In a second century treatise, How to Write History, Lucian of Samosata appeals that the ideal historian is impartial, detached, rigorously devoted to the truth. "The historian's one task,” wrote Lucian, “is to tell the thing as it happened.” Nevertheless, we know that history, however objective its writers claim to be, is always written with a motivation, even though a noble one. The historian may report facts accurately, but he chooses the facts to report. Wittingly or otherwise the perception of his reader is thus shaped.
That said, two excellently researched books were released this summer just in time for the umpteenth attempt to negotiate peace in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, was written by Jonathan Schneer, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of History, Technology and Society. Palestine Betrayed was written by Efraim Karsh, Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London. While dealing with the same subject, each author takes a different approach to explain today’s cauldron of conflict in the Middle East between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Those with little knowledge of Middle East history should understand that, heading into World War I, Palestine was a backwater, sparsely populated, and vaguely defined area of the Ottoman Empire. It had been ruled by sultans for centuries. But after Turkey became allied with Germany, Britain used Palestine and other parts of the decrepit 400-year old Ottoman Empire as bait for the Arabs, French, and Russians to win their help for the war effort .
Out of this intrigue in 1916 came the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain. This secret document – named after the two diplomats who hatched it, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot – contained the plan for carving up the Middle East after the war and the presumptive victory of the allies. Britain would be allocated control of Jordan, Iraq and a small area around Haifa. France would be allocated control of Southeastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Initially, Palestine was under joint control but ultimately it came under British control. France and Britain were left free to decide on state boundaries within their allocations. The map of the Middle East today is the legacy of Sykes-Picot with the borders matching the lines drawn using a ruler over the former lands of the Muslim Caliphate.
Naively, Sykes and Picot ignored the fact that the Middle East was a place of intense local tribal hatreds, suspicions, and rivalries, and thus unlikely to care a whit about the countries invented by drawing lines on a map and the state flags Sykes designed. That is not the way countries develop the identity that makes them countries. But this was the age of empire when diplomats suffered few insecurities about their abilities and governments thought little about how they dismembered distant lands. One of Sykes’ colleagues, Gertrude Bell, wrote home in 1916 describing a delightful afternoon spent being pulled across the desert in a donkey cart, trailing a stick behind her to create a line in the sand on which compliant Arab boys erected little piles of stones. To this day, that line is the boundary between Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Zionism arose in the late 19th century as the expression of Jewish nationalism and the desire for sovereignty in a homeland. It was especially driven by anti-Semitic persecution throughout Europe and England. The Balfour Declaration was an official statement of British policy regarding the Jewish Diaspora’s return to Palestine as contained in a November 1917 letter from the British Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, to the leader of the British Zionist community, Lord Rothschild. It stated:
"His Majesty's government views 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, 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 was somewhat motivated by British hope that the European Jews would help finance World War I and it might further influence American Jews to press the Wilson administration to enter the war.
Now to the books.
Schneer’s book traces the anfractuous path that led to the Balfour Declaration. In an effortless storytelling style reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman, he tells a tale of plotting, perfidy, backstabbing, secret meetings, and shifting alliances, with a cast of characters fit for an Agatha Christie mystery: Turkish sultans, arms dealers, tribal leaders, emirs and sharifs, emissaries – even Lawrence of Arabia – each of whom had an agenda.
Britain's Zionists, according to Schneer, were "inspired opportunists" who saw the war against the Turks as their chance to win support for a homeland in Palestine, where 85,000 resident Jews comprised one-ninth of the prewar population. An important figure arose as Zionist leader in Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born chemist whose discovery of a fermentation method for a key ingredient in explosives was important to the war effort and helped win him contact with David Lloyd George, before he became prime minister, and Lord Balfour.
As Schneer tells it, the Balfour Declaration was conceived “as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy,” and its impact has been felt ever since. It is hailed as a milestone by the Zionists, and mourned by the Arabs as the Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," because it was the first step toward the founding of the state of Israel. “Britain and her allies slew the Ottoman dragon in the Middle East,” Schneer concludes; “By their policies they sowed dragon’s teeth. Armed men rose up from the ground. They are rising still.”
The Balfour declaration thus finds its place among a multitude of fruitless diplomatic schemes in the World War I era of the Middle East, except that in this case, surprisingly, the British by and large kept their word. For at least two decades they allowed the Zionist movement to bring hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, and these new arrivals set up hundreds of settlements including several towns, as well as the political, economic, military and cultural infrastructure of the future state of Israel.
To write Palestine Betrayed, Karsh gained access to masses of recently declassified Western, Soviet, Arabic, and UN documents from the period of British rule and the period of the first Arab-Israeli war, spanning the years from 1917 to 1949. Karsh argues: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." He continues, "There was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian-Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Karsh avoids his own judgments, using instead quotes of others – Palestinians, British, and Zionists who had strong opinions. As the book opens, Karsh quotes David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders who proclaimed that, although the Jews in Palestine wanted their own state, they did not want to abridge the freedom of their Arab neighbors. He uses quote after quote, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion, to show that the ethnic cleansing arguments used by Arabs today was untrue from the outset, going into detail about the Arab-Jewish cooperation immediately after the Balfour Declaration and before a British governor inexplicably appointed Amin Husseini as the Jerusalem Mufti over the objections of the Arabs.
Karsh blames Hajj Amin Husseini for the deterioration of the relationship between the Arabs and Jews. Husseini almost single-handedly led the Palestinian Arabs to disaster as Mufti of Jerusalem, as president of the Supreme Muslim Council, and as president of the Arab Higher Committee. He was pathologically anti-Semitic, a Nazi sympathizer, and uncompromising in nature. If anyone is responsible for the initiation of Jewish-Palestinian conflict, it is Husseini. Karsh shows that Husseini had his eye on a pan-Arabic nation uniting Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, and apart from his hatred of Jews, Jewish statehood stood in the way of his plan.
The majority of the book is devoted to the fighting and Arab flight during the War of Independence. Fighting began within hours following the UN vote to partition Palestine on Nov. 29, 1947, and lasted till the eve of the British evacuation on May 14, 1948. The international conflict began on May 15 (the day after Israel came into being), when five Arab state armies invaded, and continued until January 1949. Over half (between 300,000 and 340,000) of the 600,000 Arab refugees fled before the British evacuation – most of them in the final month. Karsh argues that the majority of Arabs fled their homes as a result of fear, and often in spite of Jewish entreaties to stay in their homes and businesses.
Refugee camps were set up and managed by the U.N. in an effort to deal with the Palestinian exodus. These camps still exist, still supported by the U.N., but because of natural increase, the refugees have about tripled in number, living unnecessarily hopeless, unproductive lives. In contrast, the India-Pakistan confrontation dislodged more than a million people and spawned considerable violence in which thousands were killed. Yet today the grandchildren of these one-time refugees lead normal lives and some have achieved considerable success. There is no reason, other than the stubbornness of their leaders, that the Palestinians cannot do the same.
Taken together The Balfour Declaration and Palestine Betrayed provide 768 pages of thoughtful writing for anyone seeking an understanding of the intractable Middle East conflict and the almost futile pursuit of peace.
In a 2002 interview, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past … The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis – again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one." British deviousness no doubt contributed to the original conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist Jews. But that generation has been long in their graves. Today’s conflict is not between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but rather between the peace camps on both sides and their rejectionist opponents.
The peace camp seems to have won out in Israel. The ball is now in the Palestinian court.
That said, two excellently researched books were released this summer just in time for the umpteenth attempt to negotiate peace in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, was written by Jonathan Schneer, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of History, Technology and Society. Palestine Betrayed was written by Efraim Karsh, Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London. While dealing with the same subject, each author takes a different approach to explain today’s cauldron of conflict in the Middle East between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Those with little knowledge of Middle East history should understand that, heading into World War I, Palestine was a backwater, sparsely populated, and vaguely defined area of the Ottoman Empire. It had been ruled by sultans for centuries. But after Turkey became allied with Germany, Britain used Palestine and other parts of the decrepit 400-year old Ottoman Empire as bait for the Arabs, French, and Russians to win their help for the war effort .
Out of this intrigue in 1916 came the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain. This secret document – named after the two diplomats who hatched it, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot – contained the plan for carving up the Middle East after the war and the presumptive victory of the allies. Britain would be allocated control of Jordan, Iraq and a small area around Haifa. France would be allocated control of Southeastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Initially, Palestine was under joint control but ultimately it came under British control. France and Britain were left free to decide on state boundaries within their allocations. The map of the Middle East today is the legacy of Sykes-Picot with the borders matching the lines drawn using a ruler over the former lands of the Muslim Caliphate.
Naively, Sykes and Picot ignored the fact that the Middle East was a place of intense local tribal hatreds, suspicions, and rivalries, and thus unlikely to care a whit about the countries invented by drawing lines on a map and the state flags Sykes designed. That is not the way countries develop the identity that makes them countries. But this was the age of empire when diplomats suffered few insecurities about their abilities and governments thought little about how they dismembered distant lands. One of Sykes’ colleagues, Gertrude Bell, wrote home in 1916 describing a delightful afternoon spent being pulled across the desert in a donkey cart, trailing a stick behind her to create a line in the sand on which compliant Arab boys erected little piles of stones. To this day, that line is the boundary between Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Zionism arose in the late 19th century as the expression of Jewish nationalism and the desire for sovereignty in a homeland. It was especially driven by anti-Semitic persecution throughout Europe and England. The Balfour Declaration was an official statement of British policy regarding the Jewish Diaspora’s return to Palestine as contained in a November 1917 letter from the British Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, to the leader of the British Zionist community, Lord Rothschild. It stated:
"His Majesty's government views 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, 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 was somewhat motivated by British hope that the European Jews would help finance World War I and it might further influence American Jews to press the Wilson administration to enter the war.
Now to the books.
Schneer’s book traces the anfractuous path that led to the Balfour Declaration. In an effortless storytelling style reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman, he tells a tale of plotting, perfidy, backstabbing, secret meetings, and shifting alliances, with a cast of characters fit for an Agatha Christie mystery: Turkish sultans, arms dealers, tribal leaders, emirs and sharifs, emissaries – even Lawrence of Arabia – each of whom had an agenda.
Britain's Zionists, according to Schneer, were "inspired opportunists" who saw the war against the Turks as their chance to win support for a homeland in Palestine, where 85,000 resident Jews comprised one-ninth of the prewar population. An important figure arose as Zionist leader in Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born chemist whose discovery of a fermentation method for a key ingredient in explosives was important to the war effort and helped win him contact with David Lloyd George, before he became prime minister, and Lord Balfour.
As Schneer tells it, the Balfour Declaration was conceived “as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy,” and its impact has been felt ever since. It is hailed as a milestone by the Zionists, and mourned by the Arabs as the Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," because it was the first step toward the founding of the state of Israel. “Britain and her allies slew the Ottoman dragon in the Middle East,” Schneer concludes; “By their policies they sowed dragon’s teeth. Armed men rose up from the ground. They are rising still.”
The Balfour declaration thus finds its place among a multitude of fruitless diplomatic schemes in the World War I era of the Middle East, except that in this case, surprisingly, the British by and large kept their word. For at least two decades they allowed the Zionist movement to bring hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, and these new arrivals set up hundreds of settlements including several towns, as well as the political, economic, military and cultural infrastructure of the future state of Israel.
To write Palestine Betrayed, Karsh gained access to masses of recently declassified Western, Soviet, Arabic, and UN documents from the period of British rule and the period of the first Arab-Israeli war, spanning the years from 1917 to 1949. Karsh argues: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." He continues, "There was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian-Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Karsh avoids his own judgments, using instead quotes of others – Palestinians, British, and Zionists who had strong opinions. As the book opens, Karsh quotes David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders who proclaimed that, although the Jews in Palestine wanted their own state, they did not want to abridge the freedom of their Arab neighbors. He uses quote after quote, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion, to show that the ethnic cleansing arguments used by Arabs today was untrue from the outset, going into detail about the Arab-Jewish cooperation immediately after the Balfour Declaration and before a British governor inexplicably appointed Amin Husseini as the Jerusalem Mufti over the objections of the Arabs.
Karsh blames Hajj Amin Husseini for the deterioration of the relationship between the Arabs and Jews. Husseini almost single-handedly led the Palestinian Arabs to disaster as Mufti of Jerusalem, as president of the Supreme Muslim Council, and as president of the Arab Higher Committee. He was pathologically anti-Semitic, a Nazi sympathizer, and uncompromising in nature. If anyone is responsible for the initiation of Jewish-Palestinian conflict, it is Husseini. Karsh shows that Husseini had his eye on a pan-Arabic nation uniting Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, and apart from his hatred of Jews, Jewish statehood stood in the way of his plan.
The majority of the book is devoted to the fighting and Arab flight during the War of Independence. Fighting began within hours following the UN vote to partition Palestine on Nov. 29, 1947, and lasted till the eve of the British evacuation on May 14, 1948. The international conflict began on May 15 (the day after Israel came into being), when five Arab state armies invaded, and continued until January 1949. Over half (between 300,000 and 340,000) of the 600,000 Arab refugees fled before the British evacuation – most of them in the final month. Karsh argues that the majority of Arabs fled their homes as a result of fear, and often in spite of Jewish entreaties to stay in their homes and businesses.
Refugee camps were set up and managed by the U.N. in an effort to deal with the Palestinian exodus. These camps still exist, still supported by the U.N., but because of natural increase, the refugees have about tripled in number, living unnecessarily hopeless, unproductive lives. In contrast, the India-Pakistan confrontation dislodged more than a million people and spawned considerable violence in which thousands were killed. Yet today the grandchildren of these one-time refugees lead normal lives and some have achieved considerable success. There is no reason, other than the stubbornness of their leaders, that the Palestinians cannot do the same.
Taken together The Balfour Declaration and Palestine Betrayed provide 768 pages of thoughtful writing for anyone seeking an understanding of the intractable Middle East conflict and the almost futile pursuit of peace.
In a 2002 interview, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past … The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis – again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one." British deviousness no doubt contributed to the original conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist Jews. But that generation has been long in their graves. Today’s conflict is not between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but rather between the peace camps on both sides and their rejectionist opponents.
The peace camp seems to have won out in Israel. The ball is now in the Palestinian court.
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