A Short History of a Long War in Four Parts

Part 1, The Balfour Declaration, the Sykes Picot Agreement, and the Arab Rebellion

by Jack R. Johnson 12.2023

In a speech marking the Balfour Declaration's 80th Anniversary, Edward Said, the Palestine-born Columbia University literary professor, called for an honest discussion and dialogue between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews concerning the ways that the two people are inextricably connected.

"Like it or not, this is the historical reality," he explained. "We must better understand them [Jews], and they must better understand us [Palestinians]. We must make clear the link between the Shoah (the European Jewish Holocaust) and the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948). Neither experience is equal to the other, and neither should be minimized. We must emphasize this link not for short-term political gains, but because we cannot continue to work apart as two wounded yet incommunicado communities. We have to begin to admit the universality and integrity of each other's experience of suffering. As Arabs, we demand acknowledgment and reparations. We cannot accept that the 'redemption of the Jews' required the dispossession of millions of Palestinian people. We must rethink our common past if we want to have a future, and it is time to honestly state that we are fated to have a common, not a separate, future."

Brave words, mostly unremarked in the Western Press, and not especially well received in the Arab world, but important nonetheless.

The choice of venue was relevant. If you want to understand the Israel Palestinian conflict now torching the Gaza strip and to a lesser degree, the West Bank, you need to start, as they say, at the beginning. That’s when a British gentleman named Lord Arthur Balfour, over a hundred years ago, signed a declaration in the middle of another big war—The Great One.

Lord Arthur Balfour was an old school conservative who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain for a stint in the early 1900s and later served as foreign secretary in the Lloyd George ministry. He was sympathetic to the Zionist cause –the basic belief that Jews have a right to a homeland--which had been rattling around Europe and Russia for the better part of two centuries, There was a late 18th century effort at assimilation (the Haskala, or Jewish enlightenment), but the Russian pogroms and virulent anti-Semitism of Western Europe made this difficult, if not impossible. Curiously, Zionism was also revived in the early 19th century by Christian millenarians who believed that the return of Jews to Israel was necessary for Jesus to return to Earth as its king, i.e., the Second Coming. Many contemporary Evangelicals hold similar beliefs, a fact that goes a long way toward explaining the odd support of U.S. rightwing politicians for Israel, despite many of them being personally anti-Semitic.  

Back in the early 20th century, as a foreign secretary, Lord Balfour knew Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann since his Prime Minster tenure in 1906, and he opposed Russian mistreatment of Jews and increasingly supported Zionism as a program for European Jews to settle in Palestine. His motives may not have been entirely humanitarian, however. He supported the Aliens Act 1905, one of whose main objectives was to control and restrict Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe into Britain. As political scholar Yousef Munayyer has noted, Balfour wrote in 1919 that the Zionist movement would: “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on behalf of the cabinet, which supported a "home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. With a typically paternalistic attitude toward British subjects, especially those from the further flung colonies of the Empire, Balfour promised a piece of the British Mandate in Palestine to the Jews. Never mind that the Arab citizens of that area fiercely opposed this action. 

The Balfour declaration alone was not sufficient to grant control over the area of Palestine, of course. Technically, that control came about because of a secret 1916 treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and Italy. The agreement was based on the premise that the Triple Entente would defeat the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Sykes Picot agreement, as it came to be known, effectively divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of British and French control and influence. The British- and French-controlled countries were divided by the Sykes–Picot line. The agreement allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean. France was to control southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan Region,  Syria and lebanon. Signed in secret 102 years ago, the Sykes Picot agreement signified the brutal nature of the so called ‘Great Game’, when colonial powers divvied up land and resources without consideration for the people who lived upon that land, nor who owned those resources. 

After the end of World War I, self-declared Zionists built up the Jewish urban and rural settlements in Palestine and relying on the promise of the Balfour declaration began actively encouraging Jewish immigration. In March 1925 the Jewish population in Palestine was officially estimated at 108,000, and it rose to about 238,000 (20 percent of the population) by 1933. Jewish immigration remained relatively slow, however, until the rise of Hitler in Europe. With this increase of settlers, the Arab population feared that Palestine would eventually become a Jewish state and bitterly resisted Zionism and the British policy supporting it. When the intentions of the British and their rapport with the Zionists became apparent, the Arab Palestinian population openly rebelled

British forces struggled to maintain order in the face of the Arab uprisings that lasted from 1936 until 1939. The Arabs demanded independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home." Finally, the long and angry revolt led Britain to reassess its policies. In hopes of keeping the peace between Jews and Palestinian Arabs and retaining Arab support against Germany and Italy in World War II, Britain placed restrictions on Jewish immigration in 1939. 

The new restrictions were pretty much a disaster all around. They weren’t enough to appease the Arabs and were violently opposed by Zionist underground groups such as Lehi or “the Stern Gang” and Irgun Zvai Leumi, which committed acts of terrorism and assassination against the British and organized illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. What might be shocking to many contemporary readers is how willing the Lehi or Stern Gang was to align themselves with Fascist Italy and even Nazi Germany in order to found the Jewish state 

Stern Gang Publications used language that strikes a note of cognitive dissonance. According to Yaacov Shavit, professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, articles in Lehi [Stern Gang] publications contained references to a Jewish "master race", contrasting the Jews with Arabs who were seen as a "nation of slaves." Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes that "Lehi was also unabashedly racist towards Arabs." According to Polakow-Suransky, Lehi advocated mass expulsion of all Arabs from Palestine and Transjordan, or even their physical annihilation.

From these early guerilla groups such key figures as future Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzḥak Shamir and Menachem Begin would emerge. The first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, would succeed in fusing these violent underground Jewish militias with the much larger, more moderate Haganah militia used primarily in the defense of the Jewish settlers. Unlike Lehi or Irgun, the Haganah initially followed the organized Jewish community’s policy of havlaga or “self-restraint.” Ben-Gurion combined these forces into a national army that would evolve into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) that we know today.

Next Month, Part II, Birth of Israel and the Nakba