September 1, 1939: Thoughts on WWII and the Middle East

Seventy years ago today, the Second World War began in Europe. The war was so all-encompassing in its scope and scale that any anniversary date is artificial: China and Japan had already been at war for years in 1939, and the US would not enter the war until 1941, but from that grim September 1 when — in Auden's words — the world saw "the clever hopes expire/of a low dishonest decade," the war was clearly under way as a global conflict.

September 1939 had little immediate direct impact on the Middle East, but the war itself would ravage the region as Europe's quarrels were fought out on their colonial battlefields, as Italian and British, then German and British, forces struggled for North Africa, back and forth across Libya and Egypt, ultimately into French North Africa, Vichy Syria, and British-reoccupied Iraq, or as the Allies remolded Iran in their own image to facilitate supply lines to Russia.

Many Middle Easterners fought for the European armies — Moroccans, Tunisians, and Algerians fighting for both Vichy and Free France; fighters from the Zionist Yishuv serving with British forces in Vichy Lebanon and Syria (where Moshe Dayan lost his eye); Iraqi forces supporting Rashid ‘Ali and the "Golden Square" against British forces. Egypt and Iraq, which had gained nominal independence in the 1920s and 1930s, found themselves to all intents and purposes reoccupied.

Three of the major summit meetings of the war were held in the Middle East: at Casablanca, Cairo, and Tehran.

Despite the major campaigns that rolled across the region, the Second World War does not play a major role in the modern nationalist narratives of most Middle Eastern countries, with one very large exception and a few smaller ones.

The very large exception, of course, is Israel. The European Holocaust not only propelled the Zionist project but in the wake of the war made it all but inevitable. For the founding generation of Israel, the Holocaust looms large in explaining the need for a Jewish state. Just recently Avigdor Lieberman raised the old specter of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and his stay in Berlin and meetings with Hitler. The World War II generation is passing, but memories still play a role in Israel today. No American politician goes to Israel without visiting Yad Vashem. Even its name (literally, "a hand and a name" or "a memorial and a name", a quote from Isaiah), is all about memory.

Smaller exceptions may be found elsewhere. Egyptian nationalists still bristle over Sir Miles Lampson's reported comment, "Where's the Boy?" referring to King Farouq, in the ‘Abdin incident of 1942, and the British intervention in Iraq in 1941 is still remembered by many Iraqis. For Lebanon, the National Pact of 1943, foundation of the modern Lebanese state until revised by the Ta'if Agreements, was a direct outgrowth of the war.

And of course, insofar as the war marked the immediate end of the Italian Empire and the beginning of the end of the British and French, the war marked the beginning of much of modern Middle Eastern national evolution. Since 1980, The Middle East Journal has limited itself to publishing articles on the Middle East since 1945. That decision was made by MEJ's third Editor, Ambassador Richard Parker, whose own lifetime of dealing with the Middle East began with the end of the war: a POW in Europe, liberated by the Russians, he was repatriated through the Straits and saw Turkey for the first time on his way home. Like many of us in the field, he was hooked.

Some years ago — long enough I'm pretty sure that the airline involved was TWA — I was checking in at the airport with a ticket that read Washington/Frankfurt/Tunis. The check-in clerk, required to check for appropriate visas, asked me, "Is Tunis in Germany, too?" I shrugged it off, until my ride from the Tunis airport to the city drove past the sign marking the big American and British military cemeteries, not far from Carthage. A lot of Americans' second world war ended in Tunisia (especially at Kasserine Pass), but Americans today don't remember.

As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I was born just after the war and raised with its memories all around me, my father a veteran of the Pacific war; almost every adult male I grew up around having served in some service somewhere. That generation is mostly gone now, or will be in a few more years. (My father-in-law, a veteran of the European theater, is still around.) But for my daughter's generation, the war is as remote as the Spanish-American war was for me. The places on the German-Polish frontier of 1939 where the war began 70 years ago today are deep inside Poland now, and Germany and Poland (and France and Britain) all members of the European Union.

But if the world has changed (especially since the end of the Cold War), it is also still a world whose very shape and characteristics stem from World War II. On the question of Iranian nuclear proliferation we are still dealing with the problem of how to put the genie back in the bottle that we released at the end of World War II. (And the Non-Proliferation Treaty is now 40 years old, far closer in time to Hiroshima than to us.) Israel's very existence is a direct consequence of the war. The British and French empires would have survived longer, perhaps, if the war had not come.