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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 a 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
with 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.