How Feisal Failed and Arabs Became a League Against Israel

 Nadene Goldfoot                                       

Zionism will be referred to.  Zionism means the return of Jews to their mother country, Judah, which had become part of the Ottoman Empire in what people called "Palestine." Returning to their land had already started with the 1st aliyah from Romania and Russia.  It was a major wave of Jewish immigration (aliyah) to Ottoman Syria between 1881 and 1903. Jews who migrated in this wave came mostly from Eastern Europe and from the Middle East's Yemen; with the cause from pogroms-attacks on Jews for being Jewish.               

First thing in Palestine, Jews establishing a kindergarten in  Rishon Lezion, c.1898.  

 An estimated 25,000 Jews immigrated. Some of the European Jewish immigrants during the late 19th-early 20th century period gave up after a few months and went back to their country of origin, often suffering from hunger and disease,  It was not easy.  Read:  The Settlers by Meyer Levin.     

We had high hopes of peace with Chaim Weizmann  and Ibn Hussein Feisal (b: 1885-1933) at end of WWI:  The Faisal–Weizmann Agreement was a 3 January 1919 agreement between Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader who had negotiated the 1917 Balfour Declaration with the British government, signed two weeks before the start of the Paris Peace Conference. Together with a letter written by T. E. Lawrence in Faisal's name to Felix Frankfurter in March 1919, it was one of two documents used by the Zionist delegation at the Peace Conference to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.

Weizmann first met Faisal in June 1918, during the British advance from the South against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. As leader of an impromptu "Zionist Commission", Weizmann traveled to southern Transjordan for the meeting. Weizmann had assured Faisal that "the Jews did not propose to set up a government of their own but wished to work under British protection, to colonize and develop Palestine without encroaching on any legitimate interests". Antonius commented in 1938 that: "The combined effect of those assurances had been to induce in him a belief that there was nothing either in the Zionist aspirations as such or in the policy professed by the British Government in regard to their fulfilment that would interfere with Arab political and economic freedom in Palestine".

The agreement was presented to Faisal in his room at the Carlton Hotel on 3 January in English, which Faisal could not read, and its contents were explained to Faisal by Lawrence as the sole translator. Faisal signed the document in the same meeting, without consulting his advisors awaiting him in a separate room, but added a caveat in Arabic next to his signature, such that Faisal considered the agreement was conditional on Palestine being within the area of Arab independence. The Zionist Organization submitted the Agreement to the Paris Peace Conference without the caveat.

Yoav Gelber described the document as "of propaganda value only", since it quickly became clear that Faisal's conditions would not be met. Yoav Gelber (Hebrew: יואב גלבר; born September 25, 1943) is a professor of history at the University of Haifa, and was formerly a visiting professor at The University of Texas at Austin.  He was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1943 and studied world and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an expert on the history of the Israel Defense Forces..

         1918 Commander David George Hogarth, Archaeologist.  

Following the publication of the Balfour Declaration the British had dispatched Commander David George Hogarth to see Hussein in January 1918 bearing the message that the "political and economic freedom" of the Palestinian population was not in question. Hogarth reported that Hussein "would not accept an independent Jewish State in Palestine, nor was I instructed to warn him that such a state was contemplated by Great Britain". Hogarth may have held his own anti-Jewish sentiments.  D. G. Hogarth was the son of Reverend George Hogarth, Vicar of Barton-upon-Humber, and Jane Elizabeth (Uppleby) Hogarth, who were cousins.

Isaiah Friedman is professor emeritus of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was elected senior fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford and was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 1897-1918; Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? Isaiah Friedman, Polish historian. Recipient Theodor Körner Foundation prize University Vienna, 1964; fellow American Philosophical Society, 1971-1976, American Council Learned Society, 1972, The Lucius Littauer Foundation, 1972, American Academy, Jewish Research, 1975. Member World Jewish Studies.

In this book, Isaiah Friedman defends the British;   examines one of the most complex problems that bedeviled Middle East politics in the interwar period, one that still remains controversial. The prevailing view is that during World War I the British government made conflicting commitments to the Arabs, to the French, and to the Jews. Through a rigorous examination of the documentary evidence, Friedman demolishes the myth that Palestine was a -twice-promised land- and shows that the charges of  fraudulence and deception leveled against the British are groundless.

Central to Arab claims on Palestine was a letter dated 24 October 1915, from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, to King Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, pledging Arab independence. Friedman shows that this letter was conditional on a general Arab uprising against the Turks. Predicated on reciprocal action, the letter committed the British to recognize and uphold Arab independence in the areas of the Fertile Crescent once it was liberated by the Arabs.   respect to the territories it covers. Friedman's archival discovery of the Arabic version actually read by Hussein indisputably shows that Palestine was not included in the British pledge. Indeed, Hussein welcomed the return of the Jews just as his son Emir Feisal believed that Arab-Jewish cooperation would be a means to build Arab independence without the interference of the European powers.

Myth-shattering and meticulously documented, Palestine: A Twice-Promised Land? is revisionist history in the truest sense of the word.

 According to Isaiah Friedman, Hussein was not perturbed by the Balfour Declaration and on 23 March 1918, in Al Qibla, the daily newspaper of Mecca, attested that Palestine was "a sacred and beloved homeland of its original sons", the Jews; "the return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually an experimental school for their [Arab] brethren." 

He called on the Arab population in Palestine to welcome the Jews as brethren and cooperate with them for the common welfare. Whereas Kedourie (as well as Friedman) have argued that Hussein accepted the Balfour Declaration, Charles D.Smith has argued that both Friedman and Kedourie misrepresent documents and violate scholarly standards in order to reach their conclusions. while Schneer says that historians have spilled oceans of ink tracing the initial reactions of Hussein and his sons to the Balfour Declaration without settling the debate, noting that Hussein considered Palestine to be Arab land.  

Faisal conditioned his acceptance on the fulfillment of British wartime promises to the Arabs, who had hoped for independence in a vast part of the Ottoman Empire. He appended to the typed document a hand-written statement, next to which Lawrence added a slightly inaccurate translation:  Faisal could not read English.  

Friedman continued:  There could have been a direct and continuing pro-Zionist policy based upon interest, rather than upon a wartime undertaking. There were some who propagated ideas like the incorporation of a Jewish state into the British Empire as a “dominion” and a “reliable,” perpetual ally (as opposed to the “unreliable” Arabs). But official thinking on such lines was never more than halfhearted, let alone put forward seriously as a basis for practical politics. 

The Jewish National Home in Palestine rapidly became—at any rate in the minds of the British—an albatross around the government's neck until, with anger and relief, it was cast off in 1947. Which is all the more reason why the story of how it came to hang there is of unending fascination. For one, the British  30 year term was up and they no longer ruled in Palestine.  They had to leave.  

Weizmann's intended purpose was to forge an agreement between Faisal and the Zionist movement to support an Arab Kingdom and Jewish settlement in Palestine, respectively. The wishes of the Palestinian Arabs were to be ignored, think some researchers, and, indeed, both men seem to have held the Palestinian Arabs in considerable disdain. In the event, Weizmann and Faisal established an informal agreement under which Faisal would support close Jewish settlement in Palestine while the Zionist movement would assist in the development of the vast Arab nation that Faisal hoped to establish. Faisal had led the Arab uprising against Turkey (1916-1918) and then went on to become king of Syria and king of Iraq (from 1921).

The fact was that at first Faisal was sympathetic to Zionism from which he hoped to receive aid in building his future kingdom.  He and Weizmann met in Transjordan in 1918 and Paris in 1919 and reached an agreement on mutual aid, conditional on the implementation of British promises to the Arabs.                               

Jewish colony of Artuf foothills set fire by Arabs in 1920s.  

A constant position in Arab policy since World War I ended in 1917 has been the basic rejection of Zionism and the determination to violently destroy Israel.  This was stated in 2003 and it remains to this day of March 13, 2023 as still being true.  

         Jewish wedding in Aleppo, Syria :  In the early years of the Islamic conquest, the tribute (or jizya), paid as a yearly poll tax, symbolized the subordination of the dhimmi. Later, the inferior status of Jews and Christians was reinforced through a series of regulations that governed the behavior of the dhimmi. Dhimmis, on pain of death, were forbidden to mock or criticize the Koran, Islam or Muhammad, to proselytize among Muslims or to touch a Muslim woman (though a Muslim man could take a non­Muslim as a wife).

Dhimmis were excluded from public office and armed service, and were forbidden to bear arms. They were not allowed to ride horses or camels, to build synagogues or churches taller than mosques, to construct houses higher than those of Muslims or to drink wine in public. They were not allowed to pray or mourn in loud voices-as that might offend the Muslims. The dhimmi had to show public deference toward Muslims-always yielding them the center of the road. The dhimmi was not allowed to give evidence in court against a Muslim, and his oath was unacceptable in an Islamic court. To defend himself, the dhimmi would have to purchase Muslim witnesses at great expense. This left the dhimmi with little legal recourse when harmed by a Muslim.

Dhimmis were also forced to wear distinctive clothing. In the ninth century, for example, Baghdad’s Caliph al-Mutawakkil designated a yellow badge for Jews, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.

At the same time, Jews had been living in other Arab states since the Roman attack on Jerusalem in 70 CE.  They had the status of being 2nd class or Dhimmis.  Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with Iran and Turkey being home to the largest remaining Jewish populations. As soon as Israel declared itself a state, Jews were forced out of Muslim states.  Israel was faced with a large population returning as soon as Israel was conceived.                              

    Moscow, Russia

In the 1960s, Soviet cold war strategists were using the Arab-Zionist conflict as a tool to enhance their penetration and influence in the Arab world.                            

  Russian soldiers modeling uniforms of 1960s  Russians were in Egypt in the 1980s, 90s.  

Read:  "Messages from a Syrian Jew Trapped in Egypt."

One method was to peddle cheap arms, military  training, and political backing for the outrageous purpose of destroying  a country and its citizens.  Nothing has changed as they are doing it again Ukraine, only its Russia who is doing it, not another country.

The Arabs met in 1964 in Cairo, Egypt and the Arab League resolved to divert the waters of the Jordan River, critically reducing Israel's water supply, and declared that Israel must be destroyed. 

The League of Arab States was formed in Cairo on 22 March 1945 with six members: Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan (later renamed Jordan), Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria, with Yemen joining on 5 May 1945.  Their motto:  “One language, one civilisation: 22 Arab countries”.

The Arab League currently has 22 member states; Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordon, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. 

Left to right: Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Nasser of Egypt, Sallal of Yemen, Sabah of Kuwait and Arif of Iraq

They met again in Kartoum, Sudan, Africa in 1967. right after Israel won the Six Day War.   The Khartoum Resolution (Arabic: قرار الخرطوم) of 1 September 1967 was issued at the conclusion of the 1967 Arab League summit, which was convened in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in the wake of the Six-Day War.

The Arab League is famous for its Khartoum Resolution known as "The Three No's"; No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.The final communique of the meeting "underscored the Palestinians' right to regain the whole of Palestine—that is, to destroy the State of Israel." The outcome of this summit influenced Israeli foreign policy for decades.  

The only change is that of the Abraham Accords of August 2020 since 1967, 53 years without a glimpse of peace.   

However, The League of Arab States is an international body recognised by the United Nations where it holds ‘observer status’. This formal recognition extends to the global missions that represent the League abroad in a number of host countries.    No wonder so many no's come from the UN in regards to Israel who is always being attacked verbally in UN.    Israel is all they ever talk  about in finding fault.       

Abraham and his peace treaty (pact of friendship) Gen.21) with  King Abimelech the Philistine of Gerar in western Negev.  Abimelech had been friends with both Isaac and Abraham when they had visited there.  

                                             

                                              

       Netanyahu of Israel, Trump of USA, UAE, Bahrain

The Abraham Accords are a series of treaties normalizing diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, facilitated by the U.S. Administration between August and December, 2020. In the span of five short months, these four Arab states joined Egypt and Jordan in making peace with Israel. The agreements were called “The Abraham Accords” in honor of Abraham - the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The patriarchs of Judaism are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; son and grandson.   

Resource:

Book:  Right To Exist, a moral defense of Israel's wars by Yaacov Lozowick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Arab_League_summit

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://www.museumwnf.org/league-of-arab-states/?page=LAS-history.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Aliyah

https://www.commentary.org/articles/david-vital/the-question-of-palestine-1914-1918-by-isaiah-friedman/

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~usher/genealogy/ushersct/4989.htm

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-treatment-of-jews-in-arab-islamic-countries