Someone Aware Me Please?

[Tobie]

Basically a massive series of huge fuck-ups happened. Starting with the British and French arbitrarily splitting up the Levant between them - splitting various ethnic groups between 2 (or more) countries - most notably the Kurds, who are still fighting for independence from both Iraq and Turkey.

This was compounded by the creation of the modern state of Israel, who basically decided to invade absolutely everyone, which is fine since the paragons of democracy, the USA, backed them (and supplied them with high tech weapons, aircraft etc.). Since the cold war was happening at this time, Russia started sending weapons to Egypt and Syria. These wars resulted in Israel taking the Golan heights from Syria, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt (Sinai was given back - the Gaza strip was occupied territory, but were given the right of self-governance, and elected Hamas to rule them, which is a terrorist organisation according to most western countries) and the West Bank from Jordan. The fallout from these wars is what is currently in the news, which is fairly terrible, considering the last all out war was in 1973. Huge areas are littered with mines that haven't been cleared.

tl;dr - Israel was allowed free reign because the US backed them, which led to massive wars when the Arabs decided they didn't like the Israelis taking all their stuff.