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The Palestine Catastrophe:

Part Of A Wider National Disaster

By

Adel Beshara

The University of Melbourne

If we follow closely the course of history between 1915 and 1948, it is not hard to see that what happened in Palestine in 1948 was part of a wider national disaster. Before the First World War, the countries that we know today did not exist, so we must think in terms of geographic regions. In the southwest Asian part of the Ottoman Empire there were two such regions. We can call them geographical Syria and Mesopotamia. Each region had several provinces, and although the Turks governed the whole area, they allowed some of their provinces considerable local autonomy. For example, Mount Lebanon north of Beirut in Syria had been largely self-governing since the 1860s and the province of Kuwait in Mesopotamia had been self-governing even longer.

During the war, the Allies (Britain and France) decided to partition the Arab world and make the various provinces into countries. They did this through the "Mandate" system, created after World War I by the League of Nations, which Britain and France controlled. Initially the area was broken into three Mandates: Palestine under Britain, Mesopotamia under Britain, Syria under France. But in the 1920s Syria and Palestine were subdivided, Syria into the countries of Syria and Lebanon, Palestine into the countries of Trans-Jordan and Palestine. Also, Kuwait was kept separate from Mesopotamia.

During the war, also, the Balfour Declaration - pledging British support for a Jewish "homeland" in Palestine - was issued in late November, 1917. It stated:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Most scholarly works, past and present, take the Balfour declaration as the starting point in their investigation of the Palestine issue. But this only begs the question: why did Britain issue the Balfour Declaration during the war rather than wait until it was over? The answer to this question has often been to link the Balfour Declaration to Britain's war efforts:

Many British leaders were convinced that if Jews spoke up for the war it could make a difference. Starting in 1916 they began negotiating with Jewish leaders, promising British support for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine in exchange for Jewish support for the war. While some British leaders were sympathetic to Jews for humanitarian or cultural reasons, others thought an alliance with Jewish Nationalists (Zionists) would be strategically advantageous.

But in 1917 the Zionists were too numerically and military insignificant to deserve the attention of a world power. It was they who needed Britain, not the other way around. Moreover, if the objective of the Balfour Declaration was to lure the Jews into the British war machine, as claimed, would it not also deprive Britain of the Syrian and Arab support it desperately needed to win the war?

 

Logically, then, there would have had to have been another explanation for the Balfour Declaration. That, I believe, can be found in the Sykes-Picot agreement - that inauspicious document that Britain, France and Russia secretly framed in 1916. In short, the Sykes-Picot Agreement led to these results: Britain would get what came to be known as Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, France would get Syria (including Lebanon), and Russia would get Central Asia (currently independent republics).

 

The connection between the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration was recently investigated by Alan R. Taylor in his study Prelude to Israel. According to Taylor, the Sykes-Picot Agreement "served to negate any implied promises to the Arabs, thus eliminating the possibility of Arab control and affording the Zionists time to wrest Palestine for themselves."

 

The Balfour Declaration, on the other hand, was designed to allay Zionist fears arising from the Sykes-Picot agreement, which provided for international control of Palestine instead of a mandate run by a pro-Zionist British government. The period separating the two documents was one of intense Zionist lobbying to secure a slice of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, by getting the British government to pledge its continued support of the Zionist plan. In the period succeeding both documents, the Zionists lobbied both France and Russia, the other parties to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, to persuade them to make a similar pledge, though with limited success.

 

Another way of looking at the connection between the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration is as follows. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was the historical document which Zionism needed to ensure that Syria would emerge from the war stateless and incapable of defending Palestine against their designs. The Balfour Declaration was the document that it needed to realize these designs.

 

Given these connections, it is important to see the Palestine catastrophe in 1948 as an extension of Syria's post-war national disaster, rather than as an independent or a separate Palestinian matter. For if the Allies had allowed geographical Syria to achieve its national aspirations and establish its own independent state at the end of the war, the Zionists would not have been able to usurp Palestine, even with the Balfour Declaration. It was therefore in the Sykes-Picot Agreement and not in the Balfour Declaration that the seeds of the Palestine Catastrophe were planted.