The Asia Minor Agreement, the official name of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, dates to 1916. It was the result of secret deliberations between the British civil servant Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot. This is not a false link but an old one, responds Schwanitz. The perpetrators and their ideologies were connected before, in, and after both world wars. Born in the two decades before 1900, some experienced and later lead multiple genocides against local minorities while establishing from 1914 to 1918 a German-Ottoman axis and from 1939 to 1945 a Nazi-Islamist axis. Often the same persons connected both regions also by their genocidal cooperation based on nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism. These efforts were led on the German side by about 100 key officials, politicians and Middle Eastern experts, and on the other side Islamists and nationalists that drove ahead their joint jihadization of Islamism. [15] Jeremy Bowen’s personal history shows how hopes of peace failed and the region entered a new era of instability. Of course the author believes Israel has every right to exist in that region, and his Arab (and increasingly, his Western SJW) critics start from the assumption that the attempt to create a Jewish state where Ottoman Palestine and its inhabitants already existed was illegal and immoral from the git go... If one starts from the second position then the significance and valence of the Arab and Israeli positions in the lead up to the war and the way one sees the war itself can become very different. But at the same time, those events themselves did take place more or less as described. The significance and moral valence are yours to judge.

The Making of the Modern Middle East by Jeremy Bowen review

These conflicting promises remained at the heart of the impasse between two distinct nationalist groups in Mandate Palestine: the Zionists and the Arabs, later to be renamed Israelis and Palestinians. The same type of rhetoric is even more prevalent today in leftist academia, the UN, the international media , the so-called Non Aligned Movement , much of the European Union etc . Soviet Ambassador Sergei Chuvakhin privately informs Abba Eban that his government has decided to sever relations with Israel, "then, to the foreign minister's astonishment, the Soviet ambassador burst into tears." Ignorance Can be the greatest ally or the greatest enemy of an army at war. In the book Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren explains in considerable detail how Arab ignorance and mistrust was the real key to the vastly outnumbered Israelis defeating three Arab armies in just six days.

The first half of the book is the long spring build-up to the 1967 war, which is dominated by actions by Abdul Nasser's Egypt. We forget (or are ignorant) today that Haffez Al Assad and Nasser forged an alliance unifying Egypt and Syria into one nation. Egypt had been fighting battles in Yemen. The Arab League was bent mostly on the destruction of Israel and if they had dreams of a pan-Arab region it was always at risk from internal squabbles. Nasser held contempt for Jordan after Jordanian troops refused to help his battalion, leading to a glorious defeat and his elevation as a national hero. Nasser held Jordan's King Hussein in disdain, and Jordan seriously feared (as Nasser threatened) Egyptian troops pushing through Israel straight into Amman. Hussein had already survived multiple coup attempts he saw Nasser's hand behind. One wonders if Jeremy Bowen felt haunted in reading proofs of this book, as it is streaked with so much pain, bloodshed and death. It’s a heart-wrenching read; it matters little if you have followed affairs in the Middle East for years, somewhat inured to the train of tragedies intertwined with this fascinating part of the world.

The Making of the Modern Middle East - Gloucester History The Making of the Modern Middle East - Gloucester History

Oren has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the New York Times best-selling Power, Faith and Fantasy and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Oren has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities in the United States and at Tel Aviv and Hebrew universities in Israel. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to The New Republic. The Forward named Oren one of the five most influential American Jews and The Jerusalem Post listed him as one of the world’s ten most influential Jews. Adam Brookes Interviewed by Rana Mitter Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City Lincoln College: Oakeshott Room 4:00pm Mon 27 Monday, 27 March 2023 See this event Oren, a military historian who earned his doctorate at Princeton, does better with straight narrative than with summing up what it all means. His analysis can have a tossed-salad feel to it. But here the point is clear enough, and it's important for anyone trying to come to terms with recent Middle East history. The United Sates, oh Arabs, is the enemy of all peoples, the killer of life, the shedder of blood,, that is preventing you from liquidating Israel"Michael Oren interviewed such figures as former Jordanian Brigade Commander Ata Ali, Egyptian historian Issam Darraz former Syrian Ambassador to the UN, George Tomeh, former MOSSAD chief, Meir Amit, former Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, widow of PM Levi Eshkol, Miriam Eshkol, former IDF Chief of Operations and later President, Ezer Weizmann and former Deputy IDF Chief of Staff and later Tourism Minister, Rechavam Ze'evi, interviewed a month before his brutal murder by terrorists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine , in the corridor of a Jerusalem hotel , former members of the Supreme Soviet and Soviet military advisors to the Egyptians and Syrians and former Le Monde correspondent , Eric Rouleau , just to name a few of the Syrians , Egyptians , Jordanians , Israelis , French , British and Russians that Oren interviewed.