This is somewhat misunderstood. That Arab-Jewish conflict isn't that old. They all were under the Ottoman yoke for centuries and were, sort of, united by their common hatred for the Turk. The Great War changed all of that. One of those quirks of history, that time also coincided with the rise of oil as an important energy source. So a region that barely got a mention before (for 5 or 6 centuries) among the great powers became increasingly and immensely important over the next several decades.

And here we are.

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Posted by crazy4lsu

Member since May 2005

36311 posts

Posted on 5/13/21 at 9:08 am to Ace Midnight

quote:
So a region that barely got a mention before (for 5 or 6 centuries) among the great powers became increasingly and immensely important over the next several decades.

Almost solely due to the relative peace of Ottoman rule. But the west Asian corridor was an extremely contentious place since the Greek-Persian rivalry. The extension of that into the Roman-Sasanian conflict played a large part in the rise of Islam, as many places in the region welcomed Arab invaders due to, at that point, nearly a millenia of rivalry between various Eastern Med and Persian empires. The warfare continued until the Turks, though the rivalry continued with Persia, but also developed the dominant Islamic culture before the rise of the Wahhabis, the Turco-Persian culture, which extended from Anatolia to Mesopotamia to Central Asia to North India.

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Posted by Toomer Deplorable

Team Bitter Clinger

Member since May 2020

17881 posts

Posted on 5/13/21 at 9:39 am to Ace Midnight

quote:
That Arab-Jewish conflict isn't that old.

The intense ethnic rivalries that characterize the region are as old as recorded history. The weight of the Ottoman yoke simply kept the conflicts under control for several centuries.

After WWI, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between the victorious allies effectively partitioned the Ottoman Empire as a spoil of war. This disastrous arrangement simply created modern nation states in a region historically bound by tribal and ethnic loyalties.

The modern-day nation states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all were effectively created by Westerners drawing random lines in the sand. Add the ethnic state of Israel to the mix and you have a region rife for continued conflict.