Middle East Conflict

There is no set definition for the area known as the Middle East since shifts in global power over the years have affected the topography. Now, however, the region can expansively be said to contain “the area from Libya E to Afghanistan, usually including Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Arabian peninsula” (dictionary.com). This geographical definition can be said to contain both the ‘Near East’, ‘Middle East’, and even farther to the East and into Africa be described as the ‘Greater Middle East’, so the Middle East can only be loosely defined, and it is important to know that these countries are separate and do not truly form one cooperative unit.

It is believed that the area was where human civilization first started with the Sumerians in the Fertile Crescent, or Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, namely modern day Iraq. Ten thousand years have passed since, and the area has seen much conflict, but the many invasions by great civilizations, such as the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires, have made the Middle East into the ethnically, racially, linguistically, culturally, and politically diverse culture that it is today.

The last of these huge empires was the Ottoman, only broken up around 1920, during World War I, which was a critical time in the history of the modern Arab world. This was when Great Britain really started to delve into Arabic affairs, which is actually where the name Middle East comes from; “The term's origins are seeped in controversy for having originally been a European imposition of geographic perspective according to European spheres of influence. East from where? From London...

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...hort period of ‘peace’ where tensions were rising. It was a stressful time in the history of the Middle East, yet there were no true wars during this time, and sadly, the area has not had much respite since.

From 1948 to 1950 is a more well known section in the history of the Middle East; the Arab-Israeli War, in which there were a series of attacks on the outnumbered new state of Israel which were uncoordinated since, as said before, the Middle East is not a cohesive unit at this point in time, and were actually beaten back a bit by Israel which gained more land than they were allotted by the UN partition until an armistice was signed on January 7, 1949.

However, this was not the end of conflict, which is almost synonymous with history, in the area, and it has remained divided and cannot truly be lumped together as one unit, the Middle East, but we do it anyways.