Written
1992
THE COLONIAL
TEST-TUBE BABIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The
sovereign Arab states on today's Middle East map were no natural births. Their
present borders have no deep roots in indigenous history, in ethnic traditions
or religion, all three strong
forces in that region of the earth since the time on which we have reliable
records. The present states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, were born
as test tube babies by artificial insemination of the body politic of the Arab
Middle East nearly eighty years ago. The eager parents were the colonial
interests of Britain and France, then engaged in war against Imperial Germany
and its ally in the Orient, Ottoman Turkey. The obstetricians were British and
French Middle East experts, planning quintuplets in London and Paris during the
war for fertilization at the future peace conference, in distance and time far
from the region and its populations.
The
carefully prepared delivery culminated in the postwar birth of Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. In 1914 most of the Orient was still held by
Ottoman Turkey. The British and French governments foresaw that the decadent,
backward, 400 year old empire was about to expire. Their experts met in 1916 to
negotiate on how to divide the future spoil - the strategically important,
oil-rich territory of the Middle East, expecting the Germans and their Turkish ally to lose the war. The
two teams, known as the Sykes-Picot Commission, agreed after much haggling on
"spheres of interest" and on dividing between them the vast
and
strategically important territory on that basis.
The
agreement was put through the laborious negotiating mill of the post-war peace
conferences in France and eventually ratified in the early twenties with some
important modifications by the newly formed League of Nations in Geneva. One of
them was the formation of "Mandated Territories". Iraq, Jordan and
Palestine were turned over to Great Britain; Lebanon and Syria to France.
"Mandated Territory" was the birth certificate chosen for the five
test-tube babies, a more diplomatic and elegant term for what were in effect
colonial dependencies of Britain and France, with the baptismal blessing from the League of Nations added for a
better show of legitimacy. Among the modifications of the original Sykes- Picot agreement was also the
establishment of a "National Home for the Jewish People" in all of
the mandated territory of Palestine in accordance with the "Balfour
Declaration" of Britain in 1917 in favour of such a project. When it was
endorsed by the League in 1923 Palestine covered the whole area of what are
today Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
A glance
at the borders of all the five states is enough to show that they were drawn by
men entirely indifferent to all vital concerns - religious, ethnic, economic,
environmental - of the local populations. Some of the borders imposed on the
inhabitants are simply straight lines drawn with a ruler on the map to serve the
two Western powers' imperial interests, for instance oil wells in Iraq,
pipelines from there to Mediterranean ports, projects important to Britain's
strategic needs.
The
majority of the population in the Middle East is Arab and the religion of most
of them Islam. There never were, nor are there now, any Iraqi, Jordanian,
Syrian, Lebanese or Palestinian "peoples". Ethnically the majority
are Arabs, Islam their faith, Arabic their language. The population is more homogenous than, say, that of the
U.S.A. The main minorities are Christian (of various denominations), Jewish in
Israel, a sovereign state established 1948 by the United Nations in part of
former Mandated Palestine; Druse, and a few splinter groups.
The
Arabs in all the five countries (and, of course, beyond) speak of themselves as
belonging to the Arab nation.
Their leaders once defined as an Arab "whoever lives in our
country, speaks our tongue, is brought up in our culture, and takes pride in our
glory is one of us". In this
definition the leaders spoke of "our country" and meant by that the
whole of the Middle East. Others would regard Islam as the decisive common
bond. A generation ago, a British
scholar, Prof. H. Gibb, wrote that "all those are Arabs for whom the
central fact of history is the mission of Muhammad and the memory of the Arab
Empire and who in addition cherish the Arabic tongue and its cultural heritage
as their common property”- a
rather academic definition which does not allow for the fact that many Arabs
are uneducated or even illiterate and know little of the once great Arab Empire
and its cultural heritage.It would be more realistic to say that all Moslem
Arabs, educated or not, who feel themselves as belonging to the great
"Daar ul Islam" - the House of Islam - who believe that there is no
God but Allah, that Muhammad is his prophet and the Holy Koran is the message
of Allah to humanity and whose language is Arabic.
The Arab
leaders of today speak of their countries as "Arab brother states"
despite the strained relations between some of them. The Arabs who live in what
was mandated Palestine on both sides of the Jordan are part of that greater
Arab nation. Hence to speak of separate "Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese,
Jordanian or Palestinian
peoples" is like distinguishing between "the peoples of Maryland and
Minnesota” as separate and somehow different from the whole of the American
people and entitled to a sovereign state of their own.
The term
"Palestinian people", unknown until l967, came into usage after the
"Six Days War" when Egypt, Syria and Jordan tried to put an end to
Israel and failed. When the war was over Jordan had lost to Israel the
territory of former Palestine it had held west of the Jordan river. The first
ruler of Transjordan, Emir (later King) Abdallah, installed there by Britain in
1923, occupied Palestinian some territory west of the Jordan and East Jerusalem
in the
first Arab war against Israel in 1948. Until 1967 the Arab inhabitants of
Palestine, in Transjordan and its Jordan occupied territory regarded themselves
as part of the Arab nation and claimed no separate statehood The term "Falasteen"
(Palestine), dates back to the Romans who introduced it to replace the term
Judaea after they had put down the last Jewish rebellion in A.D. 135. To the
Arabs it meant a geographic term, following the British revival in 1916 of the
old Roman name for the territory whose control they sought. During the 400
years of Ottoman Turkish dominion all that territory was part of the province
of "Southern Syria".
On the
basis of post-World War I history Iraq's claim to the territory of Kuwait has
as little legal or historic substance to it as that of Syria to Lebanon or
Jordan. The populations on both sides of the borders belong to one nation.
Kuwait's sovereignty, not yet thirty years old, was another by-product of the
British imperialist era, like Iraq itself. All the present independent Persian Gulf territories were
simply districts and sub-districts of the Ottoman Empire.
If the
inhabitants of all these former Ottoman provinces think of themselves as
belonging to one nation, one might ask why they did not, and do not now, form
one pan-Arab commonwealth for themselves as "the United Arab States of the
Middle East", or at least a common market like Europe, or a customs union.
What keeps them apart? The answer
seems to lie in the collective character of the Arabs, their political history
since the nineteen twenties and some basic economic developments since. Several
are rich in oil, like Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates. Others
have none or only a few oil wells like Syria, or none at all like Lebanon and
Jordan. Any kind of pan-Arab union would mean that the "haves" would
be expected to share their wealth with the "have-nots". Arab brotherhood
has so far not extended to such a degree of fraternal love and solidarity.
In the
past 80 years governing dynasties, clans, groups of politicians or
self-appointed dictators in the Arab states have acquired a taste for power and
its privileges and "dug in" to defend these against outsiders and
their own subjects. Syrian
dictator Hafez Assad dreams of “Greater Syria” and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein of
becoming the leader of the whole Arab nation. None of the successor states to
the Ottoman Empire are democracies in which the citizens could manifest a
collective will. The whole Arab nation has come to accept meekly the artificial
borders which the West-dominated League of Nations decreed for them. The 22
member states of the Arab League are today a given fact and insist, so far at
least, on living with this fragmentation.
The
outlook for some degree of constructive political or economic unity is slim.
Even the Palestinian refugees, victims of the abortive Arab campaigns against
Israel, have received little help from the neighbouring compatriots to rescue
them from their miserable existence. No wonder their despair pushed them into
terrorism not only against Israel, but also against their own compatriots
across the borders. In Jordan and Lebanon they are regarded as a security threat,
and clashes of the frustrated violent refugees with citizens of these two
countries have claimed thousands of lives. As things look today the Middle East
will
remain
an arena of unrest, its basic problems unsolved.
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