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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to another episode of Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop.

Today we're going to turn our attention to an area which we've rather overlooked in our survey of the events of 80 years ago,

and which we're turning to now, in keeping with our intention to discuss not just historical events,

but their subsequent resonance. I'm talking about the Middle East. The region was profoundly

touched by the war with actual fighting in the Levant and Iraq, as we'll hear, including a campaign,

which marked the last time that Britain and France went to war with each other.

In 1944, the region stood at a crossroads. The processes began by the collapse of the Ottoman

Empire and the preceding conflict were gathering pace. The colonial arrangements that handed

mandates to France and Britain to govern the Middle East were clearly going to be untenable

after the war ended. The rise of Arab nationalism posed a huge challenge to war-weary Europeans,

and the mounting clamour for a Jewish state in Palestine was a recipe for endless trouble,

trouble that persists today, all of which made 1944 a year that would have great and enduring

significance. Conflict, of course, was nothing new to the peoples and lands of the eastern Mediterranean.

For many centuries, the area had been a cockpit, where Christendom

and Islam clashed repeatedly in a series of struggles that mixed religion with the more atabistic

and age-old hunger for land and power. Today we're going to talk about how the European

war was felt in the Middle East and how the results played out subsequently,

...