There is plenty to criticize about the actions taken by many parties post-collapse, but I strongly doubt it's at all possible for external powers to take a failed empire and keep all the pieces happy in the aftermath. Those people have to do most of that themselves, and in this case they didn't for many reasons. Europe was ready for the transition away from monarchy and empire, the middle east wasn't. Russia/USSR tried a path that worked but not particularly well. Luck and circumstance also played a part.
A century of war and strife post empire collapse isn't exactly unusual.
That's not much different from the current state of Israel which allows Arabs to live in it (and even have political representation!).
I don't know how to square the elevation of the tolerance in the ottoman empire while at the same time decrying the apartheid within Israel's borders.
The situation is fucked up. It's hard to have justice and peace.
Well for starters I don’t test the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and Israel in the 21st against the same standard. We’re not saying the Ottomans were great by a modern western standard, but compared to most of the west in their day they were quite good.
My point was that when we look back at times of peaceful coexistence within empires, it was often the results of suppression of dissent. Empires are fundamentally at odds with national self determination. Empires are by definition violent subjugation of people and self-determination movements often require violence to counteract that.
It's easy to take past empires for granted and assume they are "how things are"; but when they fail and crumble they do so for a reason, they contain the seed of their own destruction, because they impose stability and order over internal and extern forces that push against them.
moreover zionism did not start with the balfour declaration, but decades before with mass killings of jews in eastern europe
Mass killings of jews had already started in eastern europe decades before the holocaust. which was what prompted zionism. This is not a singular event, but a movement that would happen with the british or without them.
And any result of the conflict would cause serious "disaster" for one people or another
This was always wishful thinking at best, and more realistically a lie.
Quoting Ben-Gurion:
A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
Nowadays a major global problem is people stuck in poor, mismanaged countries with high crime, low economic growth, etc. etc. People are trying to solve this problem individually by immigrating to more prosperous countries, but that's a band-aid. It would be better if we had reliable way to generate new, high-functioning, well-managed countries that are nice to live in. How do we get from here to there?
But your example is a bit like 'why is it so difficult to build a hundred-storey building? My uncle John built a shed in his back yard once, perhaps we should ask him to share how he did it.'
Where has this lie come from? "Higher functioning" countries generally stem from countries that were doing well long before they met many other countries. The British invented naval clocks, required to circumnavigate the globe, before they went round the globe on a regular basis. How did they do that if everyone was equal before they met?
Probably in 50 or 100 years there will be some Afghan nationalist movement which will be telling everyone that the entirety of US wealth is based on plunder of Afghanistan. That's roughly how it is with India nationalists and Britain today, but of course, it is nonsense.
I think the OP's question is how did Britain get it a position where it had the capability to "systematically plunder the rest of the world"?
Do you think that was luck? Were the British simply "evil", and everyone else not so? One has to assume they were already high-functioning, prior to the plundering.
- be colonised by the Romans 2000 years ago
- spend the next 1000 years rediscovering and (eventually) surpassing the Romans' achievements
- invest heavily in education (when the Incas were building their monuments, most of Oxford University had already been constructed) and subsequently have 1000 years of cumulative effect of those investments
- be highly connected to Western Europe, with all the continual advancements shared between countries all trying to outdo each other
- be an island nation, with a seafaring tradition that was accelerated by all of the above to the point of being the best in the world
I'm wishing we could do more to improve the lives of people living in countries like Sudan, Venezuela, Burundi, Haiti, DR Congo, etc. They're humans too even if they don't make the news. Right now those countries are too dysfunctional to be competitive for most exports.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...
And today this continues in the form of corruption by multi-national corporations. Almost all diamond mines are owned by a few western companies. Do you really think they want progressive democratic government in any of those countries? Nope, corrupted dictators are way better for business...
Every country was a utopia until the British and French got there?
>Almost all diamond mines are owned by a few western companies.
How valuable are diamonds if not for the demand and marketing of the colonial nations?
Are you saying the incas should thank the Spanish for boosting their immune system?
Should native Americans be happy their children got sterilized?
Nope, but you can bet that in every single case it got way worse when British, French, Spanish, Belgians, Russians, Italians, Venetians, Turks, etc. occupied them by often unspeakably brutal use of force, and then exploited their natural and human resources while giving close to nothing in return.
That China’s per capita GDP increased 4x over that period — was that because of, or in spite of the US ‘riding on their back’?
1) Alaska was (and still is) a huge, and very sparsely populated land
2) For the native population it was not a big difference whether Russians or Americans ruled them, none of them treated them well - it was a colony and all they cared of was getting the natural resources.
3) Russians were not kicked out of their homes, as there was very few of them there in the first place (mostly working for the government). And then there was also proportionally very little American settlers coming in compared to the vastness of the land available.
If you want a better comparison with US history, look at the Trail of Tears, it's much closer to what happened in Israel...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Israel
Alaska's first census in 1880 counted 33,426 people! Alaska had 731,007 residents on July 1, 2019, size 663,268 square miles.
There's about 1.7 million displaced people in Gaza today, size 2,260 square miles
From Balfour's own writing in 1919 cited in his Wikipedia article:
> [Zionism would] mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.
He's the best example how support of Zionism and antisemitism aren't mutually contradictory and can actually go hand in hand. It's likewise often lost on people that there was a Zionist project helping German Jews emigrate to Palestine with support of the German government even after Hitler came to power, although of course (like all migration) it ended with the beginning of World War 2. This isn't to say the Nazis were fond of this project but they didn't actively oppose it. They did however pass laws requiring emigrating Jews to liquidate their assets (i.e. sell off any businesses or property) and significantly limiting the amount of wealth they could transfer out of the country just like they later dispossessed (and subsequently re-privatized) Jewish business owners and confiscated their property during the Holocaust.
In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's conclusion has stuck with me:
"It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."
Some of the disputes, like those elsewhere in the world, are about rulers or frontiers, but what is typical of the Middle East is that more fundamental claims are also advanced, drawing into question not merely the dimensions and boundaries, but the right to exist, of countries that immediately or eventually emerged from the British and French decisions of the early 1920s: Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon.
...
The disputes go deeper still: ... whether the transplanted modern system of politics invented in Europe—characterized, among other things, by the division of the earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship—will survive in the foreign soil of the Middle East. In the rest of the world European political assumptions are so taken for granted that nobody thinks about them anymore; but at least one of these assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.
You think the borders left after Rome fell were organic? They just used the old Roman province borders. Rome replaced the rule of every country it conquered and the conquest lasted so long that there was no trace of the old rule left, they all had to rediscover themselves afterwards, including figuring out how to redraw the borders.
It wasn't like they all got together and said, you know, it's time we did the Jewish People a solid for once.
It is equally essentially lost on most people today, that the Balfour Declaration did not create the state of Israel, nor did the United Nations create it, nor the UK, nor the US, nor was it post-war "resettlement plan" for displaced Jews by the Allies. To the contrary, Jews at that time were barred from entering the British Mandate.
Israelis declared themselves a state, similar to Americans declaring themselves independent of Britain, against the wishes of the UK. So it should also be noted that no "plan" for that region called for a civil war: but a civil war broke out. So it's revisionist shoehorning of the events that played out to say that they didn't match such and such of various plans that may have previously been made but never came to fruition. The cis-Jordan Arabs were not treated worse by the Israelis than they themselves were attempting to treat the Israelis; the Arabs did lose the military conflict, however, after which they displaced their own longstanding Jewish populations.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
(3) It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is also mostly lost to history that there was a great deal of politicking between Weizmann arriving in England and his audience with George Lloyd, including a world tour Weizmann orchestrated to promote one Albert Einstein.