British Empire

It’s Complicated and Superficial Knowledge Doesn’t Help

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Any serious discussion of the Israeli Palestinian conflict risks becoming incomplete when it treats the Palestinian Nakba as the only refugee tragedy born from the collapse of the British Mandate and the wars that followed. The suffering of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 was profound and historically significant. Hundreds of thousands were displaced during a brutal conflict whose consequences remain unresolved today. But modern discussion often overlooks an equally consequential human tragedy: the destruction of ancient Jewish communities across the Arab and wider Middle Eastern world. Tragedies affected both communities Between roughly 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews fled, were expelled, or were…

Oil, Empire, and Resistance – A History of Western Interference in Iranian Affairs from 1909 to the current conflict

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On 26 May 1908, a British drilling crew working for William Knox D’Arcy struck oil at Masjed Soleiman in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. It was the first major oil discovery in the Middle East, and it would transform Iran’s relationship with the outside world forever. Within a year, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated, and the machinery of foreign control over one of the world’s most strategically vital nations was set in motion. What followed over the next century was a sustained pattern of British, and later American, interference in Iranian sovereign affairs — a story of…

