January 30, 2016 The Partition of Ireland and the Middle East

January 30, 2016 India, Islam, and Oil

The Partition of Ireland and the Middle East

This anecdote sums up much of what was already wrong about the Middle East at the time. It was about to become worse, however, as a result of Britain’s machinations in 1916. In the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain carved up with France the same territory that, not long before, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon—in correspondence with the Arab leader Sharif Hussein of Mecca—had suggested might become independent. The effects of these decisions—contested boundaries and conspiracy theories, among others—remain with us to this day, as Mr. Jeffery is not the first to point out.

The United Kingdom was rocked by the Easter Rising, in which radical Irish nationalists, dissatisfied with the limited Home Rule on offer after the war, rebelled against British rule. Mr. Jeffery puts this event very much in its European context, titling his chapter “Ypres on the Liffey.” “Germany fights today,” the Irish conspirator Roger Casement said, against “the hordes of Russian barbarism, the sword of French hatred and the long purse of British greed . . . as an Irishman I say from my heart—God save Germany.” One might add that the iconic proclamation of the Irish Republic by the rebels in front of Dublin’s General Post Office referred to the Germans as their “gallant allies in Europe.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal. January 30-31, 2016.