Weekend long read

Our weekly round-up of Middle-East related background reading.

1) At the Jewish Chronicle, Henry Kissinger looks at the Balfour Declaration’s broader context.

“What made the Balfour Declaration so consequential? The period was shaped by the deterioration and collapse of dynastic empires. The 1912 Chinese revolution which overthrew the Qing dynasty initiated the process. The Ottoman Empire was described as the “sick man of Europe,” as it moved toward its collapse. By the time the war ended, the Tsarist, Austro-Hungarian, and German dynasties had also disappeared.

The modern international state system, inaugurated by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, sought to establish the state as the fundamental entity of world affairs. Dynasties are based on a concept of loyalty to a family. States reflect a legal concept. They function as legal entities and express a legitimacy. The transition was gradual. The Great War can be seen as a last contest between dynastic empires.”

2) An article by Dave Rich that was published by Ha’aretz last year is worth revisiting this week.

“The idea that Jews use their financial clout to influence politics and the media for nefarious purposes lies at the heart of modern anti-Semitism. Often, the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist’ are interchangeable in these storied fantasies. Put the phrase “Zionist influence” into Google and your computer screen fills up with the paranoid fantasies of conspiracy theorists – and anti-Semitic cranks.

But the conflation of the two terms, and the assumption of the malign influence of both, has not always been confined to the fringes. During the early 1970s, it made an appearance in the heart of British foreign policy making when the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) embarked on a secret research project under the title of “Zionism and its influence in USA and Western Europe.””

3) The BESA Center has published an interesting paper by Professor Efraim Karsh concerning Arab and Turkish reactions to the Balfour Declaration at the time of its issue.

““100 years have passed since the notorious Balfour Declaration, by which Britain gave, without any right, authority or consent from anyone, the land of Palestine to another people. This paved the road for the Nakba of Palestinian people and their dispossession and displacement from their land.”

So claimed Mahmoud Abbas at last year’s U.N. General Assembly’s annual meeting in what constitutes the standard Palestinian indictment of the November 1917 British government’s pledge to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” provided that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

It is an emotionally gripping claim, but it is also the inverse of truth. For one thing, Britain did consult its main war allies, notably U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, before issuing the declaration, which was quickly endorsed by the contemporary international community, including the leaders of the nascent pan-Arab movement, and aped by the Ottoman Empire.” 

4) At the Fathom Journal, Lyn Julius discusses “The Suez Crisis and the Jews of Egypt“.

“On 29 October 1956 the colonial powers Britain and France colluded with Israel to attack Egypt in order to reverse President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, a western strategic interest and the gateway to India and the East. In their analyses of the Suez Crisis as the final hurrah of old-style European colonialism, historians and journalists often fail to consider the human impact on thousands of Jews who found themselves peremptorily expelled from Egypt.

Jews like Lilian Abda. She was swimming in the Suez Canal when Egyptian soldiers arrested her. Abda was charged with trying to relay information to Israeli forces advancing across the Sinai Peninsula on 29 October 1956. ‘I was brought in my bathing suit to the police station,’ she recalls. ‘The next day they expelled me and my entire family from the country.’”

 

 

 

 

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