James Barr, A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914–1948 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 464 pp., $29.95.

THERE’S A knotted strand of Arab conspiracy thinking that goes roughly as follows: The modern Middle East is a plot hatched by colonialists and Zionists. Israel was implanted in Palestine by Western imperialists for their own cynical reasons. The Arabs have been manipulated and deceived by the West at every turn. Their history is a narrative framed by spies and saboteurs.

I’ve been listening to versions of this paranoid story during more than thirty years of traveling in the Middle East. Often, such Arab complaints of perpetual victimization seem part of a broken political culture. Not to mention that it’s tedious listening to so much whining about plots by outsiders.

But here’s the strange thing: This theme of victimization is surprisingly accurate, at least in terms of the early twentieth century. Life for Arabs has, in fact, been shaped by the conspiratorial plots and schemes of Western imperialists. If the Arabs are passive and sullen toward Israel and the West, it’s partly because they have been objects of history rather than its subjects. Their narrative, or at least its early twentieth-century chapters, was written in secret, by others.

A Line in the Sand brings this perverse story to life. The “line” in question is the one drawn by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which parceled up the collapsing Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. The coimperialists were at each other’s throats nonstop for the next thirty years, according to author James Barr. In the course of this rivalry, they used and manipulated Jews and Arabs alike, though it was the Arabs who proved the most hapless victims.

The value of this book is that it makes clear that the modern Middle East was born crazy and that each subsequent iteration of misunderstanding and manipulation has been laid on top of well-worn grooves. Barr’s account of the birth of Israel, in particular, is important—not because it invalidates the Zionist idea but because it shows how cynically it was used by France and Britain, who then left Arabs and Jews to clean up the mess. Fixing the ill will created by the imperialist plotters has proved almost impossible, as we are reminded nearly every day by newspaper headlines.

BARR BEGINS his story by sketching the two men who drew the line, who embodied the distinct personalities of their two nations in the age of high empire.

Sir Mark Sykes was a classic British amateur—an aristocrat from an eccentric Yorkshire family who spent a holiday with his family in the Middle East in 1890 and never got over it. He traipsed back again and again, as an undergraduate, a diplomat and finally a member of Parliament, and he fancied himself an expert on the Ottoman Empire in its years of seedy decline. In 1915, the British war council, searching for a strategy to cope with the Ottoman breakup, summoned Sykes for advice. The brash, self-made Arabist proceeded to draw a line on the map “from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk,” and he proposed that this should be the division between French and British zones of post-Ottoman influence.

Although the British and French, to judge by Barr’s account, loathed each other, they were nominal allies in the Entente Cordiale, fighting together in Flanders against the Boche. So Sykes’s proposal for a carve up was judged sensible by Lord Asquith, the prime minister, and in November 1915 Sykes began negotiating with a French representative named Francois Georges-Picot.

The Frenchman was a lawyer, diplomat and enthusiast for French imperial ambitions in Syria through a group known as Le Comité de l’Asie Française. Complicating the negotiations was the fact that the British were talking separately with a group of Arab nationalists headed by Sherif Hussein (the Arab ally of T. E. Lawrence)—with the conniving Brits encouraging the Arabs to take control of the very areas they were supposedly ready to cede to the French.

It was a sublimely deceitful piece of British diplomacy—the sort of operation that gave rise to the widespread view in the Middle East that the British are the most practiced and effective liars in the history of that region. As they realized the extent of the British game, the French were indignant (probably, in part, because they hadn’t thought of it first). Georges-Picot warned during the first negotiating session: “To promise the Arabs a large state is to throw dust in their eyes. Such a state will never materialise. You cannot transform a myriad of tribes into a viable whole.”

The British didn’t really disagree that their plan to draw lines and create “states” was impractical. Sir Arthur Nicolson, who chaired the first November 1915 meeting between Sykes and Picot, said the Arab state imagined by Hussein and Lawrence was an “absurdity” because the Arabs were “a heap of scattered tribes with no cohesion and no organisation.” This is among several dozen lines in the book that read hauntingly as if they might have been written yesterday about today’s Libya, Syria or Iraq.

Though they recognized the slippery slope ahead, Britain and France formalized the Sykes-Picot Agreement with an exchange of letters in May 1916, of which Barr states: “Even by the standards of the time, it was a shamelessly self-interested pact.”

The British and French, having divided the Ottoman booty, then set about trying to undermine each other and steal more than their allotted share of the goodies. A main British stratagem for thwarting French aspirations in Syria was an initiative that harnessed the idealistic cause of Zionism in the service of Britain’s screw-your-ally campaign in the Levant. It was a letter published in the Times of London on November 7, 1917, from the foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, the prominent banker and Zionist. This became known as the “Balfour Declaration” and contained a pledge that forever altered the history of the region and the world:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, . . . it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

There was an idealistic appeal to Zionism, a romantic vision of a Jewish nationalism that fit the age of empire. For an evocation of this Zionist ideal as it appeared at the time, there is no better guide than George Eliot’s daring 1876 novel Daniel Deronda and its chronicle of how the title character comes to embrace Zionism. But for the British statesmen of 1917, the Balfour Declaration was a bit of realpolitik. Lord Asquith remarked that his successor Lloyd George, the prime minister at the time of the declaration, “does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future, but thinks it would be an outrage to let the Christian holy places—Bethlehem, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem &c—pass into the possession of ‘Agnostic Atheistic France’!”

T. E. Lawrence, meanwhile, was conducting his guerrilla campaign with Sherif Hussein’s son Faisal to “set the desert on fire” by blowing up the Hejaz railway. Lawrence understood from the beginning that his campaign for Arab independence was really about besting France. “So far as Syria is concerned it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy,” he wrote in February 1915. Several weeks later, he advised a former Oxford tutor that if he could unite the Bedouin tribes behind him, “we can rush right up to Damascus, & biff the French out of all hope of Syria.”

The French gradually realized what Lawrence was up to, and they were shocked, shocked. A French general described Lawrence’s ally Faisal as “British imperialism with Arab headgear.”

With Germany’s surrender and the 1919 Versailles peace conference, the cynical Anglo-French wartime agreement to dismember the Ottoman Empire had to pass through a new filter—that of the passionately idealistic American president Woodrow Wilson (mocked by a fellow conference attendee as “Jesus Christ”). Given Wilson’s emphasis on self-determination in the newly liberated lands, the Balfour Declaration posed a particular problem with its pledge to assist the Jewish minority in Palestine. Balfour wrote to Lloyd George: “The weak point of our position is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict.”

The British and French were so eager for short-term advantage that they ignored the long-term problems they were creating. Barr cites a telling moment when Lloyd George, unsure where to mark the boundaries of the territory he was so eager to administer, asked two Christian publishers how the Bible had demarcated Palestine. In the end, it was a raw political exercise. Barr quotes one British adviser: “The truth is that any division of the Arab country between Aleppo and Mecca is unnatural, therefore whatever division is made should be decided by practical requirements. Strategy forms the best guide.”

As the maps were drawn, France got Syria and Lebanon, while Britain got Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and a Palestine that it had effectively pledged to two sides, Arabs and Jews.

BARR’S NARRATIVE rolls on toward the present in a series of freeze-frame images that prefigure our current problems. As the colonialists try to impose their will in Iraq and elsewhere on Arabs who think they have been promised independence, they are met with riots, assassinations and an early version of the roadside bombs we now call IEDs. The Westerners respond, again in ways that prefigure our times, with their own brutalizing tactics, which include night raids, targeted killings and torture.

Lebanon, then as now, was the scene of near-constant machinations by the imperial powers. The British recruited the Druze as secret allies; the French operated mostly through the Maronite Christians. These games continued through the 1920s and ’30s, but they became truly fratricidal during World War II, when Lebanon was knocked back and forth like a ping-pong ball between the British, the Free French forces of Charles de Gaulle and the Vichy-installed government in Beirut. The first two engineered Lebanese independence in 1943 to pry the territory from Vichy and the Germans. But a vicious fight then ensued between the British candidates for president and prime minister, Bechara al-Khoury and Riad al-Solh, respectively, and their French rivals. There was a brief pro-French coup before Khoury and Solh prevailed.

The jockeying in Lebanon was a metaphor for the larger tensions between Winston Churchill and de Gaulle. Barr quotes one sputtering Churchill missive after receiving a report from Lebanon: “I had no idea the French were behaving so tyrannically.” It was a measure of the British genius at “divide and conquer” that they were able to work their will even in Lebanon, a country that the French had passionately colonized. But the French would have their revenge, in Palestine.

We come now to the most sensational revelation of the book—the secret French intelligence role in assisting two Jewish terrorist groups, the Irgun Zwai Leumi and the Stern Gang, in their battle to drive out the British from Palestine and establish the state of Israel.

As early as 1920, Jewish calls to implement the promise of the Balfour Declaration had been met by Arab riots, leading a British general, Sir Henry Wilson, to observe: “The problem of Palestine is exactly the same . . . as the problem of Ireland, namely, two peoples living in a small country hating each other like hell.” A commission headed by Lord Peel in 1936–37 and a later one headed by Lord Moyne both recommended that Palestine should be partitioned between Arabs and Jews, but neither specified how or when.

The complications in Palestine intensified as the horrors of Nazi Germany encouraged more Jews to emigrate. The British tried to block the flow of desperate refugees in ways that today seem unconscionable. The Jews of Palestine, believing that they had been promised a homeland, agitated for Britain to deliver on its pledge. The British, trying to placate the Arabs (and thereby protect the region’s two strategic prizes, the Suez Canal and the oil of the Persian Gulf), kept resisting Jewish demands for statehood. The Jews began to turn to terrorism, the weapon of choice in the region, to force the British out of Palestine. And here the French saw a chance to get even.

According to Barr, the French consul in Jerusalem was contacted in February 1944 by representatives of the Irgun and Stern Gang and told of the Jewish groups’ “declaration of war” against the British. Around the same time, according to Barr, a Free French intelligence cell known as the Bureau Noir, whose job was to stem British influence in the Levant, began working with the Jewish underground. Barr cites a 1944 mi6 report “that the Bureau Noir was backing Jewish terrorists” and a 1945 mi5 report that the terrorists “would seem to be receiving support from the French,” including weapons.

Barr quotes this incendiary statement by Churchill in 1944, after Lord Moyne was assassinated by the Stern Gang:

If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labours for its future are to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past.

The quotation bristles with indignation, but it was unworthy of Churchill. It makes a mistake that is characteristic of many anti-Israel fulminations of today. The Stern Gang was a small, superextremist faction, and it did not represent mainstream Zionism any more than do extreme right-wing parties in Israel today. As for Churchill’s comparison to Nazi Germany, it was wrong—morally, historically, in every way.

But the Zionist terrorist campaign was brutal and effective. The July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin’s Irgun is well known, but it was only one instance of a sustained and well-organized campaign that included bombing a British officers’ club, a refinery and railroads as well as a bold attack on a prison in Acre that freed Arabs and Jews alike. When the British wanted to publish photographs of the terrorist leaders, the newspaper publishers were intimidated into refusing; when the British tried some grim, quasi-terrorist methods of their own, two British sergeants were hanged in public. It was a dirty war, and the British lost—and made what Barr says was the first forced withdrawal from empire since the eighteenth century.

Barr’s story ends with President Truman’s support for Israel’s independence, which was a decisive factor in the creation and viability of the Jewish state. That ends one story and begins another in the Middle East, whose chapters unfold year by year.

BARR’S BOOK makes riveting and sometimes haunting reading. It’s a book that, quite deliberately, uses the past as a provocation for the present. Readers cannot but wonder at the stories we seem condemned to relive, to our sorrow and chagrin.

I wish the rendering of history here had been a little less barbed; it makes me worry that the past is being mined selectively, for maximum effect. And though Barr does well to focus on some of the remarkable personalities, his narrative spans so many years that it inevitably is somewhat choppy and episodic. It covers much ground but lightly and, sometimes, with frustrating incompleteness. Readers who enjoy this book would do well to consult the pathbreaking 1989 study by David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace. Fromkin makes many of the same points, but he looks at the consequences of the Ottoman breakup through the more focused lens of the Versailles peacemaking.

So what do we take away from this provocative history? Each reader will have a different answer, but here’s mine.

First, the embrace of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration created problems that were foreseen from the moment of its publication. These problems can be resolved only through creation of a Palestinian Arab state that, in effect, partitions the Holy Land so that both Arabs and Jews can live there peacefully. This is especially urgent now, for the interests of Israel as well as for those of the Arabs. Indeed, the Zionist dream is best protected (and guaranteed for the future) by the existence of this very Palestinian state. In that sense, Israel has no more urgent security requirement than to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state, even if that requires politically painful concessions on Jerusalem and other issues.

Second, the tale of British and French manipulation told in these pages helps us to understand why the Arab Spring is so important and valuable. Arabs are not wrong to see their history as a story of manipulation by others; that process is described page by page in this book. The revolutions now under way in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere are about dignity and self-determination—about a people, used and abused by others, finally taking control and beginning to write its own history. It shouldn’t surprise us if this process is unstable and, in some aspects, anti-Western. The screw has been tightened for nearly a century—far longer, if you include the epoch of Ottoman domination. The unwinding won’t be flowers and parades, but it will produce a political culture in which the tedious arguments about victimization are, finally, used up.

David Ignatius is a foreign-affairs columnist at the Washington Post and the author of eight novels.

Pullquote: Barr's book quite deliberately uses the past as a provocation for the present. Readers cannot but wonder at the stories we seem condemned to relive, to our sorrow and chagrin.Image: Essay Types: Book Review