Post by earl on Mar 4, 2008 18:02:31 GMT
The Evils of British Imperialism: The Middle East
The spoils received by Britain after WW1 was not the joy of seeing a plucky little Belgium being free, but a mass carve up of the Ottoman Empire.
The partitioning actually began from the early days of the war. The allies disagreed over post-war aims, which were contradictory, and a collection of dual and triple agreements with each ally wanting to improve its position in the region. The dissolution brought the creation of the modern Arab world and Republic of Turkey. The League of Nations granted France mandates over Syria and Lebanon and granted the United Kingdom mandates over Iraq and Palestine (which comprised two autonomous regions: Palestine and Transjordan). Parts of the Ottoman Empire on the Arabian Peninsula became parts of what are today Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
The western half of Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the already substantial Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Faisal Hussein was installed as a puppet king of Iraq.
Mandate of Palestine
Britain had promised the local Arabs, through Lawrence of Arabia, independence for a united Arab country covering most of the Arab Middle East, in exchange for their supporting the British; and Britain had promised to create and foster a Jewish national home as laid out in the Balfour Declaration, 1917. The British had, in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, previously promised the Hashemite family lordship over most land in the region in return for their support in the Great Arab Revolt during World War I. The British, under General Allenby during the Arab Revolt stirred up by the British intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence, defeated the Ottoman forces in 1917 and occupied Palestine and Syria. The land was administered by the British for the remainder of the war.
The United Kingdom was granted control of Palestine by the Versailles Peace Conference which established the League of Nations in 1919 and appointed Herbert Samuel, a former Postmaster General in the British cabinet, who was instrumental in drafting the Balfour Declaration, as its first High Commissioner in Palestine. In 1920 at the Conference of Sanremo, Italy, the League of Nations mandate over Palestine was assigned to Britain. In 1923 Britain transferred a part of the Golan Heights to the French Mandate of Syria, in exchange for the Metula region
Essentially, the British use of coercion can clearly be seen during this period of time. While it was viable, the British promised the Arabs freedom to create their own state while they had a use in fighting the Ottoman Empire. After WW1, the British governments true intentions were revealed by backstabbing the Arabs who had fought side by side with them, by creating a British administered region, and with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British began their tried and trusted formula of ‘divide and conquer, where they would use a minority of Jews to help administer British dominion over the majority of Arabs. Initially, the British were perceived as favouring Zionism, but by 1922, the enthusiasm for this project was dying out. As was British Imperial policy elsewhere in the world, the natives were never once consulted during this process.
Balfor 1919:
After a number of clashes between the growing Jewish presence in the region and the native Arabs, in 1937, the Peel Commission proposed a partition between a small Jewish state, whose Arab population had to be transferred, and an Arab state to be attached to Jordan. The proposal was rejected by the Arabs and by the Zionist Congress (by 300 votes to 158) but accepted by the latter as a basis for negotiations between the Executive and the British Government.
In the wake of the Peel Commission recommendation an armed uprising spread through the country. Over the next 18 months the British lost control of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron. British forces, supported by 6,000 armed Jewish auxiliary police, suppressed the widespread riots with overwhelming force. The British officer Charles Orde Wingate (who supported a Zionist revival for religious reasons) organized Special Night Squads composed of British soldiers and Jewish volunteers such as Yigal Alon, which "scored significant successes against the Arab rebels in the lower Galilee and in the Jezreel valley" by conducting raids on Arab villages. The squads used excessive and indiscriminate force The British mobilised up to 20,000 Jews (policemen, field troops and night squads). The Jewish militias the Stern Gang and Irgun used violence also against civilians, attacking marketplaces and buses.
The Revolt resulted in the deaths of 5,000 Palestinians and the wounding of 10,000. In total 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. The Jewish population had 400 killed; the British 200. Significantly, from 1936 to 1945, whilst establishing collaborative security arrangements with the Jewish Agency, the British confiscated 13,200 firearms from Arabs and 521 weapons from Jews.
Aftermath of WW2
The holocaust had a major effect on the situation in Palestine. During the war, the British forbade entry into Palestine of European Jews escaping Nazi persecution, placing them in detention camps or deporting them to places such as Mauritius.
Starting in 1939, the Zionists organized an illegal immigration effort, known as Aliya Beth, conducted by "Hamossad Le'aliyah Bet“, which rescued tens of thousands of European Jews from the Nazis by shipping them to Palestine in rickety boats. Many of these boats were intercepted. The last immigrant boat to try to enter Palestine during the war was the Struma, torpedoed in the Black Sea by a Soviet submarine in February 1942. The boat sank with the loss of nearly 800 lives. Illegal immigration resumed after WW II.
Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, members of the Jewish Lehi underground, assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo on 6 November 1944. Moyne was the British Minister of State for the Middle East. The assassination is said by some to have turned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill against the Zionist cause.
The British had strategic interests in Arab support, because of their interests in Egypt and control of oil production in Iraq, Kuwait and the Emirates, and especially to guarantee the friendship of oil-rich Saudi Arabia. The ban on illegal immigration continued.
As a result of the assassination of Lord Moyne, the Haganah kidnapped, interrogated, tortured and turned over to the British many members of the Irgun and Lehi. This period is known as the 'Hunting Season'. Irgun ordered its members not to resist or retaliate with violence, so as to prevent a civil war.
Following the war, 250,000 Jewish refugees were stranded in displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe. Despite the pressure of world opinion, in particular the repeated requests of US President Harry S. Truman and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that 100,000 Jews be immediately granted entry to Palestine, the British maintained the ban on immigration. The Jewish underground forces then united and carried out several terrorist attacks and bombings against the British. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British administration, killing 92 people.
Following the bombing, the British Government began imprisoning illegal Jewish immigrants in Cyprus. Those imprisoned were held without trial and included women and children. Most were holocaust survivors (including many orphans). The negative publicity resulting from the situation in Palestine meant the mandate was widely unpopular in Britain and caused US Congress to delay granting the British vital loans for reconstruction. At the same time, many European Jews were finding their way to the United States. An increasing growing influence in American politics, many Zionist backers won over sympathizers in the American and other Western governments. The Labour party had promised before its election to allow mass Jewish migration into Palestine. Additionally the situation required maintenance of 100,000 British troops in the country. In response to these pressures the British announced their desire to terminate the mandate and withdraw by May 1948.
Irish influence in Israels Battle for freedom from British Imperialism
The Irgun, Hebrew for National Military Organization in the Land of Israel, was founded by Russian born Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky.
He and his successor, Menachem Begin studied the IRA’s war of independence against the British. They consciously followed the Irish model in shaping the Irguns strategy against the British in Palestine between 1944 and 1947. It has likewise been suggested that there was an Irish influence on the group that broke away from the Irgun in 1940, Lehame Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel). This group used the nom de guerre ‘Michael’, after Michael Collins. Bob Briscoe, a member of the original Sinn Fein, later Fianna Fail, and first Jewish mayor of Dublin city met Vladimir Jabotinsky when he visited Ireland to study IRA tactics and he fully briefed him, being an ex-IRA gun runner. He ran guns to Ireland from Germany during the war of independence. Briscoe decided to take on the Zionist cause. Briscoe: "I appointed myself to a full professorship with the Chair of Subversive Activity against England." During the war he went to South Africa and raise considerable funds from its Jewish community to help ferry Jewish immigrants past the British and into Palestine.
As he got more involved, he could see a possible Jewish civil war breaking out among the different freedom groups. At a meeting with Menachem Begin in Paris, he urged Begin to abandon the Irgun as a physical force movement and convert it to a constitutional party, as the IRA had done.
In 1950, he traveled to Israel with President Eamonn De Valera, who had become his close friend. De Valera was impressed with Israel's progress but disturbed by the plight of the Arab refugees. And so was Briscoe - IRA man, Irgun man, Collins man, Jabotinsky man, Zionist, Irish nationalist and gunrunner. "De Valera sympathized with the Arab people in their hopes for independence and prosperity," he wrote. "So do I. I want to see all people this way - a world where every human being is of equal dignity and equal importance."
In 1950, this old son of a gun traveled to Israel with President Eamonn De Valera, who had become his close friend. De Valera was impressed with Israel's progress but disturbed by the plight of the Arab refugees. And so was Briscoe - IRA man, Irgun man, Collins man, Jabotinsky man, Zionist, Irish nationalist and gunrunner. "De Valera sympathized with the Arab people in their hopes for independence and prosperity," he wrote. "So do I. I want to see all people this way - a world where every human being is of equal dignity and equal importance."
The spoils received by Britain after WW1 was not the joy of seeing a plucky little Belgium being free, but a mass carve up of the Ottoman Empire.
The partitioning actually began from the early days of the war. The allies disagreed over post-war aims, which were contradictory, and a collection of dual and triple agreements with each ally wanting to improve its position in the region. The dissolution brought the creation of the modern Arab world and Republic of Turkey. The League of Nations granted France mandates over Syria and Lebanon and granted the United Kingdom mandates over Iraq and Palestine (which comprised two autonomous regions: Palestine and Transjordan). Parts of the Ottoman Empire on the Arabian Peninsula became parts of what are today Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
The western half of Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the already substantial Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Faisal Hussein was installed as a puppet king of Iraq.
Mandate of Palestine
Britain had promised the local Arabs, through Lawrence of Arabia, independence for a united Arab country covering most of the Arab Middle East, in exchange for their supporting the British; and Britain had promised to create and foster a Jewish national home as laid out in the Balfour Declaration, 1917. The British had, in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, previously promised the Hashemite family lordship over most land in the region in return for their support in the Great Arab Revolt during World War I. The British, under General Allenby during the Arab Revolt stirred up by the British intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence, defeated the Ottoman forces in 1917 and occupied Palestine and Syria. The land was administered by the British for the remainder of the war.
The United Kingdom was granted control of Palestine by the Versailles Peace Conference which established the League of Nations in 1919 and appointed Herbert Samuel, a former Postmaster General in the British cabinet, who was instrumental in drafting the Balfour Declaration, as its first High Commissioner in Palestine. In 1920 at the Conference of Sanremo, Italy, the League of Nations mandate over Palestine was assigned to Britain. In 1923 Britain transferred a part of the Golan Heights to the French Mandate of Syria, in exchange for the Metula region
Essentially, the British use of coercion can clearly be seen during this period of time. While it was viable, the British promised the Arabs freedom to create their own state while they had a use in fighting the Ottoman Empire. After WW1, the British governments true intentions were revealed by backstabbing the Arabs who had fought side by side with them, by creating a British administered region, and with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British began their tried and trusted formula of ‘divide and conquer, where they would use a minority of Jews to help administer British dominion over the majority of Arabs. Initially, the British were perceived as favouring Zionism, but by 1922, the enthusiasm for this project was dying out. As was British Imperial policy elsewhere in the world, the natives were never once consulted during this process.
Balfor 1919:
For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the forms of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion, that is right.
After a number of clashes between the growing Jewish presence in the region and the native Arabs, in 1937, the Peel Commission proposed a partition between a small Jewish state, whose Arab population had to be transferred, and an Arab state to be attached to Jordan. The proposal was rejected by the Arabs and by the Zionist Congress (by 300 votes to 158) but accepted by the latter as a basis for negotiations between the Executive and the British Government.
In the wake of the Peel Commission recommendation an armed uprising spread through the country. Over the next 18 months the British lost control of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron. British forces, supported by 6,000 armed Jewish auxiliary police, suppressed the widespread riots with overwhelming force. The British officer Charles Orde Wingate (who supported a Zionist revival for religious reasons) organized Special Night Squads composed of British soldiers and Jewish volunteers such as Yigal Alon, which "scored significant successes against the Arab rebels in the lower Galilee and in the Jezreel valley" by conducting raids on Arab villages. The squads used excessive and indiscriminate force The British mobilised up to 20,000 Jews (policemen, field troops and night squads). The Jewish militias the Stern Gang and Irgun used violence also against civilians, attacking marketplaces and buses.
The Revolt resulted in the deaths of 5,000 Palestinians and the wounding of 10,000. In total 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. The Jewish population had 400 killed; the British 200. Significantly, from 1936 to 1945, whilst establishing collaborative security arrangements with the Jewish Agency, the British confiscated 13,200 firearms from Arabs and 521 weapons from Jews.
Aftermath of WW2
The holocaust had a major effect on the situation in Palestine. During the war, the British forbade entry into Palestine of European Jews escaping Nazi persecution, placing them in detention camps or deporting them to places such as Mauritius.
Starting in 1939, the Zionists organized an illegal immigration effort, known as Aliya Beth, conducted by "Hamossad Le'aliyah Bet“, which rescued tens of thousands of European Jews from the Nazis by shipping them to Palestine in rickety boats. Many of these boats were intercepted. The last immigrant boat to try to enter Palestine during the war was the Struma, torpedoed in the Black Sea by a Soviet submarine in February 1942. The boat sank with the loss of nearly 800 lives. Illegal immigration resumed after WW II.
Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, members of the Jewish Lehi underground, assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo on 6 November 1944. Moyne was the British Minister of State for the Middle East. The assassination is said by some to have turned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill against the Zionist cause.
The British had strategic interests in Arab support, because of their interests in Egypt and control of oil production in Iraq, Kuwait and the Emirates, and especially to guarantee the friendship of oil-rich Saudi Arabia. The ban on illegal immigration continued.
As a result of the assassination of Lord Moyne, the Haganah kidnapped, interrogated, tortured and turned over to the British many members of the Irgun and Lehi. This period is known as the 'Hunting Season'. Irgun ordered its members not to resist or retaliate with violence, so as to prevent a civil war.
Following the war, 250,000 Jewish refugees were stranded in displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe. Despite the pressure of world opinion, in particular the repeated requests of US President Harry S. Truman and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that 100,000 Jews be immediately granted entry to Palestine, the British maintained the ban on immigration. The Jewish underground forces then united and carried out several terrorist attacks and bombings against the British. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British administration, killing 92 people.
Following the bombing, the British Government began imprisoning illegal Jewish immigrants in Cyprus. Those imprisoned were held without trial and included women and children. Most were holocaust survivors (including many orphans). The negative publicity resulting from the situation in Palestine meant the mandate was widely unpopular in Britain and caused US Congress to delay granting the British vital loans for reconstruction. At the same time, many European Jews were finding their way to the United States. An increasing growing influence in American politics, many Zionist backers won over sympathizers in the American and other Western governments. The Labour party had promised before its election to allow mass Jewish migration into Palestine. Additionally the situation required maintenance of 100,000 British troops in the country. In response to these pressures the British announced their desire to terminate the mandate and withdraw by May 1948.
Irish influence in Israels Battle for freedom from British Imperialism
The Irgun, Hebrew for National Military Organization in the Land of Israel, was founded by Russian born Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky.
He and his successor, Menachem Begin studied the IRA’s war of independence against the British. They consciously followed the Irish model in shaping the Irguns strategy against the British in Palestine between 1944 and 1947. It has likewise been suggested that there was an Irish influence on the group that broke away from the Irgun in 1940, Lehame Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel). This group used the nom de guerre ‘Michael’, after Michael Collins. Bob Briscoe, a member of the original Sinn Fein, later Fianna Fail, and first Jewish mayor of Dublin city met Vladimir Jabotinsky when he visited Ireland to study IRA tactics and he fully briefed him, being an ex-IRA gun runner. He ran guns to Ireland from Germany during the war of independence. Briscoe decided to take on the Zionist cause. Briscoe: "I appointed myself to a full professorship with the Chair of Subversive Activity against England." During the war he went to South Africa and raise considerable funds from its Jewish community to help ferry Jewish immigrants past the British and into Palestine.
As he got more involved, he could see a possible Jewish civil war breaking out among the different freedom groups. At a meeting with Menachem Begin in Paris, he urged Begin to abandon the Irgun as a physical force movement and convert it to a constitutional party, as the IRA had done.
In 1950, he traveled to Israel with President Eamonn De Valera, who had become his close friend. De Valera was impressed with Israel's progress but disturbed by the plight of the Arab refugees. And so was Briscoe - IRA man, Irgun man, Collins man, Jabotinsky man, Zionist, Irish nationalist and gunrunner. "De Valera sympathized with the Arab people in their hopes for independence and prosperity," he wrote. "So do I. I want to see all people this way - a world where every human being is of equal dignity and equal importance."
In 1950, this old son of a gun traveled to Israel with President Eamonn De Valera, who had become his close friend. De Valera was impressed with Israel's progress but disturbed by the plight of the Arab refugees. And so was Briscoe - IRA man, Irgun man, Collins man, Jabotinsky man, Zionist, Irish nationalist and gunrunner. "De Valera sympathized with the Arab people in their hopes for independence and prosperity," he wrote. "So do I. I want to see all people this way - a world where every human being is of equal dignity and equal importance."
