By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The Unexpected Effect Wilson's Fourteen
Points Had On The Middle East
During World War I, President
Wilson's enunciation of his Fourteen Points in January 1918 briefly signaled a
more activist American global policy, and inspired hope in peoples the world
over seeking to escape from oppressive European colonial rule. In the Middle
East, the president's pronouncement was understood as meaning that World War I
was being fought in order to help the peoples achieve self-determination. It
was heralded as welcome support from a new great power that had never
entertained designs on the region and might counterbalance the overwhelming
weight of Britain and France and their imperialist ambitions. This was
especially welcome coming after the new Bolshevik regime in Russia in December
1917 published the czarist government's secret treaties, revealing among other
things the agreements between Britain, France, and Russia to partition the
Middle East among them. Known as the Sykes-Picot accords, the agreements
eventually became the basis for the postwar division of the region into
colonial spheres of influence between Britain and France. This revelation
shocked the people of the region and represented the confirmation of their
worst fears about the objectives of the two major Western powers. In the end,
these countries, as well as Iraq and Jordan, received Britain and France as
mandatories. The two old imperialist powers, with extensive interests and
long-standing expansionist ambitions in the Middle East.
People in the Middle
East apparently did not know at the time that in fact Wilson and his
advisors were primarily thinking of the peoples of Europe when they
talked about World War I as aimed at self-determination of the peoples. Plus
also the United States would prove unable, to stand up to the machinations of
the British and French leaders, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, at the Versailles
peace conference. President Wilson would soon be incapacitated; and his
global policies would be repudiated by the United States Senate and the
American electorate.
The United States'
return to isolation did not harm its standing in the Middle East in the
interwar period, when its prestige remained high. Even what thereafter became
the momentous involvement of the United States in Saudi Arabia, which began
with the 1933 agreements on oil exploration between U.S. companies and the
regime of 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn Sa'ud, founder of the
kingdom, was initially seen by many in the Middle East in a positive light. It
enabled the Saudi regime to decrease its stifling dependence on what had
previously been its sole external patron, Great Britain.
The entry of the
United States into World War II in 1941, which led to a major military campaign
in North Africa and the establishment of bases in several parts of the Middle
East, was also generally viewed favorably by people across the region. The arrival
of a "new" great power with an anticolonialist
tradition, and which although allied to Britain and France did not appear to
share their imperialist ambitions. When the United States rapidly withdrew its
forces from most Middle Eastern countries after the war, and helped to force
Britain and Soviet Russia to withdraw theirs from Iran, positive
impressions were reinforced. But during the Suez War of 1956 and the
Algerian War of Liberation from France in 1954-62, the Middle East's
honeymoon with the United States was already coming to an end. The partition of
Palestine in 1947-48, plus the Middle East Command, the Middle East
Defense Organization, and the Baghdad Pact, (whose ostensible purpose was
opposing Soviet expansion) came to be regarded with deep suspicion by Middle
Eastern nationalists.
This of course also
tied in with the conspiracy theory surrounding Zionism. For
example, as Bernard Avishai explained in his 2002 book “The Tragedy of
Zionism”, few had given attention to the Zionist arguments which predated
Labor Zionism. And focus instead on the changes in the moral perceptions of
Israelis since 1967, plus the diplomatic changes brought on by the
Israeli/Arab War with as a result the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
For the early
Zionists, democratic values were embedded in a number of prior questions, many
of them complex and charged with emotion. Zionists asked themselves if they
should choose Palestine or some other country, if they should start collective
farms or promote private enterprise. Another question was even more
fundamental: Should immigration be organized en
masse, by a sovereign Zionist "corporation," though any such method
of settling the Jewish national home was bound to produce a mix of European
languages there? Or should priority be given to supporting small groups of
cultural pioneers who were devoted to evolving modern Hebrew, however
gradually? Should Zionism wait for support from the imperial powers or go it
alone in small vanguard groups?
Though Napoleon (who
simple followed the lead of Emperor Joseph II of Austria) had emancipated the
Jews of his empire in 1807, eighteen years later, in 1825, Czar Nicholas I
intensified persecution of the million and a half Jews who lived in his. For
example in 1835, czarist officials were conscripting thousands of Jewish boys
every year for a virtual lifetime of military service-a form of forced
conversion.
The economic
initiatives of the 1840’s forced Jews out of the liquor trade, and the
czarist state expropriated the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Jewish
agents, manufacturers, and wholesalers. Heavy railroad construction, some of it
financed by a small, rising class of Jewish bankers, damned to poverty more
thousands of Jews engaged in the carriage trade. Tens of thousands made their
way to the cities, desperate to practice some acquired craft or trade. But
finally the Jews' hopes for liberal emancipation were disappointed when, in
March 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated.
After the
assassination, anti-Semitism as it had become in France after the invasion of
German troops, became Alexander III's great obsession. "It was the Jews
who crucified Our Lord," he announced, "and spilled His precious
blood." The chief procurator of the Holy Synod, Constantin Pobedonostsev, one of the leaders of the Slavophile
movement, held that Jews were a foreign growth on the Russian body politic,
were purveyors not only of a subversive religious creed but of
"materialism." The Jews, he said, would undermine the bond of family
between the Czar, the Russian people, and the Mother Church. Pobedonostsev subsidized the influential conservative and
national press in an insidious campaign of Jew-baiting.Weird
conspiracies were ascribed to Jews, precursors of The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, which would appear mysteriously twenty years later. (See: "Action
Racique Contre Les Forces Occultes.")
In this climate, Jews
began to fear that those whom the state could not assimilate would have to
disappear. An apocryphal story began to circulate that Pobedonostsev
had already arrived at a formula that would doom them: one third by
assimilation, one third by expulsion, one third by murder. One should note here
that Russia's industrial proletariat increased more than sixfold between 1860
and 1913; only 8 or 9 percent were Jews, though a disproportionately large
number of them joined-and led-proletarian movements. Still, Jews were far more
concentrated in trades: 50 percent of the Russian work force in petty
capitalism were Jews, most of them becoming more and more marginal to the
industrializing cities ' where they had sought to make a new life.
The 1881 pogroms
started in April. By the end of that year, 215 Jewish communities had been
attacked by mobs; about 100,000 Jews were left without means of gaining a
livelihood. In Minsk, fully a fifth of the city-1,600 buildings-was razed.
Deaths numbered in the hundreds, and the pogromists seemed particularly bent on
abusing Jewish women. These deeds humiliated all Jews; but particularly young
men so recently caught up in the struggle for enlightenment and, in
consequence, unable to find solace in prayer or in a traditional faith in
Judaism's superiority. (One Yiddish song of the day included the haunting
words: "Brides taken from their grooms, children from their mothers:
Shout, children, loud and clear ... you can wake your father up, as i f he were asleep for
real.") In May 1882, Minister of the Interior Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev
promulgated the May Laws. Once in the cities, the laws decreed, Jews could not
return to the countryside, and those who remained in villages-perhaps two fifths
of the total Jewish population-could expect little protection from the Czar's
provincial governors. Jews could expect harassment from the police and, indeed,
could be expelled to the cities by summary verdicts of rural courts made up of
half-literate muzhiks.
The flow of Jews to
the cities now turned into a flood. By 1897, the Jewish population of Minsk was
47,562; it was 32,400 in Dvinsk. In Minsk, the Jews
finally comprised 52 percent of the whole population; in Bialystok, 63 percent.
Nor did the Russian urban capitalists welcome these new arrivals. Even Jewish
capitalists continued to prefer Russian workers over destitute Jewish craftsmen.
In time the total Jewish population swelled to nearly 5 million, and 'hundreds
of thousands were intimidated and went hungry. Young Jews felt themselves
caught between the lure of modern life and a new age of barbarism, unable to go
forward and unable to go back. To many, the ideal of a Jewish national home in
biblical Eretz Yisrael only mocked their condition.
But it was not only
in the 19th century Europe that same period the position of Jews also worsened
in Muslim countries. There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828. There was
a massacre of Jews in Barfurush in 1867. (Benny
Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of
the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001, 2001, pp 10–11.)
Throughout the 1860s,
the Jews of Libya were subjected to what Martin Gilbert called punitive
taxation. In 1864, around 500 Jews were killed in Marrakech and Fezin Morocco. In 1869, 18 Jews were killed in Tunis, and
an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores, and burned synagogues, on Jerba Island. In 1875, 20 Jews were killed by a mob in Demnat, Morocco; elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked
and killed in the streets in broad daylight. In 1891, the leading Muslims in
Jerusalem asked the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople to prohibit the entry
of Jews arriving from Russia. In 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were
murdered in Tripolitania. (Martin Gilbert, Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000-Year History of the Jewish People and Their
Faith, 2002, pp 179–82.)
Although a latecomer
since a lot of the literature focuses on him short mention should be made
of the Austrian Theodore Herzl. While studying Roman law at the
University of Vienna, he joined the Burschenschaft
Albia, a strongly nationalist dueling fraternity. In 1883, when that group
participated in an anti-Semitic ceremony to commemorate Wagner's death, Herzl
protested and was forced to withdraw. But maybe Herzl had not intended to make
a stand for the sake of the Jews so much as to honor civility itself.
The year before, the
year of the czarist May Laws in Russia, Herzl had noted in his diary that
Jews everywhere would best be absorbed by intermarriage: "Cross-breeding
of the occidental races with the so-called oriental one on the basis of a common
state religion, this is the great desirable solution."
Then shortly after
Herzl moved there, in 1892 France was shocked by the Panama Scandal, a
commercial bubble fraud in which several Jews were implicated. The Paris mobs
now proved themselves as openly anti-Semitic as the ones Karl Lueger had been
stirring up in Vienna. Insults were everywhere hurled at French Jews; Jewish
shops were attacked. As the provocations reached a peak, several Jewish
officers in the French Army answered those affronts in duels. This all
impressed Herzl enormously. And in 1893, his solution to the Jewish question
was the mass conversion of Jewish children to Christianity.
He toyed with the
idea of contacting the Pope and inviting him to preside over such a ceremony at
Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral; Herzl felt that honor demanded that he remain
Jewish, but the children, at least, would be saved.
In 1895 then, Herzl
witnessed Paris in an uproar again, this time over the trial of Captain
Alfred Dreyfus. And it is in the wake of this, that "in a flash," or
so he wrote, the idea of a Jewish state came to him, and he began frantically to
jot down some ideas outlining his plan. In May 1895, he requested an interview
with Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who was then funding the settlement of Jews in
Argentina. But Hirsch was unreceptive both to Herzl's proposals and to him. So
Herzl decided to compose a series of appeals to Dr. Moritz Güdemann,
the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, who gave him some encouragement. Thus Herzl
proceeded with an address to Edmond de Rothschild, the source of countless
conspiracy theories including in the USA today where the ‚Rothschild’, alleged
‚Illuminate conspiracy’ theory, just like in Arab countries, is widespread.
Thus during Zionism's
formative period, there were two major efforts to provide answers:
"political" Zionism and "cultural' Zionism. The dominant
trend, which developed mainly in Eastern Europe in response to political
Zionism, was cultural Zionism.
But confusion of the
mystical Jerusalem with the iconic one was precisely what traditional Judaism,
and original Zionism, for that matter, were trying to avoid. But already one
year after Herzl’s death , the victory of cultural Zionists at the Seventh
Zionist Congress ensured that the fate of the Zionist cause would next be
determined by Jewish settlers in Palestine.
For Cultural Zionism
initially, Hebrew and Jewish culture such as language, arts identity, and
religion, however, had been important rather than the potential establishment
of a state. They, in effect, saw Zionism as a solution to the problems of
Judaism and they were associated with the thinking of the writer Asher Ginsberg
(1856-1927). The second grouping, the political Zionists, argued that the need
for territory was the most important requirement of the Zionist movement.
Indeed, Herzl's pragmatic reaction to the proposals for the Ugandan option was
a clear illustration of the aim of the political Zionists. As the Zionist
movement as a whole grew, so more and more people started to emigrate to
Palestine. These new immigrants expanded existing Jewish colonies and founded
new ones. In 1909, the first Kibbutz was started by the Sea of Galilee, called
`Kibbutz Degania', and in the same year Tel Aviv was founded along the
shoreline from Jaffa.
Perhaps the greatest myth
surrounding the arrival of the various waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine
during this time (Aliyah) was the question of their motives for coming in the
first place. The majority of the immigrants who came to Palestine did not do so
for Zionist reasons. Rather, they came for a variety of reasons that involved
both persecution in their country of origin and a lack of third country option.
The latter became an increasingly important factor when the United States
closed its doors to Jewish immigration at the end of the 19th century.
Many who came to
Palestine found life there to be too harsh and left. Emigration has been a
constant problem for the Zionist movement, both in Palestine and subsequently
in Israel. In both the Yishuv and the subsequent state of Israel, there is
clear linkage between immigration and security. In short, as much of the land
as possible had to be settled in order to control it.
In the early days of
the first and second Aliyahs, the immigrants, most of
whom came from Eastern European urban backgrounds, struggled with having to
make the land fertile. It is here that one of the great dilemmas of the Zionist
movement became apparent. Who should farm the land? The first immigrants took
the view that local Arab labor was both better equipped to undertake this
arduous task and also very cheap. The second wave of immigrants took the view
that the state for the Jews would be built using Hebrew labor, and they clashed
with the veteran immigrants over this question. Eventually, the second group
carried the day, but the debate about using Arab or foreign labor never really
went away.
In Eastern Europe,
Zionism remained a rather small movement, particularly when compared with socialistYiddishist groupings like the Allgemeiner
Yiddisher Arbeiterbund-the
"Bund"-which had been founded in 1897, the same year as the World
Zionist Organization. Zionists also found themselves in competition with Jewish
activists drawn to a non-sectarian Marxism.
However the
settlement activities in Palestine represented the practical approach to
Zionism, and this combined with political Zionism to form what was termed
`synthetic Zionism', which became closely associated with Chaim Weizman
(1874-1952). Born in Russia, Weizman played a central role in the development
of the Zionist movement and was to become Israel's first president. In 1904,
Weizman emigrated from Russia to Britain, where he lobbied for the Zionist
cause and played an influential role in winning some degree of British
recognition for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Along with David Ben-Gurion,
Weizman became one of the central figures of the pre-state Zionist movement,
serving as President of the World Zionist Organisation
during 1921-31 and 1935-46.
The cultural Zionists
succeeded in defining the goals which the Labor Zionist parties would
eventually implement. The first trend in Zionism, political Zionism, appealed
mainly to Western European intellectuals and contributed little in the way of
an ideology to the people who built up the Yishuv. Political Zionist prejudices
were absorbed into Zionist myth as the Yishuv moved inexorably toward
self-determination during the 1930’s. Only after they were thought-rightly or
wrongly-to anticipate the bitter lessons of World War II did they put cultural
Zionism in eclipse.
Especially the
Holocaust had two effects on the Zionist leadership and on the subsequent state
of Israel. The lack of an alternative host country made Jewish immigration to
Palestine all the more important. And during the Second World War, violence in
Palestine had increased as the Jewish military forces became more active. In
1946 the violence escalated following the British decision to set up relocation
camps in Cyprus for the Jewish refugees. To make matters worse, all Jewish
illegal immigration ships that were intercepted on the high seas or even when
within sight of Palestine were taken to Cyprus and the immigrants detained in
camps surrounded by barbed wire and guards. The British took this a stage
further with the interception of the ship Exodus, which was carrying nearly
4,000 immigrants to Palestine. The ship arrived and was able to dock in the
port of Haifa in northern Palestine, but the British would not let the
passengers disembark, and insisted upon the ship returning to its French port
of origin. When the Jews refused to disembark in France, the British government
sent the ship back to Germany.
Peter Novick argues
in The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) that
American Jewish attitudes toward Zionism were profoundly changed in response to
the Holocaust. American Zionists were only able to make credible claims that
there was majority support among the American Jewish community for their
position after an American Jewish conference they organized in Pittsburgh in
January 1943: Richard Stevens, American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy
1942-1947 (New York: Pageant Press, 1962).
After the war Winston
Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons on 1 August 1946, exclaimed that
the idea that the Jewish problem could be helped by a vast dumping of the
Jews of Europe into Palestine is really too silly to consume our time in the
House this afternoon. (In: the Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches, London:
Pimlico, 2003, p. 426.)
But while the world
was horrified by the Holocaust, most Western governments did little to increase
Jewish settlement in their respective countries. The realization that nothing
was too horrible to happen, the shattering of the myth that these things just
don't happen in a modern civilized world. This also affected Israeli
foreign policy-making and Israeli national identity later on. Second, the
development of the notion that the Jews must always be prepared to protect
themselves - they could not rely upon others to do this for them. They had
perished as a result of the failure of other party’s to defend them. And
explains why the notion of self-sufficiency in defense became a
cornerstone of Israeli defense doctrine and played a role in the decision at
the start of the 1970s to develop a military industrial complex in Israel
that would arm the Israeli military.
When next
the power of the US in the world and in the Middle East expanded during
and after the Cold War, in the eyes of many arabs in
the region the United States gradually changed. It went from being
considered a benevolent, disinterested outsider to something quite different: a
power with a massive presence in the Middle East, a broad range of interests
there, and objectives not always compatible with those of the people of the
region. The gap in perceptions is wide on this score: Americans still tend to
regard their country as benevolent and disinterested, as acting in the world
only for the highest purposes or in self-defense. While most Middle Easterners
for the first century and a half of American involvement with their region
shared this view, they do so no longer. It is in the context of this wide
divergence between the two sides that the post-9/11 American interventions have
taken place, with many Americans seeing not only the invasion of Afghanistan
but also the much more fraught invasion of Iraq in these high-minded terms, and
people in the region generally taking quite a different view. For some of the
Arab reactions to Cold War-driven American policies, see R. Khalidi, "The
Revolutionary Year of 1958 in the Arab World," in The Revolutionary Middle
East in 1958, edited by Wm. Roger Louis, Woodrow Wilson Press, 2002, pp.
181-208.
For example under the
Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States pledged to give increased economic and
military aid to receptive Middle Eastern countries and to protect,with
U.S. armed forces if necessary,the territorial
integrity and political independence of these nations from the threat of
"international Communism." Although the United States officially
aimed to protect the Middle East from Soviet encroachment, the Eisenhower
Doctrine had the unspoken mission of containing the radical Arab nationalism of
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom Eisenhower regarded as an unwitting
agent of Soviet expansionism. By offering aid and protection, the Eisenhower
administration hoped to convince a majority of Arab governments to side openly
with the West in the Cold War, thus isolating Nasser and decreasing the
likelihood that the Middle East would fall under Soviet domination.
But the Eisenhower
administration had come to the conclusion that any action beyond shoring up
Lebanon would be futile and dangerous, in fact at the time only one third
of Lebanon’s territory was under Government control when U.S troops started backing
it. In fact at the time the Jordanian regime was in a perilous position with
widespread popular opposition and the treat of assassination hangs of King
Hussein. And while King Saud of Arabia was privately jubilant over US
intervention in Lebanon, he dared not say so in public.
The actual position
of the US was made clear in a conversation between President Eisenhower,
Allen Dulles, and other officials where John Foster Dulles said;”We must regard Arab nationalism as a flood which is
running strongly. We cannot successfully oppose it, but we can put sandbags
around the positions we must protect-Israel, Lebanon-and the oil positions
around the Persian Gulf.” (Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The
Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East, 2004, p.241)
But in the Arab
world, these historical memories are reinforced daily by live reporting on a
variety of current crises presented in terms of foreign intervention,
occupation, and local resistance, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine,
available on a half-dozen satellite channels. (See François Burgat,
Face to Face with Political Islam , 2003).
And more recently
radical Islamic activists have operated freely in Britain, raising money for
their cause, beaming satellite TV spots or running Internet sites condemning
America in support of al-Qaida.
In conclusion I would
could add in regards to the Palestine/Israel conflict that peoples involved in
the Arab-Israeli dispute are in conflict over holy land, by of claims derived
from holy texts is not factual. Christians have made much of Jerusalem as the
site of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, something that never has been proven
historically. Contrary to myth, the Middle East is not part of a
`religions of war' in regards to a Jewish and Palestine State.
There are plenty of
bases in the holy texts, histories and traditions of Middle Eastern religions
on which to construct a modern politics and international law of cooperation,
respect for the general rules of war and coexistence between states and communities.
Moreover, while it is possible - as is often the case - to use religious
authority to legitimize modern nationalism and the claims of specific
nationalisms (Zionist, Iranian, pan-Arab, local Arab), there is also in each
religion a strong element of universalism and appeals for a shared humanity
within a recognition of the positive diversity of peoples, cultures and
religions.
As earth, rocks,
trees and rivers have no religious character, there cannot, as such, be such a
thing as a `holy' land. If land is valued, in human terms, it is because people
live, love, work and die on it, without claims to special divine or other interventions,
or other exclusionary aspirations. Nor are there any such thing as `holy'
texts. The written word is put there by human beings; by, in large measure if
not entirely, men. Any reasonable, textually educated specialist who examines
the `holy' texts of Middle Eastern religions would see at once that these texts
are composites, written at different times by different hands and in different
circumstances. Hence their flexibility and, at times, their charm.
Another erroneous
claim assumes a close relation between the Zionist movement, established
in 1897 at a conference in Basle, Switzerland, and the major states (that ended
up supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East) of the
time.
But none of the major
powers either helped create, funded or supported the goal of a Jewish
state until World War II when, in the face of Nazi persecution of European
Jews, the US, the USSR and later Britain came to accept this goal. The
assimilation of Zionism as a non-state social and political movement with
imperial strategy in the Middle East in the first part of the twentieth century
is, therefore, a simplification. And not a single founding father of the State
of Israel was a Freemason a legend created by the fraudulent ‘Protocols of the
elders of Zion.
Rather the origins of
Zionism lie in political and intellectual discussion in Europe in the latter
part of the nineteenth century amongst Jews concerned about the rise of
anti-Semitism, especially in the Czarist Russian empire but also in Western
Europe. As such Zionism was a spontaneous, in contemporary terms
`non-governmental' movement which, as any such movement or NGO
(non-governmental organisation) does, sought to win
governments over to its side. And European Governments did not
support the goal of a Jewish state until World War II when, in the face
of Nazi persecution of European Jews, the US, the USSR and later Britain came
to accept this goal. The assimilation of Zionism as a non-state social and
political movement with imperial strategy in the Middle East in the first part
of the twentieth century is, therefore, a simplification.
At the end of WWII
however it became a means of solving a particularly European problem, that of
anti-Semitism. The claim to statehood and recognition thus rests not on some
particularity of history, religion or internal conduct, but on a feature of the
modern world.
Another myth in
reverse is that Palestinian groups and nationalists - who later emerged as
al-Fatah on the one hand and the more radical Popular and Democratic Fronts on
the other - were independent of the Arab states' control. Within occupied Palestine,
the Communist Party continued to articulate Palestinian ideas. And after the
war of 1967, the Palestinian organizations all sought to build alliances with
the states of the region and beyond.
A comparative element
may help, however, since a rather similar process took place in Latin America
in the first decades of the nineteenth century after the Spanish withdrawal:
broad aspirations, inspired by Simon Bolivar, for
Latin American unity, foundered on regional, elite and popular resistance,
which ended up yielding, as in the Arab world, around twenty distinct states.
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