Ismail Khalidi

Transcription

Between 1918 and 1920 Britain and France the war's victorious powers seized occupied and colonized the former lands of the 700-year-old Ottoman Empire no one asked the people of the region what they desired. British and French colonial civil servants drew all the borders and arranged all the governments for the countries that emerged. All the political struggles, All the parties, and All the conflicts of the region from that time to the present have their roots in the colonial settlement of 1920. Britain and France divided the region between them Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, the states of the Persian Gulf and Istanbul went to Britain which was the stronger power. British politicians like Winston Churchill sought to monopolize actual and potential oil resources and dominate the lines of communication between the Mediterranean the Persian Gulf and India. Churchill wanted Egypt's Suez Canal and the corridor from coastal Palestine through Jordan and Iraq to the oil fields of the gulf and Iran. Most of the oil was already under British concessions with a company that would come to be called British Petroleum or BP. Winston Churchill had himself purchased controlling interest to make the British government the majority shareholder of BP. British control of Istanbul limited Russian access to the Mediterranean through the straits. France received the scraps left, in compensation for the destruction of the war, fought, on the Western Front. Syria, including the coastal region that came to be Lebanon, would be the French Mandate there was no oil but France had become a military power on the northern, southern, and eastern shores. Sections of Anatolia, today's Turkey, were set aside for Italy, Greece, Britain, and France. News of the partitions met with immediate opposition and eventual armed revolt by all the peoples of the region. The Turkish Republic emerged independent when Mustafa Kemal rallied former Ottoman military forces to fight against the partition. First France then Greece and Britain decided to leave Turkey rather than fight another war the British public would not stand to have the young men who survived the Great War again drafted to fight in distant colonies also in 1920 revolt broke out in Iraq as the population rose to expel the British forces from the new colony. Winston Churchill himself engineered the Counter-insurgency offensive using the new labor-saving technology of air-power and poison gas. Egypt, Syria, and Palestine were also embroiled in armed revolt which were suppressed at appalling human and financial cost. Nationalism in the Arab world begins as a response to the intrusion of Western colonial powers it has a different nature in each country partly because the colonial experience was different so in Algeria starting in the 1830s you had one kind of colonial adventure which produces one kind of response in other countries you have different kinds of colonial intrusion, Egypt for example or in the countrys of the Arab East, so-called, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine were taken over after "World War 1" by the British and French, so there's a different process in each place so to generalize in every case these responses were nationalist in the sense that people wanting not to be ruled by outside forces, but, In many cases they took a religious form, in many cases they took a secular form in some cases they combined the two or there was, there was, there was a process of evolution and change. In Egypt for example there were periods in which the national movement had a religious coloration 1890s for example under Mustafa Kamil and the "National Party", it was a secular national party but it had a certain religious balance to it and other times the period of the left after "World War 1" when the national movement was explicitly about the secular, with Muslim and Christian leaders and almost no religious rhetoric to it. A lot of discussion of Egypt as a country that went back to the Pharaohs, back to the "pre-Islamic" past. The same is true in Algeria were you have a resistance movement that is both led by Abdelkader which is both religious and secular. It is a nationalist response to colonial occupation but it also involves elements of religion same is true in the response to the Italians in Libya where you have both religious and secular elements and the same is true in the Sudan with the "Mahdist" response to British colonialism where it was largely a religious movement but it can also be seen as nationalist I guess it would be in the eastern Arab world in countries like Lebanon Syria, Iraq, Palestine that you had the least balance, the least weight of religious elements in the initial reactions to European imperialism after "World War 1" and there this national movement. was avowedly secular and religious elements were secondary if they if they existed at all so there were varied responses with the religious element really only coming back where, where had, where it had disappeared really only coming back in the latter part of the second half of the 20th century, in the seventies, nineteen seventies and eighties really was when religion began religious movements political movements inspired by religion began to ~complete~, compete seriously with secular nationalist movements. In the aftermath of the "First World War" Ottoman Turkey was dismembered and that whole empire was divided up amongst the victorious Allies in a way that was extremely cynical of course the colonial powers had earlier divided Africa up, the interior of the whole African continent amongst them in 1885 in a single conference in Berlin so it was nothing new for the West European colonial powers to suddenly, you know, get a huge new chunk of land and divide it up amongst them the way that it worked in the eastern Mediterranean area between the Mediterranean lets say and Iran which was an independent country, is that the British and the French were the two powers and they simply drew lines on the map, sometimes the lines were a little blurry, and they said, this goes to England and this goes to France and that was it. There were two guys who did it Mark Sykes and George Picot and that's why the lines were called the Sykes--Picot Agreement and what happened is interesting because these were majority Arab areas obviously the Turkish Empire had been ruled by Muslims who were ethnic Turks these were ethnic Arabs and they were given a number of different states but, so they had you know, Saudi Arabia which was largely independent anyway its independence was, was ratified if you like as part of that whole post "World War 1" period. then you had Iraq was you know, the borders were delineated and it became Iraq Syria was delineated and became Syria Palestine and Jordan, Lebanon of course was carved out in a special way to please the French and those lines didn't correspond to previous national boundaries there had been no national boundaries So what happened was that you had state administrations that were built there by the colonial powers in each of those emerging nations. The British got Iraq and Jordan and Palestine. The French got Syria and Lebanon and they were given kind of control over these countries by the League of Nations which gave them something called a mandate because of course this was after President Wilson's 14 points, one of which was, That all nations have the right to self-determination but, you know, in their patronizing paternalistic way the governments in London and Paris decided that the Arab people were not ready for independence or self-governance and so they, therefore they had to be kinda of, you know, nannied along by the British and French colonial powers of course oil interests were key especially for the British they needed to be able to extract oil and to be able to protect their sea lines of communication with the Empire in India so if you look at the way the boundaries were drawn for example there is one little portion that goes up from Jordan Northwest no, Northeast toward Iraq that exactly follows the pipeline that the British had built from Iraq that took the oil from there west-ward to the Mediterranean and in fact if you drive along that portion of Jordan you pass through several little towns kinda of small places in the desert you're driving essentially along the top of the the oil pipeline and the towns are called H1 and H2 and H3 because those were the pumping stations that the towns grew up around I mean it's very blatant how it was all done just for the oil interest and of course, you know, then you had the Suez Canal and all that. The sea lines of communication with the Empire in India Where was America? America was a victorious power too, but at the time not a particularly imperialistic one American Imperial designs were focused on Latin America & the Pacific. Meanwhile Britain and France enjoyed more or less free rein to reshape the Middle East to suit their respective goals and policies and adding more countries to their extensive empires. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was concerned that European nationalism and imperial competition had contributed to the outbreak of the World War and he determined to dull the edges of the Imperial scramble for the Middle East. Wilson dispatched the King--Crane Commission to discern the wishes and desires of the people of the Middle East it was named after its two principal members Henry King and Charles Crane. The Commission traveled to Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon in 1919 speaking with hundreds of people from elites to the most humble. They concluded that the people of the region desired independence. British and French colonial governments were the two least favored options. In 1920 America was seen as a benign and non-imperialistic power by the people of the region but when Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke colonial lobbies in London and Paris divided the region and British and French military forces occupied the cities, towns, and villages. Now the mandates were supposed to be temporary you know until these nations were so-called ready for self-governance and in the course of the Second World War the French obviously had problems because you had Petain-ism that worked with the Nazis in Germany and so the British supported to some degree the movement of the Syrians and the, and the Lebanese for independence from France in those days until of course De-Gaulle came back and and was you know a big buddy of the British and the French and the western allies in the Second World War but what had happened in that whole period you had a sort of birth of some kind of identification of people with being Syrian or with being Lebanese or with being Jordanian but it was it was very fragile and infant in the pre-Second World War period because you know people still thought of themselves primarily as as Muslims primarily as Arabs there was you know a lot of pan-Islamic and pan-Arab feeling in those days or else they would feel identification with, you know, the local Big Town it might be Nablus, it might be a Aleppo, it might be Damascus they didn't necessarily think of themselves as you know, a citizen of Syria or a citizen of Iraq or whatever. The partition of this region that that is that is sketched out in the Sykes--Picot Agreement in 1915 and 1916 is the basis for the ~governments~ the states and nations and governments of countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, Palestine all of these states were carved out of a group of provinces that were part of the Ottoman Empire by European powers that were acting entirely in their own self-interest on the basis of rivalry between them Britain and France and and that created frontiers that reflected in almost no cases the actual wishes of the people involved so you have these long straight lines running across the desert between what is today Saudi Arabia and what is today Jordan or between Saudi Arabia and Iraq or between Syria and Jordan or whatever and they're just, you know, hundreds and hundreds of miles of straight lines What's on one side. What's on the other side. That didn't concern Sykes and Picot and the other British and French diplomats and strategist who drew up these lines. So the first thing is that these are in some measure artificial states. There may of been a state of Lebanon or Iraq that might have developed in a different way but as they are, as they are today in terms of the frontiers that were established by these partitions and later deals between the European powers, they are artificial States. The second impact of this was, so the creation of states is the first, the second impact of this was to create a sense of grievance among peoples who probably would've organized their political life somewhat differently had they been given a chance to do that and so Sykes--Picot and the partitions imposed by the European powers as a result of those agreements have been since the 1920s since they were pretty much carried out a source of deep anger and and a sense of grievance that that you know, has diminished over time because these nation states have taken on a reality of their own. They are all now real nation-states but there is still a sense of grievance that, you know, what might of been a more cohesive whole might or might not of but the imagination of people is it might of Was divided up by these imperialist map makers. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, believed that the only way to solve the problems of the Jews was to create a Jewish homeland after several options were considered it was decided that the location could only be Palestine the biblical land of Israel few of the Zionists consider the fact that Arabs were already living there as the first Jewish settlers began to arrive the Arabs of Palestine gradually awoke to the fact that the Zionists were aiming to settle the country. Various Zionist Congresses said what, what European newspapers reported Zionist leaders as saying and it was very clear what they intended to do, they intended to replace an Arab population with a Jewish population and turn an Arab country into a Jewish country in the long term as soon as they could do that in the interim they said other things to the Arabs, they said other things to others but there's unmediated transmission from the German of what was being said in Europe in the pre-WW1 period through the Arabic press, to people who could read, so that was a political level. There was a clear consciousness that this was a political movement intended to replace the indigenous population with a foreign European settler population. People who would be coming to recreate or create a Jewish state in Palestine on the basis of this national movement that had developed among Eastern European Jews. At another level there was resistance to the process of dispossession of the peasantry because what the Zionist movement was trying to do was not to come in like a classical movement and exploit the native population they were coming in to replace the native population not in other words to take over the land and take the surplus that would be created by peasant Arab cultivators but rather to replace these cultivators with Jewish cultivators as a result there was a kind of friction from an early stage with people who are dispossessed from the very few colonies that were established there were only a few dozen by "World War 1" but there was, a clear, a history of tension around these first settler colonies, between the population the indigenous native population which in many cases had land rights that were being ignored as modern private, private property relations were established by the Ottoman state. Cultivators who had indefinite and, and permanent right of "Usufruct" under the old system were being told, you don't own the land, the owner has sold it, get off. So there was a great deal of unrest as a result of this and this increases through the twenties and thirties and it fuels various Palestinian revolts, and and riots, and uprisings against the British coming in "World War 2" and against the Zionist movement and this is the beginning of Palestinian reaction to Zionism which has nothing to do with anti-semitism or even really political anti-Zionism as one Palestinian wrote, I mean this is a perfectly fine movement but the problem is you're doing it here the problem is you wanna take as your country, our country. This reaction was not just a reaction of peasants to being dispossessed it was also a reaction of people who are increasingly conscious of the actual aims of the Zionist movement which were to replace the Arabs with Jews and replace an Arab society with a Jewish society. In Palestine the revolt continued into the late 1930s until the British government resolved to abandon it's troublesome commitment to Zionism and finally the mandate over Palestine itself. Independence only came to the region when the colonial powers exhausted and bankrupt by the cost of another European World War were forced to leave the region in the 1940s. Also by the 1940s armed opposition to foreign intervention and colonialism had been fully established. The desire for true independence and opposition to intervention, colonialism, and imperialism remain potent among the people of the region till today. Next time we will explore how the search for independence, justice, and dignity animated politics in the nineteen fifties and sixties.