 You are clear for launch. And with that, shut down your visors, O2 on, and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um... Mr. Ruchoff here. Alright, so the phrase piece in the Middle East is often used to suggest a problem that just can't be solved. And while the Middle East is not the only region that has had lots of conflicts, arguably no other region in the world has as much impact upon the world's economy. So in this lesson, we're going to be examining the conflicts in the Middle East. In our last lesson, we reviewed the three Semitic religions and discovered that all three Judaism, Christianity, and Islam claim Jerusalem as a holy city. In fact, we saw that not only does Judaism and Islam claim Jerusalem as a holy city, they actually claim the exact spot on the ground as holy to both religions. And while this is certainly an issue to many Arabs and Jews in the Middle East, it really isn't the number one reason for the conflict. The major reason is a bit more complicated, but essentially comes down to a disagreement, a violent disagreement over who is the rightful owner of the land. Essentially, the Jews believe that the land rightfully belongs to them, while the Palestinians, these are the Muslim Arabs who live in the region, believe the land actually belongs to them. And both are right, depending upon how you view the situation. So let's look at these two sides. The Jews, also known then as the Israelites or the Children of Israel, established a monarchy in the region around 1200 A.D. and ruled for anywhere between five to six hundred years. Although the northern portion of Israel was invaded and captured by the Assyrians. Then for the next five hundred years, the region was conquered by the Persians, the Barbarians, and then the Greeks. Now, under the Babylonians, the Israelites were expelled from the region and the temple was destroyed. When Cyrus the Great, he was a Persian, defeated the Babylonians, the Jews were then allowed to return and practice their religion. And then Alexander the Great came and the Greeks came with him. Now, after Alexander the Great died, his generals took over what is known as Judea at that time. It is the Maccabeean revolt against these Greek generals that attempts to limit the Jewish religious practices that are celebrated in the observance of Hanukkah. Then in 64 BC came the Romans, who restored Jewish local control of the region as a vassal state of the Roman Empire. It is during this time that Herod the Great rebuilt the temple and Jesus is said to have lived in the region. Now, without wanting to live under the Romans in 66 A.D., the Jews fought a war of independence which they lost. This led the Romans to destroy the temple in 78 A.D. along with most of Jerusalem with it. And finally they expelled the Jews from the holy lands some 60 years later. This forced the Jews to spread to Europe, Asia and Africa what is known as the Jewish diaspora. Now, when the Roman Empire split, Judea fell under the Byzantine Empire and largely the people of the region were Orthodox Christian. But then Muhammad is said to have been appointed as God's messenger and very quickly we see Islam spreading across the Middle East and Jerusalem fell to the Muslims in 638 BC. Ironically it would be the Muslim conquest that allowed for the Jews to begin to slowly return to the holy land. As we see the relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims during this period were rather peaceful. However Christianity was still the dominant religion in the holy land. Then came the Crusades which in 1099 seized the holy land in the name of Christianity. This was Catholic Christianity. See, in addition to attacking Muslims the Catholic Crusaders also attacked Orthodox Christians and the Jewish population and Catholic Christianity dominated the region for about 100 years. But the Muslims would once again recapture the city when salad and conquered Jerusalem in 1187. Now from this point the majority of the region would become Arab Muslim Arabs and particularly the people known as the Palestinians. The Muslim Ottomans would take over and control the region until 1917 when they would be defeated by the British in World War I. Now after World War I, Jews from around the world who often faced discrimination known as anti-Semitism began to immigrate back into the holy lands. Now this Jewish nationalist movement to its re-established or homeland is known as Zionism. This immigration was not so much religious but it was due to the hope of finally having a place to call their own. Now these hopes were buoyed by a letter from the British Foreign Secretary known as the Balfour Declaration. This letter signals Britain's intention to establish a homeland for the Jews in the region. But there was a problem with this. See, earlier in 1915 the British had also promised the Arabs a land in exchange for an Arab military alliance against the Ottomans during World War I. So Britain had managed to promise the same land to both the Jews and to the Arabs. Now after World War II the new United Nations acted to solve this issue between the Arab Palestinians and the Jews to decide what they're going to do with the holy land. Now the Jews claimed that they were the rightful owners due to previously having a kingdom in that land but they were forced to leave against their own wills and plus the British had promised them the homeland. The Palestinians argued that despite that they had never actually governed the land on their own they had always lived in the region. Oh by the way they also outnumbered the Jews plus the British had promised them the homeland. So in 1947 the United Nations decided to create two homelands, Israel for the Jews and Palestine for the Palestinians. Jerusalem was a special case and it was to be administered by the United Nations so that all the religions would be able to access the places for worship but the Arabs were not impressed with this agreement and the day after Israel actually became a country the Palestinians in five Arab countries attacked Israel in order to take the homeland for themselves. The Israelis were not only able to defeat this attack but they were able to counterattack and seize lands that the UN had previously earmarked for the Palestinians and this is the start of a pattern we see in the Middle East Arab countries attacked Israel, Israel defends Israel counterattacks and takes more land Arabs attack, Israel defends Israel counterattacks and takes more land and by 1967 Israel was able to seize all of Jerusalem the Sinai Peninsula and almost all of the lands of Palestine. While the Sinai Peninsula was later given back to Egypt as part of the Camp David Accords in which Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty Israel still controls several disputed areas which includes Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank. Despite the Israeli government prohibiting its citizens from doing so, some Israelis have begun to build settlements in these occupied areas which further outrageous the Palestinians. The Palestinians also point to the persecution they suffer under the Jewish population. Israel explains that the population controls that they have with the Palestinians is for the sake of security Israel claims that the Palestinians actually still have more freedoms than many other Arab countries do. What has made matters worse is that terrorism organizations largely supported by outside countries would launch rocket attacks from Palestinian areas into Israel. These attacks led to Israelis conducting airstrikes into the same Palestinian areas putting innocent Palestinians literally in the crosshairs of the conflict. A major country supporting these terror organizations such as Hamas is Iran. Of course, Iran is also a source of conflict between Arab countries as well. See, Iran has a different culture than the rest of the Middle East. Ethnically, they're Persian, they're not Arab. They speak Farsi, not Arabic, and they practice Shia Islam, not Sunni. But Iran wasn't always a country at odds with the Arabs or the United States for that matter. Early in the Cold War, Iran was an ally of the United States who supported the government and even saw the Iranians advance military jets. However, the leader of Iran, the Shah, while supported by the United States, used harsh tactics against his own people to stay in power of his country. Finally, the Iranian people rose up and overthrew the Shah in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Shah would eventually flee to the United States. With a fall of the Shah, an anti-American fundamentalist Islamic regime came to power led by the Grand Ayatollah community who was the religious leader of most of the Shia Muslims. Now, when the United States refused Iranian demands to surrender the Shah so he could face charges in Iran, supporters of the Ayatollah, mostly students, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The Americans were finally released after President Reagan was sworn into office but there has been serious tensions between the United States and Iran ever since. This break in relations between the United States and Iran to motion a set of different conflicts within the region. With a new regime in Iran which no longer had the protection of the United States, Iraq saw an opportunity to invade and capture Iran's rich oil fields. Iran also had something that Iraq doesn't have which is a better port for oil tankers to use in order to take its oil to foreign markets. So Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 and war raged until 1988 with as many as 1.5 million deaths many killed due to the use of chemical weapons. No while, ultimately, no land actually really changed hands between Iran and Iraq. For Iran, while tragic, the war helped strengthen the regime of the Ayatollah. For Iraq, the war left the country as well as its dictator, Saval Hussein. We can politically, as well as, it left it with a great amount of debt. Fortunately for Iraq, it has a large amount of oil but it needed oil prices to stay high so it could be able to pay its debt. But when their neighbors to the southeast quake began pumping more oil than OPEC had agreed to oil prices began to fall. And when American diplomats gave Saddam's government unclear signals, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The invasion of Kuwait would solve several of Iraq's problems. Saddam would be able to rein back the amount of oil that's coming out of Kuwait in order to raise oil prices. Iraq would also have more oil now controlling Kuwait's oil fields and Iraq was eyeing Kuwaiti's port in order to receive oil tankers. But there was one catch. The United States was not okay with an invasion like Saddam's government did fight. The fear was that Iraq would continue to move down into the oil fields of Saudi Arabia as well. So in 1991, President Bush, supported by a United Nations resolution, assembled a vast coalition to first protect Saudi Arabia. This was Operation Desert Chill. Then there was Desert Storm. After an intense bombing campaign against Iraqi forces, this massive coalition attacked and liberated Kuwait. The fighting ended with a ceasefire agreement that was conditional on Iraq giving up all their weapons of mass destruction as well as their long range missiles. However, in 1996, the United States once again attacked Iraq in order to protect the Shia population in the south. And in 1998, the United States resumed air strikes against the suspected Iraqi W&D sites for four days after Saddam's forces failed to comply with inspectors that was agreed to by the ceasefire agreement. In 2002, the U.S. felt that something had to be done about Iraq. For months, Saddam's forces have been firing at U.S. aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone established to prevent Iraq from further attacking the Shia population in the south of the country. Intelligence from around the world continued to come in suggesting that Iraq was still harboring chemical weapons. Additionally, an al-Qaeda-connected group, the Ansar al-Islam, was enjoying sanctuary in the northeast of Iraq, not to mention the human rights abuses that Saddam had continually inflicted upon his own people for years. So in 2002, Congress voted to authorize military action. In 2003, the United States and the Small International Coalition invaded Iraq. Allied forces toppled the Iraqi regime that captured Saddam hiding in the hole and helped run the country's first election. However, a fierce insurgency of former regime and al-Qaeda-related terrorist organizations grew in the country which kept the United States in Iraq until the late 2011 at a cost of over 4,500 U.S. casualties. Now, during this war, while American military operations have largely defeated the organization known as AQI or al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, when U.S. forces left Iraq, AQI grew in power and changed its name. It was now known as ISIS. ISIS had taken advantage of the Syrian Civil War which gave it the ability to regroup and become stronger and surge back into Iraq. The newly trained Iraqi military was unable to confront ISIS largely due to the government's political instability and the United States was slow to react to the surge of ISIS. At its height, ISIS controlled a third of Syria and 40% of Iraq. The United States, once again, went back into Iraq and by 2017, ISIS had lost 95% of the territory it had held. But it is Iran that most analysts still maintains may be the biggest threat to peace. So we know that Iran has had a nuclear program and while experts disagree on whether Iran is continuing its quest for a nuclear bomb, the idea of Iran with a bomb is rather scary. This is because leaders at the top of Iran's theocratic government has continuously called for the destruction of Israel and atomic bomb gives Iran the ability to act out on these goals. Now, one fortunate side effect of Iran's belligerent statements is that many Arab countries are now uniting against Iran and even joining in two peace agreements with Israel. In the last couple years, Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and UAE or the United Arab Emirates all have signed treaties with Israel with the assistance of the United States Administration. Another recent development is the movement of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem. See, in 1995, the United States Congress overwhelmingly voted to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the city of Jerusalem. However, each president since had been laid falling through on this law until 2018, the embassy was finally moved. Though most of the international community disagreed with this move, many argued that doing so was a provocative action that would lead to massive conflict. Unfortunately, these fears of overwhelming violence have not been realized, while however time will tell about what the future of peace is in the Middle East. Alright, so I've outlined many of the conflicts we have seen and continue to see in the Middle East. Until next time, keep on learning.