Hey, remember the time in the middle of WWI when England and France agreed to divvy up the Middle East between them and screw over every Arab alive just as soon as they defeated the Ottoman Empire?
No? Well, don’t worry about it; we don’t talk about it much in Western history classes so you might never have heard of it. We do NOT like to mention anything that makes us (not the USA; the West in general) look like the “bad guys”. Also, all decisions made forthwith by the REAL “bad guys” are treated as if they occurred in an ahistorical vacuum.
That’s how our narrative rolls, baby!
People forget that Palestine was under Western control for a few decades. In 1831 Egypt, under the rule of Muhammad Ali, decided to launch a campaign to annex Ottoman Syria, which included Palestine. They won, which irked Britain, since the English only approved of Anglo-imperialism. Allied with the Ottoman forces, the British forced Egypt to give the Levant back to the Ottoman Empire. However, the British got so many concessions out of the Ottomans for their ‘help’ that “under the terms of the Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire … that for most intents and purposes many nationalities in the Ottoman empire formed a state within the state … from 1840 onward, “Palestine” was used either to describe the consular jurisdictions of the Western powers[271] or for a region that extended in the north–south direction typically from Rafah(south-east of Gaza) to the Litani River (now in Lebanon).”
This worked out pretty well for the peoples of the Levant, even if they were actually being colonised. Within the borders of Palestine, the “Western Powers had their own courts, marshals, colonies, schools, postal systems, religious institutions, and prisons.” The protections enjoyed by Westerners were also extended to the large Jewish communities who had bought land and settled there. Although the idea of returning to Palestine had been rejected by the conferences of rabbis (because there were already people living there), there were individual Zionists who had already bought land and moved into the area. These early Zionists believed that a homeland in the Levant was the only safe place for the Jews, who were already facing increased Antisemitism throughout Europe. Considering what happened in Germany in the run up to World War II, they were not wrong to want a safe nation for Jewish peoples.
Within this Westernised enclave of Ottoman Syria, the “Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities of Palestine were allowed to exercise jurisdiction over their own members according to charters granted to them.” This wasn’t anything new — under Ottoman rule for “centuries the Jews and Christians had enjoyed a large degree of communal autonomy in matters of worship, jurisdiction over personal status, taxes, and in managing their schools and charitable institutions.” Those same rights were just formally “recognized as part of the Tanzimat reforms and when the communities were placed under the protection of European public law.”
By the end of the 19th century, the British and the Ottomans were starting to quarrel. Too many Empires, not enough colonial subjugation to go around. Vexed the Ottomans sided with the German Empire at the beginning of World War I. The Allied powers, determined to take the Levant away from the Ottomans as punishment just as soon as they could win this ‘war to end all wars’ 1915 started to negotiate with the Russians and the French Third Republic to create what would be called the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In the agreement the three major Western powers basically promised that they wouldn’t try to steal any territory from each other in the areas they were going to steal from the Arabs who were already living there. No one, of course, asked the Palestinians (of any religion) how they felt about it. It didn’t matter. There was OIL under that ground and the Western powers wanted all that money-making, machine-running black gold.
Although the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed and ratified on 16 May 1916, the Allied powers kept it under their hat and out of the papers for over a year. They didn’t want anyone to know, including some members of their own government, to know they had carved up the Levant like a pie — especially since they hadn’t officially stolen it from the Ottomans yet. Pictured below: Zones of French (blue), British (red) and Russian (green) influence and control established by the Sykes–Picot Agreement.
Meanwhile, the British officials in Egypt, fighting to keep the Middle East under Allied control in WWI and unaware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, sent T.E. Lawrence, now better known as Lawrence of Arabia, into Palestine with the promise that the British would allow an independent Arab state if the Arabian rebels against the Ottoman overlords would aid the Allies in fighting the Central Powers. Needless to say, the UK didn’t mention it had already promised the land needed for the purported Arabian Syria to France. The Arabs didn’t get to find that out until later.
Imagine the surprise of the Arab Palestinians when the UK announced the issued Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising Palestine as a Jewish homeland, instead of the independant Arab state they had been promised! Imagine their further surprised when a couple of weeks later the newspapers uncovered that there was a Sykes-Picot Agreement that had been signed 18 months beforehand! Nevertheless, largely in support of Lawrence of Arabia, the Arabic nationals helped the Allies take the Levant.
When WWI was finally over, the UK and France agreed to share a joint “Occupied Enemy Territory Administration” in what had been Ottoman Syria. The newly-minted League of Nations would later hand over Palestine to the British, who would rule it as Mandatory Palestine from 1923 until 1948, while France was given the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon lasted from 1923 to 1946. No one seemed to care that the Syrian and Palestinians, of all religions, were quite keen on ruling themselves, thank you very much.
Since both the Arabs (Christian and Muslim alike) had been promised Palestine for THEIR state, and the Jewish immigrants had been promised Palestine as THEIR state, there quickly arose two competing nationalistic movements. The Arabs felt they had been cheated (they had been), but their rage was most often aimed at the incoming Jewish migrants rather than the UK; the British were far away and the Jewish newcomers were easier to reach. Additionally, a large number of Jewish land purchases wealthier Arab landlords “contributed to landlessness among Palestinian Arabs, fueling unrest. Riots erupted in Palestine in 1920, 1921 and 1929.”
Since Britain was officially ‘in charge’ of Palestine, it tried to smooth things by setting up the Peel Commission and basically carving up Palestine into a Jewish part v/s an Arab part. The native residents did not like this.
The Arabs opposed the partition plan and condemned it unanimously. The Arab High Committee opposed the idea of a Jewish state and called for an independent state of Palestine, “with protection of all legitimate Jewish and other minority rights and safeguarding of reasonable British interests”. They also demanded cessation of all Jewish immigration and land purchase. They argued that the creation of a Jewish state and lack of independent Palestine was a betrayal of the word given by Britain.
The reason the Arabs felt betrayed was because they WERE betrayed.
The Jewish leaders were torn. No one wanted to hurt the Arab population, but European antisemitism was getting hellish. What to do? They needed a homeland, especially after Hitler came to power in Germany on a anti-Jewish stance in 1933 and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws “made German Jews (and later Austrian and Czech Jews) stateless refugees.” The ‘stateless Jews’ fled to Palestine whenever possible, leading to the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine against Jewish immigration. During the midst of these riots, the delegates of the 1937 Zionist Congress rejected the specific partition plan of the Peel Commission, choosing instead to give Zionist leadership the power to pursue future negotiations.
One of the reasons that Palestine was seen as the best place for the Jews was because all of the European countries — from Great Britain to the USSR — didn’t want those ‘icky’ Jews in their countries. Jewish Zionists wanted a homeland, but anti-Jewish Zionists just wanted to foist the Jews off on the Arabs, who weren’t ‘white’ and thus could be forced to live with other ‘lesser races’. Nowadays, anti-Zionism is often a home for antisemitic neo-Nazis, but there was a time when original Nazis were all about ‘exiling’ the Jews to the Middle East or Madagascar. (Ironically, Zionism has been so conflated with Jewish well-being that simply being anti-Zionist today will get you branded as antisemitic even if ARE Jewish yourself. Moreover, the rise in hate crimes against Jews makes any little bit of anti-Zionist ideology look potentially racist.)
Then, the Holocaust happened. More than 6 million European Jews were slaughtered for the ‘crime’ of being Jewish, or even having Jewish family members. Now a homeland seemed urgent; it was seen as the only hope of giving Jewish refugees a safe place to go. In the post-War years, “a massive wave of stateless Jews, mainly Holocaust survivors, began migrating to Palestine in small boats in defiance of British rules.” The British, trying to prevent another revolt among displaced Arabs, “either imprisoned these Jews in Cyprus or sent them to the British-controlled Allied Occupation Zones in Germany.
Unsurprisingly, the people who had survived the Holocaust were not in the mood to be imprisoned. Nor were their fellow Jews willing to put up with it. Zionist groups in Palestine threw a fit and fell in it when they found out Britain was rounding up Jewish refugees. That shit never ended well, and compliance was no longer seen as a hopeful option.
With the British mandate in Palestine coming to an end, in 1947 the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine “recommended that western Palestine should be partitioned into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory, Corpus separatum, around Jerusalem.” The UN adopted the partition plan on 29 November 1947, to the relief of Palestinian Jews and the dismay of Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states, who felt that the Western powers had reneged on their agreements and cheated the Arab Palestinians out of a promised state.
The Palestinian Jews, who had seen what happened to Jews who couldn’t call on an army to protect themselves, decided it was time to rumble. On 14 May 1948 — 31 years and 362 days after the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed — David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish People’s Council issued the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The following day the Arab League, consisting of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Transjordan, and Yemen, invaded the new country to back the Arab Palestinians and prevent the formation of Israel, beginning the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Israel must have found the Ark of the Covenant again, because although they were outnumbered and outgunned, they kicked all the ass. I mean ALL of it. Sadly, the victory of the Israeli armed forces meant that almost “700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the area that became Israel, and they became Palestinian refugees in what they refer to as Al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”).” They are still displaced, and although the war is long over, the fighting has never really stopped.
Worse, the government of Israel has created “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole” in Israeli Occupied Palestinian territories, so that Arab Palestinians experience “discrimination in access to education, healthcare, employment, residency and building rights”, as well as “expulsions and home demolitions”. This, of course makes the Arab Palestinians angry. So they commit terrorist acts. Which the government uses as an excuse for more discrimination. Which leads to more terrorism …
You get the picture.
Basically, the Sykes-Picot Agreement has led to dire repercussions for 100 years now. Modern terrorist organisations, like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) still claim that they are just trying to reverse the effects of the Sykes–Picot Agreement and get a little equiality. That’s a lie, of course. They are trying to establish a theocracy and are monsters who rape even their fellow Muslim captives. But they RECRUIT based on the Western shenanigans of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
ISIL is clearly much worse than anything the Franco-British Imperialists came up with, but the sad fact remains that if Western forces had not sold Arab democracy down the river and used the Middle East as a money-maker for Oil Barons then there wouldn’t have been a fertile breeding ground for theocratic terrorist ideologies. The sick irony is that although the West is being hoist on it’s own petard, it is the individual Westerners who had NOTHING to do with the political rape of the Middle East that are dying from terrorist attacks.
Just as ISIL is being crushed, the Yam Overlord of the USA, His Stupidity, Donald Trump, had to light a match in the powder keg of Palestine by recognising the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there. The idiot even sent his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to open the new US embassy on 15 May, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence, what Arab Palestinians call Nakba day, when they “commemorate the expulsion or flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in what became Israel.” Everyone knew this was trouble. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that “The opening of the U.S. embassy … will come at a price” but he added that “it is worth paying it.” The thing is that the Isreali’s didn’t pay that price.
At least 60 Arab Palestinians died in the protests, including a baby who died from teargas inhalation. They paid. They paid the ultimate price for the hubris and arrogance of the West. Not Israel’s Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, who — like Trump — is under investigation for corruption. Not any of the evangelicals or billionaires or warmongers who encouraged Trump to cause this mess. No, the people who paid were unarmed Palestinians who don’t like the apartheid they live under … the people who were gunned down as though they were vermin, not humans.
So on this, the anniversary of the Worst Agreement Ever, let us all raise a toast to the Western Oligarchies that continue to wantonly exploit, slaughter, and serve as the catalyst for killings of those less powerful. Then let us metaphorically break the glasses and use the shards to attack the systemic inequality inherent in the current system and stop murdering each other.