Syed Haider There is a sardonic humour amidst the tragedy of the new Arab-Israeli conflict. Across all the programs reporting and commenting on the war, representatives from both sides scramble for the moral high ground, usurped over and over again by Israel and her supporters. The most impious was perhaps Condoleezza Rice’s statement that cast Israel as the moral advocate and the injured party.
Her implication that whatever solution is brokered would have to be enduring is in and of itself a clearing of Israel from blame in the present state of affairs. Moreover, the insistence of other commentators – echoing Rice – that one cannot tolerate a return to the ‘status quo anti’ where a militant group could at anytime launch rockets into Israel, again skewers the origins of the conflict. The origin debate however is a pedantic wrangling over details, which at present are too clouded to deliver any decisive result, while any result that does come forward would merely add to a climate of point scoring. In fact, the debate over the origin of this conflict is a politico-ideological distraction. This war must not be seen in isolation but as part of a broader history. The Middle East has presented the world with the most volatile of subsystem in international politics, plunging the region – and often the world – into war with devastating effect. In fact the only other region that has had such sustained and recurring disputes over land has been that of the subcontinent, and in both cases there is a seminal link: colonialism. What we are witnessing today finds it genesis in the history of colonial misadventure, and the present episode further underlines the devastating repercussions of Western imperialism. Sadly, as one empire declined in the mid twentieth century another soon arose in its place, so that while the sun finally set on Pax Britannica what replaced it was what Avi Shlaim has called, Pax Americana. But the story involves yet another empire, a less recognised player in the historic narrative of the Middle East: the Ottomans.
For roughly four hundred years the Ottoman Turks had ruled the Middle East. The political state had been dynastic, Islamic, and multiethnic. Historians like Andrew Wheatcroft recognise that within its borders ethnic groups remained largely autonomous, maintaining their laws, customs, and conventions, which was all afforded them by the rulers. The Ottoman Caliphate had evolved over a long period of time and produced its own vibrant culture and forms of power relations[1]. The history of that part of the world is one typified by invasion and inner conflict. But the turmoil was always dealt with within the fabric of its own society so that even the most devastating event in its history – the Mongol invasion – did not stultify progress, rather the invaders were absorbed into the already existing framework, albeit one that had been brought to the brink of destruction. What history presents us then is not a utopia by any means but a dynamic civilisation that stood the test of time, and had formed within its own conceptual parameters ways in which to organise and manage its society. In the region then, the Ottomans by default provided a cog of cohesion, which with their downfall opened a Pandora’s box, one of the contents of which was Israel.
With the German-Ottoman defeat in the First World War, the European victors carved out the territories that we recognise today. In fact, the British had made a pact with France that in return for their support against the Ottomans the two would divide the Ottoman territories into two spheres of influence. In what is known as the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (See Appendix), the two powers set out the manner by which division and administration of the Ottoman territories would be conducted. The date incidentally betrays Britain’s promise to the Arabs whom they were enlisting for support during World War One against the Ottomans. Independence was further betrayed by another promise made in 1917 with the Jews for a national homeland in Palestine.
In a curious strategy of enlisting support, Britain crisscrossed its commitments and promises with several different players. In the end it was Balfour himself who had signed the recommendation petitioned to him by Lord Rothschild, a leading British Zionist, in 1917, who in retrospect said, ‘In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate’. Curious though it seems, Britain was following a shrewd Imperial logic and this was of effectively fragmenting that area which historically had posed such a threat. Having promised Sharif Hussayn, the chief of Mecca, an independent Arab state comprising of all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, in exchange for his assistance against the Caliph, Britain would have been entirely out of step with Colonial operandi if it had carried through its promise so straightforwardly. The crisscrossing of pledges was to keep the area divided with internal discord and to minimise the strength of the Muslims who had historically posed a great threat in that area through which of course runs the route to India[2].
Colonial attitude toward the natives of lands to which their expeditions led them can also be seen in practice in the case of Palestine. But the Imperial mindset was not restricted to the British, in fact the founding father of Zionism, Theodore Herssel, wrote in his book The Jewish State (1896)
We should there [in Palestine] form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.
When we hear of Israel described in the media today as a bastion of democracy amidst a belligerent and totalitarian bloc of states, the terms of reference may be different but the outlook remains the same. In fact one can sense a degree of historic injustice simply because the two parties – the Palestinians and the Jews – were unequal in their ability to vie for influence and self-determination. Lord Rothschild, from the mere fact of his title, was a figure that no doubt had a degree of influence over those in the echelons of power, while the Palestinians were without a voice. To this day such imbalance is overlooked so that when we hear news reports of a conflict between Israel and Palestinians, it is presented in the form of two warring rivals not as ‘an oppression of an illegal occupier and the resistance of the oppressed’[3]. The Israeli regime continues, as Pilger points out, to set the international news agenda; ‘Israelis are ”murdered by terrorists”, while Palestinians are “left dead” after a “clash with security forces”’
‘Israelis are ”murdered by terrorists”, while Palestinians are “left dead” after a “clash with security forces”’ 
[4].
Palestinians were a silent, almost non-existent party in the eyes of the major (and rich) players. Rashid Khalidi, Director of The Centre for International Studies at the University of Chicago[5], makes this point in a film produced by MPI Studios in 2001[6]
Britain had already decided in 1917 that it was going to support Jewish Nationalism/ Zionism…and it made sure that the terms of the mandate for Palestine were written so as to give the Balfour declaration pride of place…in fact the terms of the Balfour declaration are repeated in the mandate for Palestine, so there is the idea of a Jewish national home, the idea of Jewish having national rights, the idea that the British are supposed to set up a Jewish agency which is supposed to be an international body that would represent this population: all these things are set out in the terms of the mandate, but the Arabs and Palestinians – the word “Arab” the word “Palestinian” is never mentioned in the mandate. So they do not exist; they are there but they are not entitled to anything…only [being] mentioned as the non-Jewish population. So, basically, the Arabs were as it were eliminated from the very terms of reference of the mandate.
For the Zionist forefathers of Israel, Palestine was seen ‘as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom; such inhabitants as it had were supposed to be inconsequential nomads possessing no real claim on the land and therefore no cultural or national reality’[7]. The colonial echoes in this are not incidental; the Zionist movement was one that had begun amongst the wealthy Jews of Europe. Herssel had interpreted the hard history of the Jewish people as resulting from their lack of statehood and so wove into his argument modes of colonial thought. Indeed at the time of the Balfour declaration the Jewish presence in Palestine was merely ten percent and yet, to legitimise their claim, the Zionists of Europe resorted to narrativising their right sometimes in terms of theology – that the land was the historic land of Jews as found in the bible – and often as being an outpost of civilisation in that area.
In a trip to Palestine in 1922, Muhammad Asad (the then Leopold Weiss) notes in his autobiography that while the native Jews seemed to blend seamlessly with their surrounding the Jews who had arrived from Europe were distinctly at odds in their chosen environment. He says at one point that ‘although the European Jews were obviously out of all harmony with the picture that surrounded them, it was they who set the tone of Jewish life and politics and thus seemed to be responsible for the almost visible friction between Jews and Arabs.’[8] Part of this friction lay in the fact that since 1917 the British authorities were allowing and assisting Zionist settlers to purchase land that had been communal farming space amongst the Arabs for centuries. These settlers were also sponsored emigrants as part of a policy to balance the number of Jews to Arabs. Asad has a revealing conversation in his 1922 visit to Palestine with Chaim Weizmann, one of the leading British Zionists who also happened to be visiting the area. When asked about the Arabs ‘who, after all, were in the majority in this country?’ he replied: ‘We expect they won’t be in the majority after a few years’[9]. Indeed the intention was only thinly veiled, because the only possibility in the minds of the Zionists was, as Joseph Whites Director of the Jewish Land Fund wrote in his dairy in the early thirties,
It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country; if the Arabs leave the country it will be broad and wide open for us [the Jews] and if the Arabs stay the country will remain narrow and miserable, and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries…we must leave not a single village and not a single tribe. There is no other way.”
Israel then is not only born of colonialism but operates with a colonial mindset. One has only to look at the plight of the Palestinians who are within Israel’s borders and who at least by that fact alone are considered Israelis, to realise that there is in fact a policy similar to that administered by a colonial power over its colonial subjects. The wrongs of the present must be corrected by correcting the wrongs of the past. We have in Israel and in America’s support of it a clear example of Imperialism by all but name, and so we must apply a postcolonial reading to the situation that we are being fed by the media. The aggressor cannot be cast as the aggrieved, what is happening in the Middle East is but the convulsions of history.
Soon after its birth in 1948[10], Israel had its first – inevitable – war with its neighbours, but the Arab states were poorly equipped and were not unified, failing even to coordinate their battlefield strategies[11]. Meanwhile, Zionists had been amassing a large number of arsenal since the 1936 Arab revolt, during which incidentally much of Palestinian leadership was exiled by the British. The Zionist also received ammunition bought and smuggled out of Europe[12].
The 1948 victory for Israel left a deep impression on Zionist psychology. Their conviction, ‘as natural to the hawks as it was unpalatable to the doves, [was] that a state created by the sword will have to live by the sword.’[13] The American-Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann, notes this in his autobiography when he says that the 1948 war ‘seemed to show the advantages of direct action over negotiations and diplomacy’.
The victory offered such glorious contrast to the centuries of persecution and humiliation, of adaptation and compromise, that it seemed to indicate the only direction that could possibly be taken from then on. To brook nothing, to tolerate no attack, cut through Gordian knots, and shape history by creating facts seemed so simple, so compelling, so satisfying that it became Israel’s policy in its conflict with the Arab world.[14]
If the embers that cause the fires of today are coming from somewhere else then putting out these fires will resolve little; we must put out the fire of the past which shoots its embers into the present.
Bibliography
Asad, Muhammad, Road to Mecca, (New York: Dar Al-Andalus Ltd, 1985)
Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy, (London: Vintage, 1992)
Goldmann, Nahum, The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann: sixty years of Jewish life,(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)
Karsh, Efraim, The Arab-Israeli Conflict. The Palestine War 1948, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002)
Pilger, John, The New Rulers of the World, (London: Verso, 2002)
Said, Edward, Orientalism, (London: Penguin: 2003)
Shlaim, Avi, War and Peace in the Middle East, (New York: Penguin, 1995)
Vadney, T. E, The World Since 1945, (London: Penguin, 1992)
Electronic Media:
Tragedy in the Holy Land, produced by MPI Studios 2001
Appendix:
Sykes-Picot agreement text
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It is accordingly understood between the French and British governments:
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One
That France and Great Britain are prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab states or a confederation of Arab states (a) and (b) marked on the annexed map, under the suzerainty of an Arab chief.
That in area (a) France, and in area (b) Great Britain, shall have priority of right of enterprise and local loans. That in area (a) France, and in area (b) Great Britain, shall alone supply advisers or foreign functionaries at the request of the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.
Two
That in the blue area France, and in the red area Great Britain, shall be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire and as they may think fit to arrange with the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.
Three
That in the brown area there shall be established an international administration, the form of which is to be decided upon after consultation with Russia, and subsequently in consultation with the other allies, and the representatives of the sheriff of Mecca.
Four
That Great Britain be accorded (1) the ports of Haifa and Acre, (2) guarantee of a given supply of water from the tigres and Euphrates in area (a) for area (b). His majesty's government, on their part, undertake that they will at no time enter into negotiations for the cession of Cyprus to any third power without the previous consent of the French government.
Five
That Alexandretta shall be a free port as regards the trade of the British empire, and that there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards British shipping and British goods; that there shall be freedom of transit for British goods through Alexandretta and by railway through the blue area, or (b) area, or area (a); and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against British goods on any railway or against British goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.
That Haifa shall be a free port as regards the trade of France, her dominions and protectorates, and there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards French shipping and French goods.
There shall be freedom of transit for French goods through Haifa and by the British railway through the brown area, whether those goods are intended for or originate in the blue area, area (a), or area (b), and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against French goods on any railway, or against French goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.
Six
That in area (a) the Baghdad railway shall not be extended southwards beyond Mosul, and in area (b) northwards beyond Samarra, until a railway connecting Baghdad and Aleppo via the Euphrates valley has been completed, and then only with the concurrence of the two governments.
Seven
That Great Britain has the right to build, administer, and be sole owner of a railway connecting Haifa with area (b), and shall have a perpetual right to transport troops along such a line at all times.
It is to be understood by both governments that this railway is to facilitate the connection of Baghdad with Haifa by rail, and it is further understood that, if the engineering difficulties and expense entailed by keeping this connecting line in the brown area only make the project unfeasible, that the French government shall be prepared to consider that the line in question may also traverse the Polgon Banias Keis Marib Salkhad tell Otsda Mesmie before reaching area (b).
Eight
For a period of twenty years the existing Turkish customs tariff shall remain in force throughout the whole of the blue and red areas, as well as in areas (a) and (b), and no increase in the rates of duty or conversions from ad valorem to specific rates shall be made except by agreement between the two powers.
There shall be no interior customs barriers between any of the above mentioned areas. The customs duties leviable on goods destined for the interior shall be collected at the port of entry and handed over to the administration of the area of destination.
Nine
It shall be agreed that the French government will at no time enter into any negotiations for the cession of their rights and will not cede such rights in the blue area to any third power, except the Arab state or confederation of Arab states, without the previous agreement of His Majesty's government, who, on their part, will give a similar undertaking to the French government regarding the red area.
Ten
The British and French government, as the protectors of the Arab state, shall agree that they will not themselves acquire and will not consent to a third power acquiring territorial possessions in the Arabian peninsula, nor consent to a third power installing a naval base either on the east coast, or on the islands, of the red sea. This, however, shall not prevent such adjustment of the Aden frontier as may be necessary in consequence of recent Turkish aggression.
Eleven
The negotiations with the Arabs as to the boundaries of the Arab states shall be continued through the same channel as heretofore on behalf of the two powers.
Twelve
It is agreed that measures to control the importation of arms into the Arab territories will be considered by the two governments.
I have further the honour to state that, in order to make the agreement complete, His Majesty's government are proposing to the Russian government to exchange notes analogous to those exchanged by the latter and your Excellency's government on the 26th April last.
Copies of these notes will be communicated to your Excellency as soon as exchanged. I would also venture to remind your Excellency that the conclusion of the present agreement raises, for practical consideration, the question of claims of Italy to a share in any partition or rearrangement of Turkey in Asia, as formulated in Article 9 of the agreement of the 26th April, 1915, between Italy and the allies.
His Majesty's government further consider that the Japanese government should be informed of the arrangements now concluded.
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