Quantum Note
July 28, 2006
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal
On February 14, 2005, Rafik Hariri attended a session of the Lebanese Parliament
in central Beirut. Around noun, he left the Parliament area and headed home. His
convoy was driving along the beachfront when a powerful bomb exploded, killing
him and 13 others, and leaving more than 135 wounded. This was the bloodiest
attack in Lebanon since the end of the Civil War (1975-1990). The self-made
billionaire, who had led Lebanon for most of the period since the civil war
ended in 1990, had made his fortunes as personal contractor for Prince Fahd of
Saudi Arabia.
On April 26, 2005, the last of the Syrian soldiers left Lebanon, ending a military presence that began in 1976. Syria had kept around 30,000 troops in Lebanon during the 1980s, the number had decreased to 14,000 by 2005.
On July 12, 2006. Israel launched its latest offensive against Lebanon. The United States tried to block UN efforts to broker a ceasefire. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “What we are seeing here, in a sense, [are] the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one. Is there any connection between these events?
The new Middle East can obviously be built upon the old Middle East. The old Middle East was the heartland of Islam for centuries. It was a single geographical entity, extending from the Hijaz to Jerusalem, which passed through different Muslim ruling dynasties—the Ummayads, the Abbasid, and the Usmani (Ottoman) Turks. That is, until that fateful day when Field Marshal Sir Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, nicknamed the “Bloody Bull”, arrived on the scene. On June 27, 1917, he replaced Sir Archibald Murray as the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.
It was Allenby who was to carve out the “old Middle East” from an “old-old Middle East” in one week: From October 31 to November 7, 1917, his forces fought and won the Third Battle of Gaza. His forces pushed further, defeating Ottomans and on December 11, 1917, Allenby walked into Islam’s third holiest city, Jerusalem. The old-Middle East now rapidly started to take shape with the name of General Alleby written large on the new map and city streets. (Even today both Tel-Aviv and Haifa have a main street with his name, the main bridge over the Jordan River between the “Kingdom of Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank is called the Allenby Bridge.) The capture of Jerusalem took place almost twenty years after Theodor Herzl had published his Der Judenstat, which led to formation of the World Zionist Congress in 1896, and fourteen years after Herzl presented a plan to the Sixth Zionist Congress (held in 1903) to create a Jewish homeland in Uganda.
While Allenby was carving out the old-Middle East with Muslim blood, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour was busy on another plan: On November 2, 1917 he wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, communicating to him the decision of the British Cabinet meeting held on October 31, 1917: The British government supports Zionist plans for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, with the condition that nothing should be done which might prejudice the rights of existing communities there.
So, “the Balfour Declaration”, as the letter became known in history, was issued. It stated: “His Majesty’s government favourable views the creation of a national Jewish home in Palestine." The meeting of the British Cabinet which reached this landmark decision had something else on the table: the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 which divided up the heart of Islamic lands between Britain and France.
The old-Middle East, upon which Rice wants to build a new Middle East was, thus, a product of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 16, 1916 between Britain and France; the latter defined their respective spheres of post-World War I influence and control in the Middle East. This agreement was negotiated in November 1915 by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton, Mark Sykes. The understanding reached on that terrible day allowed Britain the control of areas where now we have the Kingdom of Jordan, Iraq and a small area around Haifa. France was to have control of South-eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement, it is worth recalling, came into existence in flagrant violation of an “understanding” reached between Sherif Hussein ibn Ali, the Ottoman Emir of Makkah, and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt during 1915–1916. This “understanding” exists in the well-preserved correspondence between the two men. Hussein understood the promise to be reward in the form of an Arab empire, encompassing the entire span between Egypt and Persia, with the exception of imperial possessions and interests in Kuwait, Aden, and the Syrian coast. Hussein became the official leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans.
The promises to Hussein were made to have Arabs rise against the Turks; once that deed was accomplished and Arab help was assured, Jews in the United States were approached to influence the US to join the First World War. The Jews wanted a homeland in Jerusalem; thus the Balfour Declaration was issued, which assured them a home in the Holy Land.
The World War I ended. Arabs were now “free”, that is, they were free from the Ottomans. “Freedom had arrived in the Arab lands in the form of occupation of France of Britain.The sons of Hussein were made the kings of Transjordan (later Jordan), Syria and Iraq. However, the monarchy in Syria was abruptly ended when the French were given control over the nation (resulting in much resistance and bloodshed), so his son (Faisal) was installed in Iraq instead. The old-old Middle East was thus created.
But Britain and France were not happy with their shares under the Sykes-Picot deal and thus in the 1920 San Remo conference, France extracted an additional share of the Middle-Eastern pie: control over Syria and Lebanon, this was duly baptized by the League of Nations in 1922. But the old-old Middle East was still not what the English wanted, so in July 1941, it occupied two third of Lebanon.
(To be continued)
Back to the 2006 Contents Back to the Main Page