History Hysteria: the Middle East

I am often greeted by raised eyebrows and awkward silences when I tell people that I study history. The reaction is even more astute when I tell them that I actually do like it. But history is the ultimate window in to the history and conscience of humankind. It is both a science and a humanity - its methodology is precise yet its analysis is wonderfully broad.

But more to the point. The Middle East. My interests were tweaked when I started reading A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Otoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle east, written by David Fromkin. Allow me to highly recommend it. It has opened my eyes and deepened my understanding on how such a complex and exotic region became so absorbed in political chaos. The book questions (and partly answers) the actions of European politicians and how they grossly misinterperated a region they knew too little about. The book also highlights a Middle East that was a museum in a 20th Century development buzz. Politically backward with wazirs and tarbushed figures who had little appreciation or understanding for the renaissance of Europe, nor the political flair of the West.

The Ottoman Empire, a giant with a malignant malaise, beautifully disillusioned to the end. Young patriots who through inexperience and desperation, led the Ottomans to their defeat. Sharp politicians who knew so much about too little. Lobbyists, supporters, campaigners, experts. The heroic and foolish. The romantic and false. All heroes and cowards alike.

The Middle East, as we know it today, was the creation of Arabs, Jews, Muslim, Christian, Turkish, British, French - all with their own ideals, their own borders, their own tactics, their own divisions, their own answers to the ultimte question: what to give to whom? The culmination of many many many factors, which miraculously and fatefully created one of the most, if not the most, volatile region in this already unstable world we live in.

To the historian, it is a true wonder. To the human being, we can only hope for the best and pray for the ultimate solution.

General Allenby enters Jerusalem, tactfully on foot.