By Prof Avi Bell, Times of Israel
In a debate with me at Jewish Ideas Daily, my friends and colleagues Joseph Weiler and Yaffa Zilbershats vigorously oppose adopting the legal conclusions of the Levy Report, while disagreeing with the Levy Report’s legal arguments regarding the applicability of the law of belligerent occupation to the West Bank.
I disagree with the authors’ legal arguments for reasons I shall explain below. But what disturbs me far more is their prediction of disaster if Israel holds to its traditional interpretation of its legal rights as per the Levy Report. The authors claim that the Report’s legal analysis will force Israel either to “undermine the Zionist ideal of Israel as the state of the Jewish people” by granting citizenship to the Arabs living in the West Bank and threatening Israel’s Jewish majority, or, alternatively, to “adopt a governing structure for the territories amounting to a form of apartheid.”
Frankly, this argument is preposterous. Having legal rights does not limit policy options; if anything, it expands them. Whether Israel adopts the Levy Report or not, Israel has the same policy options – to surrender the West Bank unilaterally, to compromise on its territorial rights in an agreement with the PLO (should the latter ever return to the negotiating table), to take advantage of its rights and expand Israel’s jurisdiction, or to mix and match among these possibilities.
The scenarios offered by Weiler and Zilbershats are, at best, fanciful.
The first scenario relies on a misplaced fear that Israel would cease having a Jewish majority if it were to incorporate the West Bank. The demographics of the West Bank are a matter of debate, but even using the most inflated estimates of the Palestinian population, incorporation of the West Bank would boost the Arab percentage of Israel’s population to roughly 40% (the more realistic estimates would put the Arab percentage at closer to 35%). Incidentally, if Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank were to act like their
brethren in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in response to the extension of Israeli law, they would overwhelmingly reject Israeli citizenship. Even with the West Bank in the fold, Israel would continue to be both Jewish and democratic.
In any event, most Israelis reject incorporating the West Bank in toto into Israel. Most Israelis continue to believe that notwithstanding Israeli rights in the West Bank, Israel’s best option is to continue holding out territorial compromise as an inducement for Palestinian Arabs to end their war against Israel, while sharing governance with the Palestinians in the interim. Regardless of whether Israel’s government adopts the Levy Report’s legal analysis, this is Israel’s most likely policy in the near future.
Weiler’s and Zilbershats’s second scenario copies a libel brought to the discussion by Aeyal Gross. None of the authors of the Levy Report support apartheid or argued for it, in or out of their report. None of the eminent legal authorities cited by Weiler and Zilbershats would ever dream of supporting apartheid. No major political party in Israel has ever favored adopting an apartheid regime in the West Bank, and that is not about to change. Law enforcement authorities have never carried out an apartheid regime in the West Bank and there is no chance they ever will. The authors know all of this. In suggesting there is a possibility of Israel adopting such a regime, the authors aid one of the most horrific slanders against Israel and join themselves to an ongoing campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. The authors have made a terrible mistake in following Gross into this miasma.
Weiler’s and Zilbershats’s legal arguments are more conventional. They claim that Israel’s traditional position that the West Bank is not under de jure belligerent occupation, as endorsed by the Levy Report, has been rendered irrelevant by three developments: Security Council Resolution 242, a “consensus” regarding the status of the West Bank, and the acknowledgement of Palestinian rights of self-determination.
The authors err on all three counts.
Security Council Resolution 242 does not address the question of belligerent occupation, nor does it address the question of which state, if any, has territorial sovereignty over the West Bank. Even if Resolution 242 did address those questions, it would not matter, since Resolution 242 is not a legally binding document and the Security Council lacks authority to award territorial sovereignty or create belligerent occupations. Resolution 242 is politically relevant because it has served as the basis for peace negotiations since 1967 and no doubt will continue to play that role in the future. 242 has been referenced by all of Israel’s peace agreements (with Egypt, Jordan and the PLO) and yet none of those agreements required Israel to surrender potential claims to sovereignty in the West Bank nor to agree that the West Bank is de jure under belligerent occupation.
It may be true that, as the authors guess, most international lawyers
believe that Israel has the status of a belligerent occupant in the West Bank, although I am not aware of any hard data on the subject. But of the many ways to resolve authoritatively questions under international law-such as arbitration or treaty-polling international lawyers is not one. Whatever the views of most international lawyers, the rest are entitled to a different view, and Israel is entitled to side with the minority view, if indeed it is the minority.
The authors are certainly right that Palestinians today have a right of self-determination that has been recognized by Israel. But it is not clear why this is germane. The Palestinian right to self-determination does not erase the Jewish right to self-determination in the same land, nor give the Palestinians territorial sovereignty, nor make Israel a belligerent occupier. Quebecois, Kurds, Tibetans, Western Saharans, Kashmiris and Basques, to take just a few examples, all have rights of self-determination, but that does not in and of itself mean that Canada, Turkey, Iraq, China, Morocco, Pakistan, India and Spain are belligerent occupiers, nor that Canada, et al lack territorial sovereignty over the relevant territories.
Denying Israel’s rights to try to force Israeli compromise is unsound.
Unilaterally surrendering those rights in advance of hoped-for negotiations is shortsighted and has historically proven counter-productive. Most Israelis hope to be able to reach a peace deal in the future. Let’s not destroy the possibility by destroying Israel’s legal assets before the bargaining begins.
@ yamit82:
Objection!
— assumes facts not in evidence. Also known as begging-the-question.
“We Jews”? — Who told you that you were a “Jew”?
@ yamit82:
Your comment is utterly irrelevant to the post you reference.
It has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the remark I’d made in post #22 to Wallace.
That exchange had been strictly about the reasons for issuance of the Balfour Declaration — and Lord Balfour’s personal outlook on the matter. Nothing else.
@ yamit82:
Long on execrations. Short on examples. Same-old, same-old.
As usual, you’re predictable as clockwork.
“Revisionist”? — how so?
“Tripe”? — demonstrate how.
Yes. And yes.
Is there a point somewhere in that?
Irrelevant, and off-point — haNitzri wasn’t, and isn’t, “stinking,” OR “evil,” OR “traitorous.”
If you can’t tell that he was real, that’s your problem, not mine — let alone, his.
For uninitiate readers, the words translate as, “May his name and memory be blotted out.”
As if Man — any man, even a lot of men at the same time — could possibly have any power or authority to implement a curse.
Somehow I rather doubt that The Almighty needs any help from the likes of you — or anybody else in the Peanut Gallery — to determine whose name OR memory He will blot out.
That is, after all, HIS gig — and He appears to be quite good at it.
Moreover, He seems to take it personally when His creations confuse themselves with Him.
You don’t know anywhere near enough Jews to make such a remark.
In any case, your crack is off-point:
The “blessed blood-kindred” to which I referred was plainly & obviously the Jewish People (re-read the post) — but it’s only your knee-jerk viciousness & emotionalism that make you lose all rationality and say stupid things like this.
And you’ll never be fit — or safe — to lead ANYBODY until (and unless) you lose those ugly traits
— because nobody will ever TRUST your emotional stability (and for good reason) — regardless of WHAT you think about anything.
No “pagan” would’ve had the brains (let alone, the sufficiently substantive & pertinent background info) to ‘invent,’ or ‘compose’ such a ‘character.’
I don’t think even a JEW would have had such concoctive capability; too many loose ends & rounded edges to the story.
Oh, certainly there are a few evidences of tampering with the text, TBS, as well as a number of instances (occasionally quite amusing) where certain details have a hard time jumping the cultural (or linguistic) divide — but the portrait of the man that emerges in the Gospels is no composite, and clearly no concoction; no “paint-by-the-numbers” job there.
But the truth is, Yamit, that it isn’t the notion of haNitzri’s ‘nonexistence’ that makes you make these (uncharacteristically) cretinous declarations.
— It’s the simple fact that you’d have to follow the thread that would present itself to you if you didn’t systematically shut it down in your mind.
And that prospect, quite candidly put, terrifies you
— scares the bejezus outa ya (to coin a phrase).
Truth is, boychik, that when one pulls the bark off your trunk, you turn out — underneath it all — to be a dead-bang, slam-dunk, bona fide, 24-caret
— coward.
@ dweller:
We Jews cannot possibly accept the postulate that the deity depicted in the “New Testament” and the G-d of Israel are one and the same — or that, after so thorough a baptism in the falsehoods of the “New Testament”, Christians (even those who do not worship Jesus as a god) nevertheless pray to the G-d of Israel.
@ dweller:
(
was genuinely grief-stricken over “Christendom’s” extended contribution to the agony of the Jews, a poor way of saying “thank you” to the blessed blood-kindred of their faith’s founder. What revisionist historical tripe. “Blessed”? “Blood kindred”? So was trotsky and probably Torquemada blood kindred. We have had many many stinking traitorous evil Jews in our history and if your jesus guy was real “Yemach Shmo w’Zikro”
No Jew would consider him/her/it, “blessed” and many, myself included believe him to be a purposeful pagan invention and myth. At most a composite character.
“Blessed” my arse.
@ Wallace Brand:
Of course what you say is all quite true, Wallace, and in every particular.
(Moreover, Balfour himself — no lightweight, by any stretch of the imagination, who earlier in life (before entering a political career) had published a number of serious philosophical works — was genuinely grief-stricken over “Christendom’s” extended contribution to the agony of the Jews, a poor way of saying “thank you” to the blessed blood-kindred of their faith’s founder. His niece & biographer, Lady Blanche Dugdale [“Baffy”], discussed this & related matters at length in a splendid 2-vol. offering a few years after her uncle’s passing. The pledge to the Jews was, in some part, the Earl’s way of trying to make things right.)
But I didn’t mention ANY of these things [in post #19, above], because in the interest of staying on point, I was responding strictly to your earlier observation that the Declaration was “just policy” — viz., that it had no intrinsically binding legal force at the time of its release.
Those other reasons for the issuance of the Declaration were, in that specific context, peripheral to our discussion, because altho they were quite real as reasons, they had no bearing on the TIMING of the Declaration. They’d have been good reasons at any time.
@ dweller: The motive of influencing the Bolsheviks to stay in the War was only one of several motives. These include gratitude to Chaim Weizmann for giving to the British, royalty free, his patented intellectual property for making, cheaply, a key ingredient for munitions, concern for Jews suffering from Russian and Polish pogroms despite the enactment of the Alien Act of 1909, the view of David Lloyd George, Prime Minister at the time, later expressed in his 1923 article that 400 years of Ottoman occupation of Palestine, and its Colonial Rule under system of land tenures that largely did not provide ownership, leases under cronyism, and failure to provide adequate security against the Bedouin raiding tribes, had turned Palestine from a land of milk and honey into a vast malarial wasteland — and that only Jewish rule could restore its productivity. See: Lloyd-George, “The Jews and Palestine” (1923).
@ Wallace Brand:
Yes, the Anglo-American Convention of 1924. It linked the US to the League thru Article 5 of the Palestine Mandate.
That provision held not only HMG of the UK (as designated Mandatory), but also, by way of supervision, and as early as 1922, each-&-every govt of the League Council (unanimous signatories to this sanctioned & subscribed Mandate) — and, by their accepting of League membership, the govts, as well, of ALL 51 League member nations, including the Arab member, the Hejaz in NW Arabia, together with the subsequent Arab inductees into the ranks, these latter entrants’ enrollments explicitly conditioned by, among other things, their recognition of ALL the League post-GreatWar Mandates — and in addition, per operation of the Convention, the govt of the non-member USA (from 1925 forward): ALL of said governments (incl, then, but not limited to, HMG) to be
“…responsible for seeing that no Palestine territories shall be ceded to or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign power. [emphases mine — dw] [Charter, Palestine Mandate, Art. 5]
BTW, the negotiations for the Convention took special note of the Lodge-Fish Resolution.
In preparing this Convention, the British govt of the day — with the full accord & hearty concurrence of the sitting US govt — insisted “that the Convention should contain a special allusion to the policy of establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, having regard to the interest taken in this policy in the [US] and the warm support which it has received in that country, of which the recent resolutions of both houses of the Congress have afforded striking evidence.”
[Dept of State, Mandate for Palestine, Prepared in the Division on Near Eastern Affairs, Washington, 1927, 81; cited in Nathan Feinberg, “The Interpretation of the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine, 1924,” International Law Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, Oct 1950, n. 32]
In fact, this had a lot to do with WHY the Convention incorporated the full text of the Palestine Mandate Charter — as the Convention was broadly seen as a further international guarantee that the Mandate’s pledges to the Jewish people would, in fact, be brought to full & timely fruition.
Right, since the Senate (despite Pres. Wilson’s urgings) had declined [twice: 19 Nov 1919, & 19 Mar 1920] to ratify the Treaty of Versailles — requisite to League membership, as the Treaty was the jurisdictional fons et origo of the League’s authority.
The state of war between America & the Central Powers — viz., Imperial Germany & Austro-Hungary (the US hadn’t fought, or even declared , against Ottoman Turkey) — was instead ended by the Knox-Porter Joint Congressional Resolution of 1 Jul 1921, signed by Pres. Harding the next day.
@ Wallace Brand:
Granted. Actually, it was even LESS than that.
Signed, ratified, & tendered when it was — while the War was still raging, & Palestine still the acknowledged possession of the Ottoman Empire — the Balfour Declaration could at best have been designated a “statement of intent,” originally conceived (from some perspectives) as a device to bring the “mysteriously powerful International Jews” on board — since the latter might be reluctant to throw in their lot with the Allies, inasmuch as the Russian govt was (right up until the October Revolution of just a cpl wks prior) joined with the Allied effort & the Jews were still reeling from the Czarist-sponsored (or Czarist-indulged) pogroms of the past 3-4 decades. What’s more, the GERMANS had been making noises about pressuring their Turkish allies into making a play for Jewish support with a similar (i.e., Balfour-like) Declaration of their own .
Anyway, it certainly is safe to say that the Balfour Declaration had no legal force of its own (not till it was incorporated verbatim into San Remo & the Mandate Charter 3 & 5 yrs later respectively). My only point in observing that of the 3 pledges only Balfour’s was Cabinet ratified, was that even without binding force, it could (unlike the others) at least be said to have represented the view of the sitting govt as a constituted entity, not merely that of one or another element amorphously associated with the govt.
Yes, the Lodge-Fish Resolution [HJR 322], “Favoring the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…”
Unanimously Adopted 30 Jun 1922 — 3 weeks BEFORE the Mandate was ratified by the Council of the League.
Then signed into law 21 Sept 1922, by Warren G. Harding, 29th President of the United States.
Harding had actually expressed personal appreciation & support for the Zionist enterprise several weeks before the Resolution even arrived on the floor of either chamber:
“I am very glad to express my approval and hearty sympathy for the effort of the Palestine Foundation Fund, in behalf of the restoration of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people. I have always viewed with interest, which I think is quite as much practical as sentimental, the proposal for the rehabilitation of Palestine and the restoration [to it] of a real nationality. [emphases added]
[Warren G. Harding, Letter to Palestine Foundation Fund (Keren haYesod), 11 May 1922; cited in Carl Sferrazza Anthony, “The Most Scandalous President,” American Heritage, Jul/Aug 98, 55]
@ dweller: Dweller, you say: “”George Antonius and others were pushing the view that ‘England had sold the same horse three times’.”
Yes, that was the claim, though I think they may have been overlooking the fact that of those 3 runs-for-the-roses, only the eponymous Declaration that went out over Balfour’s signature actually had the RATIFIED endorsement of a sitting Cabinet.”
It is important to note that was just policy. But it was the only multilateral agreement intended to become International Law as a result of its confirmation by first the principal WWI Allies, including the US. The US approval and confirmation was carried out first by a joint session of Congress in 1922 and later by a bilateral treaty with the UK in 1924. These were needed because the US did not join the League of Nations. . The Sykes-Picot agreement was a secret agreement and it is questionable whether the McMahon-Hussein negotiations matured into even a bilateral agreement.
@ Wallace Brand:
Yes, he did dispute that — and most particularly the inclusion of Palestine.
The secretive, never HMG-ratified, and textually ambiguous, Hussein-McMahon Correspondence — an exchange since characterized as “at once, deliberately vague and unwittingly obscure” — especially the McMahon Letter of 24 October 1915, the faulty, Arab “interpretation” of which was subsequently, and sharply, rebuked by (the more usually dull, plodding & circumspect) Sir Henry in his very public, 23 July 1937 letter, published in The Times of London:
“I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein [of the Hijaz; i.e., the Sharif] to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.” [emphases added]
The dubious Arab construction was countered yet again in 1939 — at the Palestine Round Table Conferences attended by British & Arab representatives in London — by the testimony of Gen. Sir Gilbert Clayton, who had been on Sir Henry’s staff in 1915 & 1916, as Director of Military Intelligence:
“I was in daily touch with Sir Henry McMahon thoughout the negotiations with [Sharif] Hussein, and made the preliminary drafts of all the letters. I can bear out the statement that it was never the intention that Palestine should be included in the general pledge given to the Sharif; the introductory words of Sir Henry’s letter were thought at that time — perhaps erroneously — to cover that point.
“It was, I think, obvious that the peculiar interests involved in Palestine precluded any definite pledges in regard to its future at so early a stage.”
[as cited in “REPORT of a Committee Set Up to Consider Certain Correspondence Between Sir Henry McMahon {His Majesty’s High Commissioner in Egypt} and the Sharif of Mecca {Later King Hussein of the Hejaz} in 1915 and 1916,” Cmd 5974 (London, 16 March 1939), par. 13(e)]
Yes, that was the claim, though I think they may have been overlooking the fact that of those 3 runs-for-the-roses, only the eponymous Declaration that went out over Balfour’s signature actually had the RATIFIED endorsement of a sitting Cabinet.
@ Wallace Brand:
Yes, you’re certainly right about Kedourie’s thoroughness & care. Actually, if you’ll notice, at the end of post #8 [above] I noted Kedourie’s excerpt from the McMahon letter to Indian Viceroy Hardinge in Labyrinth. (I realize you probably hadn’t seen either of the first two posts of mine in this series, as of the time you posted — since they both had gone promptly into moderation.)
Quite right again about Greek Orthodox, Lebanese-born Antonius as the party who first publicized the Correspondence.
His wife Katy seems to have been quite the character as well. (“Hostess-with-the-mostest” to the Arabist, British & US M-E diplomatic world, even long after her husband’s death.)
Yes, it’s really too bad that they don’t relate to it very much any more. If they did, one glaring reality would become instantly inescapable to them:
Those persons in our own day who insist on presupposing, or alluding to, a long-established Palestinian Arab ‘nation’ must confront ultimately the iron-clad fact of history that the Easter Pogrom of 1920 [aka, the Nebi Musa Riots] in Jerusalem — a scant 10 days after the San Remo conference — was carried out by large numbers of local ethnic Arabs who found themselves horrified & deeply offended by the very notion that they might come to be regarded as a separate ethnicity or nationality from their (northern) Syrian brothers and they be made independent of Syria.
Palestinian Arab independence was the last thing in the world they wanted.
It is for this reason that the first designation, in modern Arab history, of al-Naqba [the “Catastrophe”] is not — as typically applied — to (the consequences of) the failed, 1947-49, all-Arab assault on Jewish statehood & the associated attempt, at that time, to exterminate the Palestinian Jews. Quite the contrary, in fact, the term’s original usage was manifest 3 decades earlier, and long before there was a State of Israel — as noted by Antonius, in The Arab Awakening:
“The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings against the post-War [i.e., post-WW1 — dw] settlement imposed by the Allies in the Arab countries. In that year [1920], serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine and Iraq.” [p. 312]
Indeed.
Antonius published The Arab Awakening in 1938 (Hamish Hamilton, London): Thus he was talking about “al Nakba” a full decade BEFORE Israel’s War of Independence and the Arab evacuation that accompanied it.
@ dweller: There was some question as to whether the correspondence ever matured into an agreement. McMahon himself disputed that. The biggest dispute, however, was how much area was covered by McMahon — including for us, whether the offer was intended to include Palestine. George Antonius and others were pushing the view that “England had sold the same horse three times”. These were 1. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 2. The McMahon – Hussein Correspondence, and 3. The Balfour Declaration. Elie Kedourie, analyzing the circumstances very meticulously, said this was not so. In any event, the San Remo Agreement dignified only one of these as International Law — the Balfour Declaration.
@ dweller: I have been relying on the analysis of the McMahon – Hussein correspondence by another author, Elie Kedourie “In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 1914–1939 (1976)” . Kedouri was quite meticulous in his study.
It was George Antonious that pushed the McMahon Hussayn Correspondence and the so called Arab Awakening as Pan Arab Nationalism. But Matin Kramer says: “The world first learned the history of Arab nationalism from a book published in 1938. The Arab Awakening by George Antonius eventually became the preferred textbook for successive generations of British and American historians and their students. Yet few now would deny that The Arab Awakening, for all the appeal of its narrative style, is more suggestive of a sustained argument than a history.1 “I have tried to discharge my task,” wrote Antonius in the forward to his book, “in a spirit of fairness and objectivity, and, while approaching the subject from an Arab angle, to arrive at my conclusions without bias or partisanship.” But Antonius did not pretend that his work met the highest standards of the historian’s craft. The Arab Awakening he preferred to regard as the “story” of the Arab national movement, “not the final or even a detailed history.”2 And once the book was near completion in 1937, Antonius wrote that “my contribution should be one not merely of academic value but also of positive constructive usefulness.”
@ yamit82:
Well, of course; that surely would be delusional — but then, anyone who assumes that the target of those legal or historical arguments is “world Public Opinion” has missed the point entirely.
The target isn’t the world OR its ‘opinions.’
The target — for better or for worse — is the world’s JEWS.
Nobody else.
Others are, of course, welcome (that goes without saying) — but it’s the perception & understanding of the Jews specifically that is critical, and CRUCIAL.
“Self- masturbation”? — wouldn’t that be a redundancy?
Or have you found a new use for the practice?
@ yamit82:
He should have begun with this paragraph — instead of ending with it.
But then, absent the self-indulgent buildup, there wouldn’t have been anything else for Mr Shoher to say.
@ Wallace Brand:
In the end, of course, there was no general Arab rising — only, as you’ve noted, limited, localized action primarily in the Hijaz, the Hashemite home turf, and consisting almost entirely of guerrilla campaigns fought by local Bedouin accustomed to tribal, desert warfare. And indeed, shortly after the War, the Hijaz, with British sponsorship, did actually obtain independence, as provided in the treaties ending the conflict, the Sharif having been addressed as “King of the Hijaz” from the June 1916 outset of his northwest Arabian peninsular campaign. However, “[t]he much-vaunted Arab revolt,” quips Professor Friedman, “was a mirage.” [Friedman, Palestine: Twice?, p. 30]
Outside of the Hijaz, the only appreciable Arab support for anti-Ottoman insurgency was among the non-Islamic, Druze religious minority of Syria & Lebanon.
It must be remembered that, for the vast majority of M-E Muslims, their religious identity was much older — far more fully formed & deeply entrenched — than any sluggishly sprouting national consciousness could possibly have been at this point. The very proposition of the nation-state as a polity found little purchase within their frame of mind. Throughout Southwestern Asia, self-definition and self-identification — not only for Muslims, but also for Christians (& indeed, essentially for Jews, as well) — were still determined largely by religion. For many in the region, that remains the case, in a very real sense, even to the present day.
The bottom line here, at any rate, is that the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence can hardly be said to constitute any unconditionally binding promise by HMG, except, I would suggest, to those already predisposed to see it thus.
@ Wallace Brand:
Continued challenge to the claim.
Even before the Correspondence with the Sharif was completed, McMahon would find occasion to put the Allied proviso in courteous but most exacting terms:
“It is most essential that you spare no effort to attach all the Arab peoples to our united cause and urge them to afford no assistance to our enemies. It is on the success of these efforts and on the more active measures which the Arabs may thereafter take in support of our cause, when the time for action comes, that the permanence and strength of our agreement must depend.” [emphases added]
[McMahon, Letter to Hussein, 14 Dec 1915; cited in Isaiah Friedman, Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? Volume One — The British, the Arabs and Zionism, 1915-1920 (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, 2000), p. xxix]
The distinguished British scholar, Isaiah Friedman — who was the first researcher to study the official British records for the period of 1914-1922, when they were first opened to public inspection at the Public Record Office (Kew Gardens, London) in the late 1960’s — affirms, based on his findings, that “[t]here was thus no unilateral commitment” [emphasis added]; that, in point of fact, upon receiving the Commissioner’s letter,
“Hussein thereupon assured McMahon that he fully ‘understood the contents’ of his note… The Arabs were equally under definite obligations to fulfill their part, and it was on the nature and quality of their performance that the ‘permanence and strength’ of the agreement depended.” [emphasis added] [Ibid.]
Without specifying actual boundaries, then, within which Britain would recognize Arab independence — and with due & careful stipulation to a general Arab insurrection that would aid British forces in the field & meet with success — the McMahon Letter of 24 Oct 1915 to Sharif Hussein excluded from consideration three categories of territories cited in the Emir’s letters where Great Britain would be willing & able to extend recognition to Arab aspirations to sovereignty:
1. those areas not viewed by the British as “purely Arab” by population;
2. those areas already subject to French involvement (subsequently confirmed & reinforced in the quietly conceived & concluded Sykes-Picot Agreement 2 months after the final letter in the exchange); and
3. those areas for which a treaty relationship with the British Crown already existed.
Territories not falling under any of these headings would enjoy British support for postwar Arab sovereignty — in return for Arab wartime assistance in relieving those lands & their Arab inhabitants of their Ottoman yoke. Palestine, then known as “southern Syria”: located on both banks of the Jordan River & extending to the Mediterranean, and not yet existing in modern times [as it had until AD 135] as a geopolitical unit — thus not mentioned by name at any point in the Correspondence, but located west of the north-south line from Aleppo to Aqaba indicated in the letters as off-limits to any agreement — was, arguably, excluded, under Category One.
A respectful reading of the back-&-forth of the Correspondence discloses all the freewheeling, rough-&-tumble, hard bargaining of the Turkish bazaar & the Arab shoukh, but conducted entirely in the language of diplomacy & utmost courtesy. “Everyone was fooling everyone and no one was fooling anybody.” [Black, Banking on Baghdad, p. 185]
Bottom line — in my challenge to the claim of a Brit ‘promise’ of Arab self-determination in Hussein-McMahon Correspondence — coming up.
@ Wallace Brand:
Further challenge to the familiar assertion.
Just prior to the beginning of the Correspondence, the Sharif’s third son, Faisal, traveling overland to Constantinople (ostensibly to pay his respects to the Ottoman government) had met with (and actually joined) the moribund Arab secret societies in Damascus: the civilian, al-Fatat [“the Young,” founded in Paris, 1911] and its military offshoot, al-‘Ahd [“the Covenant”]. There, these groups’ rudderless but restless leadership had persuaded him of their desire, and assured him of their capability, to spark a revolt of the Arab divisions in the Turkish military establishment — as many of the Arab officers in the Syria-stationed Ottoman armies were said to be members of al-‘Ahd. The societies’ leadership were willing to conduct such an uprising, if they could thereby secure subsequent British support for Arab sovereignty.
The secret societies drafted a program: the Damascus Protocol — proposing British recognition of Arab independence throughout all Mideast territories then held by the Ottoman Empire. After Faisal returned home to the Hijaz, the Damascus Protocol became part of the basis of his father’s 1st letter of proposal to Commissioner McMahon. The other element of the letter’s foundation entailed a demand for British endorsement of a proclamation of an Arab khalifate for Islam (i.e., a transfer of the institution from the Turks to the Arabs) — presumably to allay the danger of a Turkish khalif calling for jihad, religious war, against the Allies.
The latter demand was extraordinary & even shocking, notes Prof. Cohen in Origins and Evolution [p. 14], as “no caliph had ever sought, or required, the sanction of a Western, Christian power.” [emphasis, again, mine — dw]
After an initial, cool though not uncordial, British reply, the Sharif sent Sir Henry a 2nd letter, wherein the haggling began, and which met with partial — if ambiguous, and in any case, conditional — assent, as Herbert Asquith’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, granted the Commissioner discretionary powers to “promise whatever necessary” to the Arabs without prejudicing the regional interests of HMG’s French ally, while keeping such assurances “as vague as possible” and contingent upon the full scope & ultimate success of Arab cooperation. Hence, the [above-cited] letter of Sir Henry to Viceroy Hardinge.
More, coming up (though I think you can see where this is going, even from early-on).
@ Wallace Brand:
That’s never been as well-established as has been claimed.
The subject of the 10 written, wartime exchanges between the Sharif & the new Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, was (as you know, but other readers may be unaware) the proposal that the Hashemites lead a general Arab uprising against the Turkish Empire in return for British postwar support for Arab independence under the leadership of the Sharif & his sons — and with, of course, the tutelage & sponsorship of His Majesty’s Govt. The purpose of the Correspondence was to establish spheres of territorial influence between Hussein (on behalf of the Arabs) and HMG (together with the Entente).
The 10 letters, kept secret for 15 years (albeit for reasons unrelated to Palestine): until they were subjected to media exposure & parliamentary investigation — offerred, as Edwin Black has it, “ambiguous British promises of national recognition within an ambiguously defined territory in exchange for ambiguous Arab offers of revolt predicated upon calculated deceptions and implied threats by both sides.” [Edwin Black, Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq’s 7000 Year History of War, Profit and Conflict (Jn Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2004), p. 179]
Commenting, many months into these communications, on his intentions regarding the negotiations, Commissioner McMahon wrote, in-confidence, to Charles Hardinge, PM Asquith’s Viceroy of India, who had seriously questioned the value of the developing alliance with Sharif Hussein,
“I do not for one moment go to the length of imagining that the present negotiations will go far to shape the future form of Arabia or to either establish our rights or to bind our hands in that country… What we have to arrive at now is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy and bring them to our side… This on our part is at present largely a matter of words and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from haggling over conditions…” [emphasis added]
[McMahon-Hardinge, 5 Dec 1915, quoted in Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914-1918 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), p. 120]
I’ll continue this in a few more posts.
@ Wallace Brand:
Yes, I agree; it IS in the main a fine summary.
BTW, Under the heading of “WHERE-ARE-THEY-NOW?”:
The late, Tulkar’m-born, Zuheir Mohsein
[“Military” Commander of As-Saiqa (the major, Syrian/Baath-based PLO constituent group of the day),
and member, PLO Executive Council;
aka, to Lebanese Christians, the 1976 ”Butcher of Damour”],
who, ever-so-graciously, let the cat out of the bag, by admitting, as you note — during that unguarded moment of candor & bravado in an interview w/ the Amsterdam daily, Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw (31 Mar 77) — to the non-existence of the ‘Palestinian people’
was 2 years later compelled to shuffle-off this mortal coil & depart the present vale of tears directly
— and on decidedly short notice
as expedited via the instrumentality of the hit squad dispatched to his luxurious Cannes villa by the rival, Baghdad-based, Abu Nidal faction on 15 July 1979.
Successful outcomes of wars are the the corrective balm of past historical errors, think of them like a stock market corrections, In the end all is reversible.
Anyone who believes that when it comes to Jews and or Israel, the legal arguments, historical arguments or the court of the world Public Opinion will be swayed by any of the arguments by our esteemed legal and historical advocates are delusional and are exercising in a form of intellectual self- masturbation.
Can’t help killing them
Obadiah Shoher
Why can’t the Jews hate? They are used to an oppressed state of being. Arabs act normally. Few Jews fought against the British—the anti-Zionist majority submitted to the Europeans, passive Zionists submitted to the British, and most submitted to fate. The majority lacks pride and will. They seek to substantiate their claims with blubbering about historical and religious rights. Unwilling to assert their demands and fight, Jews want Arabs to peacefully agree and allocate Israel a shred of existence.
Normal people hate those who hate them, and no other argument is required. They don’t discuss the merits and national aspirations of their enemies.
Hatred is also an escape of hopeless weakness. Unwilling to admit their own failures, people hate others. Leftist Jews know that their collaboration with enemies is immoral, and so they hate the religious Jews, who are a constant reminder of their moral bankruptcy.
Jews cannot get revenge on Arabs for the rockets, bullets, and suicide bombers. Where a limited revenge would have sufficed, great hatred brews, relegating Arabs to the status of animals and allowing them to be treated as such.
Hatred is silly, irrational—but oh so sweet. Proud people, confident of the righteousness of their demands, can hate. Jews doubt their right to exist, much less exist in a state of their own free of Arabs; faithless squeaky doubters cannot hate.
Some strong, rational natures do not hate either. They recognize Arabs as enemies to be dealt with by any means necessary. They also recognize that Arabs rationally defend their land, pride, nationalism, religion, houses, and groves; that the Arabs are not inherently antagonistic to Jews. So it has turned out that we have to kill the Arabs. That’s regrettable, but nothing to regret
@ dweller: dweller, Thanks for the interesting quote and the reference to its source. I will try to buy a copy of it. I think my summary was correct but I appreciate the added detail.
@ Wallace Brand:
Actually one cannot even say that the Peninsular Arabs generally fought the Ottomans on the Allied side.
Only the HIJAZI Arabs of Sharif Hussein & the Hashemites participated in any degree; and even then (as you note that Lawrence quietly acknowledged), not all that well — they never did succeed in shutting down the Hijaz Railway to Medina:
The Sa’udi clan of the more centrally located Nejd (the next plateau over from the Hijaz) sat out the GreatWar altogether.
Then, a couple years later, under Abdel-Azziz Ibn Sa’ud, they violently usurped the Hijaz from the Hashemites (it was very bloody; Abdullah just barely got out with his skin) and merged the Hijaz with the Nejd — subsequently renaming the new union “Sa’udi Arabia.”
BTW, it is interesting to note the German surnames Joseph Weiler and Yaffa Zilbershats of the professors who argue against the Levy Report which bases itself on the San Remo Agreement which is the ultimate result of Theodor Herzl;’s vision opposed by Martin Buber ant his coterie of German intellectuals as described in Yoram Hazoni’s “The Jewish Stare: The Struggle For Israel’s Soul”. Buber and his colleagues were seminal figures in the establishment of The Hebrew University – Pre-State Israel’s first university. This university in turn indoctrinated many of today’s Post-Zionists.
The Palestinians are a fake “people’ conjured up by the Soviet dezinformatsia just so they COULD claim a right of self determination. No one disputes that there is an Arab people. History shows there has been a Pan Arab nationalism. There is no evidence of a “Palestinian Arab People” nationalism prior to 1964 when it suddenly appears in the preamble of the PLO Charter, drafted in Moscow and corroborated only by the first 422 members of the contemporaneously created “Palestinian National Council”. Each of those members were hand picked by the KGB according to Major General Ion Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc who speaks from personal knowledge. In WWI the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula fought on the side of the Allies, along with Lawrence. Although the meager result was overly glorified by Llowel Thomas to sell newspapers, they did fight the Ottomans. Even Lawrence finally admitted to the effort not being much. But those were the Arabian Peninsula Arabs.
The Arabs in Palestine fought for the Ottomans against the Allies according to Winston Churchill, even though in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence England had promised political self determination if they fought on the side of the Allies. So the Arabs in Palestine had their opportunity — had they wanted self rule. They turned it down.
After 1964, two Israeli academics of the far left have papered up histories of Palestinian Nationalism pre dating 1964. Baruch Kimmerling starts his with a showing of patriotism for the Ottoman Empire in 1834 when Arabs in Palestine revolted against an assertion of authority over them by Egypt, affirming their Ottoman patriotism.. And Yehoshua Porath says they engaged in Nationalism since 1920, a date when they could no longer rely on Turkish rule, the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and North Africa having been captured by the WWI Allies in a defensive war and carved up into 21 nation states. He ignores that the Arabs local to Palestime fought, not for the British during WWI who had offered them self rule if they did so, but fought alongside the Colonial Turks who had occupied them for 400 years. If you look at the facts Porath relies on for this alleged nationalism, it shows nothing about a desire for self rule, only a national anti-Zionist movement. When Haj Amin Husseini tried to increase membership in the Arab Executive, a nationalist group, he found that the concepts of political self determination wouldn’t move the Arabs population to action so he instead spread false rumors of a Jewish plot to take over the Al Aqsa mosque. These led to a massacre in Hebron and Tszfed and killed 133 Jews. Porath ignored the notes in the diary of Count Folke Bernadotte. Porath had supervised the Doctoral candidacy of Efraim Karsh. He disagrees with Porath on this point. See his book Palestine Betrayed. Bernadotte had been hired by the UN to mediate between the parties in preparation for the UNSCOP hearings in 1948 when the British were to abandon their trusteeship in the British Mandate. Bernadotte had noted in his diary that there was no movement for Arab nationalism and never had been. Finally, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO Executive Board, said in an interview to the Dutch newspaper Trouw as late as 1973 that their was no such thing as the Palestinian People and that as soon as the PLO had annihilated the Jews, they would merge with Jordan. See: Brand, “Was there a Palestinian National Movement at the end of the Ottoman Period? http://think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html The content of Muhsein’s interview is very instructive:
“Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of ONE people, the Arab nation. Look, I have family members with Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian citizenship. We are ONE people. Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new tool to continue the fight against Israel and for Arab unity.”
“A separate Palestinian entity needs to fight for the national interest in the then remaining occupied territories. The Jordanian government cannot speak for Palestinians in Israel, Lebanon or Syria. Jordan is a state with specific borders. It cannot lay claim on – for instance – Haifa or Jaffa, while I AM entitled to Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem en Beersheba. Jordan can only speak for Jordanians and the Palestinians in Jordan. The Palestinian state would be entitled to represent all Palestinians in the Arab world en elsewhere. Once we have accomplished all of our rights in all of Palestine, we shouldn’t postpone the unification of Jordan and Palestine for one second.”
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