Palestine and the Middle East

The Middle East was an important arena for the operation of the traditional European state system, but Middle Eastern states were not accepted as part of that system, although one of them—the Ottoman Empire—for centuries controlled large areas of Europe and the Black Sea littorals. Little had changed from the old days of the Concert of Europe, the Eastern Question, and the Sick Man of Europe, when states in the Middle East were essentially objects, not subjects, of international relations. In the interwar and cold war periods, and in the decade and a half since the end of the cold war and the rise of a unipolar world system dominated by the United States, the international system, rather than restraining the dominant power or powers from expanding their dominion in the Middle East, often facilitated this dominion.