French map of the Vilayet of Aleppo: Antioch and Alexendretta, today part of Turkey, can be seen as west to the “Sanjdjak De Alepp” (Sanjak of Aleppo). Source: Wikimedia commons
In an interview
with BBC host Emily Maitlis on Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel, Israel’s ambassador to the UK Mark Regev
cited what he called a hypocritical Arab reaction to Trump’s
recognition of Jerusalem, declaring: “The Palestinians and the Arab
World officially say that they recognise Israel within the 1967
boundaries, so why is there a problem with recognising Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital when Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel
since 1949?”
Regev’s audacity here was alarming even by his notorious standards.
For
one, the ‘Arab acceptance’ of Israel on the basis of the 1967
borders was of course conditioned on Israel staying within those
borders, i.e. the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Furthermore East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed to West Jerusalem as
part of its ‘eternal undivided capital’ against international law
in 1980, of course lay within the Palestinian state according to the
1967 borders. The Arab acceptance was additionally tied to the
settling of other outstanding resolutions from 1948, such as the
Right of Return for Palestinian refugees (UN Resolution 181) and the
Status of Jerusalem.
Indeed, the reason that the
international community does not recognise Jerusalem (that is, even
West Jerusalem before 1967) as Israel's capital is because the city
was originally designated by the 1947 UN partition plan – which
Israel proclaims as the basis of its legitimacy, despite going on to
annex half of the allocated Arab state in the 1948 war – to be an
international city. In the eyes of the international community, a
revised status of Jerusalem which would depart from the original UN
resolution is thus subject to a final agreement with the
Palestinians, since the partition plan was meant to create two
states.
Of
course, this does not mean that the very recognition by the
‘international community’ of Israel in 1948/49 was anything but
contradictory, largely political, and in legal terms arguably
somewhat nonsensical. The ‘international community’ – then
primarily a small club of old colonial powers, recently independent
Latin American states under the strong influence of the US, as well
as the Eastern Bloc under Stalin’s similarly pro-Israel USSR –
accepted Israel’s occupation of half of the allocated Arab state
during the 1948 war, but balked at the annexation of West Jerusalem –
the declared capital of the state being recognised – despite both
of these realities violating the Partition plan.
Britain would refuse to vote for Israel’s recognition at the UN on three separate occasions
Indeed,
despite Theresa May’s declaration
during the centenary of the Balfour Declaration of her ‘pride’ of
Britain’s role in creating Israel, Britain on the other hand was in
fact against the concept of partition, and despite US pressure and
heavy wartime debts owed to it, abstained on the 1947 Partition plan
vote. Indeed, the British ambassador to the United Nations at the
time, Ernest Bevin, described
the partition resolution (which granted 55% of Palestine to the
Zionists, despite the Jewish population still being outnumbered by
Arabs by two-to-one even after three decades of mass immigration) as
“so manifestly unjust for the Arabs that it is difficult to see
how we could reconcile it with our conscience”. Between 1948
and 1949, Britain would refuse to vote for Israel’s recognition at
the UN on three separate occasions, before becoming the last state to
do so in 1949 following the end of the first Arab-Israeli war.
May's misplaced 'pride'
May’s unapologetic
acceptance of Britain’s right to decide the fate of another people
on their behalf of course displayed a continued colonial hubris. That
the Declaration and subsequent Palestine Mandate constituted “one
nation promising a second the land of a third” was substantiated by
Britain’s own census of Palestine, which in 1922 showed Arabs
outnumbering the Jewish community (which it should be noted included
local, Arabised Jews as well as Zionist settlers) by a ratio of
nine-to-one. However, what is perhaps less recognised is that her
declaration of ‘pride’ of Israel’s creation out of the
Palestine mandate in fact contradicted Britain’s official and
‘legal’ undertakings during its control over Palestine.
Contrary to what may be popular perception today, British governments
throughout the duration of the Mandate in fact denied that their aim
in Palestine was to transform it into a Jewish state, declaring that
Britain only meant to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ or national
presence within Palestine (though in practical terms of
course, British policy would effectively set up the infrastructures
of the Zionist state). Instead, Britain’s policy on Palestine was
to establish a ‘binational state’ of Arabs and Jews, and this was
an official tenet of the Palestine mandate. To emphasise this the
ratified declaration of the Mandate would
remove the draft wording of a Zionist ‘claim’ (a
term seen as having potential legal connotations) to Palestine, as
well as an excerpt declaring “…the establishment of the Jewish
National Home as the guiding principle in the execution of the
Mandate”.
Meanwhile the phrasing of “reconstituting
Palestine a Jewish national home” (phrasing which was not
present in the Balfour Declaration) would be changed to
“reconstituting a Jewish national home in Palestine”,
against Zionist opposition. Such ‘clarifications’ were not
accidental. Thus when Hubert Young, a prominent pro-Zionist figure in
the Foreign Office, wrote
in 1921 that the British commitment “…in respect of Palestine is
the Balfour Declaration constituting it a National Home for
the Jewish People”, he was corrected by Foreign Secretary Curzon:
“No. ‘Establishing a National Home in Palestine for the
Jewish people’ – a very different proposition”.
This
differentiation in British policy continued to be consistently
repeated by different British administrations, including even by
pro-Zionist figures. Thus the 1922 Churchill White Paper would
reaffirm that Britain’s mandate was not to create a separate Jewish
state in Palestine – declaring
again that the “…[Balfour] Declaration… do not contemplate that
Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home,
but that such a Home should be founded "in Palestine"” –
before adding that there was to be only one form of
citizenship for Arabs and Jews alike: a Palestinian one. Even
Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, the renowned and
ardent Zionist Herbert Samuel, would declare
to a Jerusalem crowd in 1921 that “Britain has never consented and
would never consent” to a “Jewish Government” in Palestine.
Finally, the 1939 White Paper would declare
"The independent State [of Palestine] should be one in which
Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the
essential interests of each community are safeguarded."
This
distinction especially stressed when Britain faced criticisms that
the Balfour Declaration violated the McMahon-Hussein agreement of
1915 (which preceded the Balfour Declaration), which promised
independence to the Arabs if they agreed to revolt against the
Ottomans. Indeed, in 1922 the House of Lords rejected
ratification of the Palestine Mandate and its
commitment to establishing a Jewish national home both as “opposed
to the sentiments and wishes of the great majority of the people of
Palestine” as well as “[it] directly violates the pledges made by
His Majesty's Government to the people of Palestine in the
Declaration of October, 1915 [McMahon Correspondence], and again in
the Declaration of November, 1918”.
The Lords were overruled by the Conservative-led Commons – in no
small part due to the efforts of Winston Churchill. This was despite
his admission in 1921 that: “The difficulty about the promises of a
National Home for Jews in Palestine was that it conflicted with our
regular policy of consulting the wishes of the people in mandated
territories and giving them a representative institution as soon as
the people were fitted for it”. Herbert Samuel was similarly
candid, writing:
“What we have got to face is the fact that as long as we persist in
our Zionist policy, we have got to maintain all our present forces in
Palestine to enforce a policy hateful to the great majority, a
majority which means to fight and to continue to fight and has
right on its side”.
Britain’s other forgotten
promise
“The Palestine position is this. If we deal with our
commitments, there is first the general pledge to Hussein in October
1915, under which Palestine was included in the areas as to which
Great Britain pledged itself that they should be Arab and independent
in the future” – Soon-to-be Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon,
speaking
in 1918 as Chairman of the Eastern Committee of the British Cabinet.
During the First World War, an agreement was made between the British
official Henry McMahon, representing the British government, and
Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the Hashemite Arab Emir of Mecca,
promising independence in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire if
the Arabs agreed to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The areas
which would formulate the independent Arab state would extend until
Aden in the south (which was a British colony), Turkey in the north,
and Persia (Iran) in the east.
There were however
territorial exemptions laid out by McMahon within these limits:
described as areas which “could not be said to be purely Arab”
and were of interest to Britain’s ally, France. These were defined
as “the two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions
of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama
and Aleppo”. The resulting pact resulted in the launch of the
Arab Revolt of 1916, later made famous by the accounts of British
officer T.E. Lawrence, i.e. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. With British
support, the revolt succeeded in expelling the Ottomans from the
Hijaz (Western Arabia) and Syria.
An agreement was made promising independence in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire if the Arabs agreed to revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
However following
the end of the First World War, some pro-Zionist British officials in
the post war government, led by Arthur Balfour and Colonial Secretary
Winston Churchill, would try to retroactively dispute the wartime
government’s original claim that the territorial ‘exemptions’
declared within the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence did not include
Palestine. Indeed, British archive
records (these were separately relayed by and can be
found in the works of Eli
Kedourie and Arnold
Toynbee) showed that both the British War Office and
the British Arab Bureau confirmed in 1916 that Palestine was part of
the proposed Arab state, and furthermore
that the British government even dropped leaflets in Palestine during
the war proclaiming the agreement for Arab independence in exchange
for the Arab revolt against the Ottomans.
Though a
natural and intuitive conclusion would be that the areas in question
referred to the Syrian coast, and in particular Lebanon (which would
become a French mandate, and in which France had long enjoyed special
privileges since Ottoman time), this revised interpretation was
adopted in order to deny any contradiction with the later Balfour
Declaration and Sykes-Picot Treaty. In particular, the theory seemed
to gain traction when the jurisdiction over Palestine was moved from
the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office (headed by Winston
Churchill), yet it was thoroughly debunked by the records and
statements of British officials themselves – both before and after
the revision.
A theory debunked
In
its simplest form, the revisionist interpretation of the McMahon
promise rested on the notion that by ‘districts’ McMahon actually
meant to refer to ‘provinces’, i.e. the Ottoman administrative
subdivision of Vilayat. The term ‘Vilayat’ came
from the Arabic ‘Wilayat’, also used by Arabs as
‘province’ but additionally understandable as ‘district’,
‘region’ or ‘environs’. The English version of the letter
used the term ‘district’, whilst Wilayet appeared in the
Arabic translation. According to this revisionist reading,
territories which were ‘west to the provinces [Vilayets]
of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo’ would include Palestine.
However, as the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax correctly
noted in a government
memorandum in 1939, there were no Ottoman Viliyats
of Homs, Hama or even Damascus; the only provinces that existed were
the Vilayet of Syria and the Vilayet of Aleppo.
Additionally, there was no land west to the Villayet of
Aleppo, but rather the Mediterranean Sea. If read as ‘districts’
on the other hand, which Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and Hama had all been
known as under the Ottomans (including colloquially by the population
and officially as Sanjaks – which unlike Vilayet was
a Turkish word not used by the Arabs), the areas west to the
districts or Sanjaks of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo
would include the Sanjaks of Beirut, Mount Lebanon (also known
as the ‘Mutasriffiyat of Mount Lebanon’ – an independent
or specially administered Sanjak), Tripoli, Lattakia, as well
as the two Ottoman sub-districts (Qazas) of
Alexandretta and Antioch.
Under the French Mandate
Beirut, Mount Lebanon and Tripoli would form “Greater Lebanon”
(which would become independent as Lebanon), whilst Alexandretta and
Antioch formed the semi-autonomous ‘Sanjak of Alexandretta’
which would be ceded by France to Turkey before the end of the
Mandate. Lattakia, meanwhile, would receive substantial autonomy
during the French mandate as the ‘Alawite state’, and like
Lebanon was similarly intended to be separated from Syria by France
(this was however abandoned in the 1940s as a result of sustained
Syrian nationalist pressure).
In other words, Palestine
was not to the west of any of the districts of ‘Damascus, Homs,
Hama and Aleppo’, but lay considerably further to the south as well
as to the west. Indeed, the entirety of Palestine could have been
identified as the area west of the districts or Sanjaks of
Houran and Ma’an. If insufficient, there were additionally three
known Ottoman districts within Palestine which could also have been
named, namely the Independent Sanjak (also Mutasriffiyat)
of Jerusalem, the Sanjak of Nablus/Balqa and the Sanjak
of Acre, which combined roughly constituted the borders of Mandatory
Palestine.
The Vilayet of Aleppo was also divided into Sanjaks (including the Sanjak of Aleppo), as shown in next map. Furthermore, the Mutassirifyat of Jerusalem’s south-eastern border had in fact been changed by the Ottomans in 1906 to reflect Palestine’s familiar modern boundary. Source: Fanack.com
French map of the Vilayet of Aleppo: Antioch and Alexendretta, today part of Turkey, can be seen as west to the “Sanjdjak De Alepp” (Sanjak of Aleppo). Source: Wikimedia commons
Area “west to District of Aleppo”: Alexandretta & Antioch (Sanjak of Alexandretta)
Area “west to District of Hama”: Latakia (Alawite State)
Area “west to District of Homs”: Tripoli (Greater Lebanon)
Area “west to District of Damascus”: Beirut & Mount Lebanon (Greater Lebanon). Source: Wikimedia commons
Indeed, this was made clear in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence
itself, with Sharif Hussein writing: “We find it our duty that the
eminent minister [McMahon] should be sure that, at the first
opportunity after this war is finished, we shall ask you … for what
we today put aside regarding France in Beirut and its coasts”.
This was subsequently acknowledged without correction by McMahon.
Palestine’s capital district, Jerusalem, was of course not part of
‘Beirut and its coasts’ (nor the Ottoman Vilayat of
Beirut).
Thus the reality is that if Palestine was
intended to be excluded, it could’ve been excluded alternately as:
-
‘Palestine’, which was the commonly used term at the time (as
the thousands of 19th century travelogues to the area,
such as those of Mark Twain, would attest); -
‘Areas to the west of the districts of Houran and Ma’an’;
-
‘The districts of Acre, Nablus and Jerusalem’;
-
‘The district [actually province or Vilayet] of Beirut
and the district [Mutasrifiyat] of Jerusalem’
Instead, the likes of Winston Churchill, who would later deride the
Palestinian Arab claim to Palestine in the words “I do not agree
that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even
though he may have lain there for a very long time”, would proclaim
that McMahon really meant to say ‘provinces’ when he said
districts – which failed as a revisionist interpretation in any
case since no such provinces existed. Indeed, aware of widespread
opposition to his ‘reading’ within the British government itself,
Winston Churchill argued
that the classified text of the McMahon agreement should not be
published, stating that it was “not in the public interest”.
Britain of course later comprehensively betrayed the
McMahon-Hussein agreement with the 1917 Sykes-Picot treaty: not only
taking control of Palestine, but also other areas which were (even
more definitively) outside of the areas ‘exempted’ such as
Transjordan – whilst the entirety of Syria (and not just its western
coast) would be similarly betrayed by Britain to French control.
Zionist
contradictions
Indeed, here an
interesting contradiction can be highlighted within the Zionist
narrative: whilst often proclaiming the Balfour Declaration as the
‘legal’ basis for the Israeli state, the Zionist movement at the
time in fact condemned in Britain in no uncertain terms for its
affirmations that the Mandate’s purpose was not to create a Jewish
state. Therefore, it is rather the case that when relations are warm
with the British government, as was the case during the centenary’s
celebrations, Israel’s proponents would praise Britain’s role in
the foundation of Israel, yet when relations are cold, as they indeed
ostensibly were during the early years of the State of Israel,
Britain would be condemned in no uncertain terms by the same
proponents.
Indeed, even today official
Israeli accounts continue to declare that Britain was
an ‘obstacle’ to the creation of Israel, whilst attempting to
fight
back at increasingly popular accusations of Israel as
a colonial product of the British Empire. Accusations of British
‘betrayal’ are rife throughout both historical and contemporary
Zionist books. Herein lies a further contradiction: on the one hand
Zionists condemned the British authorities for their repeated
affirmations that Balfour’s promise of a Jewish homeland did not
equate a commitment to creating a Jewish state, whilst on the other
proclaiming that same British promise as the basis of Israel’s
legitimacy.
This reality formed one of the reasons
Britain was busy throughout the 1940s being embroiled in fighting
what it termed a 'terrorist' insurgency by various Zionist factions
(later Prime Ministers of Israel such as Menachem Begin had been
designated as wanted
‘terrorists’ by the British mandate authorities).
It is also why Britain abstained on the 1947 Partition plan vote.
This is therefore one of the most ironic realities
of Theresa May’s declaration of ‘pride’ of Britain’s role in
establishing Israel: at the official level, the State of Israel was
founded against the tenets of the British Mandate. Not only were
British actions in Palestine unjust in the obvious (and main) sense
of constituting a hubristic colonial imposition, but 'honest' and
'proper' Britain actually acted dishonestly and improperly in
Palestine even according to its own colonial commitments.
Thus
whilst May and others can perhaps try to ignore the colonial nature
of Britain's actions in Palestine (or if acknowledging it, view them
as not necessarily negative) – or imply that its legacies should
stand regardless as a product of British Empire ‘officialdom’,
executed by a then-‘legitimate’ ancestor of the modern state –
she would be well advised to familiarise herself with Britain’s
undertakings from the government’s archives, before further
enthusing on a pride rooted in false promises.