By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Gaza Redux Part One

We earlier explained why Iran likely played a role in helping plot the latest round of Hamas attacks. Like its Hezbollah proxy, Iran sees Israel as fundamentally illegitimate. It may seek to disrupt regional trends, such as potential Saudi-Israel normalization (which Tehran sees, with considerable justification, as designed to counter Iran), by promoting anti-Israel violence.

Hezbollah would have trouble saying no if Tehran asked to get more involved in the war, even though the group retains independent decision-making power.

As for the origins before the First World War, the British controlled Egypt, the French ruled Algeria and Tunisia, and Italy controlled Libya. By contrast, the Ottoman Empire controlled modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

At the beginning of the war, the Allied Powers made secret agreements to carve up the Ottoman Empire. For their part in the war, the Russians demanded the expansion of its territory down to Constantinople. This was a sensitive issue for the British, for it would give Russia influence in the Mediterranean waters around the Suez Canal. India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, and Britain shuttled their troops to India through the canal. In short, the Suez Canal was essential to Britain's imperial control over India.

The British would agree to the Russian demand for Constantinople, but only if Britain was guaranteed specific territory around the Suez Canal. This territory included modern-day Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and southern Iraq. British control of these territories would create a bubble around the Suez Canal, securing the British route to India.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of January 3, 1916, was a secret treaty between Britain and France to carve up the Middle East after the war. France would get the territory of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and northern Iraq, while Britain would get the part of modern-day Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and southern Iraq. Later, the Russians and Italians assented to the treaty.

Unfortunately, the British made promises to the Arabs inside the Ottoman Empire incompatible with Sykes-Picot. The British and French-controlled territories in India and North Africa contained vast numbers of Muslims. The British and French were terrified that the Turkish sultan would incite Muslim revolts inside their empires. They desperately knocked the Ottomans out of the war to avoid an Islamic uprising.

British military campaigns against the Ottomans were disastrous. As a result, the British devised a plan to destabilize the Ottoman Empire from within. The plan was to have the Arabs revolt against the Turks. The British promised Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, that he would be made king of a unified and independent Arab state after the war if he revolted against the Turks. Hussein agreed. His son Faisal, advised by Lawrence of Arabia, led the Arab revolt against the Turks. The Arab revolt thus played a role in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

At the peace conference, the British broke their promise to establish a unified and independent Arab state. Instead, they created a handful of new nations in the Middle East that Britain and France would dominate. In 1921, the French created the Kingdom of Syria. The British convinced the French to make Faisal the ruler of Syria, but he had no independence. The French exiled him in July 1920. The French created the state of Lebanon in 1920 and transferred territory from Syria to Lebanon. This act of imperialism still irritates Syrians today.

Prince Faisal headed an Arab delegation but his delegation had no negotiating powers. Chaim Weissman led a Zionist delegation also without negotiating powers.

Russia had signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers in the spring of 1918, so it was not allowed to attend.

The Central Powers - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire - were allowed to attend once the nations had agreed upon details of all peace treaties with negotiating rights.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement led to the creation of Iraq. Sykes-Picot said the British would get Baghdad and Basra, while the French would get Mosul in the North. The British realized the importance of oil much earlier than the French, and the British suspected there was oil in Mosul. In 1918, the British convinced the French to relinquish their claim to Mosul. In this way, the British took control of the entire territory that is now Iraq. The British formed the Kingdom of Iraq in 1921, and Faisal was king.

The British promise for an independent Arab state was incompatible with Sykes-Picot. But British promises to European Jews further complicated the situation in the region. On November 2, 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration - a public statement supporting a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Czarist Russia was the great anti-Semitic power before the war, making many Jews reluctant to support the Allies. The English believed the Balfour Declaration would foster Jewish support of the Allies and weaken Jewish support for the Central Powers.

Sykes-Picot gave the British control of Palestine. In 1921, the British carved Jordan out of Palestine, making Hussein's son Abdullah king. However, the creation of Jordan infuriated both the Jews and the Arabs. On the one hand, the Jews thought the Balfour Declaration granted them the entire territory of Palestine. Thus, they viewed the creation of Jordan as a broken promise.

 

When The Treaty Came As A Shock

The actual Treaty of Versailles, published in the spring of 1919, came as a shock. Public opinion from right to left was dismayed to learn that Germany would have to disarm, lose territory, and pay reparations for war damage. Resentment focused on Article 231 of the treaty, in which Germany accepted responsibility for starting the war, and a young American lawyer, John Foster Dulles, had written to provide a legal basis for claiming reparations. Germans loathed the "war guilt" clause, as it came to be known, and there was little will to pay reparations.

Weimar Germany, like Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union-nursed a powerful and lasting sense of national humiliation. For many years, the German Foreign Office and its right-wing supporters did their best to undermine the legitimacy of the Treaty of Versailles. With the help of selectively released documents, they argued that Germany and its allies were innocent of starting the war. Instead, Europe had somehow stumbled into a disaster so that either everyone or no one was responsible. The Allies could have done more to challenge German views about the war's origins and the treaty's unfairness. Instead, at least in the English-speaking peoples' case, they eventually agreed with the German narrative, which fed into the appeasement policies of the 1930s.

Critics of Versailles got their attack in early. Just six months after the treaty was signed, John Maynard Keynes published “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” the book that made his name. Today, however, Keynes’s critique of the Treaty of Versailles is seen as problematic. Keynes himself shortly after stated that he regretted having written the book.

Keynes himself regretted it, and so should historians and economists today. Mentioned in an article early in 2017 saying to me was that sometime in 1936, after the March 29 “election” in Germany, which consolidated Hitler’s power, Elizabeth Wiskemann, a German-born, Cambridge-educated historian, met [Keynes] at a social gathering in London. Suddenly, she reported later, she found herself saying, “I do wish you had not written that book [meaning The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which the Germans never ceased to quote], and then longed for the ground to swallow me up. But he said and gently, ‘So do I.’ 

Peace would take a very different form in 1945. With memories of the previous two decades fresh, the Allies forced the Axis powers into unconditional surrender. Germany and Japan were to be utterly defeated and occupied. Selected leaders would be tried for war crimes, and their societies would be reshaped into liberal democracies. Invasive and coercive though it was, the post-World War II peace generated far less resentment about unfair treatment than the arrangements that ended World War I.

 

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