Understanding Israel’s War: One Hundred Years Ago, the West Planted Mines in the Holy Land

“Find the beginning of everything, and you will understand a lot.” This aphorism of Kozma Prutkov is quite applicable to many political events. But it can hardly be fully attributed to the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To understand the tragic events of October 7, 2023 and the days that followed, it is certainly necessary to look back into the past. To at least understand the driving motives of the parties to the decades-long conflict. But to what past?

Should we rewind history to 1967, when Israeli troops occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, along with East Jerusalem, during the Six Day War?

Or go back to the late 1940s, during the first Arab-Israeli War, as a result of which the newborn State of Israel withstood the blows of a coalition of hostile neighbors, and the Palestinians were left without lands and promised statehood?

Or should we look at the events surrounding the First World War? Let’s stop there for now – although to understand the complexity of the Middle East conflict we need to go much deeper, into the Middle Ages, into antiquity.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Holy Land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. And when the First World War broke out, the Arab possessions of Turkey became a battlefield between the Entente and the Central Powers.

The Western allies promised the Arabs that they would defeat the Turks together – and only then unite the Arab lands under the rule of the Arab monarch. Looking ahead, let’s say that they did not keep their promises.

But they slowly began to divide the territories of the Ottoman Empire. In May 1916, a secret agreement was concluded between the governments of Great Britain, France and Russia (but the revolutionary year of 1917 was already approaching, so our country has a rather indirect relationship to this ugly story). According to this document, which went down in history as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Entente powers agreed on how the post-war spheres of influence in the Middle Eastern regions of Turkey would be divided.

This secret conspiracy was named after the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French colleague Francois Georges-Picot. They conducted secret negotiations. In fact, the main beneficiaries were Great Britain and France.

Under this agreement, Great Britain received the territory of modern Jordan and Iraq, as well as the areas around the cities of Haifa and Acre (in what is now Israel). France was assigned the southeastern part of Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Russia also had a good jackpot: the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, Constantinople (Istanbul), Western Armenia and part of Northern Kurdistan. But we remind you that a revolution happened, and the former empire, through the efforts of the Bolsheviks, came out of the war, entering into negotiations with the Germans and their allies. In a word, it was not possible to seize either the straits or other territories from the Ottoman possessions, and they even lost part of their lands.

Well, according to the Sykes-Picot agreement, the remaining territory of the former Turkish possessions between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was to be under international control. Here, however, “deprived” Italy came to its senses, demanding that it too be allowed to share the Ottoman pie. Since the Western allies needed Italian assistance, Rome was promised Smyrna (now Izmir) and part of other Turkish territories. But even here the Italians flew over – the condition was set that the agreement would only become valid with the consent of Russia. But again, not only did a revolution take place in Petrograd, but the Bolsheviks also declassified the text of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. The Soviet government also annulled all treaties on the division of Turkey.

Of course, a huge scandal ensued. The Arabs, who helped the British fight the Turks, realized that behind their backs their own lands had already been divided. The sheriff of Mecca, the king of Hejaz, Hussein of the Hashemite dynasty, realized that dreams of creating a great Arab kingdom were unfulfilled. The gift of the romantic spy Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia, the “dynamite emir”) spoke at the Versailles Peace Conference, trying to support his comrades and defend the idea of ​​Arab independence.

But the Western allies decided: shame is not smoke, it will not eat your eyes. And territories that are attractive in geopolitical and other respects (the same Iraqi oil!) – these are our dear ones. After all, winners are not judged. And Palestine and Iraq promised to Hussein were occupied by the British, and Syria and Lebanon by the French.

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So, in April 1920, at a conference in San Remo, following the results of the First World War, Great Britain achieved a mandate to govern the territory of Palestine, which initially included the lands of today’s Jordan.

And here is the right time and place to remember another British name (along with Mark Sykes), which played a huge role in the tragedies that followed in the Holy Land.

This is Arthur James Balfour, who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century – during the First World War he was Foreign Secretary.

And so, in the hope of enlisting the support of the Entente from Jews in different countries (from America to Russia), Lord Balfour issued a declaration that received his name. This is an official letter dated November 2, 1917 to Lord Rothschild. Here’s what it said:

“Dear Lord Rothschild.

I have the honor to convey to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government the following declaration, expressing sympathy with the Zionist aspirations of the Jews, submitted to the Cabinet and approved by it:

“His Majesty’s Government is considering with approval the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, and will make every effort to promote the achievement of this object; it is expressly understood that no action shall be taken which may interfere with the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

I would be very grateful if you would bring this Declaration to the attention of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur James Balfour.”

At the beginning of 1918, France and then Italy announced their agreement with the Declaration, and later it was approved by US President Wilson and the American Congress. And in April 1920, at the San Remo conference, the “Lord Balfour Declaration” was approved by the allies as the basis for a post-war settlement in Palestine, and then included in the text of the British mandate for the administration of Palestine, approved by the League of Nations.

But the then Minister of Colonies Winston Churchill, who opposed the implementation of the principles of the Balfour Declaration, in 1922 decided to withdraw a huge piece of the territory of Mandatory Palestine for the separate emirate of Transjordan.

Well, inspired by the “Declaration of Lord Balfour,” tens of thousands of Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe, rushed to Palestine. The British, who with one hand invited them to their historical ancestral home (waving the “Balfour Declaration” in greeting), with the other set restrictions – introduced an immigration quota. But soon enough the Jewish population of Palestine grew to 90 thousand. And as anti-Semitism grew in Europe, where fascists and Nazis of all stripes became more active, the number of Jews in the Holy Land began to grow by leaps and bounds.

The Arabs, who previously made up the majority of the population, were not happy with the appearance of uninvited neighbors. In May 1921, one of the first alarm bells rang.

It all started when the Jewish Communist Party, on the eve of May Day, distributed leaflets in Arabic and Yiddish calling for the overthrow of British rule and the proclamation of “Soviet Palestine.” Demonstrators began an unauthorized march from Jaffa to Tel Aviv through a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood. But then they came into contact with a demonstration, permitted by the colonial authorities, organized by the Zionist socialist movement Ahdut HaAvoda. The two processions met and started a fist fight. The police tried to stop the fight, and the Arabs came to their aid. The fight escalated into a pogrom – Arabs broke into Jewish houses and killed their inhabitants, attacked Jewish pedestrians and destroyed Jewish businesses and shops. As a result, 47 Jews and 48 Arabs died during the pogroms and fights. These clashes became one of the milestones that determined the hostility of the two communities of Palestine for many years to come.

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The increase in Jewish immigration to the Holy Land led to the growth of Arab nationalism and to the deterioration of relations between Arabs and Jews. Nationalists and fanatics on both sides added fuel to the fire of the emerging conflict.

In 1929, another series of Jewish pogroms took place, leading to numerous casualties. And in their organization, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who became the leader of the Arab nationalists in Palestine, played a significant role. Later, in 1941, he traveled to Berlin and met with Adolf Hitler there, calling the Fuhrer “the defender of Islam.” But that was later, and even before the Second World War, the situation in British Palestine became so tense that in 1936-1939 a large Arab uprising broke out demanding a complete stop to Jewish immigration. About 300 Palestinian Jews, about 250 British troops and about 5,000 Arabs became victims of the rebellion.

The outcome of the Arab Revolt was the appearance in 1939 of a report by British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald to the Parliament of the United Kingdom on the government’s policy regarding the British Mandate in Palestine. The so-called “White Book” (this document went down in history under this name) appeared in response to the demands of the Arab population of Palestine to completely ban Jewish immigration and the acquisition of land by Jews.

The document stated that Palestine could not belong only to Jews or only to Arabs. It was also promised that within ten years after the publication of the book, a single binational state of Jews and Arabs would be created in Palestine. The Jewish immigration quota for the next five years will be set at 75 thousand people. It looked like this: at the first stage, immigration would be 25 thousand people (to help European Jews), and within 5 years it was promised to allow the immigration of 10 thousand Jews every year. And the British made the increase in immigration quotas dependent on Arab consent.

Thus, the publication of the White Paper meant that Great Britain was effectively refusing to fulfill its obligations towards the Jewish people arising from the Balfour Declaration. The document was published in May 1939 – about three months remained before the first salvos of the Second World War – and the proclamation of such a policy by London during the period of the spread of Nazi rule in Europe, when the mass flight of Jews from countries occupied by Germany began, prevented the Holocaust from being prevented, and also served the impetus for the start of the active struggle of Palestinian Jews against British mandate rule.

And here a paradoxical situation arose – while Great Britain was waging a war against Nazi Germany, which was ruthlessly implementing the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Jewish militants in Palestine were waging an armed struggle against the British authorities, not disdaining openly terrorist methods.

London’s desire to sit on two chairs between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine cost dearly both the victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Germans and the Arab population after World War II.

What we are talking about is a rather simplified attempt to talk about a complex set of problems that led the UN, created at the end of the war, in 1947 to a plan for the division of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. According to this project, Jerusalem and its surroundings were to remain under international control.

Alas, this plan was not destined to come true. The British left Palestine, leaving behind time bombs that continue to explode to this day. No sooner had the State of Israel declared itself than the first Arab-Israeli War began, which lasted from 1947 to 1949. As a result, about half of the territories that the UN proposed to allocate to an Arab state, as well as West Jerusalem, became Israeli. And the West Bank of the Jordan River, together with eastern Jerusalem, was occupied by neighboring Transjordan (hello to Sir Winston Churchill), which was renamed after the annexation of these lands in 1950 simply as Jordan. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.

The bloody wheel rolled across the Holy Land – and is still rolling, crushing both the right and the wrong.