By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

To know the context of what follows it is good to start with the short overview here, and a reference list of personalities involved.

How to account for the Antisemitism in the era of 'Gaza' and its historical context?

As Walter Laqueur wrote: "It has a very long history, but this history has been written only during the past century."

While studying Roman law at the University of Vienna, Theodor Herzl 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.

Then shortly after Herzl 1892 moved from Vienna to Paris, in 1892 Paris mobs 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. In 1893, his solution to the Jewish question was the mass conversion of Jewish children to Christianity.

Hence Herzl wanted to contact the Pope and invite 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.

 

The Palestine Question

During the time of the August 1897 First Zionist congress in Basel Switzerland Palestine did not exist as a unified geographical entitity, rather it was divided between the Ottoman province of Beirut in the north and the district of Jerusalem in the south.

The profound effects of the British Empire’s actions in the Arab World during the First World War can be seen echoing through the history of the 20th century. The uprising sparked by the Foreign Office authorizing Sir Henry McMahon to enter into negotiations with Sharif Hussein, and the debates surrounding the Sykes–Picot agreement have shaped the Middle East into forms that would have been unrecognizable to the diplomats of the 19th century.

The crux the explanation of these events, which now loom so large, is that Edward Grey and his Foreign Office officials were not very much alive to the significance of what they were doing because for them Middle Eastern affairs were simply not that important. This meant that as long as Grey and his civil servants perceived the advice of various experts not to be inconsistent with the essence of the Foreign Office’s policy – to uphold the Entente with France – they were prepared to follow it.

 

The Balfour Declaration

Certainly, the most important event for the making of the modern Middle East is the Balfour Declaration which came about because the British wanted to do away with the problem that was created the year before by the Sykes-Picot agreement. Which appeared as a brief announcement in a British newspaper:

The context is that in 1917 the British wanted to do away with the problem that was created the year before by the Sykes-Picot agreement who split the middle east with the French but it left the future of Palestine undetermined and the British didn’t like that because they needed it for the imperial defense of India and Palestine left a gap in there. That’s why they started to agree with the Zionists in 1917.

Thus the campaign for Zionism took on a new life because Britain needed to camouflage this imperialist priority because the British faced great criticism by the Americans on one side and more generally world opinion.

Sykes-Picot negotiations of 1916, had agreed to cede most of greater Ottoman Syria to the French zone of influence, although only the coastal area (i.e., today’s Lebanon) was supposed to be under direct French rule, with the inland portions under 'independent' Arab administration, which in practice meant Faisal and crowned ‘King’ Hussein’s other sons.

Sykes-Picot is often accused of having divided up the Arab world but Mark Sykes may have believed that his actions had the best interests of the Arabs at heart. He believed that, if properly encouraged, it would be possible to reawaken among the Arabs memories of a vanished greatness and bring them closer to the community of nations.1

 

There is however scholarly consensus that in the first two and a half years of the First World War, up to early 1917, the Zionists’ efforts to persuade the British government to support their aims in Palestine did not bear fruit. There is further agreement that the beginnings of the turnabout that led to the Balfour Declaration were in December 1916, following the dismissal of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, who was replaced by his political opponent and rival for the leadership of the Liberal Party, David Lloyd George. Lloyd George instigated a transformation in British policy in the Middle East, one of whose outcomes would be the publication of the Balfour Declaration.

How the above in its larger context still reverberates in the present was exemplified when more than 2,400 people on 46 campuses were involved in demonstrations which included the raising of the Palestine flag at Harvard University.

Including where once in Amsterdam Anne Frank had to hide in an attic to survive it comes as a surprise how much antisemitism today is still alive in Amsterdam when Antisemitic attacks prompted emergency flights for Israeli Soccer Fans to escape the violence they were faced with in Amsterdam.

Mobs of assailants, including men on scooters, chased Israeli soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam after a match in the capital’s main stadium, Dutch authorities said, beating them in attacks.

 

1. Sykes to Graham, no. 3, 15 April 1917, FO 371/ 3052/82749 Sykes Papers.

 

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