Regional Conflict and Shifting Borders

Much of the modern political map of the Middle East traces back to secret wartime diplomacy between Britain and France during the First World War, above all the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, negotiated by British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot, which divided the Arab provinces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire into British and French zones of influence largely without reference to existing ethnic, sectarian, or tribal boundaries. This was followed by the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British government expressed support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," a document that would shape decades of subsequent conflict over the territory. The League of Nations mandate system formalized these arrangements after the war, placing Iraq and Palestine under British administration and Syria and Lebanon under French administration, and the borders drawn in this period, often described by historians as arbitrary lines that ignored underlying communal geography, correspond closely to the state boundaries that persist across much of the region today.