WHILST THE unexpected arrival of nationalism in the Middle East had arisen in the wake of Western involvement in Arab affairs, not to mention territory and resources, the single issue that would serve to unite the Arab world more than anything else was Zionism.

The brainchild of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an Austro-Hungarian Jew, Zionism had originally been inspired by the emerging German nationalism of the late-nineteenth century. Realising that Western Europe was no place for ordinary Jews, particularly amidst the resurrection of German identity, Herzl began to speculate about a possible homeland for the Jewish people.

Despite the fact that he was an atheist, Herzl managed to enlist the help of a number of powerful and influential rabbis. Whilst many of Herzl’s proposals for a Jewish homeland had fallen by the wayside, he soon realised that the Jewish religion’s reliance upon a spiritual ‘return’ of the Jewish people to Palestine would interest an enormous number of religious Jews. This, despite the fact that Palestine’s indigenous Jewish community (Sephardim) had lived in relative peace with their Arab neighbours for many centuries.

The ‘Jews’ that Herzl was trying to entice to Palestine, on the other hand, were from various European countries and had their origins in the tenth-century conversion of the Khazar Empire that had been located between the Black and Caspian seas. In truth, therefore, these semi-Turkic ‘Jews’ from distant Eurasia would not be ‘returning’ at all, but planned to steal Palestinian territory from its Arab inhabitants. Once Herzl had secured the assistance of the notorious Rothschild family, itself responsible for having plunged Britain and much of Europe into debt, it emerged after his death in 1904 that behind the obscurantist banners of the Zionist ideology lurked the same old threat of British colonialism.

Whilst the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine had been discussed as early as 1914 by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George (1863-1945), a mere four days after the country’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire, few Arabs could have predicted that what initially appeared as a common struggle against Turkish rule in the First World War was actually part of a secret conspiracy for Anglo-Zionists to gain long-term control of the Middle East as a whole.

The following year, a British Jew by the name of Herbert Samuel (1870-1963) presented his Cabinet with The Future of Palestine (2015), a memorandum in which he discussed the possibility of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine in order to provide Syria with a neighbouring ‘European’ state in the event that Syria itself was annexed by France. This was a blatant example of the British trying to strengthen the European presence in the region on the pretext that it was designed to establish a Jewish state. The document was also a crude attempt to appeal to Christian sensibilities and their belief in the Second Coming of Christ, something that was considered impossible without the prophesied return of the Jews to Palestine. Naturally, of course, the fact that these particular ‘Jews’ were Khazars from Eastern Europe did not appear to make a jot of difference.

Britain’s Zionist sympathies were certainly nothing new, however, as Lloyd George’s own law firm had spent the previous ten years working with the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland to explore the possibility of creating a Jewish homeland in Uganda. By switching their interests to Palestine, the British now wished to have a base from which to secure their existing railway network in nearby Egypt.

Things took a more serious turn in 1916 with the arrival of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret arrangement between Britain and France (with the assent of Russia) in which the two Western powers ruthlessly divided the Holy Land between themselves. The coastal strip between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, Jordan itself, southern Iraq and the ports of Haifa and Acre went to Britain; south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon went to France; and, in order to encourage Moscow to overlook these territorial excesses, Russia was given Istanbul, the Turkish Straits and Armenia. Once the Tsarist government had been overthrown by the architects of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communists published the details of the secret agreement on November 23rd that same year and, as Peter Mansfield notes, the

British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.[1]

The assurances that Britain had made to Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi and his Arab compatriots on account of their important role in the First World War had been scrapped and even Lawrence of Arabia himself, that great Western hero of the Arab Revolt, was thoroughly disgusted with the behaviour of his own government. More betrayal followed when it was revealed that the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), had written to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild (1868-1937), a leading member of Britain’s powerful Jewish community, to say that

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 achievement of this object.[2]

Balfour, in a flagrant dismissal of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population, then sent a memorandum from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in which he proposed that the contentious Sykes-Picot Agreement be replaced by a new proposal of his own in order to secure the support of the major European states:

The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.[3]

The full text of the Balfour-Rothschild correspondence was published in the British press on November 9th, 1917, and what became known as the Balfour Declaration was later incorporated in both the Sèvres peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire and the Mandate for Palestine.

On November 3rd, 1918, one day after the Zionist Commission had arrogantly celebrated the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, a delegation from the Muslim-Christian Association – led by the senior Ottoman official, Musa al-Husayni (1853-1934) – organised a petition in which 100 leading members of the Palestinian community expressed their anger towards the Zionist Commission itself:

We have noticed yesterday a large crowd of Jews carrying banners and over-running the streets shouting words which hurt the feeling and wound the soul. They pretend with open voice that Palestine, which is the Holy Land of our fathers and the graveyard of our ancestors, which has been inhabited by the Arabs for long ages, who loved it and died in defending it, is now a national home for them. […] We Arabs, Muslim and Christian, have always sympathized profoundly with the persecuted Jews and their misfortunes in other countries […] but there is wide difference between such sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation […] ruling over us and disposing of our affairs.[4]

Needless to say, the protests were ignored and the foundations had been laid for one of the Arab world’s most contentious and brutal occupations.

Notes:

1. Mansfield, Peter; The British Empire Magazine, No. 75 (Time-Life Books, 1973), p.2078.

2. Israel Ministry for Foreign Affairs; “The Balfour Declaration”, retrieved on October 11th, 2016.

3. Balfour, Arthur; “Document 242, Memorandum” in Woodward, E. L. & Butler, Rohan, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939 (H.M. Stationery Office, 1952), pp. 340–348.

4. Wasserstein, Bernard; The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917-1929 (Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp.31-2.