Was there significant Anti-Western attitudes in Middle Eastern Countries present today prior to the establishment of Israel?

by I_Ordered_Cornflakes

Not trying to generalise here, but coming from one of these countries, I've realised there is significant west hate, especially against the US. Their most popular argument is the US's support of Israel. Did this hate originate from the creation of Israel or was it stemmed deeper, probably post Crusades?

PaxOttomanica

The US hate is pretty recent and results from America's more recent involvement in the Middle East compared to the likes of Russia, England, or France. America actually had a fairly positive image in the Middle East after Woodrow Wilson and the Americans led the charge for national self-determination following World War I. As the British and French pulled out of the Middle East following World War II, the US took up their mantle and began to meddle much more, both for oil politics and for Cold War proxy reasons.

Other powers had a more dubious reputation. Ottoman citizens and policy makers were very much aware of British, French, Italian, and Russian designs on their territory. Those countries granted citizenship to people born in the Ottoman Empire that would otherwise have been Ottoman nationals. These people received many privileges on account of their European passports. All four of those countries repeatedly chipped away at Ottoman borders (France: Algeria and Tunisia, Britain: Cyprus, Russia: Balkans and Caucasus, Italy: Libya). Despite this, your average Middle East Citizen was probably not particularly "Anti-Western."

European powers were extremely brutal to colonized Middle Eastern peoples. Before WWI, the Ottoman Empire could protect many Middle Eastern people within and outside of its borders. European powers would often be wary of mistreating people in former Ottoman territories, as the Ottomans could and did apply diplomatic pressure. The Europeans did not take this pressure lightly. In fact, one of the great fears of the British and French in 1914 was that their Muslim colonial peoples in Algeria and India would rise up to support the Ottomans after the Ottomans threw in with the Germans. After WWI, there was no "Muslim European power" like the Ottomans to try and protect Middle Eastern and North African peoples. the Turkish Republic turned inwards and became extremely disinterested in the fates of its former imperial holdings.

After WWI, the French, British, and Italians were free to pacify their new holdings, which were, in the Arab East, classified as "mandates" and not colonies. This designation supposedly meant they were more "civilized" peoples that were close to full membership in the world order than most colonized peoples, but the British and French ended up treating them like colonies.

After WWI, those three powers tried to subdue insurgencies on the cheap. Combined with new technologies developed in WWI, this meant lots of bombings and sometimes chemical gassings of rebels. The French brutally put down the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, indiscriminately shelling Damascus. In the 1930s the Italians "pacified" eastern Libya by bombing and gassing nomadic rebels, and eventually began putting them in concentration camps. The British decided Iraq was too far away from supply lines to rule with a full army of occupation, so they decided to run the mandate by ruthlessly bombing restive tribes and populations that wouldn't submit to the British authorities in Baghdad. Bombs were cheaper and resulted in far less British casualties than a full occupational army.

In the end, European colonial rule in the Middle East was extremely brutal. This period (1920s-30s) is when the "crusade" discourse emerged. No one on either side (Christian or Muslim) particularly remembered the Crusades from the time they happened until European conquerors began showing up in the Levant. Europeans, particularly the French, partly saw themselves as renewing the Crusades' goal of bringing Enlightenment to the Holy Land. Muslim populations saw that rhetoric, and intellectuals started reminding Middle Eastern populations how awful the Crusades had been for Muslims. This rhetoric, combined with the brutality of the colonial regimes, created a lot of anger and what we now would call anti-Western sentiment. As mentioned earlier in my post, the US inherited a lot of this animus after they began being more active in the Middle East following the Anglo-French withdrawal following WW2. All of this is independent of the anger generated by the Israel/Palestine situation and the US's unconditional support for Israel.

So: The hate is older than US support for Israel, but not that much older. It most certainly does not go all the way back to the Crusades, even though those have become a popular topic since the 1920s. A lot of it is inherited from the anti-western sentiment generated by European colonial powers. Some good books are Makdisi's "Faith Misplaced" on US-Arab relations, Provence's "Great Syrian Revolt" on the French in Syria, and Lindqvist's "Bomb the Savages" is a great, quick read on the brutality of European powers in the Middle East post WW 1.