The Middle East has been a disturbed region, to put it no stronger, throughout the twentieth century, and it looks as though that reputation will continue on into the twenty-first. In fact, its disturbance as a major international concern only began during the Great War, when the Ottoman Empire fell into war on the German side, and became subject to attacks by the Allies.

Every section or region of that former empire has been part of the ‘disturbances’, from Libya to the Caucasus, from Constantinople to the Yemen, from Cairo to Baghdad, but the most violent, confused, and complex region has been Syria. This is a geographical term which includes the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and Jordan, together with parts of Egypt and Turkey. It is, and has been for fifteen centuries and more, a land whose society is much divided, particularly among religious communities – in their census in 1906/1907 the Ottoman authorities distinguished nineteen separate religious groups, and this in a country half the size of Britain.

The proximate cause of the change from a group of fairly somnolent Ottoman provinces to the most notorious hotbed of warfare and intrigue in the modern world was its conquest by British forces in 1917 and 1918. In the course of the fighting a series of promises were made by the British to other peoples and countries which were all impossible to keep. In the stress of an appallingly difficult war the British government was lavish in agreeing to reward others, without bothering too much that these rewards and promises overlapped.