With the blurring of the border between Syria and Iraq by the Sunni militant group ISIS, American journalists have been talking a lot about the Sykes Picot treaty, the secret agreement during World War I between the French and the British to carve up the Middle East when the Ottoman Empire ended.

These journalists all describe Sykes Picot as an instance of imperial arrogance: European powers dabbling in Middle East geography and ignoring traditional ethnic and religious lines.

Fair enough. But if they’re going to bring up Sykes-Picot as a sign of how wrong the west is about religion in the Middle East, why don’t they bring up that other secret agreement of World War I, just a year later: the Balfour Declaration, when the British promised Lord Rothschild as representative of the Jewish community that the Jews could have a “national home” in Palestine? The Balfour Declaration was soon published in November 1917, but it was arrived at after months and years of lobbying by Zionists. And it also carved up the Middle East in ways that haunt us to this day.
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But I also see our role in this mess: the colonialist/Zionist hand in fueling religious extremism. Imperial Britain came up with the Balfour Declaration in utter defiance of local political and religious sentiment in 1917, and the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 engendered religious conflict in the region. When you travel around Palestine and its neighbors, there is a lot of rage toward the Jewish state/US client, and not a lot of talk of “a caliphate.” The State Department warned back in 1948 that recognizing a Jewish state would lead to endless unrest in the region; the reporters should be addressing that factor.