Introduction

A map of the Middle East. From CIA World Factbook.

The civilizations of the Middle East are among the oldest in the world. Like Asia, this region hosted grand empires, strong economies, and exquisite arts while post-Roman Europe languished. During the Age of Enlightenment, Europe began to outshine other regions in terms of power, at least, and Western industrialization completed Europe’s ascension. In the 19th century, European empires conquered and colonized Northern Africa, Egypt in the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa nations. The fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I allowed them to acquire and control Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan. Only Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran withstood direct colonization, although the European empires influenced them deeply with the threat of invasion in the background. Middle Eastern nationalists have always resented this imposition on their proud cultures, and Islamists recall the glory days of the great Muslim Caliphates and hope for their return.

Europe lost much of its grip on the region in the 1920s and 1930s; after that, four major concerns occupied the region. The first was the founding of Israel and the subsequent Arab-Israeli conflicts, involving both nation-states and nonstate actors. The second was Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism. The third was Political Islam and Islamic militantism. The fourth was Western intervention, driven by the desire for cheap oil, the Cold War, and support of Israel. 

This chapter will examine these concerns and how they influenced events in the Middle East.

Israel

For four hundred years, the Ottoman Empire controlled the east coast of the Mediterranean, a region known as the Levant. The region which is now Israel was populated by both Muslims and Jews, although it was ruled by the Muslim Ottoman Turks.

At the end of the 19th century, the political philosophy of Zionism grew in popularity in Europe. The point of Zionism was to establish a Jewish nation in the area of the old Israelite kingdoms in the Levant, known in Hebrew as Zion. This was homeland of the Jewish people and culture, from which they were scattered through Europe and the Middle East after various empires conquered the area over the centuries. The Jews had no homeland nation since the fall of the second Israelite kingdom, and were foreigners wherever they lived, often leading to persecution and segregation such as the pogroms of Europe. If the Jewish homeland could be re-established, claimed the Zionists, then all Jewish people could live there free from persecution. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area (known to the British as Palestine) was not about to surrender a province of its empire to the Zionists. 

During World War I, the British government, in hopes of gaining the support of the worldwide Jewish population for its war efforts, published the Balfour Declaration. This statement attested that British leaders,

“…view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

When this declaration was published, British forces were on the verge of seizing Palestine from the Ottomans, and so were able to turn this declaration into reality. They hoped that this would lead Zionists to look favorably on the UK, but the problem was that, as the declaration notes, there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs living in Palestine, and that the Jewish population there was an ethnic minority. Turning Palestine into a Jewish nation had the potential to ignite a civil war along ethnic lines.

At war’s end, the Ottoman Empire was disbanded into its constituent parts; but these regions did not get their independence as they were promised. After the war, the British and French, with the backing of the League of Nations, took over parts of the former Ottoman Empire – these new colonies were called mandates, as if they were orphaned children and the Europeans their new foster parents. The idea was for the Europeans to “raise” the new countries until they were ready to be independent; actually, this was barely-disguised imperialism, though it had an end date. The British had control of Palestine, the Zionist homeland; it was their job to administer the region until May 1948.

Given that the Balfour Declaration favored the Zionist project, Zionists expected that the British would now create the Jewish homeland in Palestine as they wished. Zionist settlers emigrated to Palestine in ever-greater numbers, but immediately clashed with Palestinian Arabs. The Arabs resented Jewish participation in the Palestinian Mandate’s government and land purchases, wanting instead to finally create an independent Palestinian state now that the Ottoman empire was defunct. Riots broke out between Palestinians and Jews, as well as against the British occupiers; in the late 1930s, these developed into a Palestinian insurgency against the British.

In response to the violence, and to ingratiate themselves to Arab governments on the eve of World War II (they wanted the Arab nations on the Allied side, not the fascist), the British accepted the recommendations of a 1939 “White Paper” and restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to only 75,000 people over the next five years. Zionists saw this as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, but the British wanted to prevent further violence in Palestine.

World War II intensified the Palestinian crisis. The Holocaust convinced many European Jews that a Jewish homeland was the only way to live in safety. Illegal Zionist immigration to Palestine skyrocketed, even as British authorities tried to prevent it, and violence in the mandate increased. International pressure for the British to settle the situation intensified, with the US delaying financial aid to the UK.

With the expiration date for the Palestinian Mandate approaching, the Americans applying financial pressure, and the Zionists and Arabs unwilling to agree on a solution for a unified state, the British government asked the United Nations to decide the fate of Palestine. In September 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP)recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: one Jewish (Israel) and the other Arab (Palestine). The Zionist leadership, believing that the two-state solution was only a temporary step on the way to controlling all of Palestine, accepted the agreement, but Palestinian leaders did not. As a result, the two-state solution to the Palestinian crisis never emerged.

British leaders knew that creating only the Jewish state would anger Arab leadership throughout the Middle East; unwilling to do so, the UK decided to ignore the UN recommendation and simply leave Palestine when the mandate expired in May 1948. Everyone knew that this would lead to a civil war between Zionists and Palestinians, but the situation was even more complicated than that. In 1945, five Arab nations -- Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria – had formed the Arab League, an international coalition of majority-Arab states for mutual support. In solidarity for their Palestinian Arab brothers, the League threatened war with any future Jewish state in Palestine.

After the British withdrawal announcement, fighting broke out between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine, and only intensified as British forces evacuated. On May 14, 1948, as the last British forces withdrew, Zionist leaders declared that the nation of Israel was established in Palestine. True to its promise, the Arab League attacked, beginning the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Although Israeli forces seemed outgunned, the new nation survived the ten-month war, not only retaining the area circumscribed for it by the UN, but also seizing about 60 percent of the land that had been designated for the Palestinian state. Egypt seized land along the Mediterranean later known as the Gaza Strip, and Transjordan (now known as the nation of Jordan) took East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River. Israel had survived its first test.

David Ben-Gurion proclaims the establishment of the state of Israel.

The Israeli victory triggered a massive demographic upheaval similar to what followed the partition of India. About 700,000 Palestinians fled Israel, often forced out of their homes by the Israelis, and became refugees in other nations, mainly in the Middle East. Their situation was now exactly what the Jewish situation had been before the founding of Israel: they were now diaspora, a nation without a state. Israel maintained martial law against Arab Israelis until 1966.

In 1950, the new Israeli government under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion established the Law of Return, granting citizenship to any Jew, no matter their nationality, who came to Israel. Virtually the entire Jewish population of the Middle East, about 850,000 people, now immigrated to Israel. Add to that immigration from Europe, and the population of Israel boomed from 800,000 in 1948 to about 2 million ten years later. For the first thirty years, Israeli governments were largely social democrats; the new nation was poor and experiencing so much immigration that citizens believed that strong government intervention in the economy was required to ride out the crisis.

But the economy would not be the only problem the new nation would face; support for Palestinians was still strong throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. In 1964, hundreds of Palestinian nationalists gathered in the West Bank and formed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a militant group dedicated to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the former mandate. It operated with a mix of bombings, hijackings, armed assaults, and assassination to destabilize Israel. At the time, it was the foremost terrorist organization in the world, and operated out of the occupied territories (see the Six-Day War, below) as well as Lebanon.

Arab hostility towards Israel did not end with the 1949 ceasefire. In 1965, Egyptian President Gamal Nassar nationalized the Suez Canal (see section on Egypt below). In solidarity with Palestinians, he also closed the canal and the Straits of Tinian to Israeli shipping. Israel participated in the international intervention against Egypt, fighting across the Sinai Peninsula; but the US and the UN halted the operation.

Hostilities flared again in 1967, when Egypt and Syria collaborated to invade Israel. Israeli forces, aware of the threat and feeling pessimistic of the odds, decided on a bold plan to strike Egyptian air bases to ground the Egyptian air force before the war began. This would give them a critical advantage in the war, though it would also break international norms by striking first. They made the pre-emptive strike on June 5, 1967. The plan worked; in the subsequent ground war, Israel defeated Egypt and Syria in only six days (leading to the war’s moniker, the Six-Day War). Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula but continues to occupy the other areas to this day; they are known as the Occupied Territories and are a source of contention in Israeli-Arab relations.

Israeli troops seizing the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War.

The final Arab-Israeli war came in 1973. Syria and Egypt simultaneously attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The Yom Kippur War was the most serious military challenge Israel ever faced, though the young nation rallied and won the contest. The war brought two major changes.

OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) is a consortium of mainly (but not exclusively) Arab nations which depend on oil exports for their income; the point of the consortium is to collaborate on production targets to manipulate the price of oil to their advantage. Since OPEC comprises mainly Arab nations, the consortium stood in solidarity with Syria and Egypt and embargoed eight nations supporting Israel. The embargo lasted five months and raised the cost of oil about 300 percent, triggering a global recession. Only American diplomatic efforts ended the crisis.

The second change was a tenuous peace. Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, recognized that Arab nations would not be able to destroy Israel; the Israelis realized that, unless it achieved a lasting peace with Arab nations, it would always be in danger of attack. In 1979, Egypt formally recognized the state of Israel, making any unprovoked future attack a violation of international law. Israel agreed to end its occupation of the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and West Bank, but this agreement has never been carried out despite much negotiation and planning. Sadat paid for this peace treaty with his life; he was assassinated in 1981, by Muslim fundamentalists who viewed him as a traitor.

While the Arab-Israeli wars had ended, Arab nationalists and Muslim fundamentalists continued their campaign against Israel. In 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon to oust PLO militants operating there. In 1987, a series of demonstrations and riots by Palestinians in the still-occupied territories, known as the intifada, lasted four years.

In 1993, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords to defuse the Palestinian situation. The accords established the Palestinian National Authority, administering the Palestinian autonomous regions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The idea was that this authority would one day develop into a Palestinian state in the model of the 1947 two-state solution. Over the years, the peace process has stalled as extremists on both sides fight for more advantageous terms. While the PLO has proclaimed the State of Palestine, the state lacks international recognition. And Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister involved in the Oslo process, was assassinated in 1995, by a Zionist for making peace with the Palestinians.

Since the Oslo peace process has fallen apart, Israeli – Palestinian tensions have continued, with Israeli attacks on Lebanon to disrupt terrorist groups while Zionist settlers continue to build new housing in occupied territories in contravention of international law.

Egypt and Arab Nationalism

The ancient land of Egypt played a major role in postwar Middle Eastern politics. Just as Panama had a special and not always amiable relationship with the US due to the Panama Canal, Egypt had a special relationship with both France and the UK due to the Suez Canal, completed in 1869 and operated by a joint French – British company. Egypt had a been a British colony, and later a “protectorate” with limited autonomy, as the British were loath to remove their troops from the nation; they regarded the canal as necessary to their empire, and wanted to maintain a military presence. British control over Egypt ended in 1922, as a result of a 1919 anti-colonial revolution. Egypt became a constitutional monarchy, but a very unsettled one, as different factions struggled for control, and the British also intervened, always mindful of maintaining control of the canal. It was still owned by the Westerners.

After World War II, an old philosophy gained traction in the Arab world and particularly in Egypt: Arab nationalism. This was the concept that all ethnic Arabs share cultural commonalities and a proud shared history going back to the Caliphate; unsurprisingly, it also calls for the removal of Western influence in the Arab world. Related to this is Pan-Arabism, which is similar to Pan-Africanism and was popular at about the same time. It called for the political unification of all Arab states as a manifestation of Arab nationalism. Also, Arab nationalism tended to tilt towards an Arab strain of socialism, though it was a form that rejected Marx’s atheism. The Arab League was a manifestation of Arab nationalism. Leaders influenced by Arab nationalism include Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Yasser Arafat of the PLO. The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, popular in Iraq and Syria, is deeply influenced by Arab nationalism. But Gamal Nassar of Egypt was to become the leader most associated with this philosophy.

Nassar was an Egyptian military officer and a fierce nationalist. He and other nationalists blamed King Farouk for the government’s ineffectiveness and corruption and, in particular, for Egypt’s humiliating loss in the 1948 war against Israel. Nassar and fellow officer Mohamed Naguib founded a nationalist group within the army, the Free Officers Movement, and launched the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. This coup overthrew the king and created the Republic of Egyptwith a secular constitution. Naguib served as the first president, a role Nassar took over in 1956. The new government was based on Arab nationalism, was secular (angering Islamic conservatives, who wanted a constitution based on sharia), anti-Western, anti-imperialism, and neutral in the Cold War. It also tended towards socialist economics in the hopes of guiding an industrialization program.

Gamal Nasser in 1962

One of Nassar’s first moves as president was to nationalize the Suez Canal, seizing it from the French – British owners. This infuriated the Europeans; France and Great Britain collaborated with Israel to retake the canal by force. While this coalition succeeded militarily, the Egyptians had blocked the canal by sinking ships in it, and international pressure against the invasion was swift and forceful. The USSR, supporting Nassar, even spoke of attacking British and French forces in Egypt, which President Eisenhower feared would trigger World War III. Under pressure from both the US and the USSR, the invading nations withdrew, and Egypt kept the canal. Nassar became an anti-imperialist hero in the Third World.

In 1958, Nassar pursued one of the greatest objectives of Arab nationalism: political unity. With Arab nationalists ascendant in both countries, Egypt and Syria united into a single country, the United Arab Republic. This political experiment was short lived; in 1961, Syrian military commanders, disgruntled with their loss of power and influence in the new state, launched a coup and removed Syria from the coalition nation, and both Syria and Egypt continued as independent countries.

Egypt’s failure in the 1967 Six-Day War was another blow to both Nassar and Arab nationalism. Nassar resigned following the defeat, but popular demonstrations supporting him compelled him to return to power. He died in 1970, leaving his post to Anwar Sadat. While the influence of Arab nationalism declined after Nassar’s death, his accomplishments remade Egyptian society. He vastly improved the economy with a strong industrialization program and expanded education. This lifted millions of people out of poverty and established a strong middle class in Egypt.

Political Islam and Militant Islam

In the first decades after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when Arab states fought for their independence from Western control and dominance, the main philosophical basis for Arab independence was Arab nationalism. However, the popularity of this movement declined sharply after the humiliating Arab defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967, as did Arab socialism. Proponents of Political Islam stepped in to fill the philosophical vacuum. Rather than being based on shared Arab ethnicity or socialism, Political Islam is based on Muslim identity and religious law. Political Islam has many of the same objectives as Arab nationalism, such as resistance to Western dominance and support for Palestinians. But, as a religious movement, Political Islam refutes secularism and replaces it with sharia, Muslim religious law based on scriptures; this makes it antithetical to the Western conception of the secular nation-state. Political Islam is also anti-corruption and fights secular authoritarian governments, making it a natural enemy to such dictators as Saddam Hussein (but not the Ayatollahs of Iran). It is also anti-globalization, viewing it as a tool of Western dominance (see Chapter 14 for a discussion of globalization). Political Islam uses standard political strategies, such as political parties, elections, and legislation to achieve its goals. When an Islamic group or movement abandons politics and instead uses violence in pursuit of its goals, it is referred to as Militant Islam or Islamic terrorism.

An overarching theme in both Political and Militant Islam is a return to the glory days of the Caliphate, the old Muslim / Arab empire of the Middle Ages. Adherents hope to recreate a version of this empire, though their historical ideas are highly dubious. Groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State (known as ISIS in the US) are two groups dreaming of recreating the old Caliphate.

Political Islam has had a deep influence on Middle Eastern politics since the late 1960s, but Militant Islam has been even more influential due to its dramatic successes. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is the foremost example of a militant Islamic victory, as the Iranian militants successfully installed sharia government in their country. A second success was the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan by Islamic forces, mainly the Mujahedeen (see section on Afghanistan, below). Defeating a superpower on the battlefield gave the adherents of Militant Islam increased clout in the Muslim world.

Afghanistan and al-Qaeda

Although Afghanistan is usually considered part of Western Asia, we include it in this chapter because of its historical ties with Militant Islam.

Afghanistan is perhaps the last place one would expect to find a socialist government – it is an agrarian country with a highly-factionalized society, and a very religious one as well. It came to socialism by accident. In 1973, former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan overthrew his cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah, the king of Afghanistan. In order to do so, Khan needed the help of an illegal communist group, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which assisted the nearly-bloodless coup. Once Khan was in power, he then cracked down on the PDPA, since he no longer needed them. But the PDPA had strong links to the Afghani military, so were able to execute a coup against Khan in 1978; this was known as the Saur Revolution, and had the unlikely consequence of turning this devout Muslim nation into a socialist state, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Nur Muhammad Taraki of the PDPA was named prime minister.

While this did not displease the Soviets, who always appreciated a socialist state on their borders, the Soviets warned the PDPA not to institute socialist reforms, so as not to antagonize the population. The PDPA naïvely and arrogantly barreled ahead anyway; they promoted atheism, closed most of the mosques, made the men shave their beards in violation of religious laws, allowed women to go to school, and so on. These changes immediately provoked an armed uprising against the PDPA government by groups calling themselves Mujahideen (soldiers of God).

President Ronald Reagan meeting with mujahideen fighters at the White House in 1983. From the Reagan Presidential Library.

As the civil war took shape, members of the factionalized PDPA fought each other for control of the party. The foreign minister, Hafizullah Amin, executed a coup against Taraki in September 1979, killing him. Amin could not suppress the mujahideen; his forces killed tens of thousands and persecuted anyone disloyal to the government, but the rebels soon numbered in the hundreds of thousands, far more than the Afghan army could handle. Furthermore, the Carter administration in the US sent arms and equipment to assist the mujahideen in their struggle against the socialists.

Amin turned to the USSR for military assistance. When the revolt began, the Soviets balked at intervening; but after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, they reconsidered, fearing that the Iranians would export their revolution to Afghanistan and then send militants into the bordering Muslim-majority republics of the USSR (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan). In December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan with the intention of not only crushing the Mujahideen, but also replacing the Amin administration with a more capable one. One hundred thousand Soviet troops stormed the country and killed Amin in his palace.

President Carter of the US believed that the invasion of Afghanistan represented the start of a Soviet move to take Iran (it wasn’t) and sent yet more aid to the mujahideen. The Soviets, despite hard fighting which included war crimes, were unable to suppress the rebels. After Gorbachev took office (see Chapter 13), he decided to pull out of Afghanistan and leave a socialist government behind, which the USSR did in 1989.

The mujahideen took Afghanistan in 1992 from the socialists after the USSR evacuated. The mujahideen were fragmented and unable to rule the country; they deteriorated into bandits, robbing the population. Millions of Afghanis had left the country during the war, most of them to refugee camps in Pakistan. The young Afghani students in the madiris (conservative religious schools) in Pakistan decided to retake their homeland from the mujahideen and install an Islamic republic under sharia law. With the help of Pakistani forces, the Taliban (from talib, or student, in Pashto) launched their invasion of Afghanistan and took Kabul in September 1996.

The Taliban, at first popular, soon lost the peoples’ support due to their harsh rule. They abolished all women’s rights and forbade dancing, singing, sports, alcohol, radio, and TV. They often publicly executed those who violated these rules. Their regime came to an end in 2001, after the US invasion of Afghanistan in order to capture Osama bin Laden and dismantle the al-Qaeda network in the country in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

There are two important things to remember about both political and militant Islamic groups. The first is that they are very fragmented, with widely-differing ideologies, and often fight each other. For example, the Taliban and Iranian regimes, while both Islamic fundamentalists and based on sharia, had very different ideologies and nearly went to war with each other in the 1990s. Second, it must be remembered that very few Muslims in the Middle East or elsewhere are of the extremist, militant bent of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In fact, the most common target of militant Islamic groups are not Americans, Europeans, or Israelis, but moderate Muslims who do not agree with their fundamentalism. For example, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood tried to assassinate the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, because he led and supported a secular state in the Middle East instead of one based on sharia. US President George Bush Jr. tried to tie al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks to Iraq, a very dubious claim, since al-Qaeda disapproved of Hussein’s secular government. Nevertheless, the accusation was used as a pretense for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq which finally ended Hussein’s rule – ironically, too, as collaborating with al-Qaeda was one of the few crimes that the dictator had not committed.

Iran

Another example of militant Islam can be found in Iran, but one must examine Iranian grievances with the West to understand its influence. The source of contention between the West and Iran was originally the Abadan Oilfield in Iran, which was owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This British company was a partially-nationalized corporation established to extract oil from Iran after it was discovered by a British expedition in 1909. Since the UK lacks oil reserves, and oil is a critical strategic asset, the British were adamant about retaining the Iranian oilfield.

The Iranian people and government long resented this arrangement; the shah (king) of Iran (which was still referred to as Persia at the time), Mozzafar al-Din, was paid a large lump sum and promised sixteen percent of company profits for the concession (permission to operate in Iran). The British treated its Iranian workers poorly and was known to be under-reporting its profits in order to cheat the Iranian people of even their sixteen percent, although they were making about one hundred million pounds a year from the Abadan fields. They also promised to build schools and hospitals in Iran to help the people, but failed to do so.

The British, in conjunction with the USSR, also invaded Iran in August 1941. The goal was to secure the Iranian oil fields – the shah at the time, Reza Shah Pahlavi, was thought to be pro-fascist – and to use Iran as a corridor to ship American Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR. The British forced the shah to abdicate in favor of his young son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah would continue to grant the British a monopoly on Iranian oil.

Change finally came in 1951. The new Iranian Prime Minister, nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh, was ordered by the Iranian parliament to nationalize the British oilfields. The shah was in a difficult political situation. He was attempting to modernize and “Europeanize” Iran to turn it into a regional power, and needed the oil money to continue his modernization plan, but doubted the Iranians could run it profitably without British technicians. Mosaddegh and his nationalist comrades were growing very popular and powerful, and he feared a coup if he resisted them.

He was saved by the British and Americans. MI-6 (British foreign intelligence) and the CIA collaborated to orchestrate a coup against Mosaddegh in 1953. The British wanted their oil back, and the Americans were concerned that the leftist Mosaddegh would allow the Soviets to access Iranian oil. The coup arrested Mosaddegh and his nationalist colleagues and the Shah installed pro-Western General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. Zahedi approved a new concession to a British / US consortium, and the oil again flowed to the West. Mosaddegh lived the rest of his life under house arrest and his political allies were tortured and executed.

The shah now intensified the modernization program, known as the White Revolution. Using Iran’s vast oil wealth, he pursued industrialization and tried to improve the lot of the rural poor with land redistribution. Furthermore, and more controversially, his modernization plans included Western human rights, such as women’s suffrage and secular government. These changes angered the wealthy rural landlords, who lost land and influence in the redistribution, and the Islamic clergy, who viewed the social changes as antithetical to their conservative interpretation of Islam. Also, the shah did not mean for the White Revolution to include democracy. He suppressed critics of his regime, imprisoning or executing them, even traditional religious authorities. The shah exiled his greatest religious critic, the Ayatollah [a high-ranking Shiite cleric] Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1964.

The conflicts developed into the Iranian Revolution in 1978, with demonstrations and riots against the shah. The shah went into exile for his safety, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979. Guerillas and rebels overwhelmed loyal military units, causing other units to declare themselves neutral and await the outcome of the fighting. In April, a national referendum chose to create an Islamic republic with laws based on sharia and led by religious leaders. The Ayatollah Khomeini was appointed the Supreme Leader of the nation. The country retained a parliament and elected a president, but the Supreme Leader and his Council of Guardians (all religious figures) held all executive power, and could even choose who was allowed to run for political positions.

Various groups opposed to the revolution – including leftists, secularists, ethnic Kurds, and even some Islamic groups – fought back, but were all suppressed with considerable loss of life. The new regime also alienated the Americans with an attack on the US embassy in Tehran. In October 1979, the shah was admitted into the United States for cancer treatment, angering Iranian revolutionaries who thought that the US might also try to return the shah to power. To prevent another CIA coup in the vein of 1953, on November 4, a group of Iranian religious students occupied the US embassy and took the staff hostage in contravention of international law. Although the Ayatollah did not know the attack was planned, he decided to accept it as it proved to be very popular with the Iranian people, who viewed the US as a supporter of the Shah. The Ayatollah now began to denounce the US as the “Great Satan” in speeches, and war seemed likely. An American hostage rescue mission failed, with the aircraft crashing in the desert. Finally, after 444 days, the Iranian government reached an agreement with the US and released the hostages, but the animosity between the two nations continued to simmer.

Iranian students storm the US embassy in Tehran, November 1979. The sign at the right shows the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In 1980, the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, decided to take advantage of the chaos in Iran and tried to seize Khuzestan, an oil-rich Iranian province bordering Iraq and hosting a large Arab population. [Note that the Iranians are not Arabs; their ethnic group is Persian. They speak Farsi, not Arabic.] While the invasion took the Iranians by surprise, they quickly rallied and repulsed the attack. They managed to push into Iraq itself, the Ayatollah dreaming of exporting his Islamic revolution into the Arab world. This worried both the US and the USSR; they did not want Iran to control the Iraqi oil fields or be in a position to threaten Saudi Arabia. The US had embargoed Iraq as a state supporter of anti-Israeli terrorism. Now the US lifted its embargo, allowing Hussein to buy the necessary equipment to produce chemical weapons. With his new chemical arsenal, Hussein stopped the Iranian assault and held on until the two sides, exhausted by the war, signed a peace treaty in 1989. The war had cost the Iranians upwards of a million lives; furthermore, a 1988 Iranian campaign to eliminate political opposition at home killed another 30,000 people. Saddam Hussein remained in power and next invaded and annexed neighboring Kuwait in 1990, only to have his troops ejected from the country in 1991 by US forces.

Iraq was not the only target of Iranian jihad, their crusade to export their fundamentalist revolution. Iran also sponsored terrorist groups throughout the Middle East with the intention of overthrowing secular governments, converting them to theocracies allied with Iran, and also of destroying Israel. Hezbollah, a terrorist group dedicated to eliminating Israel, is one such organization. The US and several other countries consider Iran a supporter of terrorism.

The Ayatollah died in June 1989, and had ensured a transition of government. Ali Khamenei, the president of Iran, was made Supreme Leader, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate conservative, became the new president. The pair, while sometimes at odds, worked together to repair the economic damage from the war, international embargoes, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s neglect. They had some success in this respect. Also, they moderated the strict religious rules which rankled the more educated urban citizens, particularly women and the youth. The youth of Iran were too young to remember the hated shah; while the older generations still appreciated the Ayatollah Khomeini for the revolution and gave his government their loyalty, the younger generations simply resented the restrictions the government placed on them. They translated their opposition into the 1997 election of reformist Mohammad Khatami as the new president. Khatami’s attempts at social reform met with stiff opposition from Iranian conservatives, who blocked his efforts and repressed dissent. A hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, became the next president in 2005. From 2001 to 2006, human rights protests broke out sporadically through the country, only to be suppressed by the government.

It was during Ahmadinejad’s tenure that tensions grew regarding the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranians had been developing nuclear power plants in the 1950s with the help of the United States; as part of the program, the Iranians were not permitted to build nuclear weapons, and were required to submit to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the United Nations to demonstrate compliance. After the Iranian Revolution, the US ceased to assist Iran, and the program continued clandestinely. The chief problem for the West is that, if a nation can enrich uranium for use in power plants, it can also enrich it to levels pure enough to create nuclear weapons.

By 2007, the US intelligence community was certain that Iran was running a nuclear weapons development program in contravention of international treaties. Iran denied the accusations, claiming that the program was for peaceful uses only; the government stated that creating nuclear weapons was contrary to Islamic law. The UN ordered Iran to halt the program, since it was not complying with inspections.

In 2009, the IAEA claimed that it had no evidence of any further Iranian nuclear weapons research. It reversed that finding in 2019, claiming that Iran was once again in violation of the UN agreement. The United States has, at the time of this writing (2023), withdrawn from the UN committee overseeing the Iranian program and unilaterally embargoed Iran. To this day, Iran has not tested or claimed to have a nuclear weapon but, given its current nuclear technology, could probably create one very quickly if it wanted. And Iran has also developed missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead across the Middle East and perhaps as far as Europe.

The Arab Spring

The most important event in recent Middle Eastern history is the Arab Spring, a region-wide wave of pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian protests. The Middle East is infamous for its corrupt, autocratic governments, which lead to weak economic systems where the elites are able to acquire great wealth and influence through bribery, embezzlement, and nepotism, leaving little for everyone else. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, with the protest of a single person. Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor, set himself on fire in response to police abuse and died soon after. This public demonstration served as the catalyst for nationwide protests, since anger at authoritarianism and corruption already simmered. The government of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali attempted to suppress the protests with a combination of violent repression and economic reforms. The demonstrators demanded nothing less than a democratic government and did not back down. In January 2011, the president resigned and fled the country; in October, Tunisia established a democratic republic with a new constitution.

The pro-democracy wave swept next over Egypt, where protests erupted against the government of President Hosni Mubarak. As in Tunisia, the government both offered concessions and repressed protestors. The military then refused to attack protestors as the president demanded, and instead demanded that Mubarak resign. This Mubarak did; but the government which formed under new President Mohamed Morsi was unstable, with constant fighting with the military and between political factions. In 2013, the military, fearing greater social instability, seized control of the government and executed several hundred Morsi supporters during a crackdown of opposition. It was in this environment that Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former military officer, became president in an election that was boycotted by many opposition parties. Sisi’s government is regarded as authoritarian, having re-written the constitution to strengthen the military’s role in government and neutralize his political opponents. Despite his anti-democratic tendencies, his anti-Islamic militant stance makes him popular with some segments of Egyptian society.

The Arab Spring spread across other nations, such as Yemen and Bahrain; but only in Libya and Syria did it have serious consequences. In February 2011, protests broke out against the authoritarian regime of dictator Muammar Qaddafi. These demonstrations developed into an all-out armed revolt. The government was on the brink of defeating the rebels when a coalition led by NATO intervened with airstrikes targeting Qaddafi’s troops. This quickly swung the war in favor of the rebels. Qaddafi fled the capitol, but was captured by rebels in October 2011 and executed. A new transitional government was formed, but it proved ineffective in holding the vastly-fragmented society together, and the country descended into civil war in 2014.

A similar situation developed in Syria, where protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad erupted in March 2011. Unlike in Libya, the international community was divided over supporting Assad. The US and Western Europe opposed him, but Russia and China supported him and blocked all UN efforts to either pressure Assad or intervene militarily. As a result, weapons and advisors flowed into Syria from both sides, and the resulting civil war has been extremely bloody, with the Assad regime even resorting to using chemical weapons. The war has killed over half a million people and led to a steady stream of refugees, numbering over six million, fleeing the country.

Only in Tunisia, birthplace of the Arab Spring, did the movement fulfill its objectives of democracy and just government. Despite the failures, however, the Arab Spring did leave an indelible mark on the Middle East and inspired future movements. For example, in 2019, protests toppled the autocratic regimes of Algeria and Sudan. Iraq and Lebanon saw similar protest movements; although these nations are nominally democratic, they suffer from extreme levels of social and political division which hamper effective government and thus triggered large-scale demonstrations.

Conclusion

After the departure of the Ottoman, French, and British empires, the nations of the Middle East were influenced by several movements. That Arab nationalism should become popular is hardly surprising; that movement had its origins in the pre-war anti-colonial struggles against occupying empires and was only intensified by the founding of Israel, which many Arabs resented as an occupation of Arab soil by foreigners. Arab nationalism had much in common with African nationalism, another decolonization movement with an ethnic component and another symptom of the anti-Western sentiment common during that period.

It is also unsurprising that Arab nationalism declined. First, the foreign empires vacated the Middle East, removing the primary irritant which birthed the movement in the first place. Also, Arab failure in the Six-Day War demoralized Arab nationalists and provoked much soul-searching. Finally, as we saw in the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria, Arab nationalism was no match for geographic nationalism and self-serving national elites, for whom extranational unity meant a loss of power. Notice that African nationalism suffered a similar fate.

The philosophical vacuum left by Arab nationalism’s decline was immediately filled, to some degree, by Islamic politics and Islamic militantism. The historical influence of Islam in the Middle East makes it a convenient basis for a political movement, able to generate a great deal of credibility in the Arab world. The popularity of the movement waxes and wanes depending on circumstances, though it remains strong in Iran where it first gained power; it is also ascendant again in Afghanistan after a twenty-year hiatus of American occupation.

Finally, the Arab Spring demonstrated that the pro-democracy movement remains strong in the Middle East, despite autocratic regimes, and can bring down major governments with public demonstrations. Still, the Middle East remains, in terms of Western conceptions of human rights, the least-free region of the world. The popularity of the Arab Spring and its effectiveness in toppling autocracies shows that autocratic governments need to keep their behaviors in check to some degree if they wish to remain credible. The dance between the pro-democracy movement, Islamic political parties and militant groups, and autocratic governments largely unconnected from any ideological commitment, is a tenuous one. It is likely that the future of the Middle East will be chaotic, and that foreign interest in the oil market will make intervention a compelling strategy once again.