The Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (with James Barr)

Feb 24 2025

Until the end of WWI, the Middle East as we know it didn't exist. No Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, or Iraq. Instead, there was the Ottoman Empire, whose dissolution using an arbitrary line on a map set the region on a course of upheaval that's still with us. Listen as historian James Barr speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, and how, in the century that followed, the machinations of the French, the British, and the local residents created the modern Middle East and affected the lives of millions.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: February 11, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is February 11th, 2025, and my guest is historian and author James Barr. I reached out to him after recent events in Syria--the fall of Assad--and I realized I had no idea how Syria became Syria, along with some other things I didn't know about the Middle East, of course. It's a long list. But, after a little research, I discovered a book, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France, and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East, by our guest, James Barr. The book explores how the French-British rivalry shaped the outcome of the area and the region in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which eventually gave the world the nations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Israel. And, that's our conversation for today. James, welcome to EconTalk. James Barr: Thank you for having me, Russ.
1:30	Russ Roberts: So, I want to go back in time. We've been talking a little bit about the Middle East now and then in the last 16 months, since October 7th. But, we're going to take a larger panoramic view today. And, we're going to go back to the Ottoman Empire, which many of you listening will have heard of. But, it ends at the end of World War I. The Ottomans ally themselves with Germany and lose. And so, the run-up to that, with the understanding that that might happen, many countries were thinking about, 'Well, what's going to happen to the Ottoman Empire?' And so, I thought we'd start with an obscure moment in history, but it turns out to have some significance, which is the Sykes-Picot, P-I-C-O-T, the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It's got a hyphen in the middle, or a dash. James, being British, will probably know which one it is. But, it's the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which started the West's ongoing involvement in a major way in the Middle East. And, by Middle East we mean much more than Israel, where focus is today, but on a much broader range of the region. So, start us off there if you could. Ottoman Empire in 1913, just prior to WWI. Source: Wikipedia. James Barr: So, I think before we get to Sykes-Picot, you were just saying Russ about the Ottoman Empire. And, the Ottomans ruled--at the beginning of the First World War, they still ruled the central Middle East. So, by that I'm thinking of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and going down the sort of edges of the Arabian Peninsula. So, that's--from their capital in Istanbul, they controlled the whole region of what was a part of the Arab world. They joined the Germans, as you said, in the First World War. And, the Germans convinced the Ottoman Sultan to declare a Holy War against, well, Britain and France, but really this was angled at the British. Because the British had significant Muslim populations in Egypt, which they had run since 1882, which they seized in 1882; and also in India. And, India was a really big part of this story, even though it's off the map, because India was pretty much the most important British colony at that time. Russ Roberts: I should just mention, I don't think I did, I apologize: The Ottoman Empire is Turkey. So, it's run by the Turks. James Barr: It is run by the Turks, but it's a multi-ethnic Empire, and it still is. Although it has become a lot more Turkish in the run-up to the First World War, and there's the sort of--yeah, there's a kind of Turkish ideology now. Which makes some of the Arab subjects of that Empire feel increasingly like second-class citizens. And, I guess we'll probably come back to that in a minute. But so, the key thing is the First World War starts. Famously, it was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914, and of course it wasn't. The whole war became bogged down on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts. And, in Britain, people started to think, 'Well, how do we win this war?' And, there was a group of people who were known as the Easterners who believed that one option was to attack the Ottoman Empire, because the prevailing view by the beginning of the 20th century was that the Ottomans were the 'Sick man of Europe.' They'd already lost a chunk--they used to have an empire that extended well into the Balkans in Eastern Europe, but they gradually lost those possessions over the previous quarter of a century or so. And so, the British view, or the view amongst this faction inside the British government, was that the Ottomans would be easy to knock out of the war. So, the idea they came up with was to attack Gallipoli, which is on the Dardanelles Peninsula. So, that's the very narrow straits south of Constantinople, leading from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara towards the Black Sea. And, that's about 150 miles from Constantinople, or Istanbul as I should call it. So, the idea was: Grab the Ottomans by the throat, defeat them, and then march into Istanbul, and then that would be the Ottomans out of the war. And, that would enable the British and the Allies to open up a new front in Southern Europe and force the Germans to disperse their efforts. So, that was the aim of the thing. But as you said, of course what that did--rather prematurely--was encourage a discussion about what would happen to the Ottoman Empire once this had happened. And, bearing in mind this was assumed that it wasn't going to be too difficult to achieve. The British, in true British form, formed a committee which set out to try and investigate options: What could happen to the Ottoman Empire? And, there was a man called Mark Sykes on this committee, and he was in his mid-30s. He had been elected a Member of Parliament for the east coast port of Hull in 1911, but he'd made his name already as an expert on the Ottoman Empire. So, he'd written about it. He'd worked for the British Ambassador in the British Embassy in Istanbul before the war. And, he'd written a couple of big, thick books on the subject and traveled pretty widely. And, he was a member of the landed gentry. His father was Sir Tatton Sykes. He was a devotee famously of church architecture, milk pudding, and keeping his body at a constant temperature. And, Mark Sykes was his only son--the only son of this slightly eccentric character. And Sykes, really by force of personality--he was a twinkly man--he was quite convincing, and he took on a lot of the work of the committee because he essentially had time on his hands. And, it was he who eventually became the British negotiator of what became the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The reason the Agreement comes about is that the French find out about what the British are thinking of. They also find out that Britain had, during this time, had made a promise to the Arabs as well. Because of the jihad that I mentioned, the British were very worried about the possibility of a Holy War. And, the way that they decided they would blunt that was by encouraging the ruler of Mecca--the axis point of the Islamic world--to rise up against the Ottomans. So, the Ottomans controlled Mecca--in theory, but not really. They didn't really have a particularly tight hold on it. And, they persuaded Sharif Hussein--who, he himself claimed he was a descendant of Muhammad--they persuaded him to rise up in 1916. But, to do that, they made him this big--rather vague--but they made him quite a big promise. Well, the French found out about that promise through rather nefarious ways. And, once they discovered that, they then forced the question of what would happen to the Ottoman Empire, because they were worried about their own interests. And, we should talk a bit about those interests. Because, the French had gradually--they had influence in the Ottoman Empire going way, way back, going right back to sort of the 1500s where the Ottoman Sultan at the time had acknowledged that they were the representatives of Christians living in what we think of as the Holy Land--or what Christians think of as the Holy Land--in Israel, Palestine now. And, the French had quite significant cultural influence in what we now think of as Lebanon and Syria, mainly through monastic organizations and institutions, which provided education. And, a French education--if you could be taught by the monks of one of these monasteries--if you were an Ottoman at that time, that was pretty good. That was better than an Ottoman state education. And so, if you were an aspiring Ottoman, sort of a middle class Ottoman with aspirations, then you would send your children off to a French school where they learn French and they would be taught in the French way. So, the French had this sort of influence through that, primarily in what we now think of as Lebanon and Syria, and they wanted the British to acknowledge that position that they had.
10:36	Russ Roberts: Just to clarify: a reminder to listeners that at this point France and England are allies. They have these competing interests in the Middle East, which we're going to explore today, but they're desperately engaged in a war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. They have Russia as an ally as well--that they're going to lose in 1917 with the Communist Revolution. But, these are two allies who were already anticipating that there's going to be a carcass to carve up at the end of this horrible war, World War I. And, the other thing I want to mention--Turkey was called the Sick Man of Europe--but, the Ottoman Empire at this point is 400 or 500 years old. So, the region of the world that we're talking about that is very familiar to us today as the Middle East--and again to focus on the four main countries that are going to get discussed, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and a little Saudi Arabia as well, I guess along the way--they don't exist. They are just--they are areas that Turkey is ruling in nominal terms, but with, as you point out, not total efficacy because it's a large place and it's hard to extend your police or military ability across such a large area. And, everybody is jockeying for influence in this area after the War. Which would include the Arab nationalists--which we're going to talk about, which I think is your next group--the Jews of what at the time is called Palestine, or an area called Palestine--but the Holy Land is as good a name as any, as you suggest. But Jews around the world also care about it. And, you also have the people living--the Arabs living in these areas who don't exactly feel attached to the Turks, to the Ottomans. So, that's the backdrop for this jockeying. James Barr: Exactly. And, the Sykes-Picot Agreement cuts a line across all this. So, the French come in and François Georges-Picot is their man. And he comes from a family of French imperialists. He hears about what the British are up to and he doesn't like the sound of it. And, he gets himself appointed the French negotiator. And he comes to London in the autumn of 1915 and starts banging his fist on the desk, essentially, and saying that the French won't accept whatever the British are up to. The alliance is at stake, effectively. He manages to dramatize that extremely effectively. And, the British are worried about the strength of the alliance, Russ, because although as you say, they're allies, they're relatively recent allies. I mean, a little bit south of where I live in London there is a fort on the North Downs, which is the main ring--line--of hills south of London, built in the 1890s in case there was a French invasion. So, we're not that far on from that, about 20 years after that fortress was built to resist the French in case they invaded. So, there's quite significant suspicions lurking below the surface. And, François Georges-Picot plays on this very, very effectively, and the British realize they've got to do a deal. And, Sykes is the man who goes to the top ministers in the British government who've got a whole load of other things to worry about--most importantly the question of conscription. Because the war had been fought by volunteers up to this point, but Britain was running out of men and they knew they were going to have to start calling people up, and that was going to be compulsory. So, they were much more worried about that. This comes as a rather unfortunate interruption, really. I think most British politicians at that time would have struggled to place Syria and Lebanon on a map themselves. And, Sykes says, 'I would like to draw a line from the E of Acre to the last K in Kirkuk.' And, he has a map. It's a square map, which he had helped draw back before the war. And so, he proposes dividing the Middle East along this diagonal line, and the French were going to get most of the area to the north of it--either directly, they were going to control it, or they were going to have some influence over it. And the British were going to get the territory to the south. And, underlying that is this sort of British strategic concept that they want what they call a belt of English-controlled country running across the Middle East from the Mediterranean Sea--the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea--right through to the border with what is now Iran, was then known as Persia. And, the aim of that was to keep all comers--keep the French, keep the Russians, or whoever, the Germans--away from the approaches to India. That was the crucial thing. So, it was protecting the routes to India. So, this strategic concept dates right, right back. It motivates what the British are doing through much of the 19th century with Russia.
16:07	Russ Roberts: And it includes, as you point out in the book, again a footnote of history that now is mostly forgotten but at the time was crucial: the Suez Canal. So, they're running Egypt. They've got the Suez Canal. Right next to the Suez Canal is the Sinai Desert, which is not exactly a buffer zone. It's a physical buffer zone, but there's nobody there to engage with. And then suddenly you're in Palestine and you're in Lebanon. And so, they were very worried, as you point out in the book, that they would have an enemy of some kind on the border of the Suez Canal, which is their lifeblood--and much of the world's lifeblood--connecting India and elsewhere to Europe and the Mediterranean. James Barr: Exactly. The canal, which was opened in 1869, had become really, really important, particularly to the British. It's owned by an Anglo-French consortium. But, yeah, it's absolutely critical to the British. So that's all part of the strategic concept. The thing was, though, with Sykes-Picot, is that the two sides--the two men--could not agree about the future of what they called Palestine at that time. They both wanted it. The British wanted it for this strategic purpose that you've just outlined. And, the French wanted it more for reasons of prestige. It was more about the religious significance of the area that they wanted it, although that also was definitely a factor in British thinking. But, fundamentally, it was a slightly--two slightly different objectives, mentalities at play here. Russ Roberts: But, I derailed you. You were going to talk about Mecca and Sharif Hussein and his interactions with the British and how that continues on into the time we're talking about. James Barr: So, Sharif Hussein does rise up against the Ottomans in 1916. But, the revolt that he calls for is a bit of a disaster because the British hadn't really thought enough about how they were going to support it. And so, within a few months it starts to peter out. And, the man who goes in to try to fix it has become very famous. It's Lawrence of Arabia, as he's now known--Thomas Edward Lawrence. He was then in his 20s. He'd been an archeologist before the war. He'd worked in Syria. And, he had a desk job in Cairo and was fed up with that. He was also probably rather guilty, because two of his brothers had been killed fighting in the war on the Western Front. And there he was, drumming his fingers on a desk, charting Ottoman Army troop movements in the intelligence department in Cairo. So, he was itching to do something, and he basically carved himself a job to go out and look at the situation on the ground and to make recommendations. But really, what he wanted to do is to find himself a proper job. Which he got. And so, he then spent the next two years of the war trying to turn the Arab revolt into something. And he succeeds in that in a huge way, far beyond anyone's expectations. The Arabs captured Aqaba, which is the port at the head of the Red Sea opposite Suez, in July 1917. And then, a year later, they are up in what is now northern Jordan/southern Syria; and they play a role in the final offensive in that part of the First World War, in the Middle East theater, where right at the end of the war, the British, under General Allenby--they've already captured Jerusalem at the end of 1917--and then they advance to Damascus in the final weeks of the First World War. And, Lawrence and the Arabs play a part in that. And the reason that Lawrence is so keen to be involved in that is because this takes the Arabs into the territory that Sykes has conceded to François Georges-Picot. Because the undercurrent of all this is that Lawrence hates Sykes. He thinks he's a total amateur. Yeah--he absolutely loathes him. He's only encountered him, I think, once. But, at that point, Sykes told him about the deal that he had struck. And, Lawrence is vehemently anti-French and thinks that it's a terrible deal on that level. But he's also quite pro-Arab. It is important not to overstate this. Some people tend to because he becomes more pro-Arab as time goes on. Fundamentally, he's a British imperialist; but he was also someone who had worked with the Arabs and certainly was sympathetic to their ambitions. And, I suppose maybe we should get on to the Arab nationalists at this point. Because, since, sort of from the late 19th century onwards, there is a developing nationalist movement--as there is across all kinds of places: across Europe and of course with the Zionists as another nationalist movement. Arab nationalism had been growing in the Ottoman Empire, partly because of this increasing Turkish ideology, held at a sort of government level, but also much, much broader things like just simple literacy and things like that. People were--Arabs were--becoming much, much more aware of their identity and the fact that they had a different identity to their Turkish rulers. And, there were significant groups that were underground, really, inside the Ottoman Empire. So, Arab soldiers, Arab officers within the Ottoman Empire kind of drove this Arab consciousness. And, there were secret societies within the Ottoman Army, not really rooting for independence, but they wanted more autonomy and they wanted better prospects for themselves. This sort of is growing before the First World War, and the Arab Revolt helps to galvanize it. So that by the end of the first World War, there is quite a powerful groundswell in favor of greater Arab autonomy.
22:52	Russ Roberts: And, of course, the British have a little bit of a conflict. They make some promises through various means and various people that they will be supportive of this desire for self-determination on the part of the Arabs in the area. And, in my list of countries, I forgot about Jordan. That's another one that's going to come out of this stew after the Ottomans are defeated and the Turks are defeated at the end of World War I. But, the Brits make promises to the Arabs that they'll be supportive of their desire for self-determination. But, they also make promises to the Jews, which are--in 1917 there's the Balfour Declaration, which is a bit ambiguous, but it suggests support for a Jewish homeland in the area that at the time is known as Palestine. And, that's, of course, something of a zero-sum game for what we call the Holy Land. There are plenty of parts of this region that will get Arab rulers, but this one little part, which is where I live, is contested then and still contested now. But, we'll get to that. But, let's get to the--World War I ends. There's the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles. We're in roughly in 1919. What happens at Versailles? Woodrow Wilson, of course, is going to stick his oar in, and there's a groundswell of international--I would call it anti-imperialism to some extent, but a sympathy for self-determination that Wilson is the champion of. And, how does that play out in this part of the world? James Barr: So, I mean, it's difficult. In a way, it doesn't play out because the British and the French work-- Russ Roberts: Didn't want it to-- James Barr: worked to undermine it. But, you are absolutely right. So, the Americans joined the war in 1917. Am I right? Russ Roberts: I think it's 1918. I'm not sure. Anyway, near the end. James Barr: I thought it was before that. My brain has suddenly gone. But, the Americans joined the war. And, as they do so, Wilson makes this great--he really attacks all the imperial powers and sort of says, 'A plague upon you all.' And, the British and the French feel very, very vulnerable. And, we'll come back to Balfour because the Balfour Declaration rises directly out of this discomfort, if you like, or at least it's an attempt to get 'round it. But, at the end of the war, you have the Peace Conference, Lawrence's sort of wartime comrade, Faisal, who is Sharif Hussein of Mecca's son--if you remember back to Sharif. Sharif Hussein starts the revolt. Faisal is his son. Lawrence identifies Faisal as the friendliest of Hussein's sons, the man who is most likely to frankly do what he wants. And, Faisal brings a delegation to Paris, and Lawrence acts as the delegation's interpreter. And, there's always a bit of a suspicion about how much he is translating and how much he was just ad-libbing. Russ Roberts: Yeah. James Barr: And, Lawrence himself, therefore he attracts quite a lot of suspicion from the French. Because, the French don't like--they don't like the Arabs. The French believe that Sykes-Picot has to stand. After all, the British have made this promise; they've agreed that they'll divide the land. And, this area of what we would now call Syria and Lebanon, the French believe that's theirs by right. And, the British, meanwhile, have had sort of second thoughts. So, the British, having been pretty pro-Arab, or at least certainly willing to entertain Arab aspirations, then start thinking about oil. And, oil has not really been a big factor in--certainly not in the Sykes-Picot agreement and not really in strategic thinking during the war so far, I would say. But, by the end of the war, two things are clear. Firstly, there's Woodrow Wilson being anti-imperialist. There's the fact that actually the Americans have supplied most of the oil that won the war. The oil has not come from the Middle East at that time. In fact, very famously, back in the 1870s, the oil that actually lit the lamps in, I think, the Prophet's tomb in Medina came from Pennsylvania, which I always think is a nice fact. It gives you an idea of how things have changed. But, yeah: so the oil had come from America. And, the British government was worried about the Americans' attitude towards Britain as an imperial power, because Britain had no plans to give up on its empire quite yet. And so, those things come into play. And so, Britain wants to take a much more direct control of Iraq. British troops had invaded Iraq during--at the very beginning of the First World War. And, right at the end of the war, having realized--they knew there was oil in northern Iraq, but having realized right at the end of the war that that might be oil that Britain wanted to control after the war, they advanced and took over what is now northern Iraq, the area around Mosul--a city that we've heard about a lot in recent years. British troops arrive in Mosul actually after the armistice has been declared. So, it's kind of sort of after the whistle has gone there are still British troops advancing. And they take that over. And, the British, in order to get the French to recognize this fait accompli, the British realized they're going to have to honor Sykes-Picot. And so, instead of Versailles acknowledging the aspirations of lots of different groups, but the Arabs for some of them--Versailles was full of different groups with national aspirations all hoping for some sort of recognition. But, what actually happens is that the British and the French close ranks. And, the British accept that if they're going to get what they want--if they're going to get Palestine and also Iraq and create this sort of chain of states across the Middle East that are under British control--they're going to have to accept French control over Lebanon and Syria as well.
29:23	Russ Roberts: And so, what happens between roughly--so, let me just add a piece of vocabulary here because it's very confusing, I think, to the modern ear. A bunch of what are called mandatory areas are created. Now, 'mandatory' is a word that usually means you have to. But, here it's referring to more like an adjective for a mandate, meaning you have the authority to. So, in this post-World War I era, and we're going to compress this period between, say, early 1920s to the start of the Second World War--in this period, there's all these weird mixes of local control in some places, but not others. And, Britain and France are kind of in charge, but not completely, or not on paper but in fact. So, try to give us the flavor of how, in Lebanon and Syria, how the French are interacting with government there. And then, in Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. And, I threw in that 'mandatory' because it's called Mandatory Palestine or the British Mandate of Palestine. It just means the British were in charge. So how--give us a feel for that crazy mix of what was happening in this two-decade-long roughly period between the First and Second World War. James Barr: It does, and that's a nice summary. The League of Nations were set up--the precursor to the United Nations after the Second World War. And, it was controlled effectively by the French and British, by the victorious Allies, but not the United States, which never got involved. It issued its mandates-- Russ Roberts: Which is ironic because it was Woodrow Wilson's pet idea. But he could not get the Senate--I think it was the Senate--to approve of it. So, that was kind of insane. But, go ahead, sorry. James Barr: Exactly. The United States retreats into isolationism again after the First World War. And that gives the British and the French a fairly free hand. So, they award themselves mandates to govern these new territories. In theory, they're not colonies, but the reality is, is that they're treated very much as an extra bit of empire. That is certainly how they're regarded. They govern in slightly different ways. So in fact, France got the mandate for Syria. At that point Lebanon didn't exist as a country. It, I think, had been an Ottoman province, perhaps. The Ottoman system focused on the cities, so the provinces were based on the key cities in the area. But, it was a patchwork of these smaller provinces. But, the French initially tried to divide and rule. So, they recognized that there was significant opposition to their presence there--so the people, local people, didn't want the French ruling them. And, to try and get 'round that they decided they would try to accentuate local differences in quite a cynical way. And, the way that they did that was to divide what is now Syria and Lebanon up into little substates. So, there was a Druze state. So, the Jabal al-Druze is a plateau right in the south of Syria today, and it's where the 2011 uprising really got started. And, it was hived off as separate. There was a state of Damascus and one of Aleppo. And, the other thing that the French did was to carve off Lebanon altogether, because there was quite a significant Christian population there and the French realized that perhaps if they turned that into effectively a bridgehead there would be--there was more support for French rule amongst Christians in Lebanon because the Christians were worried about being a minority amongst the greater Sunni population. So, that was how the French went about it. The British did a mixture of things. But in Iraq, they tried to impose direct rule. That went pretty badly wrong quite quickly, and they faced an uprising in 1920. And they then had to spend a lot of money and send in a lot of troops to deal with that over the next eight or nine months or so. And, once they had done that and it hadn't worked, they decided they would go for a slightly more hands-off--a bit more hands-off--approach. In that what they did was that they got Faisal--Faisal was the man who had fought alongside Lawrence--and they offered him the throne. They thought they would turn Iraq into a monarchy. And, in August 1921, Faisal is crowned in Baghdad. It is said that the throne is made out of wood that had been--I think it was--beer crates. Someone had fashioned a throne out of the wood from the crates of beer that had arrived for the British officers in. Anyway, he is installed in some ceremony. There isn't an Iraqi national anthem, so the British band simply played God Save the King at that ceremony. And, if you see photographs of this event, you see Faisal is there sitting on his throne and behind him there's a sort of a series of very white, very obviously British officers. And they were the people who were going to provide guidance and essentially steer the king through the next few years. And that--you know, it is not too subtle. But it roughly works. There's quite a lot of friction between Faisal and the British up through to the 1930s. And eventually Iraq does become independent or gets sort of de< facto/em>--or in theory it gets its independence in 1932. But, the British remain this kind of power behind the throne up to that and beyond, in fact right through to the 1950s. In Palestine, they did something different because, again, they faced--Faisal's older brother was proving a bit of a problem, and his name is Abdullah. And, he was far more independent-spirited than Faisal. And, in fact, Lawrence, when he first met him, had really taken against Abdullah. So, he decided that he wasn't the right man back when the Arab revolt happened: he didn't want to be working with him. Faisal was a much more compliant character. But Abdullah was there. And so, what the British did was that, in the same way that the French had carved Syria off from Lebanon, the British split the Mandate of Palestine into Palestine--everything west of the Jordan--and then created Transjordan, so, across the Jordan. And, they gave that initially on a six-month contract to Abdullah. They said, 'You can rule that for six months, and then in six months' time, we'll see how you're doing.' And, of course, actually Abdullah ended up ruling the country until he was assassinated in 1951 and became Britain's main ally in the Middle East eventually. But so, again, they split things off. In Palestine, the British kind of came with great expectations and they thought that they were going to bring peace and harmony. And, if you read the Times newspaper, the day that Allenby walks into Jerusalem, the Times, it sort of promises a great era of peace and goodwill and essentially says that the British will solve any kind of minor difficulties/disagreements between the people living in the territory. And of course, that didn't happen. But, the British did make--they made an effort to try to reconcile the Jewish population and the Arabs. They never succeeded in doing that because the Arabs essentially didn't want Jewish immigration. That was the essential issue. And, they never managed to bring the two sides together. And, the situation there became increasingly difficult as the Jewish population grew at a rate that the British had never really envisaged. Russ Roberts: And this was for a variety of factors--the pogroms and mistreatment of Jews in Russia and elsewhere created a huge demand for emigration from Russia and elsewhere. Much of went originally to the United States. But as the United States got more restrictive on immigration, they went to what was called Palestine at the time--this weird, British, kind of a colony, kind of not. And, you chronicle quite extraordinarily the constant fighting back and forth between the Arabs and the Jews who were both worried about losing sovereignty over this very small piece of land.
39:04	Russ Roberts: Talk a little bit about the Mufti--the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem--because he plays a rather extraordinary role in this. James Barr: Gosh. Yeah. I'm going to have to dig this out of my memory a bit. But, yeah, the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini was one--there were two families, the Nashe Shibis and the Husseinis. They were the two big families in Arab Palestine. And, they were rivals. Eventually, Amin al-Husseini became Mufti in the--I'm just trying to remember exactly it was. The 1930s, I think? Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's in the 1930s. James Barr: I'm a little bit rusty about this. Russ Roberts: Sorry. James Barr: So, he became--and he establishes himself as the sort of figurehead when the Arabs rise up in 1936. So, just to recap just a tiny bit from what you were saying, there were very few Jewish people living in Palestine before the First World War. The people who were there were often working in experimental agriculture. They were sort of farming colonies and that sort of thing. But there were maybe 20,000 Jews living in Palestine. Not many at all. Some people came after the First World War, but they found life incredibly hard because Palestine then was a malarial--it was--there was little soil there. It was a nightmare. You spent most of your time breaking rocks to try and do any farming. And, a lot of people came and then they left again. So, in fact, in some years in the late 1920s, there was actually net Jewish emigration from Palestine, which given what happened in the 1930s is now hard to imagine. But at that time, people came--they had often come from cities in Central or Eastern Europe. They weren't farmers by any stretch of the imagination. And, they came and they just found it too tough. But, the rise of Hitler changed everything in 1933; and people who realized what that meant and had the money to be able to leave, often ended up in Palestine because, as you said, Russ, other places in the world were beginning to tighten up on immigration. They didn't want Jews coming from Central and Eastern Europe--often because they thought they might be Communists. There was that kind of prejudice tied up in it as well. Russ Roberts: Some were. But, yeah. James Barr: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Certainly some of them were. But, they were seen as destabilizing and sort of people who were not hugely welcome. And for anti-Semitic reasons, as well. But so, those people ended up--they ended up coming increasing numbers to Palestine where that created more and more tension with the Arab population. Because they came with some money, they were able to fundraise, particularly in the United States. They bought up land off Arab landlords, many of whom were increasingly in debt. And so, they were able to buy land. And the friction rose until in 1936, finally--and I can't remember the exact incident, but I think it was a hijack of a bus in which some Jews were killed, and then there was a retribution, retaliation, and then the Arab Revolt of the 1930s exploded. And, the Mufti brilliantly exploits-- Russ Roberts: And he's like a--what would you call him? Like the Head of the City Council in Jerusalem, right? He's been empowered by the British to try to keep this balance of power between these two Palestinian Arab, Jewish--excuse me--Arab, Muslim population. These two indigenous families, they're constantly fighting. The British just want quiet. So, every once in a while--they take turns for a while having power, and now it's the Mufti's turn. James Barr: Exactly. And, he's in charge of what I call waq Funds [waqf]. It's sort of Islamic charity funds. So, he had quite a bit of money at his disposal, and he uses that quite cleverly to improve his own position; and really takes ownership of the uprising when it starts. And, the British realize how powerful he is because he's able to actually call off the uprising. So, the British announce that there's going to be a Royal Commission: They will send a panel of distinguished people to Palestine to look at the question and try and work out is there a way of both the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews living together? Can we work this out? And, at that point, the Mufti is able to call off the violence. And, the British realized that actually, although this is very welcome, at the same time, it's actually also quite sinister because it reveals just how much power this man exerts over the country, to an extent they hadn't really appreciated. But, the violence stops and the commissioners arrive and they try to--they go round. And, it was a genuine attempt to try to work out whether there was some sort of solution possible. They write a big old report. The crucial thing is at the back of the report, they had a map. And, the map, if you couldn't wade your way through the report--and most people didn't--you could look at the map at the back and see whether you were--where the place where you lived was destined to be part of the Arab area that they were proposing or the Jewish area. And, of course, that created a whole new world of trouble because lots of people found themselves living in the area they didn't want to be in. And so, the violence restarted again the following year and it got worse and worse. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it was really--I don't know if it's the first. It's an early two-state, quote, "solution" to the Arab-Jewish tension in the Holy Land.
45:17	Russ Roberts: So, at this point, the Arabs are very upset about the increasing numbers of Jews arriving into Palestine, into the British Mandate area. And, the Jews, of course, are really eager to increase that immigration. The rise of Hitler is frightening. They don't know how horrible it's going to be, but it's terrible. And, we're on the eve--we're in the mid- to slightly late-1930s with this Peel Commission Report. Nobody likes it. Everybody is angry. But, ultimately the British decide to be more sympathetic to the Arabs. We're in 1939 now. You say--I'm going to read you a paragraph from the book--you say, Implicit in Britain's decision to back the Arabs was a simple calculation. Whereas--as in the previous World War--the Arabs were dangerously unaligned, Hitler's clear hatred left the Jews without a choice. 'The Jews?' the British ambassador to Egypt asked rhetorically. 'Let us be practical. They are anybody's game these days. But we need not desert them. They have waited 2,000 years for their "home." They can well afford to wait a bit until we are better able to help them get their last pound of flesh... We have not done badly by them so far and they should be made to realise that crying for the moon won't get them anywhere--especially if we are the only friends they have left in the world. So, this is an extraordinary quote for a bunch of reasons. One, this idea of: You've waited 2000 years, what's another century or so, whatever it takes? Two, the idea that it's their last pound of flesh, which is a rather horrifying reference to The Merchant of Venice [Shakespeare] and a long tradition of anti-Semitism in England and elsewhere. But also, the idea that: Well, forget the justice of it. In a real politick world, the Jews can't turn anywhere other than to be friends with the British because Hitler is their enemy. Whereas, the Arabs can go either way. And, the Mufti is--well, we don't need to go into it. But, the Mufti goes to Hitler and they have things in common. And, the British are very eager that Palestine not erupt in violence at this time. So, they become much more sympathetic to the Arabs. And the Jews learn a lesson, as you point out--a tragic lesson perhaps--that the violence in response to the Peel Commission, the Arab Revolt of 1936, got the Brits to be more sympathetic to the Arabs. So, the more violent Zionists in Palestine--the Stern gang and the Irgun and others--decide they, too, can threaten the British and make their life uncomfortable. And we have, on this program, talked about the Algerian-Palestinian interest and affection for the Algerian exit of the French from Algeria, and thinking that maybe that will work here as well in modern times to get the Jews to leave Israel. And, Haviv Rettig Gur has spoken quite eloquently here and elsewhere that that's the wrong analogy: that the French can go home to France. The Jews who live here, who came in 1948, came from a whole--half of them came from Arab countries where they were thrown out. They have no place to go back to. Another huge portion come as the refugees from the Holocaust. They have nowhere to go back to. It's a bad analogy. But at the time, in the late 1930s, the idea that you could get a colonial oppressor to leave by violence was true. And so, both the Arabs and the Jews are killing British officers and civilians, and they're sparring for control even though it's going to take another decade. James Barr: Exactly. What you said there, in that quote, which I'd forgotten--I'd just forgotten quite how jaw-dropping it is--it brings us back perhaps to the Balfour Declaration just briefly. Because I think something I didn't really cover in the book that I think more about now is: the Balfour Declaration obviously it was a careful sort of declaration of support for a Jewish national home with the second part being that it didn't--as long as this didn't prejudice the rights of the other communities already living in that space. But, the thing that I realize now, or the thing that interests me as well now, particularly given the last two or three years, even before Hamas launched its attacks, is that it was also there's anti-Semitism in the Balfour Declaration. Because, one of the things that--the reason it happened when it did was because Britain was very, very worried about raising finance to fight the war. And, because it was in an alliance with France, and particularly with Russia, this was an issue. Because the Russians were notoriously anti-Semitic. I think levels of anti-Semitism now are striking. But, when you look back and you see what people would say a hundred years ago, it's always very striking. But, the Russians were very, very anti-Semitic. And of course, there'd been pogroms and so on. And, that meant that when the Russians came to New York to try to raise money, there were plenty of people there--there were Jewish people working in finance who just weren't inclined to help. And, the British realized this. Behind this, there's this kind of concept of the Jewish people are very, very influential in world finance, frankly. That is lurking underneath the Balfour Declaration. Because, the thought in within the British government as they say, 'Yes, let's make this public declaration,' is, 'We are worried about loyalty of Jewish people around the world. We want to find something that will bring them onto our side. Perhaps if we issue this favorable declaration--in favor of the Jewish national home--that will help us with raising money.' That's the thing that's lurking behind it. But, you see this again and again, as you say, that the British--loads of different British officials obviously treat--as you said there, that was the British Ambassador to Egypt--talk about Jewish people in a pretty appalling way. But, underlying that, though, the strategic calculation actually is an accurate one because the Jewish people who had come to Palestine didn't have a huge amount of choice up to 1942.
52:18	Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, one thing we didn't make clear: We said there was a huge increase, but I'm looking at one website--don't know if it's accurate; obviously these are estimates--they give--it's the Jewish Virtual Library. Take it for what it is. We can look for some more; we'll put some other links up. But, in 1918, there were roughly 60,000, a little higher than you said, Jews in Palestine. They were 10% of the population in 1918. Very much a minority. Even if it's a smaller number, doesn't matter. But, by 1936, it was 384,000. It had basically increased six-fold over this very short period of time, 18 years, because of the situation in Russia, because of the rise of Hitler. And, they are suddenly 28% of the population of Palestine, and that number is going to rise up through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. So, it gives it a little more context in terms of the numbers. It was very alarming to the Arabs here in Palestine. And, the other thing we want to talk about--you can react to that, but the other thing I don't want to miss, and then I want to come to the present. Because eventually what happens is--well, I guess we better do a little bit of 1945 to 1950. But, over this whole time period, what your book chronicles--we can't go into the details because it's too complicated, but it's fascinating; and it's not complicated in the book--is the French are constantly trying to undermine the British in the parts of the Middle East that the British have some authority over. And vice versa: the British are constantly trying to undermine the French. And, it's really, I think, what makes your book, I think, so extraordinary, because I don't think people were even vaguely aware of this competition. James Barr: Exactly. And, it's not always deliberate, but it's just the effect of being neighbors with--both of whom have got interests to protect. So, the French face a revolt in Syria in 1925, and that breaks out and it lasts three years. And, at one point the French really don't control much more than Damascus in Syria. They've still got a handle on Lebanon. But, they suspect that the British are helping the Arabs fight that war. I've never found any evidence for it, but the French were convinced that this was the case. What was happening was--and this goes on, think of this goes on through time--is that the Arab rebels, whatever you want to call them, were hiding out on the British side of the Sykes-Picot line. So, if you imagine that diagonal line running from the Med to the Iranian frontier, that basically is--you see it now in the modern border between Jordan and Syria, and Syria and Iraq, that sort of straight line that there is. And, the Arabs were camping out in British territory. And so, the French approached the British and said, 'Look, will you extradite these people? We know they're there.' And, the British wouldn't do it because the British were just as unpopular as the French. The Arab population of Palestine did not want the British there, and the British knew that they would become even less popular if they handed these people over, and no doubt they would face execution. So, the British weren't going to do that. So, the frontier acts as this--it protects the rebels. And the same thing then happens in the 1930s as well. So, when the British are fighting their Arab revolt in 1930s Palestine, the rebels are all in Damascus, fundraising, buying weapons, you name it, having meetings very, very open. In fact, there's a great chapter in the book about this British Consul called Gilbert Mackereth, who is a very unorthodox character who goes around wearing what he called a bulletproof waistcoat. But, he was spying on what the rebels were doing, desperately trying to get the British Government to take some interest and to take rather direct action against them. But, there's nothing, again, the British can do. The British approach the French and say, 'Can you help us out?' And, the French just shrug and pretty much say, 'Well, do you remember what happened 10 years ago?' And the British say, 'Fair point, we didn't help you, so why would we expect you to help us?' And, this all boils up in the 1940s when the French authorities in Lebanon and Syria backed the Vichy Government in France--partly because they dislike the British; it's partly because the British are local and they don't like them. And, the British then invade-- Russ Roberts: The Vichy Government being the collaborators with the Nazis after the fall of France in 1940? James Barr: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, the British, of course, have found General de Gaulle. They've brought him back to London. And, one of the first successes that de Gaulle has is to take back control of Lebanon and Syria, with British help. The British invade in 1941. But, before they do so they force de Gaulle to issue a promise that he will hold elections and essentially put Lebanon and Syria on the pathway to independence after he's taken back power. Well, of course, once de Gaulle is back in power in Beirut, boy, that's the last thing he wants to do. Because, again, the prevailing French mentality is that empire is no bad thing. And so, he's not just going to start decolonization. But, the British are determined to hold his feet to the fire because they want to distract attention from what's going on in Palestine. And as far as possible, if the French can be the lightning conductor for general Arab anger at foreign rule in the Middle East, then so much the better. So, the British forced de Gaulle: they gradually--he runs out of road eventually. And, eventually in 1943, there are elections in Lebanon and then in Syria, and they result in a victory of Arab nationalist governments. And, effectively both Lebanon and Syria become independent at that point, and they're properly independent from 1946. But, the French don't forget that this has happened, and they are determined to get their revenge. And so, the last part of the book really concerns the story of this, because--and it's the sort of start point in a way. Because when I was rooting around in files belonging to MI5 [Military Intelligence, Section 5], which is the British Internal Security Service--so not the sort of foreign espionage but domestic security. And, they were starting to declassify these 20 years ago, and there were files in there about--the phrase they used was Jewish terrorism. And, one of the things that they had found out was that there was a connection between these Jewish terrorist groups--by which they meant the Stern Gang and Irgun--and the French. And the French were actually helping these groups. Again, they were basically providing them with shelter in Lebanon and Syria where the British couldn't get at them so easily. There was also probably some gun running going on, although that was quite hard to pin down. And, the French helped the Zionist movement. So, initially the more extreme groups; but then as time went on, they transferred their support to the more general Zionist movement. And, that support became very important once the war was over. Because, Jewish people have played a very important part in the French resistance because once it was clear that if you didn't flee into the woods, you would end up being deported to your death in a concentration camp in Germany, of course, Jewish people joined the Resistance in quite significant numbers. And, what that meant was that in France, in 1944 and 1945, there were networks for smuggling--people, arms, you name it. And so, when the war ended, the French helped smuggle weapons to Palestine to help the Zionists. But they also helped smuggle people. So, there were people obviously who survived the Holocaust, who were living in Displaced Persons camps or had never even--had managed to stay underground. And, those people trickled out, often through Southern France or Italy, but often through Southern France. And they got onto ships there, and then they made their way to Palestine--where the British did their absolute utmost to try and stop them from landing. And, Britain found itself essentially just utterly on the wrong side of global opinion at that point. The British had this idea--it wasn't just them, there were other--notably Franklin D. Roosevelt also thought this was possible. They still believed that perhaps people who had survived the Holocaust might go back to where they had come from. I don't know: it's a strange mentality. But, clearly people who had possibly been betrayed by people they'd lived next door to or whatever, the last thing they were going to want to do was go back to those places after the war. They wanted a fresh start in a place where they felt more secure. So, obviously there was a complete mismatch between what the British thought was possible and what actual people who had made it through and survived the Holocaust thought. And, the British found themselves--they're trying to impose these draconian immigration restrictions, which they'd brought in before the war to appease the Arabs. They found themselves obviously trying to enforce those. Most famously in the case of a ship--well-known ship, called the Exodus--which had been bought in the United States, given a makeover. Well, more than a makeover: its engines had all been souped up so that it could do the last few miles to Palestine at great speed. And, it was loaded with pregnant women, young children, the elderly. Because the people who bought ship knew exactly what the trap they were going to set for the British: They wanted the British to intervene to stop the ship, because they knew that once people saw the kind of people who were being taken off it and sent off back on another ship to leave again, that that would win plenty of sympathy. And of course, that's exactly what happened in 1947: The British ran the ship, took it to Haifa, unloaded all the people aboard, and then put them on a ship bound back for Hamburg, of all places, or at least initially they were supposed to go back to France but then they ended up going on to Hamburg. But, some of the people standing on the quay side when this happened had come from a UN [United Nations] Commission. Because by that point in time, the British had turned the whole question of who should run Palestine over to the United Nations. It's important though, not to think the British thought that was the end of the matter. The British still hoped that the UN might say, 'Actually, Britain is the best country to run this space. They know it well,' and so on. This wasn't a surrender at this point. So, the British had turned the question over in February 1947. Summer 1947, the Exodus arrives, and on the quay side--there's a brilliant photograph showing this that you can find, I think, online--you have the ship against the dock. And on the dock, on the quay side, there are some smartly suited men--because they're all men--from the UN Commission and they are watching the refugees aboard the ship being offloaded. And, I think if you were to try and date the moment at which Britain loses the argument to a point, I think I would choose that point in time, because it becomes absolutely obvious to the United Nations that there's no possible way that Britain can claim not just a right, but a duty or a capability of running Palestine by this point. The place is really in uproar and flames and the British are fighting a very well-organized insurgency by that point. And so, the United Nations comes back and they make the partition plan that is then voted on in November 1947. That's the moment when the United Nations--all the countries of the United Nations--recognize that there should be a State of Israel and an Arab State alongside it.
1:06:03	Russ Roberts: And of course, that partition is accepted, reluctantly, by Ben-Gurion and the Israelis--the Jews--but rejected by the Arabs. And, when the British leave, Ben-Gurion declares a State; the Arab neighbors invade. The Arab residents of what is now the new State of Israel, some of them run away, some of them stay, some are killed in fighting. And, the result is something like where we are today in the world, with this part of the world. So, we have: Lebanon gets a country in 1946, Syria, 1946--I think that's right. Israel gets established in 1948. Iraq is what you said, 1930-something. James Barr: 1932 it actually joins the League of Nations itself as an independent country. But, it's by no means independent. I mean, it's still essentially a kind of British Protectorate going right up beyond, after the Second World War. Russ Roberts: And then, Jordan eventually also gets its independence, I think, around the same time. The 1940s, right? James Barr: 1946. Russ Roberts: 1946. So, it's striking for those of us who don't know as much history as we'd like to realize that these countries--and we haven't mentioned Saudi Arabia, which it might be a can of worms we don't open. But, all these countries that are in the news today, all this strange talk of President Trump that the Gazans will be resettled in, say, Jordan--which is by the way, enormously populated by Palestinians already. And, they're not so eager to take them for a variety of reasons, including justice, but also narrow self-interest. The same with the Egyptians. All these countries, with the exception of Egypt--which is also a little older--both their governance and their borders are relatively new and the creation of a strange set of events, which start with--much of it starts with Sykes-Picot. These borders are arbitrary. It's a line on a beautifully--title of your book--a line in the sand. It's not a river or an ocean, or the things that usually establish normal borders between countries that persist for a long time. Yes, nations fight over who has which piece of what near the border in many, many places, but this is--it's such a tumultuous national story, and it's very young. James Barr: Yes, I think. Exactly. I mean, the paradox is that this is an area of the world which has been inhabited for millennia. And, urbanized, I suppose more importantly than inhabited. But, this is absolutely the center of human civilization. And, many of these cities are--I don't know, Aleppo, Jerusalem. Less so: Baghdad is a newcomer, only built in the 8th century AD. But, going way, way back, far longer than most cities in Europe have existed for. And, yet the countries, as you say, are new. And, the border, this main border, the diagonal line which you still see is one that is very permeable. It cuts across open country. And I mean, borders these days are not hugely good at stopping all sorts of things. You know, the politics of one country very quickly affect the politics of the next door country. But, here you see things cross those borders very, very easily. And, that's one reason, I suppose, why the trouble that we saw in Iraq after the Americans invaded in 2003 and the consequent insurgency, that's why that then became an issue in Syria in the following decade, essentially. That the trouble didn't stay on one side of the frontier for very long: it crossed over. And, you see this going right the way back to the moment when the border was first drawn: that whatever happens, one side will very quickly appear or destabilize the politics of the adjacent states on the other sides of those borders.
1:11:06	Russ Roberts: So, before we leave this conversation, do you want to say anything about Syria per se? It kind of took most of us by surprise. Here's a dictator, seems to have authority. He's willing to do horrible things to his own people and especially to people who are a little different from his own people. And, one night he's gone. And of course, we haven't talked about Iran. Iran appears to be somewhat unstable. It is also a complicated story of Western dominance and indigenous regaining of control. But, it's not a control that's democratic. It's not a leadership that's beloved by its people. It's the opposite. It's an extraordinary time. And, even weirdly, of all things, when you read a book like this, you have to think: there's no way this is going to end with the establishment of a state in Israel. But, it does. And, we are perhaps the most stable place in the region. It's not saying much: it's a low bar. But, what a strange time. James Barr: It is. I mean, I've been to Syria twice. And the last time was 2009, so before the war broke out. And, I have to say, one of the things I noticed is that you don't--I had no inkling two years before the uprising broke out about what was going to happen. There weren't great signs of it. There were things that I look back at now and think, 'Oh.' There was a real difference between people living in Damascus who clearly were close to the regime and had got very rich. And then, I was down in the south; I had to get a puncture fixed. I was driving myself around-- Russ Roberts: That's a flat tire, for American listeners. James Barr: Yes, a flat tire. And so, the car stopped. I had a flat tire, and these two lads appeared on the roadside and said, 'We'll fix your tire for you, mister, and it'll be $1.' And, I thought, 'Well, that's great.' Exactly. And, they did a great job. I drove probably the best part of a thousand miles on that tire after that. So, whatever they did, I think they just sort of bodged it, but for a dollar. And, they were desperate for work. And of course, Daraa [also spelled Dar'a], which is where I had my flat tire, was the epicenter of the revolt. It was there that people first wrote up that graffiti--what did they say?--'You're next, doctor,' or, 'Your turn, doctor,' referring to Assad. Because of course, he had trained as an ophthalmologist here in London and had never expected to be the ruler of Syria. That was supposed to be his elder brother until his elder brother killed himself in a car accident. So, yeah, it's hard to say. And then, the time before that--it was 2002--Bashar Assad, at that point, was the golden boy. He'd only just taken over and people had great expectations of him. It was a period of huge optimism about the possibilities and the sense that here was someone who was Western educated and might see things a bit differently. And of course, he turned out to be worse than his father. So, it's a strange thing. Map of Syria, showing the proximity of Homs [Hims] to the Mediterranean and at the crossroads from the north to Damascus. Also showing Dar'a in the south. Source: Wikimedia. But, I suppose I'm now writing a book about the sort of very long, 'Why do people fight over the Middle East?'--going right, right back in time. And, when I saw that HTS [Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham]--the group that have now taken over Syria--when I saw they'd reached Homs [also spelled Hims], which is sort of the central town in Syria, really, the next major town north of Damascus, city north of Damascus--once I saw they'd got there, I realized that the game was up. Because, if you look right, right back in history, going back thousands of years, Homs is really--it is the crucial point. And it's the crucial point because just to the west of Homs, you have a gap in the hills that run all the way down the east coast of the Mediterranean. So, it's the easiest access point to the sea. And so, for thousands of years, armies have been going through there. It's the way that you get from the sea, inland. The Crusaders built an enormous and very famous castle called Krak des Chevaliers, which is just west of Homs, to watch that valley. And so, when HTS had got there, then I thought, 'It's not going to get to Damascus. Damascus will fall before they get there,' because they have won once they've controlled that point. And, that explains why-- I mean, Homs was fought over for a year or so, very, very savagely in 2012, 2013, because it was so strategically important. So, yeah, it was the key to the place. But, I wouldn't say I could see things coming before that. All you can sort of see is that it turned out that a dictatorship was a bit like a rotten log: When you go out for a walk and you see what looks like a tree stump and you stand on it and the whole thing collapses under your weight because it was already completely rotten. And yet it looked like a solid functioning thing, and it appeared to have still got some sort of structure. But, in fact, the reality was it had been completely hollowed out by corruption and competing interests within regime. And, in the end, I think, the unwillingness of the Iranians or the Russians to invest any more money in keeping Assad in power. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been James Barr. His book is A Line in the Sand. It's a wonderful place to start if you want to get a handle on how we got here. Crazy times. I can't decide whether the more things change, the more they stay the same, or who knows what's going to happen next. But, James, thank you for part of EconTalk. James Barr: Thanks for having me, Russ.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: February 11, 2025.]

Russ Roberts: Today is February 11th, 2025, and my guest is historian and author James Barr. I reached out to him after recent events in Syria--the fall of Assad--and I realized I had no idea how Syria became Syria, along with some other things I didn't know about the Middle East, of course. It's a long list.

But, after a little research, I discovered a book, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France, and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East, by our guest, James Barr. The book explores how the French-British rivalry shaped the outcome of the area and the region in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which eventually gave the world the nations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Israel. And, that's our conversation for today.

James, welcome to EconTalk.

James Barr: Thank you for having me, Russ.

1:30

Russ Roberts: So, I want to go back in time. We've been talking a little bit about the Middle East now and then in the last 16 months, since October 7th. But, we're going to take a larger panoramic view today. And, we're going to go back to the Ottoman Empire, which many of you listening will have heard of. But, it ends at the end of World War I. The Ottomans ally themselves with Germany and lose. And so, the run-up to that, with the understanding that that might happen, many countries were thinking about, 'Well, what's going to happen to the Ottoman Empire?'

And so, I thought we'd start with an obscure moment in history, but it turns out to have some significance, which is the Sykes-Picot, P-I-C-O-T, the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It's got a hyphen in the middle, or a dash. James, being British, will probably know which one it is. But, it's the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which started the West's ongoing involvement in a major way in the Middle East. And, by Middle East we mean much more than Israel, where focus is today, but on a much broader range of the region. So, start us off there if you could.

*Ottoman Empire in 1913, just prior to WWI. Source: Wikipedia.*

James Barr: So, I think before we get to Sykes-Picot, you were just saying Russ about the Ottoman Empire. And, the Ottomans ruled--at the beginning of the First World War, they still ruled the central Middle East. So, by that I'm thinking of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and going down the sort of edges of the Arabian Peninsula. So, that's--from their capital in Istanbul, they controlled the whole region of what was a part of the Arab world.

They joined the Germans, as you said, in the First World War. And, the Germans convinced the Ottoman Sultan to declare a Holy War against, well, Britain and France, but really this was angled at the British. Because the British had significant Muslim populations in Egypt, which they had run since 1882, which they seized in 1882; and also in India. And, India was a really big part of this story, even though it's off the map, because India was pretty much the most important British colony at that time.

Russ Roberts: I should just mention, I don't think I did, I apologize: The Ottoman Empire is Turkey. So, it's run by the Turks.

James Barr: It is run by the Turks, but it's a multi-ethnic Empire, and it still is. Although it has become a lot more Turkish in the run-up to the First World War, and there's the sort of--yeah, there's a kind of Turkish ideology now. Which makes some of the Arab subjects of that Empire feel increasingly like second-class citizens. And, I guess we'll probably come back to that in a minute.

But so, the key thing is the First World War starts. Famously, it was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914, and of course it wasn't. The whole war became bogged down on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts.

And, in Britain, people started to think, 'Well, how do we win this war?' And, there was a group of people who were known as the Easterners who believed that one option was to attack the Ottoman Empire, because the prevailing view by the beginning of the 20th century was that the Ottomans were the 'Sick man of Europe.' They'd already lost a chunk--they used to have an empire that extended well into the Balkans in Eastern Europe, but they gradually lost those possessions over the previous quarter of a century or so. And so, the British view, or the view amongst this faction inside the British government, was that the Ottomans would be easy to knock out of the war.

So, the idea they came up with was to attack Gallipoli, which is on the Dardanelles Peninsula. So, that's the very narrow straits south of Constantinople, leading from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara towards the Black Sea. And, that's about 150 miles from Constantinople, or Istanbul as I should call it.

So, the idea was: Grab the Ottomans by the throat, defeat them, and then march into Istanbul, and then that would be the Ottomans out of the war. And, that would enable the British and the Allies to open up a new front in Southern Europe and force the Germans to disperse their efforts. So, that was the aim of the thing.

But as you said, of course what that did--rather prematurely--was encourage a discussion about what would happen to the Ottoman Empire once this had happened. And, bearing in mind this was assumed that it wasn't going to be too difficult to achieve.

The British, in true British form, formed a committee which set out to try and investigate options: What could happen to the Ottoman Empire? And, there was a man called Mark Sykes on this committee, and he was in his mid-30s. He had been elected a Member of Parliament for the east coast port of Hull in 1911, but he'd made his name already as an expert on the Ottoman Empire. So, he'd written about it. He'd worked for the British Ambassador in the British Embassy in Istanbul before the war. And, he'd written a couple of big, thick books on the subject and traveled pretty widely. And, he was a member of the landed gentry. His father was Sir Tatton Sykes. He was a devotee famously of church architecture, milk pudding, and keeping his body at a constant temperature. And, Mark Sykes was his only son--the only son of this slightly eccentric character.

And Sykes, really by force of personality--he was a twinkly man--he was quite convincing, and he took on a lot of the work of the committee because he essentially had time on his hands. And, it was he who eventually became the British negotiator of what became the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

The reason the Agreement comes about is that the French find out about what the British are thinking of. They also find out that Britain had, during this time, had made a promise to the Arabs as well. Because of the jihad that I mentioned, the British were very worried about the possibility of a Holy War. And, the way that they decided they would blunt that was by encouraging the ruler of Mecca--the axis point of the Islamic world--to rise up against the Ottomans.

So, the Ottomans controlled Mecca--in theory, but not really. They didn't really have a particularly tight hold on it. And, they persuaded Sharif Hussein--who, he himself claimed he was a descendant of Muhammad--they persuaded him to rise up in 1916. But, to do that, they made him this big--rather vague--but they made him quite a big promise.

Well, the French found out about that promise through rather nefarious ways. And, once they discovered that, they then forced the question of what would happen to the Ottoman Empire, because they were worried about their own interests.

And, we should talk a bit about those interests. Because, the French had gradually--they had influence in the Ottoman Empire going way, way back, going right back to sort of the 1500s where the Ottoman Sultan at the time had acknowledged that they were the representatives of Christians living in what we think of as the Holy Land--or what Christians think of as the Holy Land--in Israel, Palestine now. And, the French had quite significant cultural influence in what we now think of as Lebanon and Syria, mainly through monastic organizations and institutions, which provided education.

And, a French education--if you could be taught by the monks of one of these monasteries--if you were an Ottoman at that time, that was pretty good. That was better than an Ottoman state education. And so, if you were an aspiring Ottoman, sort of a middle class Ottoman with aspirations, then you would send your children off to a French school where they learn French and they would be taught in the French way. So, the French had this sort of influence through that, primarily in what we now think of as Lebanon and Syria, and they wanted the British to acknowledge that position that they had.

10:36

Russ Roberts: Just to clarify: a reminder to listeners that at this point France and England are allies. They have these competing interests in the Middle East, which we're going to explore today, but they're desperately engaged in a war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. They have Russia as an ally as well--that they're going to lose in 1917 with the Communist Revolution. But, these are two allies who were already anticipating that there's going to be a carcass to carve up at the end of this horrible war, World War I.

And, the other thing I want to mention--Turkey was called the Sick Man of Europe--but, the Ottoman Empire at this point is 400 or 500 years old. So, the region of the world that we're talking about that is very familiar to us today as the Middle East--and again to focus on the four main countries that are going to get discussed, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and a little Saudi Arabia as well, I guess along the way--they don't exist. They are just--they are areas that Turkey is ruling in nominal terms, but with, as you point out, not total efficacy because it's a large place and it's hard to extend your police or military ability across such a large area.

And, everybody is jockeying for influence in this area after the War. Which would include the Arab nationalists--which we're going to talk about, which I think is your next group--the Jews of what at the time is called Palestine, or an area called Palestine--but the Holy Land is as good a name as any, as you suggest. But Jews around the world also care about it.

And, you also have the people living--the Arabs living in these areas who don't exactly feel attached to the Turks, to the Ottomans. So, that's the backdrop for this jockeying.

James Barr: Exactly. And, the Sykes-Picot Agreement cuts a line across all this. So, the French come in and François Georges-Picot is their man. And he comes from a family of French imperialists. He hears about what the British are up to and he doesn't like the sound of it. And, he gets himself appointed the French negotiator. And he comes to London in the autumn of 1915 and starts banging his fist on the desk, essentially, and saying that the French won't accept whatever the British are up to. The alliance is at stake, effectively. He manages to dramatize that extremely effectively.

And, the British are worried about the strength of the alliance, Russ, because although as you say, they're allies, they're relatively recent allies. I mean, a little bit south of where I live in London there is a fort on the North Downs, which is the main ring--line--of hills south of London, built in the 1890s in case there was a French invasion. So, we're not that far on from that, about 20 years after that fortress was built to resist the French in case they invaded. So, there's quite significant suspicions lurking below the surface.

And, François Georges-Picot plays on this very, very effectively, and the British realize they've got to do a deal. And, Sykes is the man who goes to the top ministers in the British government who've got a whole load of other things to worry about--most importantly the question of conscription. Because the war had been fought by volunteers up to this point, but Britain was running out of men and they knew they were going to have to start calling people up, and that was going to be compulsory. So, they were much more worried about that. This comes as a rather unfortunate interruption, really. I think most British politicians at that time would have struggled to place Syria and Lebanon on a map themselves.

And, Sykes says, 'I would like to draw a line from the E of Acre to the last K in Kirkuk.' And, he has a map. It's a square map, which he had helped draw back before the war. And so, he proposes dividing the Middle East along this diagonal line, and the French were going to get most of the area to the north of it--either directly, they were going to control it, or they were going to have some influence over it. And the British were going to get the territory to the south.

And, underlying that is this sort of British strategic concept that they want what they call a belt of English-controlled country running across the Middle East from the Mediterranean Sea--the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea--right through to the border with what is now Iran, was then known as Persia. And, the aim of that was to keep all comers--keep the French, keep the Russians, or whoever, the Germans--away from the approaches to India. That was the crucial thing. So, it was protecting the routes to India.

So, this strategic concept dates right, right back. It motivates what the British are doing through much of the 19th century with Russia.

16:07

Russ Roberts: And it includes, as you point out in the book, again a footnote of history that now is mostly forgotten but at the time was crucial: the Suez Canal. So, they're running Egypt. They've got the Suez Canal. Right next to the Suez Canal is the Sinai Desert, which is not exactly a buffer zone. It's a physical buffer zone, but there's nobody there to engage with. And then suddenly you're in Palestine and you're in Lebanon. And so, they were very worried, as you point out in the book, that they would have an enemy of some kind on the border of the Suez Canal, which is their lifeblood--and much of the world's lifeblood--connecting India and elsewhere to Europe and the Mediterranean.

James Barr: Exactly. The canal, which was opened in 1869, had become really, really important, particularly to the British. It's owned by an Anglo-French consortium. But, yeah, it's absolutely critical to the British. So that's all part of the strategic concept.

The thing was, though, with Sykes-Picot, is that the two sides--the two men--could not agree about the future of what they called Palestine at that time. They both wanted it. The British wanted it for this strategic purpose that you've just outlined. And, the French wanted it more for reasons of prestige. It was more about the religious significance of the area that they wanted it, although that also was definitely a factor in British thinking. But, fundamentally, it was a slightly--two slightly different objectives, mentalities at play here.

Russ Roberts: But, I derailed you. You were going to talk about Mecca and Sharif Hussein and his interactions with the British and how that continues on into the time we're talking about.

James Barr: So, Sharif Hussein does rise up against the Ottomans in 1916. But, the revolt that he calls for is a bit of a disaster because the British hadn't really thought enough about how they were going to support it. And so, within a few months it starts to peter out.

And, the man who goes in to try to fix it has become very famous. It's Lawrence of Arabia, as he's now known--Thomas Edward Lawrence. He was then in his 20s. He'd been an archeologist before the war. He'd worked in Syria. And, he had a desk job in Cairo and was fed up with that. He was also probably rather guilty, because two of his brothers had been killed fighting in the war on the Western Front. And there he was, drumming his fingers on a desk, charting Ottoman Army troop movements in the intelligence department in Cairo. So, he was itching to do something, and he basically carved himself a job to go out and look at the situation on the ground and to make recommendations.

But really, what he wanted to do is to find himself a proper job. Which he got.

And so, he then spent the next two years of the war trying to turn the Arab revolt into something. And he succeeds in that in a huge way, far beyond anyone's expectations. The Arabs captured Aqaba, which is the port at the head of the Red Sea opposite Suez, in July 1917. And then, a year later, they are up in what is now northern Jordan/southern Syria; and they play a role in the final offensive in that part of the First World War, in the Middle East theater, where right at the end of the war, the British, under General Allenby--they've already captured Jerusalem at the end of 1917--and then they advance to Damascus in the final weeks of the First World War. And, Lawrence and the Arabs play a part in that.

And the reason that Lawrence is so keen to be involved in that is because this takes the Arabs into the territory that Sykes has conceded to François Georges-Picot. Because the undercurrent of all this is that Lawrence hates Sykes. He thinks he's a total amateur. Yeah--he absolutely loathes him. He's only encountered him, I think, once. But, at that point, Sykes told him about the deal that he had struck. And, Lawrence is vehemently anti-French and thinks that it's a terrible deal on that level. But he's also quite pro-Arab. It is important not to overstate this. Some people tend to because he becomes more pro-Arab as time goes on. Fundamentally, he's a British imperialist; but he was also someone who had worked with the Arabs and certainly was sympathetic to their ambitions.

And, I suppose maybe we should get on to the Arab nationalists at this point. Because, since, sort of from the late 19th century onwards, there is a developing nationalist movement--as there is across all kinds of places: across Europe and of course with the Zionists as another nationalist movement. Arab nationalism had been growing in the Ottoman Empire, partly because of this increasing Turkish ideology, held at a sort of government level, but also much, much broader things like just simple literacy and things like that.

People were--Arabs were--becoming much, much more aware of their identity and the fact that they had a different identity to their Turkish rulers.

And, there were significant groups that were underground, really, inside the Ottoman Empire. So, Arab soldiers, Arab officers within the Ottoman Empire kind of drove this Arab consciousness. And, there were secret societies within the Ottoman Army, not really rooting for independence, but they wanted more autonomy and they wanted better prospects for themselves. This sort of is growing before the First World War, and the Arab Revolt helps to galvanize it. So that by the end of the first World War, there is quite a powerful groundswell in favor of greater Arab autonomy.

22:52

Russ Roberts: And, of course, the British have a little bit of a conflict. They make some promises through various means and various people that they will be supportive of this desire for self-determination on the part of the Arabs in the area. And, in my list of countries, I forgot about Jordan. That's another one that's going to come out of this stew after the Ottomans are defeated and the Turks are defeated at the end of World War I.

But, the Brits make promises to the Arabs that they'll be supportive of their desire for self-determination. But, they also make promises to the Jews, which are--in 1917 there's the Balfour Declaration, which is a bit ambiguous, but it suggests support for a Jewish homeland in the area that at the time is known as Palestine. And, that's, of course, something of a zero-sum game for what we call the Holy Land. There are plenty of parts of this region that will get Arab rulers, but this one little part, which is where I live, is contested then and still contested now. But, we'll get to that.

But, let's get to the--World War I ends. There's the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles. We're in roughly in 1919. What happens at Versailles? Woodrow Wilson, of course, is going to stick his oar in, and there's a groundswell of international--I would call it anti-imperialism to some extent, but a sympathy for self-determination that Wilson is the champion of. And, how does that play out in this part of the world?

James Barr: So, I mean, it's difficult. In a way, it doesn't play out because the British and the French work--

Russ Roberts: Didn't want it to--

James Barr: worked to undermine it. But, you are absolutely right. So, the Americans joined the war in 1917. Am I right?

Russ Roberts: I think it's 1918. I'm not sure. Anyway, near the end.

James Barr: I thought it was before that. My brain has suddenly gone. But, the Americans joined the war. And, as they do so, Wilson makes this great--he really attacks all the imperial powers and sort of says, 'A plague upon you all.' And, the British and the French feel very, very vulnerable. And, we'll come back to Balfour because the Balfour Declaration rises directly out of this discomfort, if you like, or at least it's an attempt to get 'round it.

But, at the end of the war, you have the Peace Conference, Lawrence's sort of wartime comrade, Faisal, who is Sharif Hussein of Mecca's son--if you remember back to Sharif. Sharif Hussein starts the revolt. Faisal is his son.

Lawrence identifies Faisal as the friendliest of Hussein's sons, the man who is most likely to frankly do what he wants. And, Faisal brings a delegation to Paris, and Lawrence acts as the delegation's interpreter. And, there's always a bit of a suspicion about how much he is translating and how much he was just ad-libbing.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

James Barr: And, Lawrence himself, therefore he attracts quite a lot of suspicion from the French. Because, the French don't like--they don't like the Arabs. The French believe that Sykes-Picot has to stand. After all, the British have made this promise; they've agreed that they'll divide the land. And, this area of what we would now call Syria and Lebanon, the French believe that's theirs by right. And, the British, meanwhile, have had sort of second thoughts. So, the British, having been pretty pro-Arab, or at least certainly willing to entertain Arab aspirations, then start thinking about oil.

And, oil has not really been a big factor in--certainly not in the Sykes-Picot agreement and not really in strategic thinking during the war so far, I would say. But, by the end of the war, two things are clear. Firstly, there's Woodrow Wilson being anti-imperialist. There's the fact that actually the Americans have supplied most of the oil that won the war. The oil has not come from the Middle East at that time. In fact, very famously, back in the 1870s, the oil that actually lit the lamps in, I think, the Prophet's tomb in Medina came from Pennsylvania, which I always think is a nice fact. It gives you an idea of how things have changed.

But, yeah: so the oil had come from America. And, the British government was worried about the Americans' attitude towards Britain as an imperial power, because Britain had no plans to give up on its empire quite yet.

And so, those things come into play. And so, Britain wants to take a much more direct control of Iraq. British troops had invaded Iraq during--at the very beginning of the First World War. And, right at the end of the war, having realized--they knew there was oil in northern Iraq, but having realized right at the end of the war that that might be oil that Britain wanted to control after the war, they advanced and took over what is now northern Iraq, the area around Mosul--a city that we've heard about a lot in recent years. British troops arrive in Mosul actually after the armistice has been declared. So, it's kind of sort of after the whistle has gone there are still British troops advancing. And they take that over.

And, the British, in order to get the French to recognize this fait accompli, the British realized they're going to have to honor Sykes-Picot. And so, instead of Versailles acknowledging the aspirations of lots of different groups, but the Arabs for some of them--Versailles was full of different groups with national aspirations all hoping for some sort of recognition. But, what actually happens is that the British and the French close ranks. And, the British accept that if they're going to get what they want--if they're going to get Palestine and also Iraq and create this sort of chain of states across the Middle East that are under British control--they're going to have to accept French control over Lebanon and Syria as well.

29:23

Russ Roberts: And so, what happens between roughly--so, let me just add a piece of vocabulary here because it's very confusing, I think, to the modern ear. A bunch of what are called mandatory areas are created. Now, 'mandatory' is a word that usually means you have to. But, here it's referring to more like an adjective for a mandate, meaning you have the authority to. So, in this post-World War I era, and we're going to compress this period between, say, early 1920s to the start of the Second World War--in this period, there's all these weird mixes of local control in some places, but not others. And, Britain and France are kind of in charge, but not completely, or not on paper but in fact.

So, try to give us the flavor of how, in Lebanon and Syria, how the French are interacting with government there. And then, in Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. And, I threw in that 'mandatory' because it's called Mandatory Palestine or the British Mandate of Palestine. It just means the British were in charge.

So how--give us a feel for that crazy mix of what was happening in this two-decade-long roughly period between the First and Second World War.

James Barr: It does, and that's a nice summary. The League of Nations were set up--the precursor to the United Nations after the Second World War. And, it was controlled effectively by the French and British, by the victorious Allies, but not the United States, which never got involved. It issued its mandates--

Russ Roberts: Which is ironic because it was Woodrow Wilson's pet idea. But he could not get the Senate--I think it was the Senate--to approve of it. So, that was kind of insane. But, go ahead, sorry.

James Barr: Exactly. The United States retreats into isolationism again after the First World War. And that gives the British and the French a fairly free hand.

So, they award themselves mandates to govern these new territories. In theory, they're not colonies, but the reality is, is that they're treated very much as an extra bit of empire. That is certainly how they're regarded.

They govern in slightly different ways. So in fact, France got the mandate for Syria. At that point Lebanon didn't exist as a country. It, I think, had been an Ottoman province, perhaps. The Ottoman system focused on the cities, so the provinces were based on the key cities in the area. But, it was a patchwork of these smaller provinces.

But, the French initially tried to divide and rule. So, they recognized that there was significant opposition to their presence there--so the people, local people, didn't want the French ruling them. And, to try and get 'round that they decided they would try to accentuate local differences in quite a cynical way.

And, the way that they did that was to divide what is now Syria and Lebanon up into little substates. So, there was a Druze state. So, the Jabal al-Druze is a plateau right in the south of Syria today, and it's where the 2011 uprising really got started. And, it was hived off as separate. There was a state of Damascus and one of Aleppo. And, the other thing that the French did was to carve off Lebanon altogether, because there was quite a significant Christian population there and the French realized that perhaps if they turned that into effectively a bridgehead there would be--there was more support for French rule amongst Christians in Lebanon because the Christians were worried about being a minority amongst the greater Sunni population. So, that was how the French went about it.

The British did a mixture of things. But in Iraq, they tried to impose direct rule. That went pretty badly wrong quite quickly, and they faced an uprising in 1920. And they then had to spend a lot of money and send in a lot of troops to deal with that over the next eight or nine months or so.

And, once they had done that and it hadn't worked, they decided they would go for a slightly more hands-off--a bit more hands-off--approach. In that what they did was that they got Faisal--Faisal was the man who had fought alongside Lawrence--and they offered him the throne. They thought they would turn Iraq into a monarchy.

And, in August 1921, Faisal is crowned in Baghdad. It is said that the throne is made out of wood that had been--I think it was--beer crates. Someone had fashioned a throne out of the wood from the crates of beer that had arrived for the British officers in. Anyway, he is installed in some ceremony. There isn't an Iraqi national anthem, so the British band simply played God Save the King at that ceremony. And, if you see photographs of this event, you see Faisal is there sitting on his throne and behind him there's a sort of a series of very white, very obviously British officers. And they were the people who were going to provide guidance and essentially steer the king through the next few years.

And that--you know, it is not too subtle. But it roughly works. There's quite a lot of friction between Faisal and the British up through to the 1930s. And eventually Iraq does become independent or gets sort of de< facto/em>--or in theory it gets its independence in 1932. But, the British remain this kind of power behind the throne up to that and beyond, in fact right through to the 1950s.

In Palestine, they did something different because, again, they faced--Faisal's older brother was proving a bit of a problem, and his name is Abdullah. And, he was far more independent-spirited than Faisal.

And, in fact, Lawrence, when he first met him, had really taken against Abdullah. So, he decided that he wasn't the right man back when the Arab revolt happened: he didn't want to be working with him. Faisal was a much more compliant character. But Abdullah was there. And so, what the British did was that, in the same way that the French had carved Syria off from Lebanon, the British split the Mandate of Palestine into Palestine--everything west of the Jordan--and then created Transjordan, so, across the Jordan. And, they gave that initially on a six-month contract to Abdullah. They said, 'You can rule that for six months, and then in six months' time, we'll see how you're doing.'

And, of course, actually Abdullah ended up ruling the country until he was assassinated in 1951 and became Britain's main ally in the Middle East eventually. But so, again, they split things off.

In Palestine, the British kind of came with great expectations and they thought that they were going to bring peace and harmony. And, if you read the Times newspaper, the day that Allenby walks into Jerusalem, the Times, it sort of promises a great era of peace and goodwill and essentially says that the British will solve any kind of minor difficulties/disagreements between the people living in the territory. And of course, that didn't happen.

But, the British did make--they made an effort to try to reconcile the Jewish population and the Arabs. They never succeeded in doing that because the Arabs essentially didn't want Jewish immigration. That was the essential issue. And, they never managed to bring the two sides together. And, the situation there became increasingly difficult as the Jewish population grew at a rate that the British had never really envisaged.

Russ Roberts: And this was for a variety of factors--the pogroms and mistreatment of Jews in Russia and elsewhere created a huge demand for emigration from Russia and elsewhere. Much of went originally to the United States. But as the United States got more restrictive on immigration, they went to what was called Palestine at the time--this weird, British, kind of a colony, kind of not. And, you chronicle quite extraordinarily the constant fighting back and forth between the Arabs and the Jews who were both worried about losing sovereignty over this very small piece of land.

39:04

Russ Roberts: Talk a little bit about the Mufti--the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem--because he plays a rather extraordinary role in this.

James Barr: Gosh. Yeah. I'm going to have to dig this out of my memory a bit. But, yeah, the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini was one--there were two families, the Nashe Shibis and the Husseinis. They were the two big families in Arab Palestine. And, they were rivals. Eventually, Amin al-Husseini became Mufti in the--I'm just trying to remember exactly it was. The 1930s, I think?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's in the 1930s.

James Barr: I'm a little bit rusty about this.

Russ Roberts: Sorry.

James Barr: So, he became--and he establishes himself as the sort of figurehead when the Arabs rise up in 1936.

So, just to recap just a tiny bit from what you were saying, there were very few Jewish people living in Palestine before the First World War. The people who were there were often working in experimental agriculture. They were sort of farming colonies and that sort of thing. But there were maybe 20,000 Jews living in Palestine. Not many at all.

Some people came after the First World War, but they found life incredibly hard because Palestine then was a malarial--it was--there was little soil there. It was a nightmare. You spent most of your time breaking rocks to try and do any farming. And, a lot of people came and then they left again.

So, in fact, in some years in the late 1920s, there was actually net Jewish emigration from Palestine, which given what happened in the 1930s is now hard to imagine. But at that time, people came--they had often come from cities in Central or Eastern Europe. They weren't farmers by any stretch of the imagination. And, they came and they just found it too tough.

But, the rise of Hitler changed everything in 1933; and people who realized what that meant and had the money to be able to leave, often ended up in Palestine because, as you said, Russ, other places in the world were beginning to tighten up on immigration. They didn't want Jews coming from Central and Eastern Europe--often because they thought they might be Communists. There was that kind of prejudice tied up in it as well.

Russ Roberts: Some were. But, yeah.

James Barr: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Certainly some of them were. But, they were seen as destabilizing and sort of people who were not hugely welcome. And for anti-Semitic reasons, as well.

But so, those people ended up--they ended up coming increasing numbers to Palestine where that created more and more tension with the Arab population. Because they came with some money, they were able to fundraise, particularly in the United States. They bought up land off Arab landlords, many of whom were increasingly in debt. And so, they were able to buy land. And the friction rose until in 1936, finally--and I can't remember the exact incident, but I think it was a hijack of a bus in which some Jews were killed, and then there was a retribution, retaliation, and then the Arab Revolt of the 1930s exploded. And, the Mufti brilliantly exploits--

Russ Roberts: And he's like a--what would you call him? Like the Head of the City Council in Jerusalem, right? He's been empowered by the British to try to keep this balance of power between these two Palestinian Arab, Jewish--excuse me--Arab, Muslim population. These two indigenous families, they're constantly fighting. The British just want quiet. So, every once in a while--they take turns for a while having power, and now it's the Mufti's turn.

James Barr: Exactly. And, he's in charge of what I call waq Funds [waqf]. It's sort of Islamic charity funds. So, he had quite a bit of money at his disposal, and he uses that quite cleverly to improve his own position; and really takes ownership of the uprising when it starts. And, the British realize how powerful he is because he's able to actually call off the uprising. So, the British announce that there's going to be a Royal Commission: They will send a panel of distinguished people to Palestine to look at the question and try and work out is there a way of both the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews living together? Can we work this out? And, at that point, the Mufti is able to call off the violence.

And, the British realized that actually, although this is very welcome, at the same time, it's actually also quite sinister because it reveals just how much power this man exerts over the country, to an extent they hadn't really appreciated. But, the violence stops and the commissioners arrive and they try to--they go round. And, it was a genuine attempt to try to work out whether there was some sort of solution possible.

They write a big old report. The crucial thing is at the back of the report, they had a map. And, the map, if you couldn't wade your way through the report--and most people didn't--you could look at the map at the back and see whether you were--where the place where you lived was destined to be part of the Arab area that they were proposing or the Jewish area. And, of course, that created a whole new world of trouble because lots of people found themselves living in the area they didn't want to be in. And so, the violence restarted again the following year and it got worse and worse.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it was really--I don't know if it's the first. It's an early two-state, quote, "solution" to the Arab-Jewish tension in the Holy Land.

45:17

Russ Roberts: So, at this point, the Arabs are very upset about the increasing numbers of Jews arriving into Palestine, into the British Mandate area. And, the Jews, of course, are really eager to increase that immigration. The rise of Hitler is frightening. They don't know how horrible it's going to be, but it's terrible.

And, we're on the eve--we're in the mid- to slightly late-1930s with this Peel Commission Report. Nobody likes it. Everybody is angry. But, ultimately the British decide to be more sympathetic to the Arabs.

We're in 1939 now. You say--I'm going to read you a paragraph from the book--you say,

Implicit in Britain's decision to back the Arabs was a simple calculation. Whereas--as in the previous World War--the Arabs were dangerously unaligned, Hitler's clear hatred left the Jews without a choice. 'The Jews?' the British ambassador to Egypt asked rhetorically. 'Let us be practical. They are anybody's game these days. But we need not desert them. They have waited 2,000 years for their "home." They can well afford to wait a bit until we are better able to help them get their last pound of flesh... We have not done badly by them so far and they should be made to realise that crying for the moon won't get them anywhere--especially if we are the only friends they have left in the world.

So, this is an extraordinary quote for a bunch of reasons. One, this idea of: You've waited 2000 years, what's another century or so, whatever it takes? Two, the idea that it's their last pound of flesh, which is a rather horrifying reference to The Merchant of Venice [Shakespeare] and a long tradition of anti-Semitism in England and elsewhere. But also, the idea that: Well, forget the justice of it. In a real politick world, the Jews can't turn anywhere other than to be friends with the British because Hitler is their enemy. Whereas, the Arabs can go either way. And, the Mufti is--well, we don't need to go into it. But, the Mufti goes to Hitler and they have things in common. And, the British are very eager that Palestine not erupt in violence at this time.

So, they become much more sympathetic to the Arabs. And the Jews learn a lesson, as you point out--a tragic lesson perhaps--that the violence in response to the Peel Commission, the Arab Revolt of 1936, got the Brits to be more sympathetic to the Arabs.

So, the more violent Zionists in Palestine--the Stern gang and the Irgun and others--decide they, too, can threaten the British and make their life uncomfortable. And we have, on this program, talked about the Algerian-Palestinian interest and affection for the Algerian exit of the French from Algeria, and thinking that maybe that will work here as well in modern times to get the Jews to leave Israel.

And, Haviv Rettig Gur has spoken quite eloquently here and elsewhere that that's the wrong analogy: that the French can go home to France. The Jews who live here, who came in 1948, came from a whole--half of them came from Arab countries where they were thrown out. They have no place to go back to. Another huge portion come as the refugees from the Holocaust. They have nowhere to go back to. It's a bad analogy.

But at the time, in the late 1930s, the idea that you could get a colonial oppressor to leave by violence was true. And so, both the Arabs and the Jews are killing British officers and civilians, and they're sparring for control even though it's going to take another decade.

James Barr: Exactly. What you said there, in that quote, which I'd forgotten--I'd just forgotten quite how jaw-dropping it is--it brings us back perhaps to the Balfour Declaration just briefly. Because I think something I didn't really cover in the book that I think more about now is: the Balfour Declaration obviously it was a careful sort of declaration of support for a Jewish national home with the second part being that it didn't--as long as this didn't prejudice the rights of the other communities already living in that space.

But, the thing that I realize now, or the thing that interests me as well now, particularly given the last two or three years, even before Hamas launched its attacks, is that it was also there's anti-Semitism in the Balfour Declaration.

Because, one of the things that--the reason it happened when it did was because Britain was very, very worried about raising finance to fight the war. And, because it was in an alliance with France, and particularly with Russia, this was an issue. Because the Russians were notoriously anti-Semitic. I think levels of anti-Semitism now are striking. But, when you look back and you see what people would say a hundred years ago, it's always very striking. But, the Russians were very, very anti-Semitic. And of course, there'd been pogroms and so on.

And, that meant that when the Russians came to New York to try to raise money, there were plenty of people there--there were Jewish people working in finance who just weren't inclined to help. And, the British realized this. Behind this, there's this kind of concept of the Jewish people are very, very influential in world finance, frankly. That is lurking underneath the Balfour Declaration. Because, the thought in within the British government as they say, 'Yes, let's make this public declaration,' is, 'We are worried about loyalty of Jewish people around the world. We want to find something that will bring them onto our side. Perhaps if we issue this favorable declaration--in favor of the Jewish national home--that will help us with raising money.' That's the thing that's lurking behind it.

But, you see this again and again, as you say, that the British--loads of different British officials obviously treat--as you said there, that was the British Ambassador to Egypt--talk about Jewish people in a pretty appalling way.

But, underlying that, though, the strategic calculation actually is an accurate one because the Jewish people who had come to Palestine didn't have a huge amount of choice up to 1942.

52:18

Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, one thing we didn't make clear: We said there was a huge increase, but I'm looking at one website--don't know if it's accurate; obviously these are estimates--they give--it's the Jewish Virtual Library. Take it for what it is. We can look for some more; we'll put some other links up. But, in 1918, there were roughly 60,000, a little higher than you said, Jews in Palestine. They were 10% of the population in 1918. Very much a minority. Even if it's a smaller number, doesn't matter.

But, by 1936, it was 384,000. It had basically increased six-fold over this very short period of time, 18 years, because of the situation in Russia, because of the rise of Hitler. And, they are suddenly 28% of the population of Palestine, and that number is going to rise up through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. So, it gives it a little more context in terms of the numbers.

It was very alarming to the Arabs here in Palestine. And, the other thing we want to talk about--you can react to that, but the other thing I don't want to miss, and then I want to come to the present. Because eventually what happens is--well, I guess we better do a little bit of 1945 to 1950. But, over this whole time period, what your book chronicles--we can't go into the details because it's too complicated, but it's fascinating; and it's not complicated in the book--is the French are constantly trying to undermine the British in the parts of the Middle East that the British have some authority over. And vice versa: the British are constantly trying to undermine the French. And, it's really, I think, what makes your book, I think, so extraordinary, because I don't think people were even vaguely aware of this competition.

James Barr: Exactly. And, it's not always deliberate, but it's just the effect of being neighbors with--both of whom have got interests to protect.

So, the French face a revolt in Syria in 1925, and that breaks out and it lasts three years. And, at one point the French really don't control much more than Damascus in Syria. They've still got a handle on Lebanon. But, they suspect that the British are helping the Arabs fight that war. I've never found any evidence for it, but the French were convinced that this was the case. What was happening was--and this goes on, think of this goes on through time--is that the Arab rebels, whatever you want to call them, were hiding out on the British side of the Sykes-Picot line.

So, if you imagine that diagonal line running from the Med to the Iranian frontier, that basically is--you see it now in the modern border between Jordan and Syria, and Syria and Iraq, that sort of straight line that there is. And, the Arabs were camping out in British territory.

And so, the French approached the British and said, 'Look, will you extradite these people? We know they're there.' And, the British wouldn't do it because the British were just as unpopular as the French. The Arab population of Palestine did not want the British there, and the British knew that they would become even less popular if they handed these people over, and no doubt they would face execution.

So, the British weren't going to do that. So, the frontier acts as this--it protects the rebels.

And the same thing then happens in the 1930s as well. So, when the British are fighting their Arab revolt in 1930s Palestine, the rebels are all in Damascus, fundraising, buying weapons, you name it, having meetings very, very open. In fact, there's a great chapter in the book about this British Consul called Gilbert Mackereth, who is a very unorthodox character who goes around wearing what he called a bulletproof waistcoat. But, he was spying on what the rebels were doing, desperately trying to get the British Government to take some interest and to take rather direct action against them. But, there's nothing, again, the British can do. The British approach the French and say, 'Can you help us out?' And, the French just shrug and pretty much say, 'Well, do you remember what happened 10 years ago?' And the British say, 'Fair point, we didn't help you, so why would we expect you to help us?'

And, this all boils up in the 1940s when the French authorities in Lebanon and Syria backed the Vichy Government in France--partly because they dislike the British; it's partly because the British are local and they don't like them. And, the British then invade--

Russ Roberts: The Vichy Government being the collaborators with the Nazis after the fall of France in 1940?

James Barr: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And, the British, of course, have found General de Gaulle. They've brought him back to London. And, one of the first successes that de Gaulle has is to take back control of Lebanon and Syria, with British help. The British invade in 1941. But, before they do so they force de Gaulle to issue a promise that he will hold elections and essentially put Lebanon and Syria on the pathway to independence after he's taken back power.

Well, of course, once de Gaulle is back in power in Beirut, boy, that's the last thing he wants to do. Because, again, the prevailing French mentality is that empire is no bad thing. And so, he's not just going to start decolonization.

But, the British are determined to hold his feet to the fire because they want to distract attention from what's going on in Palestine. And as far as possible, if the French can be the lightning conductor for general Arab anger at foreign rule in the Middle East, then so much the better.

So, the British forced de Gaulle: they gradually--he runs out of road eventually. And, eventually in 1943, there are elections in Lebanon and then in Syria, and they result in a victory of Arab nationalist governments. And, effectively both Lebanon and Syria become independent at that point, and they're properly independent from 1946.

But, the French don't forget that this has happened, and they are determined to get their revenge. And so, the last part of the book really concerns the story of this, because--and it's the sort of start point in a way. Because when I was rooting around in files belonging to MI5 [Military Intelligence, Section 5], which is the British Internal Security Service--so not the sort of foreign espionage but domestic security. And, they were starting to declassify these 20 years ago, and there were files in there about--the phrase they used was Jewish terrorism. And, one of the things that they had found out was that there was a connection between these Jewish terrorist groups--by which they meant the Stern Gang and Irgun--and the French. And the French were actually helping these groups. Again, they were basically providing them with shelter in Lebanon and Syria where the British couldn't get at them so easily. There was also probably some gun running going on, although that was quite hard to pin down. And, the French helped the Zionist movement. So, initially the more extreme groups; but then as time went on, they transferred their support to the more general Zionist movement.

And, that support became very important once the war was over. Because, Jewish people have played a very important part in the French resistance because once it was clear that if you didn't flee into the woods, you would end up being deported to your death in a concentration camp in Germany, of course, Jewish people joined the Resistance in quite significant numbers. And, what that meant was that in France, in 1944 and 1945, there were networks for smuggling--people, arms, you name it. And so, when the war ended, the French helped smuggle weapons to Palestine to help the Zionists. But they also helped smuggle people.

So, there were people obviously who survived the Holocaust, who were living in Displaced Persons camps or had never even--had managed to stay underground. And, those people trickled out, often through Southern France or Italy, but often through Southern France. And they got onto ships there, and then they made their way to Palestine--where the British did their absolute utmost to try and stop them from landing.

And, Britain found itself essentially just utterly on the wrong side of global opinion at that point. The British had this idea--it wasn't just them, there were other--notably Franklin D. Roosevelt also thought this was possible. They still believed that perhaps people who had survived the Holocaust might go back to where they had come from.

I don't know: it's a strange mentality. But, clearly people who had possibly been betrayed by people they'd lived next door to or whatever, the last thing they were going to want to do was go back to those places after the war. They wanted a fresh start in a place where they felt more secure.

So, obviously there was a complete mismatch between what the British thought was possible and what actual people who had made it through and survived the Holocaust thought.

And, the British found themselves--they're trying to impose these draconian immigration restrictions, which they'd brought in before the war to appease the Arabs. They found themselves obviously trying to enforce those. Most famously in the case of a ship--well-known ship, called the Exodus--which had been bought in the United States, given a makeover. Well, more than a makeover: its engines had all been souped up so that it could do the last few miles to Palestine at great speed. And, it was loaded with pregnant women, young children, the elderly. Because the people who bought ship knew exactly what the trap they were going to set for the British: They wanted the British to intervene to stop the ship, because they knew that once people saw the kind of people who were being taken off it and sent off back on another ship to leave again, that that would win plenty of sympathy.

And of course, that's exactly what happened in 1947: The British ran the ship, took it to Haifa, unloaded all the people aboard, and then put them on a ship bound back for Hamburg, of all places, or at least initially they were supposed to go back to France but then they ended up going on to Hamburg.

But, some of the people standing on the quay side when this happened had come from a UN [United Nations] Commission. Because by that point in time, the British had turned the whole question of who should run Palestine over to the United Nations. It's important though, not to think the British thought that was the end of the matter. The British still hoped that the UN might say, 'Actually, Britain is the best country to run this space. They know it well,' and so on. This wasn't a surrender at this point.

So, the British had turned the question over in February 1947. Summer 1947, the Exodus arrives, and on the quay side--there's a brilliant photograph showing this that you can find, I think, online--you have the ship against the dock. And on the dock, on the quay side, there are some smartly suited men--because they're all men--from the UN Commission and they are watching the refugees aboard the ship being offloaded.

And, I think if you were to try and date the moment at which Britain loses the argument to a point, I think I would choose that point in time, because it becomes absolutely obvious to the United Nations that there's no possible way that Britain can claim not just a right, but a duty or a capability of running Palestine by this point. The place is really in uproar and flames and the British are fighting a very well-organized insurgency by that point.

And so, the United Nations comes back and they make the partition plan that is then voted on in November 1947. That's the moment when the United Nations--all the countries of the United Nations--recognize that there should be a State of Israel and an Arab State alongside it.

1:06:03

Russ Roberts: And of course, that partition is accepted, reluctantly, by Ben-Gurion and the Israelis--the Jews--but rejected by the Arabs. And, when the British leave, Ben-Gurion declares a State; the Arab neighbors invade. The Arab residents of what is now the new State of Israel, some of them run away, some of them stay, some are killed in fighting. And, the result is something like where we are today in the world, with this part of the world. So, we have: Lebanon gets a country in 1946, Syria, 1946--I think that's right. Israel gets established in 1948. Iraq is what you said, 1930-something.

James Barr: 1932 it actually joins the League of Nations itself as an independent country. But, it's by no means independent. I mean, it's still essentially a kind of British Protectorate going right up beyond, after the Second World War.

Russ Roberts: And then, Jordan eventually also gets its independence, I think, around the same time. The 1940s, right?

James Barr: 1946.

Russ Roberts: 1946. So, it's striking for those of us who don't know as much history as we'd like to realize that these countries--and we haven't mentioned Saudi Arabia, which it might be a can of worms we don't open. But, all these countries that are in the news today, all this strange talk of President Trump that the Gazans will be resettled in, say, Jordan--which is by the way, enormously populated by Palestinians already. And, they're not so eager to take them for a variety of reasons, including justice, but also narrow self-interest. The same with the Egyptians. All these countries, with the exception of Egypt--which is also a little older--both their governance and their borders are relatively new and the creation of a strange set of events, which start with--much of it starts with Sykes-Picot. These borders are arbitrary. It's a line on a beautifully--title of your book--a line in the sand. It's not a river or an ocean, or the things that usually establish normal borders between countries that persist for a long time. Yes, nations fight over who has which piece of what near the border in many, many places, but this is--it's such a tumultuous national story, and it's very young.

James Barr: Yes, I think. Exactly. I mean, the paradox is that this is an area of the world which has been inhabited for millennia. And, urbanized, I suppose more importantly than inhabited. But, this is absolutely the center of human civilization. And, many of these cities are--I don't know, Aleppo, Jerusalem. Less so: Baghdad is a newcomer, only built in the 8th century AD. But, going way, way back, far longer than most cities in Europe have existed for. And, yet the countries, as you say, are new.

And, the border, this main border, the diagonal line which you still see is one that is very permeable. It cuts across open country. And I mean, borders these days are not hugely good at stopping all sorts of things. You know, the politics of one country very quickly affect the politics of the next door country. But, here you see things cross those borders very, very easily.

And, that's one reason, I suppose, why the trouble that we saw in Iraq after the Americans invaded in 2003 and the consequent insurgency, that's why that then became an issue in Syria in the following decade, essentially. That the trouble didn't stay on one side of the frontier for very long: it crossed over. And, you see this going right the way back to the moment when the border was first drawn: that whatever happens, one side will very quickly appear or destabilize the politics of the adjacent states on the other sides of those borders.

1:11:06

Russ Roberts: So, before we leave this conversation, do you want to say anything about Syria per se? It kind of took most of us by surprise. Here's a dictator, seems to have authority. He's willing to do horrible things to his own people and especially to people who are a little different from his own people. And, one night he's gone.

And of course, we haven't talked about Iran. Iran appears to be somewhat unstable. It is also a complicated story of Western dominance and indigenous regaining of control. But, it's not a control that's democratic. It's not a leadership that's beloved by its people. It's the opposite.

It's an extraordinary time. And, even weirdly, of all things, when you read a book like this, you have to think: there's no way this is going to end with the establishment of a state in Israel. But, it does. And, we are perhaps the most stable place in the region. It's not saying much: it's a low bar. But, what a strange time.

James Barr: It is. I mean, I've been to Syria twice. And the last time was 2009, so before the war broke out. And, I have to say, one of the things I noticed is that you don't--I had no inkling two years before the uprising broke out about what was going to happen. There weren't great signs of it. There were things that I look back at now and think, 'Oh.' There was a real difference between people living in Damascus who clearly were close to the regime and had got very rich. And then, I was down in the south; I had to get a puncture fixed. I was driving myself around--

Russ Roberts: That's a flat tire, for American listeners.

James Barr: Yes, a flat tire. And so, the car stopped. I had a flat tire, and these two lads appeared on the roadside and said, 'We'll fix your tire for you, mister, and it'll be $1.' And, I thought, 'Well, that's great.' Exactly. And, they did a great job. I drove probably the best part of a thousand miles on that tire after that. So, whatever they did, I think they just sort of bodged it, but for a dollar. And, they were desperate for work.

And of course, Daraa [also spelled Dar'a], which is where I had my flat tire, was the epicenter of the revolt. It was there that people first wrote up that graffiti--what did they say?--'You're next, doctor,' or, 'Your turn, doctor,' referring to Assad. Because of course, he had trained as an ophthalmologist here in London and had never expected to be the ruler of Syria. That was supposed to be his elder brother until his elder brother killed himself in a car accident.

So, yeah, it's hard to say. And then, the time before that--it was 2002--Bashar Assad, at that point, was the golden boy. He'd only just taken over and people had great expectations of him. It was a period of huge optimism about the possibilities and the sense that here was someone who was Western educated and might see things a bit differently. And of course, he turned out to be worse than his father. So, it's a strange thing.

*Map of Syria, showing the proximity of Homs [Hims] to the Mediterranean and at the crossroads from the north to Damascus. Also showing Dar'a in the south. Source: Wikimedia.*

But, I suppose I'm now writing a book about the sort of very long, 'Why do people fight over the Middle East?'--going right, right back in time. And, when I saw that HTS [Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham]--the group that have now taken over Syria--when I saw they'd reached Homs [also spelled Hims], which is sort of the central town in Syria, really, the next major town north of Damascus, city north of Damascus--once I saw they'd got there, I realized that the game was up. Because, if you look right, right back in history, going back thousands of years, Homs is really--it is the crucial point. And it's the crucial point because just to the west of Homs, you have a gap in the hills that run all the way down the east coast of the Mediterranean. So, it's the easiest access point to the sea.

And so, for thousands of years, armies have been going through there. It's the way that you get from the sea, inland. The Crusaders built an enormous and very famous castle called Krak des Chevaliers, which is just west of Homs, to watch that valley. And so, when HTS had got there, then I thought, 'It's not going to get to Damascus. Damascus will fall before they get there,' because they have won once they've controlled that point. And, that explains why--

I mean, Homs was fought over for a year or so, very, very savagely in 2012, 2013, because it was so strategically important. So, yeah, it was the key to the place.

But, I wouldn't say I could see things coming before that. All you can sort of see is that it turned out that a dictatorship was a bit like a rotten log: When you go out for a walk and you see what looks like a tree stump and you stand on it and the whole thing collapses under your weight because it was already completely rotten. And yet it looked like a solid functioning thing, and it appeared to have still got some sort of structure. But, in fact, the reality was it had been completely hollowed out by corruption and competing interests within regime. And, in the end, I think, the unwillingness of the Iranians or the Russians to invest any more money in keeping Assad in power.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been James Barr. His book is A Line in the Sand. It's a wonderful place to start if you want to get a handle on how we got here. Crazy times. I can't decide whether the more things change, the more they stay the same, or who knows what's going to happen next. But, James, thank you for part of EconTalk.

James Barr: Thanks for having me, Russ.

The Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (with James Barr)

An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (with Haviv Rettig Gur)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Political Economy of Power

READER COMMENTS

Shalom Freedman

Feb 25 2025 at 9:49am

Pete Ruble

Feb 25 2025 at 2:11pm

Mick Prest

Feb 27 2025 at 12:50am

Dr G

Feb 28 2025 at 8:22pm

Robert Swan

Mar 1 2025 at 5:29pm

The Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (with James Barr)

An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (with Haviv Rettig Gur)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Political Economy of Power

READER COMMENTS

Shalom Freedman

Feb 25 2025 at 9:49am

Pete Ruble

Feb 25 2025 at 2:11pm

Mick Prest

Feb 27 2025 at 12:50am

Dr G

Feb 28 2025 at 8:22pm

Robert Swan

Mar 1 2025 at 5:29pm

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