Charles Glass

An invisible frontier cuts across the North of Iraq for hundreds of miles, from Syria in the west to Iran in the east. This border doesn’t conform to legal, ethnic or tribal boundaries; it ignores mountains, rivers and other natural barriers; it is not even a straight line, like the 36th parallel. The United States likes straight lines, but down on the ground, there aren’t any....

Lloyd George wished to acquire two provinces above all: Palestine, on behalf of Jewish Zionists from Europe . . . and Mesopotamia – with Baghdad at its heart – for its oil and its positionas the Arab world’s frontier with Persia, Afghanistan and India . . . Britain would divide Syria, and unite Iraq.

At sunset on Christmas Day last year, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs from the once Christian towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour assembled outside the burned and gutted Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem to protest Israel’s blockade of their towns. The Paradise was damaged in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard...

The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the...