Between Today and Yesterday

Does history repeat itself? Or – as the phrase that is so widely known it is almost a bromide asks – do historians repeat one another? I don’t know the answer and I don’t claim to be a historian, but I am a student of history and this enables me to compare between today and yesterday. The first two decades of the last century saw a number of Western conspiracies targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Orient, and the first two decades of this century are witnessing similar conspiracies and betrayals. While the British and French colonialisms were to blame a hundred years ago, the U.S. neo-imperialism has today taken up the mantle from the old colonialism. Nonetheless, I want to take the reader back to the first half of the nineteenth century, to Egypt where an enlightened regime emerged led by Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha. The hallmark of their rule was a renaissance in education, with student delegations dispatched to France and elsewhere, and agricultural reform in Egypt, the construction of bridges and canals, and the establishment of a strong military that threatened the Ottoman regime in Istanbul. Egypt was on its way to become the Japan of the Middle East. However, Britain and France supported “the sick man of Europe” in every confrontation between emerging Egypt and the dying Ottoman Empire, imposing a blockade or forcing Egyptian and allied troops from the Levant to retreat, and preventing Egypt’s entry into the industrial age. In the first two decades of the last century, Britain supported the Arab Revolt against the Turks, led by Sharif Hussein and his son Faisal, from 1916 until the rebels entered Damascus in September 1918. The British promises to the Arabs, including the correspondence between Sharif Hussein and Mr. Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, had stipulated the establishment of a unified Arab kingdom that specifically included Palestine. However, every Arab knows that Britain and France were conspiring at the same time to partition historical Syria between them both. The agreement between the two colonial powers in May 1916 coincided with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, and carried the name Sykes-Picot, since it was held between Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot from the two countries’ foreign ministries. The agreement was supposed to remain secret for a long time, were it not for the fact that Russia, a secondary party to it, underwent the Revolution of 1917, after which the Bolshevik victors exposed the secrets of the agreement. If the above is not sufficient in terms of conspiracies and betrayals, there was the Balfour Declaration of 2/11/1917, in which His Majesty’s Government promised to allow the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, or in other words, they gave another people’s land that they do not own, to another people that has no claim to it. To be fair, the White Paper issued by the British government in 1939 reversed the Balfour Declaration, and said that those who made it did not intend to establish a Jewish state against the will of the natives, for “His Majesty's Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past…” Thus, the British government proposed the establishment of the independent State of Palestine within ten years, where Arabs and Jews would share government in such a way as to ensure that the interests of each community are safeguarded. We know today that it was the Balfour Declaration, and not the White Paper, that was implemented. I also note that this paper was issued because of Britain’s need for the Arabs as it was preparing for war with Nazi Germany. If I am to add something on the sidelines here about the harm inflicted upon us by the Nazi Germans, it would be the fact that they, in 1936 (the date of the Arab Revolt in Palestine), issued the Nuremberg Laws which withdrew German citizenship from 500 thousand German Jews, pushing many of them to immigrate to Palestine, both in secret and in public. History is repeating itself in the first two decades of this century. The Ottoman Turks had established a Sunni government in Iraq as a barrier against the spread of Persian-Shiite influence. Then the neoconservative and Likudnik Jewish Americans came to destroy a five centuries-old system and handed over Iraq to the ayatollahs in Qom. Their goal has been to create a Shiite-American alliance against Sunni Arabs, for many reasons but most importantly because of the oil and Israel. Where is the promised democracy in Iraq? Do I even need to ask? Yet a Gulf minister, who is fully aware of the magnitude of the threat of the Iranian regime – not the people of Iran – to his country, seeks assistance by the Americans to combat this threat. However, the Americans are behind this threat, if the minister were only able to see farther than his nose or mine. khazen@alhayat.com