-Caveat Lector- / |/ / /___/ / /_ // M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S / /|_/ / /_/_ / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East /_/ /_/ /___/ /_/ \\ http://www.MiddleEast.Org News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups, and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know! * * * * * * * IF YOU DON'T GET MER, YOU JUST DON'T GET IT! To receive MER regularly email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MER Weekend Reading: THE ETERNAL STUMBLING-BLOCK By Con Coughlin* "Not a hair of their heads shall be touched." Chaim Weizmann Israel's First President Sunday Telegraph - 15 October 2000: IT could all have been so different. Jews and Arabs enjoying an harmonious existence in the land of their forefathers, living side by side in an atmosphere of mutual cooperation and goodwill. At least that was the thinking that governed the actions of the early-19th-century Jewish pioneers who, attempting to escape the brutal anti-Semitism that had taken root in Tsarist Russia, set out to make a new life for themselves in the biblical land of milk and honey. As Dr Chaim Weizmann, the Manchester-born chemist who became one of Zionism's founding fathers and Israel's first president, would later write of the movement's objectives, the Jews' main priority was to settle in the country without violating the legitimate interests of the Arabs - "not a hair of their heads shall be touched", he pledged. Indeed, had it not been for the active cooperation of the local Palestinian population, the early Jewish settlements might never have survived. The first colonists, who established settlements on the malaria-infested coast and the arid hills of Gallilee, had no idea how to farm the land, and depended heavily on local Arab help simply to survive. The turning point in relations between Arabs and Jews came one crisp December morning in 1917, when General Edmund Allenby became the first Christian commander since the Crusaders to march triumphantly into Jerusalem, at the end of a gruelling campaign by British imperial troops to conquer the Holy Land. Prior to Allenby's arrival, Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, had made a declaration to the House of Commons, which stated that the British government formally endorsed "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". The Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was a watershed in the development of the modern Middle East. Balfour's statement was partly a response to the sustained lobbying of the recently formed Zionist movement that, in seeking a solution to the constant persecution of east European Jewry, articulated the notion of creating an independent nation for the Jewish people. Balfour was drawing on a deep vein of pro-Jewish sympathy within the British political establishment that dated back to Lord Palmerston, who believed that the restoration of the Jews to the land of their biblical forefathers would provide Britain with a useful ally against the intrigues of other European powers over the fate of the Ottoman dominions. More recently, the idea of creating a Jewish homeland owed a great deal to Theodore Herzl, a Viennese Jewish journalist who, in 1896, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) after covering the Dreyfus court martial in Paris, in which a young Jewish officer was falsely accused of treason. An equally important factor, however, in Balfour's calculations, was his determination to place the former Ottoman province of Palestine under British control, thereby enhancing Britain's ability to protect and defend the Suez Canal, the gateway to the Indian empire. In his desire to help the Zionists and protect Suez, Balfour and his Foreign Office advisers conveniently overlooked the fact that, only the previous year, they had given entirely contrary undertakings to the region's leaders as part of the deal by which they promised to support Britain in its war against the Ottoman Empire, a campaign made famous by the exploits of T E Lawrence. British officials promised Sharif Hussein, the Guardian of Mecca, whose family later created modern Jordan, that they were "prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs", including those resident in Palestine. The duplicity of the British, which caused Lawrence to accuse his political masters of betraying the Arabs, doomed Britain's administration of Palestine to failure from the start. Throughout the course of the British mandate, which was to last until 1948, various high-minded attempts were made to find a solution to the contending political aspirations of the Palestinian Jews and Arabs, all of them without success. The decisive event, however, that finally destroyed any chance the British might have had of maintaining the peace in Palestine was Hitler's rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s. Until Hitler's emergence, Jewish immigration to Palestine in the early 1930s stood at a paltry 4,000 a year, hardly a figure to challenge the dominance of the local Arab population. But after Hitler came to power, there was a dramatic increase: 30,327 in 1933, rising to 61,854 in 1935. The surge in Jewish immigrants served only further to antagonise the Palestinian Arabs, who believed that it was yet more evidence of the duplicitous British establishment's desire to deny them their political rights. By the mid-1930s, under the leadership of the fanatical Haj Amin Husseini, the Arabs were organising themselves to oppose the British administration by force, and in 1936 the Arab Rebellion erupted. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain bought off the Arabs with the 1939 White Paper, which made vague promises to establish an "independent Arab state" within 10 years. All mention of an independent Jewish state was dropped. Despite this disappointment, 28,000 Palestinian Jews volunteered to fight for the British, including a charismatic young officer called Moshe Dayan, who lost an eye fighting the Vichy French in southern Lebanon. Haj Amin Husseini, meanwhile, threw in his lot with the Nazis, becoming a trusted confidant of Heinrich Himmler. The end of the war, and the discovery of the true nature of the Holocaust, left the British in an impossible position. Their official policy was to prevent further Jewish immigration, while many survivors of the Nazi death camps had no alternative than to make their way to Palestine. Britain's refusal to relax its strict immigration rules led to many harrowing scenes, with ships full of bedraggled and emaciated refugees being turned away from Haifa harbour. Britain's intransigence prompted the Zionists to adopt the same terrorist tactics used by the Arabs before the war, culminating in the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, used as offices by the British, by a terrorist group led by Menachem Begin, a future Israeli prime minister. A total of 91 people died (28 British, 41 Arabs and 17 Jews). The Attlee government quickly concluded that Britian's position in Palestine was untenable, and asked the newly-formed United Nations to relieve it of its burden. In 1947, in an attempt to placate both the Jews and Arabs, the UN voted for the partition of Palestine, with Jerusalem to be placed under the control of an international peacekeeping force. While the Zionists, with reservations, accepted the plan, because it granted them their long-held goal of creating an independent state, the Arabs bitterly opposed it. Thus the British withdrawal from Palestine in May 1948, which was immediately followed by Israel's declaration of independence, prompted the start of the first Arab-Israel war, which lasted for six months and ended with the division of the country along lines similar to those set out in the UN partition plan. One of the most significant results of the war was that Jerusalem was divided between Israeli and Arab control, with the Arabs controlling access to the all-important holy sites, including the Wailing Wall, the holiest shrine in Judaism. On the Arab side, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, and became refugees in camps set up in Lebanon and Jordan. The areas of Palestine under Arab control were quickly annexed by neighbouring Jordan, and became known as that country's West Bank. A heavily fortified "Green Line" was established, separating the Arab and Jewish communities. To the enduring humiliation of the new Israeli state, religious Jews were prevented from praying at the Wailing Wall. This situation prevailed until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel's armed forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined forces of Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Apart from reuniting Jerusalem, the Israelis seized control of the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza and the Sinai desert from Egypt. The territories occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War have been at the centre of innumerable peace negotiations ever since. The political vacuum created by the Arabs' defeat saw the emergence of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation, which launched an international campaign of terrorism aimed at creating an independent homeland for the Palestinians - with Jerusalem as its capital - out of the land in the West Bank and Gaza that the Israelis had captured. In 1973, in an attempt to wrest from Israel the diplomatic initiative that it had enjoyed in attempts to resolve the conflict, Syria and Egypt attacked the Israelis during the Jewish Yom Kippur religious holiday. Both the Syrians and Egyptians made good initial progress in the Golan Heights and Sinai respectively, but were finally beaten back by Israel. The failure of the Yom Kippur War persuaded President Sadat of Egypt to abandon decades of hostility towards Israel and negotiate a peace deal. The Camp David peace negotiations, hosted by Jimmy Carter, the American president at the time, resulted in Sadat signing a peace agreement with Israel's Menachem Begin in 1979, under which Israel returned Sinai to Egyptian control. Soon after signing the deal, Sadat was murdered in Cairo by Islamic fanatics. The Palestinians were excluded from the Camp David negotiations. Determined to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, the Israelis annexed east Jerusalem and built a network of settlements throughout the West Bank. The demands of the Palestinians for recognition went largely unheard until 1987, with the eruption of the intifada, a violent uprising aimed at ending Israeli rule over them. In 1991, following the allies' victory over Iraq, President George Bush attempted to launch a new initiative to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute, at the Madrid peace summit. While the omens did not look promising, secret negotiations carried out in Oslo between representatives of the new Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and Arafat resulted in 1993 in the Oslo accords, under which the Israelis agreed to place territory in the West Bank and Gaza under Palestinian control, in return for a wide-ranging peace deal. Rabin was murdered by a Jewish fanatic in 1995, and, ever since, the peace process has struggled to survive, with Islamic terrorists staging suicide bomb attacks and the Israelis experiencing several changes of government. The election of Ehud Barak, a former Israeli chief of staff, as prime minister in 1999 was heralded as a new start for the peace process, and President Clinton, a keen sponsor of the peace process throughout his presidency, invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David last summer in an attempt to reach a final breakthrough. After days of intensive negotiations, the talks broke up without an agreement, mainly because of the failure to reach a deal over the future status of Jerusalem. Hostilities between the two sides recommenced last month, when the Palestinians reacted to a provocative visit to the Muslim al-Aqsa mosque by Ariel Sharon, a former Israeli defence minister who now leads the opposition Likud bloc, by attacking Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall. * Con Coughlin is the author of A Golden Basin Full of Scorpions: The Quest for Modern Jerusalem (Little, Brown) MiD-EasT RealitieS - www.MiddleEast.Org Phone: 202 362-5266 Fax: 815 366-0800 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscriibe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject SUBSCRIBE To unsubscribe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject UNSUBSCRIBE <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. 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