By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Recently, President Netanyahu addressed the war with Iran and said that the IRGC "rushed to weaponize enriched uranium after the fall of Hezbollah and the collapse of the axis." "We saw it. We said, within a year they will have a nuclear bomb - and they will use it," he continued. "Unlike other nuclear powers, they will use it, and they will wipe us out."

Foreign policy adviser Harley Lippman says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not agree to a ceasefire because Hamas is still a threat to the nation. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

As shown in parts one and two, If you want to understand why the Middle East is such a volatile region today one has to go back to the start of the World War I when participants in the Middle East each had their reasons for entering the conflict: the British fought to secure the Suez canal and the Gulf oilfields; the Turks feared Russian encroachment and hoped to regain territory lost before the great war; the Germans sought to destabilize the British empire, the Russians coveted Istanbul and Anatolia…

 

The first Arab Revolt

Thus an uprising erupted at the axis of the Islamic world, in Mecca. Encouraged by the British, the ruler of the holy city, Sharif Hussein, launched a revolt against the Ottoman Turks.

The British hoped that Hussein’s ancestry and authority – made him the ideal man to disrupt the jihad called by the Ottoman Sultan in 1914. To persuade him to help them, the British promised him and his Arab nationalist supporters independence in the post-war world if they rebelled against the Turks. 

Sparked by the Foreign Office authorizing Sir Henry McMahon to enter into negotiations with Sherif Hussein and the debates surrounding the Sykes-Picot agreement has shaped the Middle East into forms that would have been unrecognizable to the diplomats of the 19th century.

Following the Arab revolt sparked by the Hussein-McMahon correspondence; and memoranda such as the Balfour Declaration, first the British (closely followed by the French) became very influential in the Middle East.

The revolt was officially initiated at Mecca on 10 June 1916. The revolt aimed to create a single unified and independent Arab state stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Aden in Yemen, which the British had promised to recognize.

As for the above, the history of what is now Palestine and Israel is a complicated one that started when the Hashemite Sharif Hussein and particularly also his son Faisal I bin Hussein teamed up with the British the result of which was that for a brief period in 1920 Faisal I bin Hussein became the King of Syria which supposed to have included what is now Palestine and Israel.

To Israelis, October 7, 2023, is the worst day in their country’s 75-year history. Never before have so many of them been massacred and taken hostage on a single day. Thousands of heavily armed Hamas fighters managed to break through the Gaza Strip’s fortified border and into Israel, rampaging unimpeded for hours, destroying several villages, and committing gruesome acts of brutality before Israeli forces could regain control. Israelis have compared the attack to the Holocaust; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described Hamas as “the new Nazis.” In response, the Israel Defense Forces have pursued an open-ended military campaign in Gaza driven by rage and the desire for revenge. Netanyahu promises that the IDF will fight Hamas until it achieves “total victory,” although even his own military has been hard put to define what this means. He has offered no clear idea of what should happen when the fighting stops, other than to assert that Israel must maintain security control of all of Gaza and the West Bank.

 

How It All Started

Detailed by us in 2005, the relationship between the Jewish people and Jerusalem goes back to pre-Roman times. But the first person in modern times who presented a reliable report of the current area of dispute is Mark Twain.

Mark Twain wrote that, "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes"- "about whose borders nothing grows but weeds."

Later, PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, interviewed in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977, wrote that: "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese."

The fall of the Ottoman Empire, which ended at a stroke thirteen hundred years of imperialism in the Middle East, was not a necessary, let alone an inevitable, consequence of World War I. It was a self-inflicted disaster by a shortsighted leadership blinded by imperialist ambitions. Had the Ottomans heeded the Entente's repeated pleas for neutrality, their empire would most likely have weathered the storm. However, they did not, and this blunder led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the British army and the creation of the new Middle Eastern state system on its ruins. Even this momentous development was not inevitable, and its main impetus came not from the great powers but from a local imperial aspirant: Hussein ibn Ali of the Hashemite family.

Following the rebellion sparked by the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and memoranda such as the Balfour Declaration, the British (closely followed by the French) in 1918 became the first to be influential in the Middle East.

Far from being a proto-nationalist struggle for the sake of Arabism, this was a bid for dynastic security and an opportunity to replace the secularists in Istanbul with a caliphate of his own.

Concurrently with Sahrif Hussein’s planning was the conspiracy of Al Fatat, a Syrian secret society founded one year before the war. Al-Fatat was the civilian equivalent of the military-dominated al-Ahd (the Covenant). This group's membership was limited largely to army officers. It advocated the establishment of autonomous entities for all ethnic groups within the empire; each group was to be permitted to use its native language, although Turkish would re­main as a lingua franca. Al-Ahd maintained a central office in Damascus. After the outbreak of war, the two movements would merge.

The revolt primarily sprang from Arabs’ discontent with the rule of the Young Turks, who had betrayed the hopes for local autonomy, democracy, and rule of law that had been raised in the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution. The Young Turks’ 1912 coup had effectively suspended the constitution. They had purged the government and reorganized the military to privilege Turks over Arabs. Early in World War I, even as many Arab soldiers fought on the side of the Turks in the victorious battle at Gallipoli, the Ottoman governor of Syria had executed a dozen prominent Arab leaders and exiled many more on suspicion of treason for their earlier political dissent.

Al-Fatat approached Hussein to enquire whether he would lead the movement against the CUP government in Istanbul. Hussein again hesitated, but the discovery in February 1915 of Ottoman plans to have him arrested and executed compelled the sharif to act. He sent his son Faisal to gather intelligence about the groups in question.

Meeting the conspirators, Faisal discovered that the nationalists were concerned that, if the Ottomans were defeated, the French would make a bid to take over Syria. Yet, they were reassured by news of secret talks between Faisal’s brothers, Abdullah and Kitchener.

Al-Fatat thus drew up their plans, defined in the Damascus Protocol. They desired an alliance with Great Britain to provide military and naval protection, and accepted the principle of economic preference for the British Empire. In June 1915, these plans and the Ottoman demands were considered by Hussein and his sons before being presented as terms for cooperation with the British at Cairo. In exchange for letters, the Hashemites claimed to represent the ‘Arab nation’.

The British reaction was to dismiss this extensive claim to represent the Arab ’nation’, but there was some sympathy for a Sharifian revolt that might potentially tie down thousands of Ottoman troops.

 

 

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