Wednesday, January 07, 2009
ME History
So in Middle Eastern History, we're talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict for basically the rest of the year. I had an idea of posting the things I learn in that class here. I'll post the earliest beginnings of it, and if people like that I'll continue.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a Great War taking place. The Ottoman Empire had been reduced to Turkey (or Anatolia), the Fertile Crescent, and Arabia. The British decided to try to get the Arabs to revolt against the Ottomans. They approached Sherif Husayn, Emir of Mecca, to organize a revolt. McMahon was the name of the British High Commissioner for Egypt, and he negotiated a deal with Husayn, and the conditions are as follows:
1) Subject to modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca.
2) Great Britain will guarantee the Holy Places against all external aggression and will recognize their inviolability.
3) When the situation admits, Great Britain will give to the Arabs her advice and will assist them to establish what may appear to be the most suitable forms of government in those various territories.
4) On the other hand, it is understood that the Arabs have decided to seek the advice and guidance of Great Britain only, and that such European advisers and officials as may be required for the formation of a sound form of administration will be British.
5) With regard to the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra, the Arabs will recognize that the established positions and interests of Great Britain necessitate special administrative arrangements in order to secure their territories from foreign aggression, to promote the welfare of the local population and to safguard our mutual economic interests.
The territory asked for by Husayn includes the Fertile Crescent and Arabia, from the borders of Turkey and Iran to the Red Sea. Palestine is included.
Now, the British made a separate, secret deal with the French, between Sir Mark Sykes and Charles Georges-Picot, the French consul in Syria. They divided the map between each other, with most of Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia going to Britain, and a remaining portion of Iraq, a part of Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon (Many of these countries didn't exist yet) going to the French. They decided to administrate Palestine together.
Finally, in order to get American Jewish and Russian Jewish support for the war, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild, a Zionist and prominent member of the Jewish community:
"I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet. His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievemnet of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status of Jews in any other country."
Palestine was promised in 3 separate treaties to 3 separate parties: the Arabs, the French and British, and the Jews.
15 Comments:
By 
TigerHawk, at
Wed Jan 07, 09:35:00 PM:
Excellent idea! And it will have the additional benefit of helping you study for your tests and exams. :)
By Who Struck John, at
Wed Jan 07, 09:57:00 PM:
If you want to read more about it in depth, I suggest a A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922.
By Escort81, at
Wed Jan 07, 10:22:00 PM:
I could be wrong, but IIRC, the French had little if any role in what eventually became Israel and Gaza and the West Bank. The French were almost entirely in Lebanon and Syria, to the north and east of what we now think of as "Palestine" or some possible site of a future state for the Palestinian Arabs. I don't think any French soldiers, Foreign Legion or otherwise, bled alongside the Brits as they exited the Mandate in 1947-48.
Also, I don't think the Balfour Letter was particularly aimed at Russian Jews, since many of them were anti-Czarist (if not outright Mensheviks or Bolsheviks) and were therefore already predisposed to oppose WWI, and in any case were probably busy trying to ward off starvation in their shtetls at the time to care too much about a new Jewish State. Zionism in concept probably had more political appeal to American Jews and British Jews.
But your father is correct -- keep posting. And WSJ is also correct -- the Fromkin book is excellent.
By AmPowerBlog, at
Wed Jan 07, 10:30:00 PM:
By Leif, at
Wed Jan 07, 11:01:00 PM:
The Fromkin book is good, but dated (try Karsh's "Islamic Imperialism" for a more contemporary work). The critical point that is missing from this discussion is that the agreement between the British and the Sherif of Mecca was based on reciprocal responsibilities. The Sherif promised much and delivered almost nothing. Militarily, the Arab revolt was a complete joke. Lawrence tried to play it up in order to save his own reputation, but even a reading of "Seven Pillars" shows that what little real fighting occurred was done by Muslim troops in the British Army (mostly Sudanese and Indian) sent to bolster the Sherif. Based on this utter failure of the Arabs to meet any of their military obligations, the British did not feel compelled to honor the original agreement. Moreover, they turned to the Zionists as a counter-weight to the Arabs.
By SR, at
Wed Jan 07, 11:40:00 PM:
Keep it up TH Teen, and you will have plenty of discussion material to bring back to perplex your teacher. This is delicious.
By Jeff, at
Thu Jan 08, 12:02:00 AM:
Leif is right. But it's not that simple.
The British thought in turns and also all at the same time that the French would be helpful, the Arabs would be helpful and the Jews would be helpful in fighting the Ottomans in the Middle East.
When they were feeling desperate, the made promises to the French which they felt would have to be undone. The British Egypt officers--the "experts"--were convinced that the Egyptians and other Arabs loved and admired the British and wanted to be ruled by them. How's that for self-delusion? :p
They thought that the French were despised and that they would have the utmost difficulty ruling and since they had been of no help in the war effort in the Middle East, they would have to be done out of their share by "making them see sense."
"Making them see sense" would be by done by bringing the Meccan sons of the Sharif Hussein to bear to tell the French that they refused to be ruled by them in any way whatsoever.
Since the Hashemites, as they were called, were British proteges, and the Arabs obviously going to need and therefore accept British "protection and guidance".
The British left the exact terms of their promises to the Hashemites vague so that they could fiddle about with them as they pleased. In fact, they were under the illusion that the Caliphate was a sort of spiritual authority like the papacy, while Hussein and his sons understood that they were being promised a vast kingdom.
The Jews were supposed by these anti-Semitic Egypt officers to be "running the show and pulling the strings from behind" in the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, they reasoned, if they promised Palestine to the Jews, these financiers and half-caste Young Turk politicians would pull their support from the war and back the British.
Lot of sense, right? But that's in fact what they thought.
Palestine was never explicitly mentioned to the Hashemites as part of their realm to be. But as the nature and scope of that realm were left deliberately vague it didn't need to be.
With respect to the French, it was part of Syria of course. Until Lloyd George asked for Palestine and Clemenceau gave it to him, it was supposed to be within the French Syria mandate.
But the French were to be "talked round" and "made to see sense" in the end when they saw the great contribution of the Jews to the War.
You have to remember what a desperate affair the World War had become for the British. It was by no means clear that they would win. Most clear minded observers would have guessed they would lose.
All this stuff has the air of people who were in over their heads trying desperately to crack the stagnant, all consuming maw of the trenches on the Western Front.
And when the day dawned at last and with it a British victory, those vague pipe dreamy things had suddenly to be squared with one another and put into practice. It's to the credit of the British that they did after a fashion try to keep all their promises to all the parties, though none of them had done anything to deserve it.
The worthless French got their Syria mandate. The worthless Hashemites got the thrones of the new nations of Iraq and Jordan. And the Jews, who were never the powers behind the throne they were supposed to be, got their vaguely worded "National Home *IN* (not consisting of) Palestine", which was somehow not supposed to conflict with the rights of the native inhabitants...
The Zionists thought the native Arabs would be pleased to have lots of Jewish settlers swamp their countryside and raise the standard of living. More self-delusion.
And it STILL would have come to naught since Jews mostly didn't WANT to live in Palestine, thank you. But Hitler provided the waves of refugees that made for a critical mass of Jewish immigrants and made the state a real possibility. And the deal was sealed by the massive Jewish expulsions from Yemen and Iraq.
One might almost say that Israel was a creation of Hitler and the anti-Semitic Arabs...a fine irony.
By 
, at
Thu Jan 08, 01:28:00 AM:
I could be mistaken, but much of the land that became Israel after the 1947 partition had already been bought by the Jews.
They started to buy land before the beginning of the 20th century (the Jewish Agency), and settle many European Jews (many from Eastern Europe, beyond the Pale, and all that). The beginnings of Zionism; the return to Israel, ending the Diaspora.
A sizable community of Jews existed in the 1920's in Palestine.
Tel Aviv was a modern city founded by the Jewish settlers. There are photographs you can find on the Web of Tel Aviv in the 20's; a very handsome small city at the time, as I recollect.
-David
By Gary Rosen, at
Thu Jan 08, 04:39:00 AM:
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, originally published in 1917, Jerusalem was two-thirds Jewish as long ago as 1905:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08364a.htm
Jeff's message has quite a bit of characterization and innuendo, but perhaps not much in the way of facts.
By , at
Thu Jan 08, 10:03:00 AM:
There is an interesting aside to the origins of the Balfour Declaratiuon starting on page 89 and continuing over to page 90 in Richard Rhodes' The Making of The Atomic Bomb. It seems to be in part payback for Dr. Weizmann's contribution to an improved manufacturing process for gun cotton during WW1 for the British.
By TOF, at
Thu Jan 08, 11:18:00 AM:
Palestine is the name ancient Romans used to refer to the region between the Mediterranean Sea the Jordan River.
Those damned Romans are still causing mischief.
Or maybe the Arabs just can't let go of the past.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Jan 08, 12:25:00 PM:
Gary: Although your source's numbers don't match up with some other sources, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Jerusalem) your assertion about the population of Jerusalem doesn't actually conflict with anything Jeff said, which focuses on the half-witted British diplomatic dealings of the period. (and seems correct, if not really specific on details)
The conflicts between promises made by the British had to do with the personal beliefs of important personalities within the British government, the relative success of Zionist lobbyists, the fall of the Tzar, and simply poorly designed policy where one hand didn't know what the other was doing. The different beliefs of successive governments eventually affected events as well.
That's a problem that authoritarian states have when dealing with democracies. You think you have an understanding set up, and then one of those stupid elections come along and suddenly, you're talking to a different group of people who want to throw out or renegotiate everything.
By , at
Thu Jan 08, 07:53:00 PM:
You're all jumping way ahead, just thought I'd let you know that.
By Gary Rosen, at
Fri Jan 09, 01:56:00 AM:
DF: I admit my post was a little disjointed; I didn't mean to imply a connection between Jeff's post and that little statistic I gave but I wasn't clear about that. It's just that Jeff's post bugged me, not even because it necessarily took the point of view of one "side" or the other, but because it was long on snarky speculation about the parties' motives and inner thoughts but short on historical facts. Given the great deal of emotion that people have over this conflict (and I'll admit I'm one of them) I think it's better to start with whatever history we can verify before leaping to broad conclusions. Of course even the history itself is often a matter of raging dispute.
By , at
Fri Jan 09, 12:41:00 PM:
I think that the modern history really needs to be started almost a century earlier than that in 1808. Eastern European Jews began buying land and moving to Palestine. Remember that this was under the Ottoman.
There was friction between the new arrivals and the prior population which consisted predominantly of Arabs almost immediately.
This movement of Jews from Europe to Palestine gained the support of rich and influential people (mostly in Europe) and eventually came to be known as "Zionism" (around 1891).
