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Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - Statistical Data Included
Humanist, July-August, 2002 by David Schafer
The British presence in India and the Far East depended increasingly on control of the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. When the Ottoman Empire joined Germany at the start of World War I in 1914, Britain seized the opportunity to strengthen its long-term position in the Middle East by courting support from Jews and especially Arabs, many of whom (though by no means all) had long chafed under Ottoman rule. Over the next three years, three separate policy statements emerged from these efforts, partially contradicting each other. Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, sent a letter in Arabic to Hussain, Sharif of Mecca, on October 24, 1915, in effect offering independence to the Arabs who would support the British war effort.
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The following June, under the leadership of Hussain's son Faisal, the Arab Revolt began--a stirringly romanticized version of which is familiar from the film Lawrence of Arabia. While General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby's forces moved north along the Mediterranean coastline, taking Jerusalem by December 1917, Arabs under Faisal and Thomas Edward Lawrence advanced by a parallel course along Allenby's right flank, east of the Jordan River, blowing up portions of the Hejaz railroad between Damascus and Medina, and taking Damascus by October 1918, shortly before an armistice agreement was signed by the Turks. To complicate later relationships, a Jewish spy ring operating in Palestine was very helpful to Allenby's success in taking Jerusalem. Thus the British had a commanding position over this region during the peace negotiations that followed.
Meanwhile, the British government had been following different tacks in separate discussions with French and Zionist representatives about the postwar disposition of captured lands in the Middle East. In May 1916, the Sykes-Picot agreement gave France "influence" or outright control over the northern and western areas corresponding roughly to Syria, southeastern Turkey, and the upper Tigris-Euphrates valley of modern Iraq. The area corresponding most closely to modern Palestine would be governed by an "allied condominium." Then on November 2, 1917, Lord Arthur James Balfour, British foreign secretary, wrote to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, head of the British Zionist Organization, an influential "declaration" of two essential parts:
1. "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object."
2. "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."
These two statements contained vague language and translation ambiguities that would later be interpreted as contradicting each other or the McMahon letter. It is of historical importance that Chaim Weizmann, a brilliant Russian chemist and charismatic Zionist leader who worked in London during the war and much later became Israel's first president, played a crucial role in persuading David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and others high in the British government to support the Balfour Declaration.
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