DID WINSTON CHURCHILL hiccup or sneeze? Either way, the story goes, the pen in his hand slipped on the map, leaving Jordan’s eastern border sharply indented. Like many legends, this holds a kernel of truth. Many Arab frontiers reflect not natural or human boundaries but the whims and fears of the imperialists who drew them up.
As colonial secretary in 1921, Churchill might have lopped off more of Jordan, but he wanted to keep control of an air corridor to another British protectorate, Iraq, where the Royal Air Force was dropping poison gas on rebellious Arab tribes. In 1916, in the middle of the first world war, Britain and France had signed a secret pact, the notorious Sykes-Picot agreement (named after the British and the French diplomats who negotiated it), to split the Fertile Crescent between them. A northern slice, running from the Mediterranean to the Tigris river, went to France; a southern slice, from Palestine to Iraq, was bagged by Britain. Both had reason to be happy. The Catholic church had been nagging for French control of the Syrian coast, home to many Maronite Catholics, and Britain was keen to put the French between them and the Russians to the north.
Their carve-up of the Ottoman empire might have been worse. Unsure at first what to do with Palestine, they considered giving it to Belgium. Instead, Arthur Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, in 1917 issued a declaration promising a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Like Churchill and Sykes, Balfour quietly favoured steering Jews away from British shores. Wartime British officials also sought to please influential Zionists in America, as well as Russian Bolsheviks.
France did slice Lebanon out of Syria, aiming to create a Christian-dominated republic, and in the 1920s briefly considered giving a coastal state to the Alawites and an inland one to the Druze. France and Britain also backed the formation of a Kurdish state at the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, but they refused to allow “their” Kurds in Iraq and Syria to join it. The idea fizzled, leaving today’s 25m Kurds as the globe’s largest people without a state. But in 1938 France donated a chunk of Syria, now known as Hatay, to Turkey. Hatay’s Turkish minority had been lobbying more effectively than the rest of the population, mostly Arabic-speaking, who wanted to remain in Syria.
Now, with Syria again fracturing into warring parts, Iraq threatening to follow suit and cracks beginning to show in Lebanon, the borders drawn up nearly a century ago are starting to look frayed. Syria’s dispersed Kurds are now meeting as refugees in the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. The closely related Sunni Arab tribes of the Euphrates valley, sliced in two by Messrs Sykes and Picot, are uniting again, this time to face Shia oppressors. And to the west, perhaps, that stillborn Alawite state is about to rise again.