Season 4, Episode 5: Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club. A monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written, scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world. Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. I could not be more thrilled than to have today's guest professor Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Oxford University, and one of the great historians leading historians of the modern Middle East. And boy, do we need to speak and we need your wisdom and guidance and lessons Eugene were remarkably dangerous and trouble time of course and everybody wants to understand why. And so we're going to be discussing a absolutely great book that you gave to the world first in 2009, The Aerobs History. It's a fabulous history of the Middle East, roughly from 1517 to the near present it was written in 2009. I happen to listen to it as an audiobook in the 2017 edition. I think it is. So there was some update for the Aerobs Spring which turned into a lot of complexity. But of course in our discussion I want to bring us up to the current day as well. To get us started I will quote from the introduction of the Aerobs history. You say that in the face of an uncertain future there is no better guide than the past. A simple truth often lost on political analysts. So here we are. We need a guide urgently Eugene. Let me thank you for being with us and what is going on? Oh my God. We've got an expanding more violence conflict hugely divergent points of view of what's happening in your region. So can you help get us started? Well first off Jeff, thank you so much for the invitation and I'm a little humbled by your introduction. But I've always argued that the present value of history lies in you know the the way it's relevant to understanding our world today and to make sense of the world we're in today, the mess we're in today. You do need to know a bit of history. As we look at what's going on across the region right now that the two things it's need to be converging to me is the kind of the war of the Palestinian succession. Since the end of the British mandate the two rival nationalisms Palestinian and Zionist have never really reached a resolution to their crisis. It's been a matter of wars in 1948, 1967 being the real lands or the wars over Palestine and in a sense as we came to the 21st century the unresolved nature, the failures of the peace processes and then the sense of the world was moving on through the Abraham Accords to try normalize Israel's place in the Middle East without finally resolving its differences with the Palestinians. That's all been ruptured since the 7th of October and I think that what we are seeing now we can trace the roots back to the unresolved agenda going right back to 1948 and the British mandate. I would think and the writing is so clear on this point we could say it's actually even a century at least since the Balfour Declaration and the original modern idea of the Zionist program, the Jewish homeland that the Balfour Declaration brought about because the trials and tribulations of this came right from the start. So I'm going to get us there soon. There seems to be other deep tensions in the region, the play of the great powers from outside still looking in. France with its still role in Lebanon in the Levant playing a role. Russia of course being around the United States very much so Turkey with of course its current weight but also historic weight in the region and Iran Persia as another great power that is not an Arabic speaking country. It's not part of the Arab region but it is definitely part of this region. I think one thing that impresses me from the history and the geography and our current situation is this really is a meeting place of great powers and a crossroads a connectivity of Europe, Africa and Asia and seems to be a not quite a perpetual battleground but never quiet. No my job security is insured working on the Middle East you're always going to have a crisis around to keep you relevance but you've touched on something interesting. Yes you're absolutely right the great powers have treated the Middle East this crossroads of Asia, Africa and Europe as a zone of rivalries competition and conflict whether it was in the imperial age or during the Cold War but what's different today and what I think has been mostly stabilizing in the 21st century is the role of regional actors. The the middle weight powers not the great powers like the Americans the Chinese today but Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia. These are countries which have shown a greater willingness to put skin in the game and I think there in many ways more influential than let's say the old Cold War powers. The United States obviously has huge influence in the region but it has been looking to remove its footprint from the Middle East really since the Obama years where they never ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw America pin down. We still have thousands of troops in the region don't get me wrong but I think that really since President Trump's presidency president Biden's presidency the Americans have been looking for ways to try and reduce their presence they create a bit of a vacuum there and then it's the local powers whose interests are most directly caught up and here Turkey and Iran stand out. And then also the local powers trying to draw the United States back in especially Israel to fight its wars. It's a curious relationship as we witness the post 7th of October or Middle East between the United States and Israel. You know President Biden is so outspoken in his supportive Zionism he declares himself a Zionist and yet the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister Netanyahu very strained and I think for all of the support that the Biden and White House has given Israel they have had very little influence over Israeli policies as a compensation. So you know really I don't know whether Israel is trying to draw America in or trying to you know contain what influence America might exercise on a very very volatile situation where the government of Israel seems to be really going its own course without being constrained by friends or enemies. Let's start back 500 years if we can. Your book actually begins I think it is 1517 if I have the date right which is well tell us what what is why is 1517 it's so important it is the crucial starting point it opens your history of the modern Middle East and what happens there just to say as as we start delving into the history you make two points that I think are compelling or one point that there are two themes that are compelling one is that foreign domination has been a reality for 500 years in the Arab region. Not a constant definitely different now from 100 years ago but it's a continuing theme and reality what is the role of the Arab peoples as opposed to the outside powers and that is 500 years of drama that you describe starting in 1517 and the second you describe is the challenge of governance that really represents the interests of the peoples rather than the interests of autocrats or a narrow part of the population so it's both the geopolitics of the region and the domestic politics of the region that are the two great themes of your book and you started 1517 a year that's especially notable on this first theme of foreign domination. Yeah thanks Jeff it's it's true I mean I I wanted to write this book for a general audience I didn't want to write just for scholars I wanted any newspaper reader with interest in the region to be able to pick up on the big ideas of the book without being lost in a lot of academic jargon and so I talk about it works well good I hope so I hope it's an approachable book it's terrific absolutely but I start with this concept of the rules of the game and so what I say one of the distinctive features of the modern era for the Arab world is that they've always had to navigate the modern age by other peoples rules and so I chose 151617 this is a period where the Ottoman Empire conquers the Mamluk Empire as the beginning of the modern age precisely because the Arab peoples stop being ruled from their own capitals at that point you know that the centers of the big Arab them pires before 1517 for Cairo to Damascus, Baghdad, North African empires. But for the first time, they'd be ruled not from their own cities, but from Istanbul. It's the Muslim city. It's part of a Muslim empire, but Turkish speaking, geographically distinct and separate, far away. And the center of rulemaking after the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Empire in 1517 would be Istanbul. And it sets a pattern which would then be repeated. The Ottomans are going to be actually four centuries of that story practically. And it's only with the fall of the Ottomans in 1918, they're controlled over the Arab world anyway, that you're going to enter a second period of someone else's rules. And it's going to be the European colonial powers, the imperial rules of Britain and France that would really shape the inner war years. And then I guess the last phase, after the Second World War, with the decline of British invention, imperial power and the rise of the USSR and the USA as superpowers, it's going to be the rules of the Cold War that really shape the modern engagement. We're in a kind of post-Cold War world now, and the rules are a little harder to discern, but back to you there. Well, just to say that we have listeners from Asia, we have listeners from all over the world. And for people not so familiar with this, and I would say also by the way in the United States and Europe where we also have a cultural sense of Christendom versus the Islamic world, there may not be awareness even of this most basic point that the Arab countries are the countries where the language Arabic is spoken. So this is North Africa and the Middle East. The Islamic countries is a different category and it includes in this context, crucially, Turkey and the Turkic nations and nations in Southeast Asia as well. So the Arab world and the Islamic world are very, very different. Of course there's an overlap, so there's a kind of Venn diagram there. But this is a period starting in 1517, where Turkish rule, which was then a great empire, the Ottoman Empire and an expanding empire, conquered Egypt, conquered the Arab speaking region one part after another, starting in 1517. Do I have that right or is it 1516? The first conquest of Syria is 1516. Okay. Syria is 1516 and then they get the Mamluk capital of Cairo in 1517. Okay. That's the battle that I'm thinking of in 1517. And this is a great, longstanding Egyptian based modern Egypt empire of the Mamluks, also a fascinating part of history, who they are and how they rose to power and what they meant. But this is now a Turkish empire dominating the Arab world and it would last for 400 years in fact. And complicated because there was gradually the emergence of an Arab consciousness and certainly local potentates or would be potentates, wanted their freedom of action from a distant capital with a different culture, a different language, same religion by and large. But really a conquering power. It's obviously a very basic fact, but I just want to make sure everybody understands that basic fact because it's not necessarily cleared everybody. And I think it helps to understand this great Arab region, a region of great culture, tradition, fabulous history in the arts, the sciences, humanities, philosophy in the first many centuries of the rise of Islam, the golden age of Islam. But then it falls under hundreds of years of domination. So that must be a very deep cultural and psychological and political blow. Well, I think it was a while before we'd talk about a blow. And I think that even under Ottoman rule, the Arabs felt that they were part of a Sunni Muslim empire. So their religious and cultural values were respected. They also knew they were part of the biggest, scariest, most powerful empire in the world. And we have to remember whatever you think of the Ottomans today. At that point, they were the most powerful force in all of Europe. You know, Britain, France, there was no Germany or Italy. These were small states terrified of Ottoman power. The Ottomans dominated the Mediterranean world. So, you know, I think from any in the Arab world, it wasn't particularly oppressive to be part of that very successful venture called the Ottoman Empire. But in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, you have the genesis of new ideas challenging absolutism, starting in Europe, but spreading around the Mediterranean basin, making their way into the Ottoman Empire. And suddenly you start to see new ideas and technologies giving European powers an edge or an advantage. And I think Ottoman observers concerned about their own empire standing in rule affairs began to think that perhaps they needed to reconsider their own institutions of government and maybe adopt some of these new technologies of warfare or of industrial creation to be able to preserve their territory and keep up with their neighbors. And I think that's where you start getting a rethinking of the relationship between the government and its peoples. And the Balkans even before the Arab world, the Balkans were, you know, Greece and Bulgaria, all that, was all part of the Ottoman world. You have the beginnings of national movements that would lead to wars of independence of secession, the Greeks lead the way here in the 1820s. And in the course of the 19th century, there's going to be a kind of fragmentation of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. This idea of Balkanization comes from that very fraught period of 19th century Eastern European history. But I think that's when people in the Arab world begin to question their ties to the Ottoman center. Was it enough for them to be part of a suddenly Muslim-dominated empire, but one that spoke a different language than their own, their Arabic language? And where identity politics begin to craft new political movements in the beginning of the 20th century, that would challenge the Arab's position in the Ottoman world. So it's very interesting and really very helpful. And I think the important that the Ottoman empire was very successful, very powerful, expansionist. Of course, the conquest of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire dates back to the 15th century, 1453. Then these conquests of the Arab lands at the beginning of the 16th century in 1516, as you say, in Syria, 1517, in Manloch Egypt and the threats of the Ottomans to Europe were very great. And indeed, the conquests of Hungary and the Balkan regions were successful. And Vienna was besieged twice. And it was only at the end of the, I guess, at the end of the 18th century, at the end of the 17th century in the 1690s, that the end of the threat came with victories over the Ottomans and the Ottomans had to retreat from Hungary at that point. And the Europeans were on their path of dominance. And so very interesting. Of course, that would change your view. Hey, we're part of a losing side, or at least a side that is no longer so dominant, it's so glorious. And I can see that the questions raised. And then this shift of power to Western Europe and the increasing encroachments on Ottoman lands, the rising power of Russia, vis-a-vis the Ottomans, all of this, I suppose, then opens the path for the Arabs to reconsider their place in the world. And by the 19th century, you describe a real sense of not only a cultural revival in some sense of looking back to the classic age of Arab rule, but also big changes of politics, for example, in Egypt, which first is invaded by Napoleon in the 1790s. That doesn't go so well for Napoleon in the end, but it does open a space politically for almost independent Egypt to emerge with a more powerful local rule at the beginning of the 19th century. Yeah, I think for the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was the ultimate challenge, where you have a province that would grow so strong economically and militarily that they could actually challenge the Ottoman center of itself, the founder of that dynasty in Egypt, a man named Muhammad Ali Pasha, was able to raise a very powerful army, train it on European lines, equip it with state-of-the-art muskets, and then was able to march right onto Istanbul itself. He gets within a couple hundred miles of the Ottoman capital, and it's only the intervention of the European powers, not ready to see the Ottoman Empire collapse just yet, who forced Muhammad Ali to retreat from the Ottoman capital and uphold the Ottoman Empire. And I think that that sets off a period in which the Ottomans recognizing their own problems and go about initiating reforms, reforms in their administration, reforms in their laws, and those reforms are going to play a key role in trying to redefine relations between state and society. You're really seeing the Ottoman Empire playing this role as kind of the middle man in the forces of modernity. As Europe was in the driving seat, Europe is certainly taking the leading role here, but powers like the Ottomans in the Middle East, the King Dynasty in China, you know, are interpreting the forces of modernity and trying to adapt it to their own cultures and society through a process of reforms. These reforms are fascinating, and as a result of that, there will be a rewriting of social contracts like constitutions, creating a rule of law that binds rulers and ruled alike. And an attempt to try and create identity politics out of loyalty to the Ottomans, a sort of Ottomanism, to compete with all of the ethic and religious identity politics that as we get into the 19th century, we'll begin to shape not just Greece as separate, but whether the Armenians are separate people or whether the Arabs are separate people. And that's the state of play when you get to the 20th century. A time where I think identity politics are going to really shape Arab hopes and aspirations, but not yet whether thinking in terms of independence from the Ottoman Empire, they're very aware of European threats to colonize the Arab lands. They've seen France invade Algeria in 1830 and a long and scorched earth policy of conquest and submission that followed. And in the course of the 19th century, most of North Africa will come under one form of European rule or other, Tunisia, Egypt. The last ones to fall will be Libya in 1911 to Italy and Morocco in 1912 to France. By which point, I think people in the Arab world believe that even if the Ottoman Empire is a relatively weaker state than it was when they first joined, better to stay under the Ottoman umbrella that make a bid for independence and risk being taken over by the Europeans. Yeah, how interesting. The story you tell of France taking over Algeria is unbelievable to me. I've been as an economist involved in that questions when governments go bankrupt or when they can't pay you that for more than 40 years. But I never heard a story where the debtor took over the creditor as you described in what happened in 1827 in Algiers. Can you just summarize that event? It's mind-boggling. From mind-blowing, I was pounded absolutely fascinating. I didn't know it. Well, it's a great story, Jeff, but it really says a great deal more about what desperate governments in Europe are capable of doing to try and distract their unpopular standing at home. In this case, it was the restored bourbon king. This is after France's revolution and after the failings of Napoleon Bonaparte. You have a restoration of the old royal family of France and the king at the time Charles X is desperately unpopular. And he ceases on an old grievance between the ruler of Algiers who had loaned grain through local Jewish intermediaries to Napoleon's army to feed the army during a naval blockade of French ports that the British had imposed during the Napoleonic Wars. And this debt had gone unpaid from the early 1800s until the 1820s. And the ruler of Algiers demands of the French consul in his city that these debts be honored, that they be honored now. And he loses his temper and he strikes the French consul with his fly whisk. Now, listeners, the fly whisk is a sort of horse tail on a little wooden handle, which is good at flisking flies away, but it's not something you could like assault someone. It's not a baseball bat. Yes, it's not a capital crime. It's not a capital crime. But this was treated by the French consul de Valais, though it were an insult on French honor. And he appeals to his king and his government to respond to this slight with all the force that it's due. And that little note sits from 1827 until declining popularity of the bourbon monarchy leads the desperate king, Charles X and his foreign minister to put in yak, to dream up a distraction through glorious wars of conquest against former Roman imperial lands of North Africa, justified in terms of redeeming French honor over this fly whisk incident. And yes, from such twisted butterfly wings, you can unleash quite a storm. And what followed was an accidental occupation that was meant to be a takeover of just the city of Algiers and drew the French in deeper and deeper until basically you would have 132 years of French outright colonization in which Algeria, not just a colony, would be annexed to metropolitan France, North African French territory. Incredible story, but true. It is incredible. And you know, reading it as an economist, there are many cases in history. And I want to turn to one of them because it's covered in depth in your book, in which a debtor cannot repay. And the creditor then invades the debtor country or takes over the finances on the claim that they're owed. So they essentially take over the sovereignty of the debtor country and will turn to the case of each of dinner moment. But this is a case you've explained also the political context, but this is a case where in debtor so is not to repay a debt, probably a quite modest debt, a loan of grain to the revolutionary armies in 1792 and 1797 if I remember correctly. And the day of Algiers is saying, "You owe us, repay us." And the French instead invade. So I thought it was, I have to put it on my list of things that debtors can do because I usually represent debtor countries. And I never frankly had thought about the debtors invading the creditors, but I took this as an absolute astounding precedent. But it will recur, Jeff. And if you think about the origins of your rocks invasion of Kuwait, it's another example of the debtor invading the creditor. Okay, fair enough. Yes, fair enough. Very good. All right. Well, this is a new part of the toolkit that I had not considered before what debtor countries might do, but a more normal occasion partly because normally the creditor is the rich party and the debtor is the poor side is that a sovereign entity gets into a debt crisis. And the creditor uses that as an occasion for political gain or takeover. And I think that's a somewhat fair summary of 1882 in Egypt. So I'm thinking of you also said how Egypt is really kind of the fundamental part of the Turkish Arab relationship because Egypt is such an important state and such an important player in world history. And in Egypt, we go from the 1517 conquest of the Ottomans to nearly self rule under Muhammad Ali Pasha as you describe a strong state who tries to modernize in the European way, tries to industrialize in the 1840s. And one of the great ideas that changed the world in many ways was the Suez Canal building the Suez Canal with French engineering help and French finance originally. But the canal opens in 1869 I believe if I'm correct. And soon after all of the debt that was incurred by the Egyptians to finance the Suez Canal becomes tremendously onerous. And what happens then because it's a fundamental part of the modern Arab history as well. It is and it'll be so familiar to you in your own work looking at the role that international financial institutions have played in trying to take over failing economies and then impose restructuring on them and imposing experts on them and exposing debt repayment schedules. And so this is something with deep roots in economic history certainly in Europe's relations with not just Egypt but you know it's quite salutary to see that Spain, a number of countries in Europe certainly every country in Latin America, Russia all experienced similar bankruptcies in the course of the 19th century. But I guess the lesson here is you want to be more powerful or bigger than your creditor nation if you want to retain your sovereignty. You know the example of Saddam Hussein and Kuwait or even of Algiers and Egypt is if you're the smaller party don't lend to a bigger party. Yeah, okay good. But what happens when you're a little Egypt, indebted to all the major powers of Europe, certainly to private bondholders in France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, Italy is that they are going to impose solutions on you. You will lose your sovereignty as a result. And what happens after Egypt declares its bankruptcy in 1876 is a kind of takeover of certainly the economic sovereignty of Egypt. And it leads to the point where a Britain and a Frenchman are appointed to the Egyptian cabinet. Yeah, it's It's really the IMF intervention, a hundred years before the IMF. Right. You've seen this before or you've seen it since all the time. Right. And yet these are the precedents being set. And I mean, in a sense, in Middle Eastern history, in the 19th century, you have three such bankruptcies. Tunisia is great. You'll bankrupt in 1869. The Ottoman Empire itself will go bankrupt in 1875. And then Egypt, the 1876. And Tunisia and Egypt, that's going to lead to outright colonial domination. And I think the Ottoman example is about being too big to swallow. So though the Ottomans went bankrupt, no European power was going to go and occupy the Ottoman Empire. The colonial solution in the Ottoman case was to alienate whole parts of the Ottoman economy and put them under European control so that the Ottomans had to try and make do in terms of state craft with a much reduced resource base. And then Europe had control over certain lucrative sectors of the Ottoman economy like tobacco, where they could just carved up economically. Carved it up and colonized economic sectors rather than the whole of the Ottoman Empire. But all three Middle Eastern bankruptcies of the 19th century lead to colonial solutions. That brings us to, let's say, the century that is the one that is giving us our dire headaches today and World War I. And the end of the Ottoman Empire, it's a defeat alongside the Habsburg Empire and the German state and then the carving up of the Middle East. Take us through that briefly if you can. It's so complicated. But it's the briefly part that worries me here. Yes. The Ottomans lose, because they're on the losing side of World War I to the victorious powers, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Americans. The settlement is made at Versailles. What has always impressed me and am I wrong about this, but the British, I don't know how to describe it. I might say cynicism, I'm not sure what it is. But Britain promised the Ottoman lands three times over to different groups, to the Arabs, to their French partners in part and to the Jews. And it seems to me therein lies a lot of the mess that we are still in today. More than 100 years afterwards. Well, it's really clear to any student of the history of the Middle East that the First World War is just one of those major turning points, the before and there's the after. And I was so intrigued in writing the Arabs about all of the various threads of the World War I story that in a shameless plug for my own books, I subsequently went on to write a book called The Fall of the Ottomans, which follows the First World War in the Middle East. And it is as much a military history as it is a kind of diplomatic history where I tried to follow the partition diplomacy that you're referring to, the many promises of Ottoman territory to the French, to the Arabs, and to the Zionists. But I try and put it in the context of the war itself. And so what I would come away with, not as an apologist to the British, but just as a pragmatic reader of rail polytique, is that all of the wartime promises were crazy. It was not the kind of promise that the British government would have made under normal peacetime circumstances. Every one of those promises were wild and reckless. They were made by the way, promising things that they don't own or don't control. Yeah, never let that get in the way. Okay. Right. Be driven by your own self-confidence and optimism. And remember, you only had to deliver on these promises in the very happy outcome of winning the war. Exactly. Right? You can see why Britain was being a little reckless in the promises they were making. But the really interesting thing, Jeff, is that the British entered World War I with no territorial ambitions in the Ottoman Empire. And they start their wartime partition diplomacy just before the Gallipoli campaign. When the Russians put their cards on the table, they think that the Ottomans having entered the war are very, very weak and about to fall. And Russia wants to grab the territory. It sees as its essential gains. They want the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. They actually want to annex it. And they want to control the waterways between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. This is the Bosphorus, the Marmero Sea, and the Dardenelles. Not just out of cultural capital like Constantinople, but because this is their vital economic connection to the Mediterranean world. By the way, I had not realized until very recently in another history that I recently read, that the Greeks had their eye on Constantinople also at exactly that moment. Everybody wanted Constantinople back. He did. And again, I don't want to go down rabbit holes here, but there were two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913. And it really inflamed Russia's fears that a victorious Greece or Bulgaria might march on Constantinople and get it before them. So they were very quick to claim Constantinople. And of course, we should remind everybody they know, but it was Istanbul still. And it is still Istanbul today. It was the capital of the Ottoman Empire and the capital of today's Turkish Republic. But the Greeks, by the way, something I also didn't appreciate. If you go to the airport in Athens for your flight to Istanbul, it says Constantinople on the screen. And that is still the Greek name for a city that has been for almost 600 years now, Turkish. Absolutely. But it's funny. In the 19th century, even the Ottomans would refer to their city as Constantinople. Is that right? Yes. And you'll find in Ottoman documents references to the city by many names. But often the language of diplomacy was French. And French written, in fact, Ottoman documents in French consistently refer to it as Constantinople. So I didn't mean to sound like I was giving away the capital. No, I did not know that fact also. So that's absolutely fascinating. But here's the point. You know, at that point, Russia claims Constantinople and the Straits. They also claim some more Caucasian territory in Eastern Anatolia. France says, we'll give you the greatest prize, Constantinople. It returned, we want Syria and we want Selissia. Selissia is not going to be familiar to listeners. It's the territory in South Eastern Turkey around Adina and Tarsus. These are Roman topadames. So it plays a role in the story because they're very vague in our imaginings like what are the limits of Syria? What's the limits of Selissia? And the Brits at this point say, we don't know exactly what we want, but we reserve the right to claim territory of equal strategic value when we sort it out. So we really have a document that makes clear that Britain enters World War I with no territorial ambitions in the Ottoman Empire. And that's going to change the course of the First World War as they get drawn in through Gallipoli, through the Mesopotamia campaign, through the Egyptian campaign. And as they begin to suffer very serious losses and setbacks, this scrambles Britain's traditional policies towards the Middle East. And they begin increasingly to identify territories they want. So they first say that they want Mesopotamia. They're conquering it from the early days of the First World War. At that point, they start making promises to the Sharif's of Mecca. The Sharif's say they want all Arab lands from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. And the Brits knowing they've already promised Syria to the French, say, okay, we'll give you all the things you ask for, but we've got interests in Mesopotamia and France. They don't mention France by name. They say that the territories to the west and the line of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo not being purely Arab, fall outside our promise. So that's how they try and respect their promises to France. But immediately after they've made this promises to the Sharif to get them to launch the Arab revolt and internal war against the Turks, they enter into dialogue with the French to try and get them to put boundaries around the Syria that the British have already agreed France can claim. That's Sykes Pico. And then in a sense, the last piece that falls into place is as the British suffered two attacks on the Suez Canal by the Ottomans and the course of the war, the Ottomans based in Palestine, that's the last watering hole before you hit the bone dry Sinai. And the British realize they can't defend the Suez Canal from attacks in the Sinai because there's no water for the Nabilite troops. If they have a hostile party holding Palestine, then the Suez Canal will always be at risk of somebody rolling artillery within range of the canal and shooting at ships. And the Suez Canal is not only generally important, but is also the gateway to the jewel of the British Empire to India. And beyond. So you must control. And beyond the Southeast Asia. Yes. And to Australia and New Zealand, whose importance in the first war was absolutely central. So that is the vital artery of the Empire and the Dominions. And protecting that suddenly gave Palestine by 1916, 17, an importance it didn't have before. How do you rewrite Sykes Pico? You do it in the interest of a big historic idea, like the restoration of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland. No, it's not out of imperial self-interest. We make a promise to Zionism around the Balfour Declaration to use our best efforts to help realize this goal. So what you see, Jeff, is a kind of an impart or maybe mostly a tactical maneuver to counter the commitments to the French. I mean, it's basically view the wartime partition diplomacy as an evolving project that reflected the deepening British engagement with the Middle East and the course of the First World War, during which they defined territorial interests. They didn't have the start of the war, but they sure had by its end. in that process. The only thing that we can do is to get the right amount of information. willing to promise anything to anyone who might aid help them win the war, top priority, and be assured the position of the British Empire at the successful outcome of that war. Wow. Well, we get out of this a promise to the herbs, which is then essentially contradicted, not fulfilled. We have a Jewish homeland announced in 1917, and I think it's fair to say a hundred seven years of headaches since that time. Yeah. Isn't it right to say that from the first moment of the Valford Declaration, this has been a contentious issue locally. This has never been a settled issue from the minds of the people living in Palestine at the time, and it was never, of course, I think we know the famous Zionist slogan, "A land without a people for a people without a land." This was a land with the people very much, and then a project for a Jewish homeland that had ancient roots, but not a lot of presence at the time. So this was a setup for a hundred years of unresolved crisis, and we're at the height of this right now. It's extraordinary to me how dangerous it is, because of course now the Middle East is a region of nuclear weapons, of course, with the Israel, perhaps nuclear weapons already, or possibly soon with Iran, and a lot of killing and suffering, and we won't go through the whole history of this, but can I ask you a high level question? There have been so many pretty significant attempts to reconcile the Zionist project, which started with the Valford Declaration, from the political point of view it started earlier with the Herzl, of course, but that project and the Arab evolving both already existing and evolving views about nationhood, about rights and so forth. And one can name, and I took some notes, the King Krenna Commission. The King Crane Commission. That's my scrolls. The Peel Commission, the 1939 white paper, the UN Special Commission on Palestine in 1947, which presented a partition plan. This has gone on really for a century without resolution. Why isn't there some way to recognize the complexity and say, but at least we don't kill each other? No, this is the question of our times, Jeff, and it's being asked with more poignancy today than ever. But what Britain said in motion with the Valford Declaration was a competition between what would emerge to be over the course of the next 20 years between 1917 and 1937, rival national movements, Palestinian and Zionist. And the British recognized that in the 1937 Peel Commission. It's the first time they recognized that they weren't dealing with differences between religious communities. They were dealing with national movements. And in a sense, it came down to demography. Who would achieve the majority in the land of Palestine that would allow them to call the shots? The majority population in any stable system will usually dominate. And by the time you got to the white paper of 1939, the best that the British mandate was willing to offer the Zionist movement was another 75,000 immigrants that would take the Jewish population, the Yashuv in Palestine, up to 35%. And it promised independence to the state of Palestine as a unified state as a unified state 10 years later. So 1949 onto majority rules. 65% Palestinian, 35% Jewish. And for the Yashuv, this meant that Britain was no longer an ally, assisting them achieve their dream, their goal of statehood. They were now an imperial colonial occupier, which is how the Arabs that always seen them. And they began their own revolt towards the end of the Second World War. From that point until today, in a sense, you could say this has been a competition of who would have the demographic might to dominate the land of Israel, the state of Palestine. I think it's right to say that while the Arab and the Palestinian opposition to this partition idea was very strong at the beginning. Why should we have a partition? This is our majority. And then the loss of the war of independence in 1948 and the disaster that befell a lot of the Palestinian people who were chased out of what would become Israel, to so-called Nakba, at least by the mid 1970s. The Palestinians were putting forward practical and pragmatic feelers and approaches. At least let's go back to partition and find a way to do this. And I take those as Bonafide attempts that have now been actually 50 years this year from one that you describe at length when Yasser Erfat and the PLO make the first public statements about the possibilities of two states living side by side in peace. 50 years now. And 50 years and we still can't do this. In fact, it in some ways worse than ever. That was the point I was going to make, because there is so much more detail to this history than we have time to go into in this podcast. And it's worth going into. So maybe on another occasion, I'm going to take you on that. That wonderful offer. But I want to really bring it to where we are today because there is a continuity between this question of who's going to reach the demographic weight to call the shots in the land of Israel, the land of Palestine. And if I go to my good friend Wikipedia and I add up the numbers, it'll tell me that Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of the state of Israel or living in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem and in Gaza Strip are now at about 7.3 million. And the population of Israeli Jews is about 7.2 million. Amazing. So that's Wikipedia. You'd want a better source for demographic arguments. But basically we're at 50. We're at 50. We're at parity. So there are three possible outcomes. You either have extermination. And I don't say that lightly. The conduct of the war in Gaza has raised red flags in many very serious international forums about a genocidal moment. And we'll leave it to the international court of justice to pursue their case. But from my perspective, Benjamin Netanyahu's government is not taking the measures it would need to take to reassure the world that this is not a genocidal conflict. I agree with you. Absolutely. So there's a way to demonstrate that Israel's actions are not and they're not doing it. I'll leave the judgment to others. So extermination is a real threat. It's a real risk. And certainly the health and sanitation conditions in the Gaza Strip let alone the ongoing use of you know, heavy ordinance and warfare puts a very large population in very high risk of a mass casualty event. Or else you have expulsion. And this would be the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. And many have been concerned about policy measures designed to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank and out of the Gaza Strip. I don't think the international community is willing to absorb 7 million Palestinians. It's very clear already Egypt will not take the 2.1 million 2.2 million in the Gaza Strip. The European Union is very down on immigration right now and we know the situation in the United States. It's a hot ticket item in the current election. And the people don't want to be expelled. This is their homeland. Exactly. So you know, people have hung in there through thick and thin and great hardship because they wish to retain their right to be on their own land. So the expulsion option is really not a very easy one to see either. And the third option is cohabitation. And there there seem to be two ideas on the table. There is a unified state of its citizens where everybody holds citizenship of Israel regardless of whether you live in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem. But I don't think that that's going to be acceptable to Israelis least of all after the events of 7 October. And so we come back to the basis on which all previous diplomacy has been based, which is to create two states side by side at peace with each other under guarantees of the international community, in which I don't believe there's any scope for Palestine to surrender anything more. We're dealing with the situation where if you just go by the green line of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, that would lead Palestine, 22% of the land mass of the British Mountedida Palestine and Israel holding 78%. And the green line for everybody is the borders of Israel on the 4th of June 1967. So this is what we're talking about to revert to the state of affairs with the Palestinian state on lands that are now occupied after the 1967 war by Israel. And where the International Court of Justice recently ruled in July of this year that that occupation is illegal. Absolutely. And you know, a growing weight of European powers are joining the majority of Asia, African, Latin America in in recognizing Palestinian statehood. We recently saw Spain, Belgium, Slovenia, and Ireland joined Sweden among European states to recognize Palestinian statehood formally. And there's certainly been talk in the Biden White House that the resolution of the conflict in Gaza should be built around the creation of a Palestinian state. So one can hope that there will be momentum there. But I don't see another way forward. And I think that the state of Palestine, the state of Israel, let's throw in Jordan just because so many Palestinians live there and because it has been an anchor to stability in Palestinian and Israeli relations and peace building for decades now, that we could see the makings of a free flow of people of capital of goods, the better future for the next generation that might just give people a motive to turn the page on the past and look forward to a better future. But it's going to take a lot of will power from the international community to get their Jeff, because we can't leave it to the deeply divided, deeply scarred Palestinians and Israelis after what they've been through since the seventh of October. Eugene, thank you for putting it so clearly and also for that wonderful offer of another hour with you soon. I'm going to take you up on that. We have reached at the end of an hour. We covered 508 years of history from 1516, the Ottoman conquest of Syria, until the present moment, because we've been in the hands of the master historian, a great, great historian of the Middle East, Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Oxford University. Eugene, thank you. Thank you for a fabulous book, The Arabs' History and your book on the end of the Ottoman rule. We will take up in our next conversation as well. That'll be a good starting point for our in-depth dive on the question of solutions for the Middle East. Your voice, your wisdom, your knowledge is so extraordinarily important. Up, Jeff, I've got to answer my wife and so will you. Absolutely true. Tell her what I said. So thank you so much for being with me on book club with Jeffrey Sachs. Thanks to all of the listeners all over the world for joining today's wonderful discussion. Thank you so much, Jeff. [music] Thank you for joining in the conversation. 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