I grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza. I remember when I was very young, how we children were fascinated by a beautifully stocked and well-maintained garden, which stood in the middle of all the dirt and overcrowded chaos that we inhabited. An armed guard protected the entrance jealously, but over the walls and through the gates, we could glimpse the ornamental trees and shrubs ... and white grave stones, marked with crosses, standing neatly in rows. We later learned that this was the graveyard for British soldiers who had fallen in Palestine during the First World War. To us, barefoot and malnourished, it made no sense that our people were buried under mounds of earth while foreign soldiers enjoyed such grand and serene surroundings in death.
It would be several years before studious reading and discussion with educated camp-dwellers allowed me to understand that the 1914-1918 war ushered in the Palestinian tragedy and many of the problems that still beset the Arab world today. Whenever I am invited to take part in a BBC programme on Armistice Day — which has happened a few times now — I refuse to wear the red poppy everybody is supposed to wear in remembrance of British soldiers killed in the First World War. These are my reasons:
Millions of young lives — not just British, but from every race, nation and creed — were squandered during that terrible war, including more than 700,000 Arabs; most of them had little idea what they were offering their lives for. They were simply ‘cannon fodder’ in a colonialist struggle by the super powers of the day. Some revisionist historians now suggest that the First World War was first and foremost about the Middle East, and, although most of the media coverage in the West suggests it was about Europe and the Western Front, I agree. Then, as now, the great western powers wanted to dominate the Arabs and their valuable natural resources — oil in particular.
And there was an additional reason: The Zionist goal of establishing a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. That this was very much on the British agenda became more apparent as the war progressed. The prime minister who had led Britain into the war, Herbert Henry Asquith, opposed the Zionist project but he had lost control of his war cabinet and the press by 1916, when he was replaced by David Lloyd George. George had championed the Zionist cause since 1903, when his law firm first advised Chaim Weizman’s Zionist Movement. In 1914, while a member of Asquith’s cabinet, George supported Herbert Samuel’s proposal for “the establishment in Palestine, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, a national home for the Jewish people”. A very clear statement of intent that would later be fulfilled.
Consolidation of power
As the prime minister, George encouraged and backed the Balfour declaration of 1917, believing it would mobilise global Jewry in support of the Allies. He also ensured its terms were included in the Peace Treaty with Turkey. After the 1920 San Remo conference, which rubber-stamped the British mandate for Palestine, George appointed none other than Samuel as that unfortunate country’s first high commissioner.
In order to consolidate its power in the Middle East — and free-up Palestine for the purposes cited above — it had become imperative for the West to dismantle the already teetering Ottoman Empire. And what better way to do it than by employing the Turks’ Arab subordinates to rebel against them from within, while Allied troops fought them on all fronts?
A propaganda campaign paved the way, fomenting indignation that the ‘noble Arabs’ were under the yoke of Turks, promoting Arab nationalism, ‘modernity’, ‘reform’, the promise of independence from colonial rule and a united, Arab empire. An effective socio-political tool, which dates from these times, is to take members of the indigenous elite and intelligentsia and educate them in the West, with the intention of them undermining the ‘backward’ regime from where they came, upon their return.
The man who was promised leadership over the ‘new Arab empire’ was the highly influential Sharif of Makkah, Hussain Bin Ali. Muslims believed he descended from Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and, at his instigation, the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire got under way in June 1916.
In a series of letters spanning the period July 1915-February 1916, Bin Ali agreed with the British high commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, on the so-called ‘Damascus Protocol’. The terms of the agreement were that, following the defeat of the Turks, Britain would recognise and guarantee an independent Arab state within its ‘natural borders’: Along the 37th parallel to the north and incorporating what are today Syria, Palestine, Iraq and the whole of the Arabian Peninsula except for the strategic port of Aden. But, as we have seen, by 1914, Palestine had already been promised to the Zionist movement and in May 1916, two months after the Hussain-McMahon letter, British and French negotiators Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot convened in secret to draw up the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided all the Arab land covered by the Damascus Protocol between France and Britain, with the assent of Russia.
Seeds of hatred
One of the sayings of British diplomacy is, ‘You can promise anything you like because the situation is bound to change’. By 1920, the situation for the Arabs had changed drastically. Having reneged on the deal with Bin Ali, the newly-formed League of Nations, at its meeting in San Remo, officially mandated to the European superpowers the administrative divisions outlined in Sykes-Picot. The Arabs were furious and the seeds of hatred for the powers that had so deliberately, and cynically, deceived them were planted. They had paid for the Allies victory with their land and their blood.
For the Palestinians, the situation was to become even worse: The process of dispossession, which would lead to the 1948 nakba, had been set in motion.
The First World War established a new paradigm for western interventions in the Middle East, which continues to this day. Recent decades have seen similar levels of deception, as well as military and political interventions to secure regime change and oil supplies. Nowadays, such interference flies the banners of ‘reform’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘human rights’. Now, as then, propaganda and the media are employed to repackage the truth in a manner that promotes the endgame. Having established and nurtured the Zionist entity, the West now seeks to keep Israel as the only regional superpower and has managed to turn the Arab revolutions around to further this aim by dismantling the most powerful Arab armies.
So forgive me if I do not join in with the national celebrations and remembrances of First World War in my adopted country, Britain. For the Arabs, this is a time to lament.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan