This course will discuss the developments in the Middle East from the early 20th century to the present. It will discuss the rise and retreat of Arab nationalism, the problems of internal cohesion of the Arab states, issues of religion and state, and the evolution of Islamist politics. It will also focus on the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on the region and will conclude with an in depth analysis of the “Arab Spring” by placing these contemporary revolutionary events in their historical context. Please note that this course builds upon a previous course - The Emergence of the Modern Middle East - Part I Learn about the history of the Middle East for a deeper understanding of current regional developments!
6.3.1 Initial Arab Resistance - Part 1
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The Emergence of the Modern Middle East - Part II
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WEEK 2
The beginnings of the Arab-Israeli conflict
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Professor Asher SusserSenior Research Fellow
Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
And the Arabs, of course, did not acquiesce as the Jews might have expected.
And one could ask, how could it have been otherwise.
The Arabs would ask, naturally, if the Jews had problems in Europe,
why should the solution be at their expense?
If the Jews had a problem in Europe, the solution ought to be a European solution.
Why should it be a solution that the Arabs felt was costing them and
made very much at their expense.
The realization that the Zionists intended to create their own stadium Palestine and
to turn the Arabs into a minority was obviously not welcomed
by the Arab population of Palestine.
And needless to say,
another contention was that they were never asked about the Balfour Declaration.
They were never asked about this idea of
allowing the Jews to establish a state in Palestine, part of it or all of it.
It was against their wishes from the very beginning.
There were of course, some exceptions on the Arab side.
In January 1919, Prince Faisal of the Hashemite family that we
have already encountered through the Arab revolt,
came to an agreement with the leader of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann,
on what was essentially an Arab acceptance of the idea of a Jewish Palestine.
But Faisal was not really representative of the Arabs generally speaking and
not of the Palestinian Arabs in particular.
And therefore the agreement between Faisal and Weizmann never really held much water
and never had much great historical significance.
In 1920, the mandates were handed out to the European powers Britain and
France in San Remo, and the Balfour declaration as given by the British to
the leadership of the Zionist community in England in 1917, the Balfour
declaration was now incorporated into the British mandate over Palestine.
This was a great achievement for the Jews.
It was an upgrading of the British commitment to the Zionist enterprise.
The British commitment was now not just in a letter by Lord Balfour to the leader of
the British Zionists.
But it was an international obligation that Great Britain had made
at the highest level.
Palestinian opposition to the Zionist idea was already apparent before
the First World War.
But after the war, we see the beginnings of a much more organized Arab opposition.
The first organized opposition after the war is the Muslim Christian Associations
that organized in Palestine against the Zionists idea.
And it's interesting to note that these associations were called
Muslim Christian Associations,
that is the people still identify themselves very strongly,
as the case had been for centuries upon centuries in the Middle East,
by their religious affiliation rather than by their national identity,
which was still in its very embryonic phase.
In early 1919, we have the first of a,
a variety of Palestinian congresses that, that were held throughout
the years emphasizing Palestinian opposition to the Zionist idea.
In the early years after the war,
there was this idea that Palestine should actually be part of Syria.
Southern Syria they argued amongst the Palestinian Arabs.
This was the period in which Faisal was the ruler of Syria
under the auspices of the Arab rebellion and the cooperation with Britain.
But as we have already seen, the French expelled Faisal from Damascus in 1920,
transforming Syria into a French mandate and
ending the Arab state that had existed there between 1918 and 1920.
Once the French had taken over Syria,
the idea of Palestine being southern Syria didn't make any sense anymore, and
the idea of southern Syria simply disappeared into oblivion.
And now the focus was not on southern Syria, but on the struggle for Palestine.
Riots in Jerusalem erupted in April 1920, and
even more serious riots in Jaffa in May 1921.
The Arab opposition was very clear.
The violence of the early 1920s for some British officials who were supporter
of the Arabs, gave them reason to believe that the British policy in Palestine
was forcing upon the majority, a policy which they found most distasteful.
On the Zionist side, there was a tendency to deny the extent of Arab opposition,
and therefore the willingness to explain that essentially this was
an incitement of the masses by the upper classes or incitement by the British.
And that the opposition expressed by the people to design his project
was not truly reflective of the majority opinion amongst Palestinian Arabs.
But the leadership, people like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, leaders of
the Zionist community in Palestine, from the outset knew, knew better.
And they understood perfectly well that the opposition was a national
opposition to the Zionist enterprise, but they usually kept this for
internal discussions of the leadership and did not make this a public knowledge.
But this was not a misunderstanding between the parties
that actually had common interests, but quite the opposite.
The massive violence of 1921,
left the Zionist leadership with the inner radically impression.
That their enterprise in Palestine was very precarious.
But Zionist officials, though they maintain the fiction in public,
that the hostility was not really genuine, were quite aware of the fact that there
was an Arab national movement implacably opposed to the Zionist enterprise.
It was not the offendees, that is the upper class, and
it was not the British and antisemites that were mobilizing the opposition, but
Zionism itself was the problem for the great majority of the Arabs of Palestine.
Most Arabs wanted the Jewish community and
Palestine, the Yishuv as it was known in Hebrew, simply to disappear.
The Jews on the other hand, despite to become the majority in Palestine and
expected to be the future masters of the land,
they also expected to be treated accordingly by the British authorities.
They in their mind had the right to change the face of the land peacefully for
the benefit of all its inhabitants.
Seeing the problems in Palestine, the British made a decision
to exclude the Zionist project from the East Bank of the Jordan River.
Trans-Jordan and western Palestine were all part
of the British mandate over Palestine, but seeing the situation in Palestine,
understanding that Palestine was heading for a huge conflict between the Jews and
the Arabs, the British decided in 1921 to restrict the application
of the Balfour Declaration to the western part of Palestine only.
And that meant not to include Trans-Jordan in
the part of Palestine that was open to Zionist settlement.
And therefore the British decision in March 1921, as we have already seen.
To establish the Hashimites in Trans-Jordan and
to establish an Arab state in Trans-Jordan,
meaning, that Jewish settlement would not take place there.
The creation of Trans-Jordan was the way of saying that it
would become only an Arab state, and
that would be the beginning of perhaps, they thought, the solution for Palestine.
A Jewish state that would be established in Palestine.
But the East Bank, Trans-Jordan, would be reserved for the Arabs only.
The Jews and Arabs in Palestine were so politically distant from each other.
That from the very beginning there was an inability of the Jews and
the Arabs to form joint political organizations.
And they tended to develop separately in all respects, politically, socially and
economically.
This was the first inklings of the understanding
that in the end there would be a need for partition.
But that would come later.
In the meantime, hostility to design this project only grew.
They came to a head and to a,
a pinnacle of violence against the Jewish project in the riots of 1929.
And the riots of 1929, the worst that, that, the Jews had experienced
in Palestine until then, had a very strong and powerful religious component.
The problem started at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
The Jews wished to expand their rights of prayer at the Wailing Wall.
Giving rise to the belief amongst the Muslims that the Jews sought to undermine
and perhaps even destroy the Muslim holy places on Temple Mount.
The Palestinian leadership from the early phase of the British mandate was
in the hands of a man of a r, religion, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was a Mufti,
that is, a man of religion who issued religious interpretations of the Quran.
And the Mufti, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs,
led the opposition to the expansion of any Jewish rights
at the Wailing Wall in the fear that the Jews actually intended
to subvert or even destroy the most unholy places on Temple Mount.
And it is against this background that riots broke out in Jerusalem and
other places in Palestine in 1929,
the worst that had taken place until that time in the country.
The most serious of these expressions of hostility was the massacre
that took place in the Jewish community of Hebron in August,
1929 when scores of Jews were killed by their Muslim neighbors.
All in all, in the riots of 1929, over a 100 people were
killed on either side of the the warring parties in Palestine.
The severity of the riots led to the establishment of a British Commission of
Inquiry, which came to study the causes of the violence in Palestine.
And the British commission of inquiry explained
that the root cause was the animosity of the Arab majority to the Zionists.
As a consequence of the findings of this commission of inquiry,
the British issued a white paper that is a statement of policy in October 1930 by
the colonial secretary Lord Passfield,
and in this white paper, restrictions on immigration and
land purchases were imposed on the Zionist project.
The Passfield White Paper also called for
the establishment of a legislative counsel that would have an Arab majority.
Essentially, the Passfield White Paper if ever implemented,
would have spelt the end of the Zionist project in Palestine.
The Zionist of course protested very vehemently,
and the British eventually backed down.
But by the late 1920s and the early 1930s,
the prospects of the Zionist in Palestine seemed dire.
The project was in decline in the late 1920s, reflected in the fact
that more people were leaving Palestine than were coming to it.
Jews were emigrating from Palestine to other places and
the idea of the Zionist project seemed to be facing failure.
The Passfield White Paper spoke of an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.
That is a recognition of the fact by the early 1930s, that the Jews were not about
to establish a majority in Palestine as the Zionist had hoped.
To that, the Zionist replied that one should not look at the numbers as they
were at present.
That one should look at the statistics in Palestine with a view to the future.
Related to the universal Jewish aspiration according to which millions of Jews
would eventually come to Palestine and in the long run,
they would eventually become the majority and should be treated as such.
In the meantime, the Muslims in Palestine were jacking up their opposition.
And in 1931, an international Islamic conference was convened in Jerusalem.
And it looked as if the Zionist project facing huge opposition in Palestine,
declining immigration from abroad, faced very little chances of success.
But then, suddenly, things changed very dramatically.
The early 1930s changed everything.
The rise of fascism in Europe, Hitler in Germany.
An erratically anti-Semitic government in Poland
led to massive Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine.
And the Jewish community in Palestine during the 1930s grew
at an unprecedented pace.
In the years between 1932 and 1935, the Jewish population in
Palestine increased from 185,000 to 375,000,
and by 1939, the Jewish population in Palestine was close to half a million.
This was a really sizeable population.
And increase the confidence of the Jews in their power simply by virtue
of their numbers.
And on the Arab side there was ever-increasing fear of Jewish domination.
But if the Zionist enterprise at the end of the 1920s of the early 1930s
looked like something rather temporary and a fleeting feature.
By the mid 1930s, things looked very different.
And the Arabs in their own mind, faced the real possibility
of the Jews taking over what was their country as they saw it.
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