The Middle East does not convulse in a vacuum. It’s wars, its proxy armies, its assassinations, its coup attempts, its sectarian hatreds, none arose spontaneously from desert sand. They descend, with the terrible logic of cause and consequence, from two foundational acts: a decision made in Washington on a May afternoon in 1948, and a declaration thundered from Tehran in February 1979. Together, they form the twin original sins of the modern Middle East.
On May 12, 1948, the Oval Office held a clash of historic proportions. President Harry Truman had assembled his senior advisers to deliberate on the imminent declaration of a Jewish state. General of the Armies George C Marshall, whom Truman himself called “the greatest living American,” the architect of Europe’s postwar resurrection, rose to object. Marshall believed that recognising Israel the moment it was declared would ignite a war across the entire Middle East. Within twenty-four hours of independence, it did. His memo that evening left no ambiguity: “I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against the President.”
For a man who, as a matter of principle, had never cast a ballot in his life, it was the gravest possible rebuke.
Marshall’s objections were both strategic and moral. Recognition would alienate the Arab world, threaten American access to oil, and hand Moscow a pretext to penetrate a region that Washington was trying to seal. His Near East experts agreed almost without exception They were right. They have been proved right every decade since.
And yet Truman overruled his greatest adviser, not solely for humanitarian reasons, but because an old friend walked into the Oval Office. Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson had opened a haberdashery together in Kansas City after the First World War. It failed. The friendship did not. By 1948, Jacobson, the eighth-grade-educated son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, was the only private Jewish citizen an exasperated president would still receive. On March 13, he slipped past the gatekeepers and made a single, devastating appeal: “Your hero is Andrew Jackson. I have a hero too, Chaim Weizmann. He’s an old man, very sick, and you’re putting him off. This isn’t like you, Harry.”
Truman agreed to the meeting. Eleven minutes after Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, the United States became the first nation on earth to recognise it. America’s UN ambassador walked out of the building rather than witness the announcement.
What those eleven minutes also produced, unremarked upon in Washington, was the dispossession of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who had lived on that land for centuries. They were not in the Oval Office. They were not in Eddie Jacobson’s prayer. In the calculus of 1948, they were invisible: a people erased by the momentum of Zionist diplomacy and the moral arithmetic of post-Holocaust guilt. The Nakba, the Catastrophe, planted a grievance so deep it has never healed, and never will until it is honestly named.
Thirty-one years later, a different hubris took hold. On February 11, 1979, as the Shah fled and Ayatollah Khomeini descended from the skies like a figure from scripture, a new ideology seized state power. It was not, its architect immediately declared, a domestic affair. In a 1980 speech, Khomeini was unambiguous: “We should try hard to export our revolution to the world.”
The target map was drawn in sectarian ink. Iraq, where Shia constituted 65% of the population but lived under a Sunni Ba’athist boot. Bahrain, 70% Shia, is ruled by a Sunni monarchy. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, and Lebanon, all home to Shia communities that Khomeini considered his constituency, not sovereign citizens of independent nations.
The theory was seductive in its simplicity: demographics would do the work of ideology. What Khomeini fatally miscalculated was that Arab Shia were not Iranians. Their grievances were real; their willingness to serve as instruments of Persian theocratic ambition was another matter. The results were a decade of blood: a coup attempt in Bahrain in 1981, bombings in Kuwait in 1983, assassinations across the Gulf, and the birth of Hezbollah in Lebanon under Iranian Revolutionary Guard tutelage. Above all, there was the war: Saddam Hussein, watching Khomeini’s revolutionary export doctrine with the eye of a man who saw both threat and opportunity, invaded Iran in September 1980. Eight years. One million dead.
To understand Khomeini’s ferocity, one must travel back to August 1953. Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, ending the arrangement by which British shareholders extracted Iranian wealth while Iranians watched. The CIA and MI6 organised Operation Ajax, bribed military officers, hired street thugs, and on August 19, 1953, arrested Mossadegh in his pajamas and restored the Shah to his throne. Washington then funded the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, for 26 years.
David Nalle, who served as Director of the Bi-National Center in Tehran, later said it plainly: “The removal of Mossadegh was, in my estimation, a tragic mistake. We caused, in effect, the Khomeini revolution by doing that.”
The three decisions form a chain. Washington’s careless erasure of Palestinian rights in 1948. It’s the criminal overthrow of Iranian democracy in 1953. Tehran’s delusional attempt to ignite a regional revolution in 1979. Each was made by men who believed they were acting rationally. Each sowed a catastrophe that outlasted them.
The Middle East of today, its rubble Gaza, its hollowed Lebanon, its proxy-war Yemen, is the direct inheritance of these original sins. The wars are not ancient. The hatreds were manufactured in specific rooms by specific men on specific days.
History does not forgive what it does not forget. And the Middle East forgets nothing.
- The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor