Palestine: An Extension of European Imperialism
Palestine and the Middle East — for many Americans, these words typically evoke ideas of religious fundamentalism, oppression, and the use of terror or armed violence. Not very often is it thought of, or questioned, how exactly the region arrived at its current state of affairs. Clearly, it must have been through their own doing, or lack of competence, that they failed to achieve stable and secular liberal democracies. Though historians and academics in other fields often beg to differ, the previous explanation is a common one, it may be one that the reader themselves once held, or one that a close friend or family member has expressed on occasion.
So what is wrong with this particular view, and why is it so common? For one, it requires no pre-requisite knowledge of the history of region, and pays no mind to the countless records of European or American interventions into Arab affairs in order to take economic or political advantage of the weakened states created by the League of Nations. Making it a very simple explanation to an astronomically complex geopolitical affair, which is a lot more palatable than asking one to read hundreds of pages of scholarly articles to understand a topic that has very little to no impact on the daily life of most Americans.
Prior to the creation of the nation states we currently know as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, among several others in the region, the Middle East was, for the most part, under control of the Ottoman Empire then European powers. Following the collapse of the once massive and relatively decentralized Ottoman state, the League of Nations tasked itself with the formulation of a new Middle East. The League of Nations concluded that despite being part of one of the most advanced nations prior to the 19th century, the peoples of the Middle East were undeserving of governing themselves. With that conclusion, the League of Nations declared: “The Mandatory shall have full powers of legislation and of administration.” Mandatory being the term for the European power in charge of a given state, this decree indicated that the British had the discretion to be in control of all aspects of the states they were delegated. Bringing into question whether this state was created to serve the interests of British empire, as further evidenced by the exposing of the Sykes-Picot agreement prior to the formulation of Palestine and other states in the region. The Sykes-Picot agreement being a secret treaty in which the British and French agreed to delegate portions of the Middle East to themselves in a way that furthered their own geopolitical aspirations.
To assist with this genuinely monumental undertaking, several experts came together to form a commission, the King-Crane commission, that would poll citizens and take a census in each potential state to allow for a more informed decision-making process by the League of Nations. According to the King-Crane commission’s data, only 0.3% of the population stated a desire for a Palestine independent from a Greater Syria, 0.1% desired a Palestine under the authority of the British, and 80.4% expressed support for a unified Greater Syria, comprising Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. The King-Crane commission ultimately recommended against putting the British or French in charge of Palestine, or forcing the creation of a state solely tasked with serving a single ethnic and religious denomination, and warned the League that a continuation of their exploitative tendencies would lead to disaster in this case.
On the reception of the King-Crane commission’s report, historian Richard Drake states: “They told their story to the American Peace Commission in Paris, which expressed interest and concern — without, however, doing anything. Brodie… personally delivered a copy of the report to the White House on Sept. 15… The report ended up, without official comment, in the U.S. Department of State archives.” If it remains unclear, the League of Nations ignored the expert recommendations, then concluded that the proposition that acquired less than 0.1% popular support, would be the preferred method to manage the region. Not to mention the draconian policing methods employed by the British to keep the Arab population in compliance with the tremendously unpopular state forced upon them.
This small sample of the many blunders of the League of Nations cannot however be explained solely through incompetency or a lack of information. As very briefly explored here, it is entirely feasible that it was a deliberate effort to further the interests of European empire at the expense of global stability and the lives of millions. With this only being a highly specific commentary on a single decade of the history of Europe and America in the Middle East, it puts into context well why the Middle East may be in such a state less than a century later. Illustrating why blaming the residents of the Middle East for the lack of liberal democracies, or stable nation states, is a rather difficult position to defend when confronted with the events of the past century.
