Descrizione
In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, two men secretly agreed to divide the Middle East. The British Sir Mark Sykes and the Frenchman François Georges-Picot drew a diagonal line in the sand from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier, redefining the map of the Ottoman Empire that was soon to collapse and give way to the British “mandates” of Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, and the French mandates of Lebanon and Syria. The following thirty years saw that area as the scene of a sordid history of violence and covert political maneuvers, noble proclamations and hypocritical greed, whose protagonists – between Zionist aspirations and Arab claims, the Holocaust and the politics of appeasement – were statesmen, negotiators, spies and soldiers, among whom the names of TE Lawrence, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle stand out. Using recently declassified documents from British and French archives, James Barr offers in these pages the most complete and in-depth reconstruction yet of how the modern Middle East was designed and how the centuries-old rivalry between the British and the French, though formally allies, fueled the current Arab-Israeli conflict and all of today’s geopolitical instability.
