The only mistake Britain made was withdrawing before they had the populations indoctrinated in how to live like humans instead of dark age savages.
Savages?!
Would you call Zionists “savages”? How about the Roma?
The underpinning issue here isn’t even one of religion. The same issues you see between Muslims and other Muslims, can be seen between Hindus and non-Hindus, between Jews and non-Jews, Roma and non-Roma, and so on.
The nomadic lifestyle predates Christianity and Islam and the concept of the nation state and wherever people live according to a nomadic lifestyle, our understanding of property rights and artificial nation state borders just doesn’t work properly.
For thousands of years, nomadic tribes in the tropics have been rooted in one village but travel hundreds if not thousands of miles for at least six months of the year, to follow the climate. The Old Testament confirms that the Jewish tribes were just as mobile as the Tuareg still are.
So when, in the 20th century, a lot of Western loonies with big maps of whole regions, just drew lines and said “that’s one country, that’s another”, all they really managed to achieve was, exacerbate entrenched tribal disputes between nomadic tribes of all faiths.
In Iraq/Iran/Kuwait there are tribes with centuries worth of historical and cultural claims to villages on different sides of the bordersm suddenly separated by an artificial barrier. Same happened with Kashmir, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Result: perpetual political and cultural disputes both between nations and between tribes within nations, right across the region.
If you took away all the power structures in those countries, abolished the borders, and left them to their own devices, there’d be a lot of transient hotspots where multiple tribes claim ownership of the same turf. But you’d also find a lot of stability - “that town’s Shammar, that town’s Dulaim, that town’s Jabouri, that town’s Pashtun” and so on.
At that point you wouldn’t get the scale of war we have now, because the system would regulate itself and disputes would be between small local population groups.
The same is the case in Libya. Libya can never be “one nation” without an oppressively strong regime to force cooperation between the tribes. But it cannot be two nations either, because the entire population has deep nomadic roots and it’ll simply be a matter of time before they come into conflict. The best solution really is, to have several nation states within a federal union where they have to cooperate and no one tribe is given power to dominate the others. But that might not be practical right now.
There are thousands of Westernised Jews migrating from America to Israel - even if ten generations of their ancestors have never even visited Israel, they still feel as though Jerusalem is their spiritual home. And the sheer fact they have that nomadic drive to go “home” to Israel, *proves* that the same mindset cannot be totally bred out even after living according to Western norms for a hundred years or more. However, the Palestinians share the same mindset.
A Palestinian might have no legitimate claim to land in Israel but when he says, “But at least my family have been here for three generations, that guy just got off the boat from America and the last time an ancestor of his was here we still thought the world was flat!” he’s making the exact same mistake that we in the West make - assuming that there’s no nomadic tendency involved when there patently is.
I haven’t yet met a Christian from America who’s got a huge romantic vision of moving back to Dorset because they have a stronger pull to Weymouth than they do to America! This is because Northwestern Europe never has depended on that nomadic lifestyle. Frankly, we’ll never understand that pull in the same way an Arab or a Zionist will.
Given that the British did what they could to keep them that way for as long as possible (for understandable reasons) what was the mistake? Face it, empires are ruled by force and lies. I'm an admirer of the British Empire and don't hold it against them.