TURKEY survived the crisis of defeat and thereby its future because it was fortunate to find a leader like Kemal Atatürk, a General whose genius lay in nationalism. He fought to protect Turkey’s integrity rather than a flatulent empire. Britain and France were defeated when they tried to dismember Turkey through an invasion by their proxy, Greece. The Arab regions had monarchs whose interests did not always coincide with the demands of a new era of history.
The foundation of Israel was laid in Ukraine’s Kharkiv; Ukraine is clearly a country where history and geography often get together. On January 25, 1882, 25 Russian Jewish students launched a campaign for the formation of a homeland to be called Israel; on July 6 that year, 14 of the founding members went to Jaffa; and on July 31, 10 volunteers established Rishon LeZion, to initiate the Jewish emigration to the dream state, known as Aliyah, meaning ascent in both Hebrew and Arabic.
It was an active year. On December 12, the first Jewish settlement was set up in Galilee. These territories were part of the Ottoman Caliphate, which, unlike Europeans who condemned Jews to ghettos, was comparatively benign.
Zionist convention
Within two years, in 1884, the first international Zionist convention gave a further fillip to the dream. On March 5, 1891, a petition was sent to American President Benjamin Harrison asking for help to establish a Jewish state around Jerusalem. In another six years, on August 27, 1897, the World Zionist Organisation was established in Basel by Theodore Herzl, who made his only visit to the holy land in October 1898, reaching Jaffa.
Jaffa became the home of the first Jewish labour movement; the first medical centre opened in Jerusalem in 1902; the first Hebrew high school in the world in 1903 in Tel Aviv. The continued persecution of Jews in Europe prompted Herzl to ask for a temporary home in Uganda, an idea that did not travel far. On October 29, 1907, Bar-Giora, for the defence of the Jewish people, was born.
Jewish organisations supported the Anglo-French alliance in World War I. On November 2, 1917 they were rewarded with the Balfour Declaration. By 1922 America and the League of Nations had added their voices to the Promised Land. Israel became a fact after World War II; and a recognised fact on November 29, 1947 when the United Nations accepted its existence.
Volatile environment
That made Israel a permanent fact. But no commitment could guarantee security in a volatile environment where one man’s safety was another man’s threat. Continual war, from setpiece action by recognised armies to evolving forms of violence, drains life out of the region.
In 1917 Tsarist Russia became the Soviet Union. Lenin and Stalin promised liberation from hunger through the untested doctrines of Karl Marx and sent armies to colonise Asians and Caucasians, and later East Europeans, in what became a massive empire from Berlin to Vladivostok. In 1945 America accepted the Russian empire as a fact of life at the famous conference in the Crimean city of Yalta. But military parades could not sustain an empire seething with lava beyond six decades. The brittle communist edifice crumbled in the 1980s; the Western alliance spearheaded by NATO advanced through East Europe in the 1990s.
The rise of Putin
It was not until the rise of Vladimir Putin in 2000 that Russia managed to restore a degree of stability in Chechnya by handing over local power to the enemy. In the confrontation with NATO, he decided to draw the line at Ukraine, a buffer state. America and its allies did absolutely nothing in 2014 when Putin took Crimea. He may have assumed that they would do nothing much again when he advanced into Russian-speaking parts of the country in 2022. If he did make such an assumption, he was wrong.
About a year after Putin consolidated his place in Moscow, history returned to breathtaking gymnastics. Al Qaeda’s carefully crafted terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 shifted America’s priorities. The pressure was off Putin. George W Bush marched into Afghanistan, to universal acclamation. He then invaded Iraq, to universal puzzlement. America’s zone of influence in West Asia became a zone of turbulence.
