Von Shoumojit Banerjee
Anmerkung: Dieser äußerst lesenswerte Text wurde mir auf englisch zur Verfügung gestellt. Eine inoffizielle maschinelle Übersetzung finden Sie am Ende dieses Beitrags.
By recognising a phantom Palestinian state, Britain and France are not advancing peace but replaying their very misjudgments that set the Middle East ablaze a century ago.
The United Kingdom led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, along with France, Canada and a handful of Western nations have recently ‘recognized’ the State of Palestine. The announcement, intended as a moral gesture to check Israel in Gaza, is in fact a grotesque exercise in political fantasy which risks repeating historical blunders of more than a century ago.
To understand this folly, one must look to history and the duplicitous roles essayed by Britain and France in Palestine during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to World War I, Palestine was a peripheral Ottoman province, home to Arab peasants, small Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias, and a growing influx of Jewish immigrants driven by Eastern European pogroms. With the Ottoman Empire in terminal decline, nationalist movements – both Jewish and Arab – emerged, each with competing, irreconcilable ambitions.
Historical Misjudgements
During World War I, Britain courted both sides. The 1915–16 McMahon-Hussein Correspondence promised Arab independence for a swathe of the Levant, while the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement carved the region into British and French spheres of influence. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, pledging support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Britain promised the same land to two opposing groups, and then blamed the inevitable violence on the victims.
After the war, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948), tasking it with establishing a Jewish homeland while protecting Arab rights. British administrators proved unequal to the task. They vacillated between suppressing Jewish defence groups like the Haganah and placating Arab mobs, often simultaneously. Incidents such as the Nebi Musa riots of 1920 and the Hebron massacre of 1929, in which 67 Jews were killed and survivors expelled, were warnings ignored. The Peel Commission of 1937, which proposed partition, was rejected by Arab leaders and only cautiously accepted by Jewish leaders. „Rewarding Terror: Britain and Europe’s Dangerous Fantasy of a Palestinian State“ weiterlesen