History-Middle East

The nations in what we today call the Middle East are entirely the invention of Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The national boundaries of Iraq, Kuwait, and Ibn Saud's Arabia were all defined at a meeting in Uqair in late 1922. Three separate provinces - Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul - came under British control in 1918. The British called the entire area Mesopotamia, drew new national boundaries around it, and changed the name to Iraq. This meant that three very different groups were all enclosed within the same boundaries. Kurds and Christians, mostly refugees from Turkey, were established in the North; a very large Jewish population formed a community in Baghdad; and Arabs, bitterly divided into Sunni and Shiite, were established in the South. The British presence was long-standing in Persia but came under pressure in the North, in the Caspian Sea region, from the new Soviet Union. There were also internal pressures for "self-determination." In 1921, Major-General Edmund Ironside, the British commander in the region, arranged for a new leader, Reza Khan, to take control of the country. In February 1921, Reza Khan marched on Tehran and deposed the British-supported monarch with General Ironside's approval. Reza Khan took the throne for himself as Reza Shah Pahlavi, and in 1935, changed the name of the nation from Persia to Iran.
Following World War II, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust looked to Palestine as a place of refuge, a place where they could establish the homeland promised to them by the British in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In 1947, the United Nations decided to divide Palestine into two separate zones, one Jewish and one Arab, and to make Jerusalem an international zone open to everyone. The Palestinians did not favor this plan. A year later, Jewish immigrants declared the territory allocated to them the state of Israel. Arabs protested this action and war soon followed. As a result of the First Arab-Israeli War, the Israelis