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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
On the eve of World War I, the anticipated break-up of the
enfeebled Ottoman Empire raised hopes among both Zionists and Arab
nationalists. The Zionists hoped to attain support from one of the
Great Powers for increased Jewish immigration and eventual
sovereignty in Palestine, whereas the Arab nationalists wanted an
independent Arab state covering all the Ottoman Arab domains. From
a purely demographic standpoint, the Zionist argument was not very
strong--in 1914 they comprised only 12 percent of the total
population of Palestine. The nationalist ideal, however, was weak
among the Arabs, and even among articulate Arabs competing visions
of Arab nationalism--Islamic, pan-Arab, and statism--inhibited
coordinated efforts to achieve independence.
A major asset to Zionism was that its chief spokesman, Chaim
Weizmann, was an astute statesman and a scientist widely respected
in Britain and he was well versed in European diplomacy. Weizmann
understood better than the Arab leaders at the time that the future
map of the Middle East would be determined less by the desires of
its inhabitants than by Great Power rivalries, European strategic
thinking, and domestic British politics. Britain, in possession of
the Suez Canal and playing a dominant role in India and Egypt,
attached great strategic importance to the region. British Middle
East policy, however, espoused conflicting objectives, and as a
result London became involved in three distinct and contradictory
negotiations concerning the fate of the region.
The earliest British discussions of the Middle East question
revolved around Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, scion of the Hashimite (also
seen as Hashemite) family that claimed descent from the Prophet and
acted as the traditional guardians of Islam's most holy sites of
Mecca and Medina in the Arabian province of Hijaz. In February
1914, Amir Abdullah, son of Sharif Husayn, went to Cairo to visit
Lord Kitchener, British agent and consul general in Egypt, where he
inquired about the possibility of British support should his father
stage a revolt against Turkey. Turkey and Germany were not yet
formally allied, and Germany and Britain were not yet at war;
Kitchener's reply was, therefore, noncommittal.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914,
Kitchener was recalled to London as secretary of state for war. By
1915, as British military fortunes in the Middle East deteriorated,
Kitchener saw the usefulness of transferring the Islamic caliphate-
-the caliph, or successor to the Prophet Muhammad, was the
traditional leader of the Islamic world--to an Arab candidate
indebted to Britain, and he energetically sought Arab support for
the war against Turkey. In Cairo Sir Henry McMahon, the first
British high commissioner in Egypt, conducted an extensive
correspondence from July 1915 to January 1916 with Husayn, two of
whose sons--Abdullah, later king of Jordan, and Faysal, later king
of Syria (ejected by the French in 1920) and of Iraq (1921-33)--
were to figure prominently in subsequent events.
In a letter to McMahon enclosed with a letter dated July 14,
1915, from Abdullah, Husayn specified an area for Arab independence
under the "Sharifian Arab Government" consisting of the Arabian
Peninsula (except Aden) and the Fertile Crescent of Palestine,
Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. In his letter of October 24, 1915, to
Husayn, McMahon, on behalf of the British government, declared
British support for postwar Arab independence, subject to certain
reservations and exclusions of territory not entirely Arab or
concerning which Britain was not free "to act without detriment to
the interests of her ally, France." The territories assessed by the
British as not purely Arab included: "The districts of Mersin and
Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the
districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo." As with the later
Balfour Declaration, the exact meaning was not clear, although Arab
spokesmen since then have usually maintained that Palestine was
within the pledged area of independence. Although the Husayn-
McMahon correspondence was not legally binding on either side, on
June 5, 1916, Husayn launched the Arab Revolt against Turkey and in
October declared himself "King of the Arabs."
While Husayn and McMahon corresponded over the fate of the
Middle East, the British were conducting negotiations with the
French over the same territory. Following the British military
defeat at the Dardanelles in 1915, the Foreign Office sought a new
offensive in the Middle East, which it thought could only be
carried out by reassuring the French of Britain's intentions in the
region. In February 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement (officially the
"Asia Minor Agreement") was signed, which, contrary to the contents
of the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, proposed to partition the
Middle East into French and British zones of control and interest.
Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Palestine was to be administered
by an international "condominium" of the British, French, and
Russians (also signatories to the agreement).
The final British pledge, and the one that formally committed
the British to the Zionist cause, was the Balfour Declaration of
November 1917. Before the emergence of David Lloyd George as prime
minister and Arthur James Balfour as foreign secretary in December
1916, the Liberal Herbert Asquith government had viewed a Jewish
entity in Palestine as detrimental to British strategic aims in the
Middle East. Lloyd George and his Tory supporters, however, saw
British control over Palestine as much more attractive than the
proposed British-French condominium. Since the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, Palestine had taken on increased strategic importance
because of its proximity to the Suez Canal, where the British
garrison had reached 300,000 men, and because of a planned British
attack on Ottoman Syria originating from Egypt. Lloyd George was
determined, as early as March 1917, that Palestine should become
British and that he would rely on its conquest by British troops to
obtain the abrogation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
In the new British strategic thinking, the Zionists appeared as
a potential ally capable of safeguarding British imperial interests
in the region. Furthermore, as British war prospects dimmed
throughout 1917, the War Cabinet calculated that supporting a
Jewish entity in Palestine would mobilize America's influential
Jewish community to support United States intervention in the war
and sway the large number of Jewish Bolsheviks who participated in
the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to keep Russia in the war. Fears were
also voiced in the Foreign Office that if Britain did not come out
in favor of a Jewish entity in Palestine the Germans would preempt
them. Finally, both Lloyd George and Balfour were devout
churchgoers who attached great religious significance to the
proposed reinstatement of the Jews in their ancient homeland.
The negotiations for a Jewish entity were carried out by
Weizmann, who greatly impressed Balfour and maintained important
links with the British media. In support of the Zionist cause, his
protracted and skillful negotiations with the Foreign Office were
climaxed on November 2, 1917, by the letter from the foreign
secretary to Lord Rothschild, which became known as the Balfour
Declaration. This document declared the British government's
"sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations," viewed with favor "the
establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish
People," and announced an intent to facilitate the achievement of
this objective. The letter added the provision of "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 enjoyed by Jews in any
other country."
The Balfour Declaration radically changed the status of the
Zionist movement. It promised support from a major world power and
gave the Zionists international recognition. Zionism was
transformed by the British pledge from a quixotic dream into a
legitimate and achievable undertaking. For these reasons, the
Balfour Declaration was widely criticized throughout the Arab
world, and especially in Palestine, as contrary to the spirit of
British pledges contained in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence. The
wording of the document itself, although painstakingly devised, was
interpreted differently by different people, according to their
interests. Ultimately, it was found to contain two incompatible
undertakings: establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jews and preservation of the rights of existing non-Jewish
communities, i.e., the Arabs. The incompatibility sharpened over
the succeeding years and became irreconcilable.
On December 9, 1917, five weeks after the Balfour Declaration,
British troops led by General Sir Edmund Allenby took Jerusalem
from the Turks; Turkish forces in Syria were subsequently defeated;
an armistice was concluded with Turkey on October 31, 1918; and all
of Palestine came under British military rule. British policy in
the Arab lands of the now moribund Ottoman Empire was guided by a
need to reduce military commitments, hold down expenditures,
prevent a renewal of Turkish hegemony in the region, and safeguard
Britain's strategic interest in the Suez Canal. The conflicting
promises issued between 1915 and 1918 complicated the attainment of
these objectives.
Between January 1919 and January 1920, the Allied Powers met in
Paris to negotiate peace treaties with the Central Powers. At the
conference, Amir Faysal, representing the Arabs, and Weizmann,
representing the Zionists, presented their cases. Although Weizmann
and Faysal reached a separate agreement on January 3, 1919,
pledging the two parties to cordial cooperation, the latter wrote
a proviso on the document in Arabic that his signature was tied to
Allied war pledges regarding Arab independence. Since these pledges
were not fulfilled to Arab satisfaction after the war, most Arab
leaders and spokesmen have not considered the Faysal-Weizmann
agreement as binding.
The conferees faced the nearly impossible task of finding a
compromise between the generally accepted idea of self-
determination, wartime promises, and plans for a division of the
spoils. They ultimately decided upon a mandate system whose details
were laid out at the San Remo Conference of April 1920. The terms
of the British Mandate were approved by the League of Nations
Council on July 24, 1922, although they were technically not
official until September 29, 1923. The United States was not a
member of the League of Nations, but a joint resolution of the
United States Congress on June 30, 1922, endorsed the concept of
the Jewish national home.
The Mandate's terms recognized the "historical connection of
the Jewish people with Palestine," called upon the mandatory power
to "secure establishment of the Jewish National Home," and
recognized "an appropriate Jewish agency" for advice and
cooperation to that end. The WZO, which was specifically recognized
as the appropriate vehicle, formally established the
Jewish Agency (see Glossary)
in 1929. Jewish immigration was to be facilitated,
while ensuring that the "rights and position of other sections of
the population are not prejudiced." English, Arabic, and Hebrew
were all to be official languages. At the San Remo Conference, the
French also were assured of a mandate over Syria. They drove Faysal
out of Damascus in the summer; the British provided him with a
throne in Iraq a year later. In March 1921, Winston Churchill, then
colonial secretary, established Abdullah as ruler of Transjordan
under a separate British mandate.
To the WZO, which by 1921 had a worldwide membership of about
770,000, the recognition in the Mandate was seen as a welcome first
step. Although not all Zionists and not all Jews were committed at
that time to conversion of the Jewish national home into a separate
political state, this conversion became firm Zionist policy during
the next twenty-five years. The patterns developed during these
years strongly influenced the State of Israel proclaimed in 1948.
Arab spokesmen, such as Husayn and his sons, opposed the
Mandate's terms because the Covenant of the League of Nations had
endorsed popular determination and thereby, they maintained,
supported the cause of the Arab majority in Palestine. Further, the
covenant specifically declared that all other obligations and
understandings inconsistent with it were abrogated. Therefore, Arab
argument held that both the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot
Agreement were null and void. Arab leaders particularly objected to
the Mandate's numerous references to the "Jewish community,"
whereas the Arab people, then constituting about 88 percent of the
Palestinian population, were acknowledged only as "the other
sections."
Prior to the Paris Peace Conference, Palestinian Arab
nationalists had worked for a
Greater Syria (see Glossary) under
Faysal. The British military occupation authority in Palestine,
fearing an Arab rebellion, published an Anglo-French Joint
Declaration, issued after the armistice with Turkey in November
1918, which called for self-determination for the indigenous people
of the region. By the end of 1919, the British had withdrawn from
Syria (exclusive of Palestine), but the French had not yet entered
(except in Lebanon) and Faysal had not been explicitly repudiated
by Britain. In March 1920, a General Syrian Congress meeting in
Damascus elected Faysal king of a united Syria, which included
Palestine. This raised the hope of the Palestinian Arab population
that the Balfour Declaration would be rescinded, setting off a
feverish series of demonstrations in Palestine in the spring of
1920. From April 4 to 8, Arab rioters attacked the Jewish quarter
of Jerusalem. Faysal's ouster by the French in the summer of 1920
led to further rioting in Jaffa (contemporary Yafo) as a large
number of Palestinian Arabs who had been with Faysal returned to
Palestine to fight against the establishment of a Jewish nation.
The end of Faysal's Greater Syria experiment and the
application of the mandate system, which artificially carved up the
Arab East into new nation-states, had a profound effect on the
history of the region in general and Palestine in particular. The
mandate system created an identity crisis among Arab nationalists
that led to the growth of competing nationalisms: Arab versus
Islamic versus the more parochial nationalisms of the newly created
states. It also created a serious legitimacy problem for the new
Arab elites, whose authority ultimately rested with their European
benefactors. The combination of narrowly based leadership and the
emergence of competing nationalisms stymied the Arab response to
the Zionist challenge in Palestine.
To British authorities, burdened with heavy responsibilities
and commitments after World War I, the objective of the Mandate
administration was peaceful accommodation and development of
Palestine by Arabs and Jews under British control. Sir Herbert
Samuels, the first high commissioner of Palestine, was responsible
for keeping some semblance of order between the two antagonistic
communities. In pursuit of this goal, Samuels, a Jew, was guided by
two contradictory principles: liberalism and Zionism. He called for
open Jewish immigration and land acquisition, which enabled
thousands of highly committed and well-trained socialist Zionists
to enter Palestine between 1919 and 1923. The Third Aliyah, as it
was called, made important contributions to the development of
Jewish agriculture, especially collective farming. Samuels,
however, also promised representative institutions, which, if they
had emerged in the 1920s, would have had as their first objective
the curtailment of Jewish immigration. According to the census of
1922, the Jews numbered only 84,000, or 11 percent of the
population of Palestine. The Zionists, moreover, could not openly
oppose the establishment of democratic structures, which was
clearly in accordance with the Covenant of the League of Nations
and the mandatory system.
The Arabs of Palestine, however, believing that participation
in Mandate-sanctioned institutions would signify their acquiescence
to the Mandate and thus to the Balfour Declaration, refused to
participate. As a result, Samuels's proposals for a legislative
council, an advisory council, and an Arab agency envisioned as
similar to the Jewish Agency, were all rejected by the Arabs. After
the collapse of the bid for representative institutions, any
possibility of joint consultation between the two communities
ended.
Data as of December 1988
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