In 1918, the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918. It was a caliphate. The caliphate was abolished on March 3, 1924 (since the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans had laid claim to the title of caliph of the Muslims). From February to June 1926 the Swiss civil code, the Italian penal code, and the German commercial code were adopted wholesale. As a result, women’s emancipation was strengthened by the abolition of polygamy, marriage was made a civil contract, and divorce was recognized as a civil action.  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the great leader of the National War of Independence who pioneered the revolutions and reforms that founded modern Turkey. In response to Turkey becoming a secular country, in1928 Hassan al Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood was to create a new caliphate by bringing all lands to the Caliph’s rule pursuant to shariah. When the Ottoman Empire was carved up after World War I, maps were drawn with little regard for ethnic groups or past history. That is part of the root of today’s Middle East wars.

During the First World War (in 1917), the British issued The Balfour Declaration, a public statement announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. Three years later, the League of Nations codified the boundaries set forth in the Balfour Declaration. (The name Palestine had been given to the region after the Romans conquered the Jews in 70 A.D. as an insult to the Jews. There was never a country of Palestine.) In 1919, a formal agreement on the  mandated Jewish homeland was signed in London. The agreement was signed by Emir Feisal ibn-Hussien, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Chaim Weitzman, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization. The  boundaries of this land included all of Israel (including Gaza, Samaria, West Bank, etc.) and what is now Transjordan. It is telling that Emir Feisal had written a letter agreeing to exactly what the land division was and pledged that he and the Arab states would carry out this agreement. Jordan was supposed to be the modern Palestinian state. Unfortunately, in 1920, Britain began limiting the immigration of Jews into the Jewish state while the Arabs were freely allowed to immigrate. That was a major part of the tensions that would ensue when Israel became a nation.

There is much more to this history–Jordan became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Jordan had originally been part of the land promised for the Jewish nation, but Thomas Edward Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) made some promises to the Arabs in exchange for their support against the Turks. For a time, ‘Palestinian’ refugees were allowed to live in Jordan, but they were kicked out after they attempted to overthrow the government. To put it simply, there is enough Arab land to settle the ‘Palestinians’ anywhere in Arab land, but the Arabs do not want them. They are useful as a political tool to be used to ‘drive Israel into the sea,’ but they are an unruly people who tend to be violent.

That is a brief look into the background to the current mess in the Middle East.