I’ve noticed that when the media refers to the Middle East, they frequently mean just the area around Israel and the Palestinian Territories. This is especially true when talking about peace in the Middle East or the Middle East peace negotiations. I suppose it might make some sense if that was the only conflict in the region. With recent wars going on in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen among others, it seems like someone talking about peace in the Middle East should be more specific about which conflict they are referring to. Here are some examples.
I realize this is a minor rant, it’s just something I find annoying and have always wondered about. I put in this forum because I don’t know if their is a factual answer, and questions on this topic frequently end up in Great Debates. Please move to another forum if appropriate.
Well what term would you suggest? 1. The existing terms are either Israel slanted or Palestine slanted, and the media don’t wanted slanted terminology. 2. For a long time Gaza was claimed by Egypt and the West Bank was claimed by Jordan.
I always thought it came about due to longitude. The area in question, was - longitudinally - roughly halfway to the other side of the world. Middle East, get it?
Sort of like our American Mid-west. Mid-west of what? Longitude 90W, that’s what.
Because Israel & Palestine are in the Middle East. Same way I’m sure that news agencies outside the US refer to stories from NY or Texas or California or Kansas as all being ‘…in America’.
While there is an historical basis for the use of the term, the question is about what governs the use of the term in particular circumstances. Since this is often political, I’m punting this back to GD.
I’ve always thought it was a good choice because the Israel/Palestine issue is a regional issue as much as one between those two players in particular. The six-day war included Egypt, Syria and Jordan, but pretty much every country in the region has been involved, if only in terms of money and rhetoric. You simply can’t understand that conflict by looking at just the geographic territory of Israel/Palestine.
Of course, the OP is right that we can’t just talk about Israel/Palestine when we say “Peace in the Middle East.” Settling their particular issue would go a long way toward stabilizing the whole region, but it wouldn’t solve other conflicts, like the Sunni/Shiite divide.
Why do the media and people still use cold war era classification of countries as allied with the US, The Soviet Union, or neutral and unaligned to describe the world?
Why do the media and people append gate to a word to describe every scandal?
I always read of the ME as the area between the Euphrates and Indus and South of a lone formed by (roughly) the Caucases, Caspian, Oxus and HinduKush. The Near East was the area between the Bosphorus and the Euphrates.
Actually, I think -at least in U.S. media - the opposite is true. Places that are very remote from the Middle East such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, or Somalia get rolled into the Middle East.
And that last point is the key to it. The terms Near East, Middle East and Far East were used by the (British) India Office and the Foreign Office in the nineteenth century, and they are defined partly in relation to India. The meant, basically:
Near East: Territories under Ottoman rule (including, in the nineteenth centuries, territories in the Balkans).
Middle East: Territories between the Ottoman territories and India. (And, at the time, India included what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma). Plus, often those parts of the Ottoman Territories which were closer to India than Europe.
Far East: Every south and east of Burma - i.e. everywhere beyond India.
With, first, the progressive loss of Ottoman territories in Europe and, secondly, the loss of its Arab territories, “Near East” fell into disuse, and those parts of Asia and North Africa which were formerly considered to be Near East were included in the Middle East.