History of the Middle East

The first section that really caught my attention was around the middle of the page, concerning the discovery of oil. In Wikipedia, it said, "Another turning point in the history of the Middle East came when oil was discovered, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia (in 1938) and the other Persian Gulf states, and also in Libya and Algeria. The Middle East, it turned out, possessed the world's largest easily accessible reserves of crude oil, the most important commodity in the 20th century industrial world. Although western oil companies pumped and exported nearly all of the oil to fuel the rapidly expanding automobile industry and other western industrial developments, the kings and emirs of the oil states became immensely rich, enabling them to consolidate their hold on power and giving them a stake in preserving western hegemony over the region. Oil wealth also had the effect of stultifying whatever movement towards economic, political or social reform might have emerged in the Arab world under the influence of the Kemalist revolution in Turkey."

What snagged me is how this made an impact on the American Industrial Revolution. According to another Wikipedia article, "The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and under licence to Benz, in France by Emile Roger. By 1900 mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States." In particular, the Ford Model T was "the most widely produced and available car of the era," especially between 1908 and 1927. Trains had already been around and popularized in the US by the 1850’s, but cars are the real gas-guzzlers.

The other section in the Middle East article that I found engaging was the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. According to Wiki, "Egypt under Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, concluded a peace treaty with Israel, ending the prospects of a united Arab military front. From the 1970s the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, resorted to a prolonged campaign of violence against Israel and against American, Jewish and western targets generally, as a means of weakening Israeli resolve and undermining western support for Israel. The Palestinians were supported in this, to varying degrees, by the regimes in Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq. The high point of this campaign came in the 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism and the reception given to Arafat by the United Nations General Assembly. The Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 by the UNGA Resolution 4686."

I confess I was rather shocked that the UN had ever thought Zionism was a form of racism. I have certainly never thought it could be interpreted that way, and am still rather confused as to how they came to that conclusion. Anyway, it seems to me that the majority of fighting in the Middle East today is over oil, Israel, or a combination of the two. So, I thought this covered a lot of pertinent information.