Aksakal’s The War That Made the Middle East presents itself as a corrective to the familiar narrative of Ottoman inevitability, but the revision it offers raises serious problems of emphasis and judgment. While the book aims to dislodge the idea of terminal imperial decay, it does so by shifting the primary burden of causality toward European imperial ambition and wartime contingency, while narrowing attention to the Ottoman Empire’s own long-standing internal hierarchies and violences. The result is not simply a different angle on collapse, but a reframing that risks obscuring responsibility.
By foregrounding late Ottoman “state survival,” high diplomacy, and strategic calculation, the narrative devotes comparatively little sustained attention to the lived experience of non-Muslim populations or to the ways Ottoman policy choices—rather than foreign pressure alone—produced catastrophe. This imbalance subtly recasts a deeply stratified Islamic imperial order as a largely neutral framework destabilized from without, rather than as a system whose internal cleavages, corruption, and discriminatory structures helped make the First World War so devastating in the region. Contingency becomes explanatory cover, and inheritance fades from view.
This distortion is most evident in the treatment of the Armenians. Although the book acknowledges the mass deportations and killings of 1915–1916, these events are embedded within a broader story of imperial crisis and survival. Yet the Armenian genocide is not simply one tragic wartime cost among many. Serious scholarship recognizes it as a centrally directed effort to destroy a people. Any framing that folds this annihilation primarily into an abstract narrative of national preservation risks echoing apologetic state discourse, where atrocity is relativized by circumstance. Naming genocide without proportionately foregrounding it remains a moral evasion.
A similar marginalization occurs with respect to the Jewish story. Jewish immigrants who legally purchased land under Ottoman law—often through organized communal institutions—were not peripheral actors. Their economic activity, social infrastructure, and growing political consciousness reshaped Palestine well before the war’s end. These developments formed a critical prehistory of the postwar order. When Jewish agency is compressed into the background while Ottoman statecraft dominates the foreground, the emergence of Jewish collective self-determination appears contingent and derivative rather than deliberate and long-gestating.
Consequently, the fall of the Ottoman Empire is cast largely as tragedy: the violent dismantling of a multiethnic polity whose disappearance unleashed instability. What this framing underplays is that for communities long confined to juridical subordination, imperial defeat also marked a reckoning. The empire’s collapse dismantled a system that normalized dhimmitude and constrained Jewish political existence, clearing space for lawful return, international recognition, and public sovereignty. The instability that followed cannot be understood apart from sustained rejection of that transformation.
Taken together, these choices of emphasis advance more than an academic argument. They normalize the old order by treating its collapse as the central loss, decouple that loss from the empire’s own record of minority persecution, and render Jewish national revival as an aftershock of great-power maneuvering rather than a legitimate historical project in its own right. A more honest account of the war that made the Middle East would invert these priorities, placing genocide and the emergence of Jewish collective self-rule at the center of the story, and judging imperial nostalgia by the standard of those whose suffering and liberation define the era’s true legacy.