Read: The Ottoman Empire Dismembered

From: Irish Foreign Affairs: Editorials

Date: September, 2014

By: Editorial

The Ottoman Empire Dismembered

Editorial
The Ottoman Empire Dismembered

Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, said that there were no Palestinian people. The trace of a semblance of truth in that statement is that the people living in Palestine did not wish to be cut off from the people living in Lebanon and Syria in order to live their own lives as a separatist nation. The various peoples living in the Middle East – in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Mesopotamia – lived harmoniously together in the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire without any of them feeling the need to impose their beliefs and ways of life on the others as the only right thing to believe and the only human way to live. Nor did the State feel any need to make them uniform in subordination to a comprehensive ideology of state.
The Ottoman state was the only really multicultural European state. Because it was multicultural it was decreed not to be European. But its capital was in Europe and many European countries were under its government for centuries.
The reason it was judged not to be European was not that it was not governed in the way that we now call democratic. No European country was governed democratically, even if the word is used loosely, until the middle or late 19th century. The French Revolution declared democracy to be the only right form of government but France did not manage to establish a functional system of democracy until the failure of its war of aggression on Germany in 1870. And Britain was an aristocracy under the form of monarchy where a minuscule electorate had a choice of two aristocratic parties.
The reason the Ottoman Empire was not European was that it was not nationalist and totalitarian in ideology, and it had no wars of religion, and it was not racist.

English government of Ireland after the 1688 Revolution – which Conor Cruise O’Brien declared to be an English Enlightenment superior to the French Enlightenment of the 18th century – was a form of nationalistic totalitarianism. It had the declared purpose of exterminating the Catholicism of the Irish and enlightening them into Protestants. France developed itself into a nationalistic monarchy by means of civil wars which were wars of religion. Spain acquired national uniformity in the war against the tolerant civilization of the Moors and the Inquisition which followed it, which was a Catholic counterpart of the Protestant Penal Laws in Ireland.
And Germany – it was a geographical expression covering a multitude of small states of different kinds until it was driven to establish a national state in 1871 by pressure of the surrounding states. And then it gave profound offence to the culture of the older European states by its major foreign policy initiative, which was support for the Ottoman Empire which the British, French and Russian Empires were intent on destroying and taking for themselves. That German development – bizarre in European terms – was frowned upon as the Sonderweg – the ‘Special Way’ that Germany developed, instead of the proper way of the other European states.
The Sonderweg failed. The British, French and Russian Empires ganged up on Germany, made war upon it, defeated it, and shared out the Ottoman state among themselves – well, the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917: too soon for it to claim its prize of Constantinople (Istanbul) for having started the Great War by mobilizing in support of Serbia following the Serbian assassination of the heir to the Austrian Empire.

German support for the Ottoman Empire was not the only reason for the Anglo-French-Russian war alliance against it. Britain and France had other reasons for it. But Germany’s Ottoman policy was common ground for the alliance against it.
Germany saw the Ottoman State, representing one of the major cultures of the world, as a necessary part of a stable world order, and the Kaiser emphasized the point with a state visit. Britain saw it as “the sick man of Europe”, ready to die, but was concerned that, when it did die, Russia should not be its chief beneficiary. Therefore Britain defended Turkey from Russia while arranging for itself to be the chief beneficiary.
Then along comes Germany, with its Sonderweg which, instead of seeing that the destruction of the backward and outmoded Ottoman State is a necessity of progress, takes it continuing existence to be necessary to a stable world order.

The war on Turkey was launched about four months after the war on Germany. Britain invaded Mesopotamia from India, expecting a cake-walk. But it took more than four years of hard fighting to kill off the sick man.
In the first instance Britain refused to have any truck with the vestigial form of Arab nationalism in Mesopotamia that offered itself as an ally. It wanted to gain the Middle East as a clear Imperial conquest. But, after it made little headway during a year of hard fighting, it decided that it needed Arab nationalism after all. But it was not the small groups of nationalist ideologues of the cities that it turned to, but the Muslim religious authorities in Mecca. It secured a declaration of Jihad, Holy War, against the Ottoman State. Religious/racial hatred of the Turk was stirred up. The posturing Lawrence did his thing, the Arab State was promised when the Turk was beaten.
The French, who were bearing the brunt of the war in Europe, demanded their bit of the Middle East, and Britain was in no position to refuse.
Then, late in 1917, with its war situation getting desperate, Britain made a bid to turn Jewish world influence against Germany by making an alliance with the Zionist movement and adopting the policy of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

When Turkey was defeated the promised Arab State was proclaimed at Damascus – and was suppressed. Then a development in Baghdad was made war upon and broken.
Instead of the Middle Eastern region of the Ottoman State being replaced by an Arab State, its place was taken by many Arab States created by Britain and France, and dependent on them.
The initial intention in 1914 was that the conquered Middle East should be a kind of extension of the Indian Empire, governed imperially.

But wasn’t Britain supposed to be making war so that nationalism should have free development throughout the world? Wasn’t that what the Irish were told? Nationalism was a good thing, and everyone should have it. And then there was the Jihadist Arab nationalism that Britain had fostered.
There was an incoherent argument about this at Westminster and the effective decision was that the Middle East should not have responsible Imperial government – so to speak – but that Imperial control should be exercised by the creation of Arab nation states under Imperial hegemony. Not an Arab state, but an array of Arab states, potentially, but not actually, independent. And the Empires formed a League of Nations to be the political structure of the world, and made their hegemony over the new states they were creating legal by giving themselves League Mandates to guide these states.
An Arab State for the Arab nation would have had some prospect of success. It was what was promised in return for the Jihad against the Turks. It might be that there was no Arab nation up and ready to take on statehood, but there were peoples who were Arab, amongst other things, and they had been roused by Imperial propaganda and Imperial action into a state of mind of nationalist Arabism and there were enthusiastic leaders eager and willing to have a go at conducting an Arab nation-state, working out in the process what Arab Nationalism was to be – whether it was to be a working out of the Jihadism which Britain procured at Mecca or would be in accordance with the ideals of the pre-war nationalist groups in Basra and Damascus.
The fact that there was no organized Arab national movement ready to take state power was no argument against the formation of an Arab national state. There was no organized South Slav national movement yet a South Slav State (Yugoslavia) was established by the Versailles Conference of Victors and its creation, the League of Nations. And likewise with Czechoslovakia.

On the other hand there was an organized Irish national movement ready to take power, which won an election against Britain in December 1918, yet was not recognized as existing by the League of Nations. The party elected in December 1918 to govern Ireland nevertheless went ahead and began doing what it was elected to do. Joost Augusteijn, a Trinity College academic expert on these matters, has said (in the History Ireland magazine for academics) that the elected Irish Government was not legitimate because recognition by other Governments is a necessary precondition of legitimacy. It follows from this that Britain was within its rights when it made war on the Irish who had voted for independence without Imperial authority.
Augusteijn’s view of the matter was not challenged by the academics for whom History Ireland is published.
The principle that Imperial authority is required for national self-determination is being applied by the European Union today with regard to the Russian peoples in the Ukraine who voted to remove themselves from the authority of the Ukrainian State, following an anti-Russian coup d’état in the Government of the state which the EU recognized as legitimate.

In 1919, the legitimising condition of recognition by other states amounted in practice to Imperial permission because the world was being remade by the Victors at Versailles. All other Governments were gathered there (apart from the Bolshevik Government in Russia, which was not regarded as legitimate) and Britain did not allow the Irish Election to be put on the agenda.
The 1919 Congress of Victorious Empires, the League of Nations, the Versailles Treaty – which was all the same thing – asserted authority over the world and asserted it imperially and capriciously, creating nation-states where there was no nation, and denying national status where it existed. The American Congress refused to ratify the Treaty and the USA went its own way, a law unto itself. That left the League as a plaything of the British and French Empires, with the British quickly establishing ascendancy over the French.

Four nation states were carved out of the Ottoman Middle East: Lebanon and Syria, over which the French Empire was given an indefinite Mandate by the League, and Iraq and Jordan, with British Mandates. The various peoples in the regions of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul were told on Imperial authority that they were Iraqi nationals – a thing of which they had no suspicion until then.
And Iraq was given a King by Britain. In fact it was told it was to elect a King. Britain had a candidate for the Kingship – a member of the family in the Western desert from which Britain had procured a Jihad in 1916. But a local candidate presented himself, and seemed likely to win – Said Talib of Basra. So Britain got him out of the way. Gertrude Bell, a lover of the Arab people and an influential person in the British administration, invited Said Talib for afternoon tea at her villa, where he was kidnapped and whisked away to Ceylon.
The people of Iraq got the message. They voted obediently for the British candidate.

Egypt was an independent state – governed by the British Ambassador. It was a former region of the Ottoman Empire, recognized as independent by Britain, and governed by the British Ambassador. That was how it had been for a generation before 1914, and how it continued to be until the 1950s. It was an independent state that was a lynch-pin of the British Empire. There was an Egyptian Government which was told what to do by the Ambassador. On his instructions it made war on Turkey – whose notional sovereignty over it does not appear to have been officially revoked until the 1950s – in 1914, and on Germany in 1914 and 1939.

And then there was Palestine, for which Britain took the League Mandate. The supposed principle of the Mandate system was that the Mandated Empire should develop in the backward peoples of the territories a capacity for self-government. But when? This year, next year, sometime, never.
In the case of Palestine the Mandate was qualified by the Balfour Declaration, which was adopted by the League.
When the Declaration was issued, Palestine was occupied to the extent of 90% by people who were not Jews. The Ottoman State had not discriminated against Jews. It was free of the Anti-Semitism that characterized Europe. Jews went about their business in various cities of the Empire, and pious Jews who wanted to live quietly in Jerusalem were allowed to do so. But Jewish nationalist political colonization which would disrupt the lives of other peoples in Palestine was not allowed. And, after the Balfour Declaration made the Zionist Organisation one of the privileged bodies of the Imperial world, opposition to Jewish colonization and conquest of Palestine was declared to be anti-Semitic.
(Today the British Chief Rabbi declares that, while it is theoretically possible to oppose Israel without being anti-Semitic, it is not possible in practice.)
Britain instructed itself, by its League Mandate, to lay the basis for a Jewish State in Palestine without interfering with the rights of the existing population. This was obviously an impossibility. And the operative part of the Mandate was the Jewish State. The Jewish Agency was given special status under the British administration, and large-scale colonization was organized. This led to a rebellion of the Arab population which Britain had to fight a small war to suppress. After the Rebellion, Britain began to reconsider the advisability of the project. It began to be said that the Declaration committed Britain to establish a “national home” for the Jews, not to establish a Jewish State. But members of the Government which issued the Declaration, including Lloyd George and Churchill, said that what they had meant was a Jewish State.
Balfour himself, in the early 1920s, had admitted that the Declaration had been made in breach of the principle of national self-determination for which the War had supposedly been fought. The justification of that breach, he said, was that the Jews were an extraordinary people for whom extraordinary provision must be made. The actual reason seems to have been a mixture of Anti-Semitism and War strategy. The Jews were reckoned to be an influential people, closely identified with Germany at the time, whom it would be advantageous to bring onto the Allied side. And Churchill a short while later saw the Bolshevik state in Russia as an essentially Jewish construction, intent on turning the world upside down, from which Jewish energy might be diverted into the conquest of Palestine. Then, in the thirties, when Whitehall, stimulated by the Arab revolt, was expressing concern for the rights of Palestinians, Churchill dismissed the natives by comparing them to the dog in the manger, who tried to prevent others using it, though he had no use for it himself.
Whitehall did try to scale down the project in 1939, and it lay in abeyance for a few years. Then in 1945 the British administration was faced with a Jewish nationalist terrorist assault with no holds barred.

In 1945 Ernest Bevin was made Foreign Secretary in the first majority-Labour Government. In the 1930s he had been one of the first active Anti-Fascists, and he had gone against the grain of the Left by supporting increased armament for a major war. During the War he had run Britain as Minister for Labour, laying the basis for the post-War Welfare State, and ensuring victory in the General Election of 1945. Then he was transferred to the Foreign Office, for which he was ill-fitted, and was required to fight dirty wars for the empire. The Malayan War which was not called a War but an Emergency, so that it might not come under the Laws of War supposedly established by the Nuremberg Trials of the Germans – was fought by methods resembling German methods in Eastern Europe.
But Bevin baulked at implementing the Unionist policy of his Party.
It seems that he had paid little attention to the Zionist resolutions adopted at Labour Annual Conferences until he was faced with the task of putting them into effect. Then it seems that he was appalled by the idea of throwing the inhabitants of a country out of their country in order to set up a religious state in the territory which would then be populated, by means of mass immigration, of believers in that religion.
As the creator of a major Trade Union, Bevin abhorred all forms of religious bigotry, including Anti-Semitism. In his youth people who were called Anti-Semites asserted that Judaism was not just a religion like any other, with members in many nation-states in which they were good citizens, but were a separate nation whose members accorded only a limited allegiance to the nation-states amongst which they were dispersed. But, after the Balfour Declaration and its being adopted by the League of Nations, the meaning of Anti-Semitism changed fundamentally. It now became anti-Semitic to deny that the Jews were a nation where it had previously been anti-Semitic to assert that they were a nation.
The Zionist Organisation asserted what had previously been the Anti-Semitic position. It asserted that the Jews were not just a religion but were a nation, and that there was an irreconcilable antagonism between the Jews and the Gentile nations amongst which they lived.
Bevin knew what the Anti-Semitic position had been and he could not bring himself to adopt it – not after the War against Fascism, of which he had been one of the advocates and in which he had played a major part. So he was branded an Anti-Semite – and his influence on British Socialism was subverted to its great disadvantage.
He refused to continue the project of creating a Jewish State. But he failed to act decisively against the Jewish terrorist movement in Palestine, dedicated to the establishment of the Jewish State. If he had persisted in the attempt to crush the terrorist movement, he would undoubtedly be branded the new Himmler.
What he did was resign to the newly-created United Nations the Mandate which Britain had given itself through the League. He washed Britain’s hands of the monstrous project which Britain had inaugurated in 1917. But so much had already been done towards the realisation of the project that this only made the situation worse.
A quarter of a century of large-scale Jewish immigration had built up a substantial Jewish population different in kind from the pious religious Jews who had been there in 1917. It was still very far from constituting a majority, but it was highly organized for war, had influential supporters in international politics, had been trained in terrorist wars on Arabs in the 1930s by a British officer, General Wingate, and had been surveying the territory in preparation for the moment of victory in its War of Independence against the British administration when the Arabs would be at its mercy.

Britain did not resign its Mandate to the Security Council, which is the effective part of the UN, but to the General Assembly. It sacrificed the Palestinians in the hope of maintaining hegemony over its Arab States and Egypt, which was being eroded by events in Palestine. On the Security Council it would still have been responsible, because of the Veto, for what was done with Palestine. That is why the matter was referred to the General Assembly for decision by two-thirds majority.
The UN decision was to divide Palestine into two states, awarding the greater part to the Jewish minority. The vote in favour of the Jewish State was carried by the USA and its client states in South America, by Russia and its client states in Eastern Europe, and some states of the British Empire.
The territory awarded for the Jewish State had a bare majority of Jews in it. It could not have been a Jewish State in the intended sense as a democracy with a 49% non-Jewish minority. The first task of the Jewish authorities, therefore, was an extensive campaign of ethnic cleansing. This was followed by expansion into the territory allocated for the Arab State, and further ethnic cleansing. The UN stood idly by, the General Assembly having no Executive power.

Jewish expansion was stopped in 1948, chiefly by the intervention of the British-officered Arab Legion from Jordan, which was heavily under British influence. That Ceasefire line, which included within Israel much of the territory awarded by the UN to the Palestinians, now seems to be regarded internationally as the border of Israel proper, and only the further conquests of 1967 as Occupied Territory. But Israel itself has refused to define its borders, and it does not accept that the Occupied Territories do not belong to it.
An article in the Jerusalem Post of July 31st, 2014, by Martin Sherman, proposes that the open ethnic cleansing practices of 1947-8 should be resumed as a means of dealing with the Occupied Territory. It concludes: “To prevent an even more brutal and extreme successor from taking over, Gaza must be dismantled and the non-belligerent populated relocated”.
Ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine to make way for a Jewish nation-state was the British Labour Party policy which Bevin refused to implement. Proposing the Zionist motion at the Party conference in December 1944, Hugh Dalton said there must be unlimited Jewish entry to Palestine, so that there should be a Jewish majority. “There was a strong case for this before the War. There is an irresistible case now” because of what the Germans had done. “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in. Let them be compensated handsomely for their land… The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine less than the size of Wales. Indeed, we should re-examine also the possibility of extending the present Palestinian boundaries, by agreement with Egypt, Syria or Transjordan…”

In December 1944 the world was dominated by the War, and Dalton was a great warmonger. Agreement of Egypt, Syria and Jordan only meant Imperial agreement of Britain and France – Syria being French. When the matter was referred to the UN three years later a great post-War change was under way. France had been made let go of Syria by Britain, and it had to be careful what it did in Egypt and Jordan. The UN decision about the Jewish State was opposed by all Middle East Governments.

Because of what the Germans had done, a safe haven must be found for the Jews. And the safe haven that was chosen was a territory that could only be made available by ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants, and when established would be surrounded by Governments which resented its imposition in their midst.

The realistic implication of this was that the safe haven would be one of the least safe places on earth for Jews, if the Jewish state was not made a military Superpower in the region, capable of crushing all its neighbours. And so it was.
The European Powers and nations had all behaved badly towards the Jews. All except the Soviet Union had. That means that all the democracies had. Then the democracies made virtuous amends by supporting the Jewish conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The thought of creating an empty space in Europe for a Jewish State never occurred to them.
And the United States, which had carried out the greatest ethnic cleansing of territory in recorded history, creating vast empty spaces, did not offer any of them as a site for a Jewish State that would actually be a safe haven – wouldn’t it? It had behaved badly when the Jews were in trouble, restricting their immigration quota. And now, after 1945, it took over the role of the British in imposing them on the inhabited country of Palestine, surrounded by countries which did not want a hostile, expansionist state inflicted on them as a neighbour.
But it must be admitted that the USA followed through on the logic of providing the Jews with a “safe haven” in what was probably the most hostile environment in the world. It provided the Jewish State with the means of exterminating its neighbours.
*
We read in an anti-Zionist Jewish pamphlet published in 1917, a few months before the Balfour Declaration was issued:

“From a practical point of view the existence of Palestine as a homeland will not solve the problem except as a refuge for those Jewish dreamers who will consecrate themselves to make their Jewish dreams come true. But they are not the only dreamers. The dreamers of Israel have lived and suffered, and made their Jewish dreams come true for the world without a Jewish State, and they will still exist and their dreams will have a spiritual quality, as distinguished from a mere romantic one, to contribute to the profoundest problems of life, which are, in the final analysis, spiritual and religious…” (Zionism No Remedy by Henry Moskowitz, 1917.

That writer apparently envisaged the Jewish State as a self-indulgently pious Jewish retreat from the busy world in which the main body of Jews were active. He could hardly have envisaged the way the Jewish State was actually constructed. Only the ‘Revisionists’ envisaged that and committed themselves to it. And because they imagined the Zionist project in the realities of the world, and saw it as a colonial project which would be resisted by those who were to be displaced by it, and nevertheless had the will to carry it through, they were condemned –or were at least frowned upon – as Extremists. But, in the working out of the project, the Moderates, who said that it could be achieved in a more pleasant way, always managed not to come into antagonistic conflict with the realistically plain-spoken extremists.

It needs to be emphasised that Zionism was set in motion as a practical project of colonization and ethnic cleansing long before the Nazi Party came to power, and even before it was formed. Whether Nazi Jewish policy was to any degree a response to the policy of establishing a Jewish-national State in Palestine is something we have never seen investigated. We assume that it wasn’t, but since it would be a thought-crime even to consider that possibility, we leave it.

There was, however, a coincidence between the Zionist and Nazi views of the Jewish question. Both asserted that the Jews were a nation, or a race, apart and could never be absorbed into the nations in which they lived. And the Zionist organization was the only party, other than the Nazi Party, which had legal existence in Germany after 1933. The Zionist project was compatible with Nazi policy.
The source of antagonism in Europe – intensified by the Allied destruction of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918 — was not the separatist ambitions of Zionism, but the influence of integrated Jews in the European world, which was praised by Moskowitz.
The Normans in Ireland became “more Irish than the Irish”. And the Jews in Europe became more European than the Europeans, especially after the destruction of the Hapsburg Empire and other acts of the Versailles Treaty.
The Jews were in the forefront of progressive development in Europe while Europe was progressing. Evolutionary progress in Europe was stopped short by Britain’s World War on Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and the establishment in 1919 of a welter of ‘nation-states’ based on inadequate national development. (Casement summed up the situation well in 1914 when he described Britain’s prepared war on Germany as a Crime Against Europe).

*
Shortly after the Balfour Declaration was issued, a pro-Zionist book was published in England by a Manchester Guardian journalist close to Lloyd George’s circle: England And Palestine: Essays Towards The Restoration Of The Jewish State by Herbert Sidebotham. It reviewed the history of Jewish States and, taking it that the Jewish nation, having preserved itself for two thousand years since its last State was put down by the Romans, was still essentially the same as it had been then, considered whether it would be responsible to facilitate the establishment of another Jewish State. Jewish States in the past had been intolerably belligerent towards their neighbours, and Sidebotham did not think that the Romans had been wrong in suppressing the last one. But he thought this one would be different as it would be set up by the British Empire and guided by it, and prevented from getting out of hand. Thirty years later, of course, when the moment of truth came, Britain abdicated responsibility for what it had brought into being, and gave it free rein. But it must be admitted that some serious thought was given to the matter at the outset.

The Irish Party, led by John Redmond, had over 70 MPs in Parliament when the Balfour Declaration was issued, and they supported the Government in the War because it was, they said, being fought on the principle of national rights. The Balfour Declaration was a war measure that contravened national rights – and it wasn’t the first war measure that did so.
We are now in the midst of a Redmondite cult. A two-volume biography of him has been published. A former Taoiseach says it was a tragedy that the Redmondite Party was displaced by Sinn Fein.
The obstacle to the implementation of Redmondite Home Rule was a colonization of Ulster three centuries earlier. What did Redmond’s Party say when the Government they were supporting proposed another colonization and the displacement of another people?
The neo-Redmondites do not tell us. We’ll have to find out for ourselves. And review Sidebotham’s remarkable book, and a book published by Socialist MP Richard Crossman in 1947 as a contribution to the construction of the Jewish State. All of this is not ancient history. It is current politics.

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The Ottoman Empire Dismembered

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