The catastrophic violence perpetrated in Gaza following the Hamas raid into Israel, 7th October2023, is an episode in a strand of history that began a century ago, during the geopolitical adjustments following WWI. For 500 years before that, the Middle East, or Western Asia, had been part of the Ottoman Empire which, iron fist in velvet glove, imposed peace, social order and mutual tolerance on its multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national population. In 1860, the population of the territory known as Palestine was around 410,000 people, 90% of whom were arabs. Particularly relevant to subsequent events, was the lack, under Ottoman hegemony, of a concept of land ownership. Families occupied the same plots of land through succeeding generations without consideration of legal ownership. Jewish and Arab communities, all the sons of Shem, co-existed peacefully in the territory which, since the collapse of the empire, has become in the ensuing 100 years an arena of internecine and inter-religious atrocity.
Declining in geo-political clout throughout the 19th century, the weakening Ottoman Empire sided with Germany in WWI, declared jihad against the western allies and was attacked by a British army advancing northwards through Palestine. British strategy included alliances with local Moslem groups, partly so that their campaign against the Ottomans should not present as a Christian assault upon the Moslem empire and thus antagonise the moslem population of British India. So, Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, wrote a series of ten letters to Hussein bin Ali, leader of a major Arab faction offering British recognition of Arab independence in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. More or less at the same time, Britain and France negotiated the ‘Sykes-Picot Agreement’, to divide the middle east, post-war, into British and French spheres of influence. Hussein bin Ali perceived this as a betrayal and Britain abandoned their liaison with him in favour of an understanding with the ibn Saud clan, a move with far-reaching implications.
There was another development going on in the background at that time. It was a growing sentiment among the Jewish diaspora in Europe that they should find a way of returning to Palestine, whence their ancestors had emigrated nearly 2,000 years ago. The diaspora included some important and powerful individuals and European governments were increasingly sympathetic to the idea. In this context, on 2nd November 1917 Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild, doyen of the Jewish community in Britain, the first version of what has come to be called ‘The Balfour Declaration and it states that: ‘the British Government would view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, adding: ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. This text was issued as a statement of government policy on 9th November and the precise meaning of its terms has been the subject of diplomatic discussions and commissions ever since.
Once WWI was over, a grouping of England, Italy, France and Japan set up the San Remo Conference in 1920 to devise a new political structure for former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, an area including Mesopotamia, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. The Conference appointed two interim administrations known as the French and British Mandates, to create political, administrative and economic conditions facilitating transition to independent rule in the various territories while conducting policies in accordance with the needs of both Jews and Arabs and undertaking to implement the principles of the Balfour Declaration; Syria and Lebanon became the French Mandate while Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, and Palestine came under British authority. The population of Palestine at that time included around 690,00 Muslims, 83,000 Jews and 73,000 Christians.
Already, during the early years of the Mandate, Jewish immigration from Europe, under the terms of the Balfour Declaration, was much higher than the San Remo Conference had anticipated, exacerbating tension with the native population. The Shaw Commission, set up by the British authority following an outbreak of violence in 1929 identified the underlying cause of the violence as the failure of the British to fulfil their wartime pledges to the Palestinian Arabs who now feared that uncontrolled Jewish immigration would deprive them of their traditional low-density, rural livelihood and the promised progress towards their own political independence. The report recommended that the Mandate Authority should make greater efforts to protect the rights and aspirations of the native Arab population, calling for restrictions on land purchase by Jews, for a pause in immigration and for a change in attitude towards the Zionist movement which was organising massive immigration, the main factor in a population increase from 730,000 in 1922 to 1.8 million in 1945, and the acquisition of Palestinian land, an un-intended consequence of the San Remo decisions.
Although there had been since 1860 a system of land registration in the Ottoman Empire, introduced mainly as a means of collecting property taxes, there had been no survey and registration of existing occupiers no right of ownership accrued through generations of occupation. Much of the land farmed by Arab families for countless generations was not recorded, so immigrants arriving from Europe were able to register tracts of land and evict the Palestinian occupiers. Zionist organisations bought land from Arab villagers who had no idea of what was being bought and sold.
Again, in 1936 there was serious Arab unrest with unforeseen levels of Jewish immigration and escalating problems of land-ownership, in response to which a Royal Commission of Inquiry led by William Peel in 1937, concluded that the two Palestinian communities, Jews and Arabs, were irreconcilable, and proposed the land should be portioned between them. A White paper published by the British Government in 1939 suggested that Palestine should become a bi-national State occupied separately by both Arabs and Jews.
The Arabs rejected the partition of the land they had occupied for 1000 years and revived their revolt, violently put down by the British who declared the Arab High Committee, the highest political Arab representation, to be illegal, permanently weakening Arab society. During this period Jewish immigration and land purchase accelerated, driven by two paramilitary Zionist groups: Irgun founded in 1931 and Lehi, also known as ‘The Stern Gang’ founded in 1940. The stated aims of these two organisations were: the eviction of British forces from Palestine, unrestricted Jewish immigration, foundation of a Jewish State. Most notorious of Irgun activities was the bombing, 22nd July 1946, of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters of the British Mandate in Palestine.
The following year a UN resolution proposed the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab States with an international regime to run Jerusalem. Britain had objections to certain individual Arab leaders and disagreed with the UN proposal. Meanwhile, as the violence increased and British forces of law and order appeared impotent, the Mandate was becoming very unpopular in Britain leading the government to announce the termination of the Mandate, effective May 14th 1948. On the same day, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish Agency announced the founding of the State of Israel, recognised by Harry Truman, President of the USA a day later.
At that time, the UN remained opposed to Jewish occupation of Arab property and passed several resolutions condemning Israeli activities in Arab quarters, but those resolutions were ignored by the Israelis and the Palestinians were in fact expropriated, left without a homeland and 700,000 Arabs, expelled from northern areas of Palestine, fled to Lebanon, setting up the refugee camps in which their descendants still live, 75 years later; new settlements were built around Jerusalem, a city of fundamental significance to Christians, Moslems as well as the Jews to emphasise its inclusion in the State of Israel, born as it was out of a terrorist campaign.
Disputes between Israel and Egypt over the right of Israeli shipping to pass through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea lead in 1967, to the ‘six day war’ in which Israel defeated a coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, annexed the West Bank of the river Jordan and expelled from that territory around 200,000 Palestinian Arabs who mostly fled to refugee camps in Lebanon. The Israeli Government, convinced of its moral right, imposed its jurisdiction throughout the whole territory previously known as Palestine.
By 1975 there were over 250,000 Palestinian Arabs living in refugee camps, managed by The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Southern Lebanon which became involved in the Lebanese civil war between the right-wing Christian Social Democrat government supported by Israel on one hand and the PLO with its Shia Moslem allies on the other 1st Sept 1982 the PLO withdrew from Lebanon, leaving the camps under the protection of a multi-national peace-keeping force, led by the USA. This Force pulled out on 10th Sept and the Israeli Defence Force, (the IDF), took control of West Beirut including the Shatila refugee camp, set up in 1949 to accommodate 10,000 displaced Palestinian Arabs. Sept 14th, Lebanese presidential candidate Bachir Gemayel was assassinated and the Christian militias blamed the PLO. The IDF allowed the Militias to enter Shatila Camp where, over 2 days Sept 16th to 18th 1982 ,they massacred 2,000 to 3,000 unarmed civilians. In February 1983, a commission headed by the Assistant Gen Sec of the UN concluded that the Israeli Defence Force, at the time the Occupying Power in southern Lebanon, was responsible for the massacre but there were no repercussions for the IDF nor for the State of israel.
After the Camp David Accords of 1978 which purported to outline a ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’ a series of negotiations, at first facilitated by Norway then sponsored by the USA resulted in mutual recognition between the PLO and the State of Israel with dialogue around a possible Palestinian State, Israeli settlements in occupied territory, the status of Jerusalem and a ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees. A pair of Agreements, known as the ‘Oslo Accords’ were signed in 1993 in Washington then in Egypt in 1995 but were rejected by right-wing Zionists and the more militant Arab groups. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, signatory of the Accords, was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic and the whole process was abandoned as a failure at the Camp David summit hosted in the year 2000 by Bill Clinton in the US. By this time, only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were designated as Palestinian Arab territory.
The Gaza Strip, around which Israel had built a wall, was an overcrowded refugee camp with access controlled by the IDF. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers continued to expropriate Arab land and to build new settlements, designated illegal by the UN Security Council in more than 25 resolutions calling on Israel to cease its harassment of Arab communities. Israel ignored all these resolutions and no international action was taken to halt the cycle of expropriation, expulsion and the construction of new settlements.
So, the McMahon Correspondence 1916, the Balfour Declaration 1917, the San Remo Conference 1920, the Shaw Commission 1930, the William Peel Enquiry 1937, the UN Two-State proposal 1947, the Camp David Accords 1978, the Oslo Accords 1993 & 5 have variously promised the Palestinian Arabs their own independent state, assured them of protection of their civil rights, in the context of aggressive Jewish immigration and forbidden further expropriation by the Israelis of Arab property. But none of these promises and assurances have been fulfilled, the international community, notably USA, UK and Germany have been complicit in the slow degradation of the Palestinian Arab Nation; broken promises, empty assurances; the Palestinian Arab nation found itself on the brink of extinction. Western Powers had fully demonstrated their unreliability, dishonesty and inability to hold Israel to account. It became clear to the Arabs that negotiation leads to further degradation, that Israel is immune to international criticism and that the international community will not intervene.
In these circumstances, it seems that Hamas, elected by the Arabs of the Gaza Strip more militantly to represent their interests, refused to accept the gradual destruction of their nation and decided to provoke a final existential crisis to bring an end, one way or another, to a century of suffering. The Arab attack on Israeli border villages, 7th October 2023 was heavily signalled by Hamas, with televised rehearsals and stories in the press but the Israeli security services refrained from any pre-emptive action or defence of the threatened communities and allowed the invasion to go ahead thus justifying, to itself and to the compliant international bodies, its reprisals upon the Gaza Strip and the final annihilation of the Palestinian Arab people. Massacres at Masada and the Warsaw ghetto are episodes in Jewish history, but this time the boot is on the Jewish foot.
Britain, the USA and Germany, while publicly decrying Israeli expropriation of Arab property and the atrocities being committed in Gaza and the West Bank by the IDF and Israeli settlers are continuing to arm the Israelis and thereby confirm their complicity in the on-going genocide of the Palestinian Arab Nation. Meantime the war spreads and terrorist action escalates. This was Hamas’ intention; for them it is a rage against the passing of the light.