the Israeli civilians and the hugely disproportionate retaliation by Israel thereafter. Jews fearing persecution fled from countries like Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, and many more Jews migrated from all over the world to their new home in Israel in 1948. On the other hand, ethnic Arabs were expelled from their homeland in Palestine to make room for the burgeoning Jewish population. This further deepened the hatred between Jews and Arabs. In 1967 the Six Day War broke out between the same two parties. This time the Arab countries Egypt, Syria, and Jordan tasted defeat with losing territory: Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, Syria the Golan Heights, and Jordan the West Bank. During the period from 1967 to 1970, Egypt and Israel confronted each other on many occasions termed the War of Attrition. Jordan expelled Palestinians in 1970 with the help of Pakistani general Zia ul-Haq. The Palestinian movement under the leadership of the PLO shifted its base to Lebanon. From 1975 to 1990 Lebanon suffered a civil war. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War occurred, during which Syria and Egypt mounted a surprise attack against Israel to recapture their lost territory, but they ultimately failed after achieving initial success. The Yom Kippur War, though a localised conflict confined to three countries, Egypt, Syria and Israel, caused the world to experience the first oil shock. Oil-producing Arab countries imposed an oil blockade against countries supporting Israel, creating a crisis by raising oil prices and holding the world hostage to their energy needs. If World War I laid the foundation of fragmentation and the creation of nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire, World War II brought in the US, the emerging superpower, into the geopolitical landscape of West Asia, attracted by its strategic location and oil.

This background of the Arab-Israel conflict provides one with a historical perspective as to how far the colonial forces had stooped to exploit a region’s resources to their own advantage while pushing the rest of the world into the quagmire of war and disruption. The next time you stand in line for a gas cylinder refill, at a fuel station, or if you have lost your job due to the current energy crisis, don’t just blame Trump and Netanyahu for your situation; they are merely continuing a colonial legacy left by Britain and France.