ABSTRACT
Many of the present difficulties of the Middle East can be traced to the region’s colonization in the aftermath of World War I, which included constituting artificial states in the absence of a pre-existing unified national tradition. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire created a vacuum filled by Britain and France in a callous manner epitomized by the betrayal of regional nationalist, ethnic, and tribal leaders, many of whom had sided with the victorious European powers after being led to believe in the prospect of political independence at the end of combat. These historically rooted difficulties include the Balfour Declaration’s cynical promise of an ill-defined Jewish homeland in the territory of Palestine that became a British mandate, supposedly ‘a sacred trust’ for the benefit of the inhabitants as embodied in a set of societal circumstances that existed in 1917. In the period between the two world wars various degrees of nominal independence were
achieved by the states in the Middle East, but the hegemonic role of the European colonial powers persisted.
