There are moments in the Middle East when history suddenly shift gears and takes us all by surprise. Lenin knew the cadence: there are decades, he wrote, where nothing happens; and then, weeks in which decades happen. A year ago, Syria – trapped in the vortex of its civil war for almost fourteen years and virtually ignored by the rest of the world since October 7 2023 – suddenly leapt into one of those crazy weeks, leaving allies, enemies, and analysts alike blinking in the dust. Even now, a year after the astonishing fall of Damascus, the country sits like Kipling’s Tomlinson at the gates of judgement: not quite damned, not fully redeemed, suspended between heaven and hell.
Sleepers awake …
For years, as The Independent’s Bel Trew observed last December (see Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants) the world forgot about Syria – notwithstanding the courageous efforts of western and Syrian reporters and humanitarian workers who strove in perilous circumstances to bear witness. The civil war had become the background hum of the region, a grim drone many had learned to tune out as Ukraine and Gaza dominated the world stage. The regime of Hafez al Assad, brutal and immovable, bolstered by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, looked set to endure indefinitely. The jihadi rebel enclave in Idlib, though supported by Türkiye, was dismissed as a besieged hold-out. Even those who professed expertise couldn’t reliably tell you whether the war was still ongoing, who was fighting whom, or what stage the conflict had reached. It was as if the wheels of war had stopped spinning.
Then, over the space of days – eleven, to be precise – the wheels spun again. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s fighters burst from their confined redoubt with a momentum no one expected (including, it seems, themselves), sweeping through Aleppo and racing down the highway to the capital. Analysts reached instinctively for historical parallels: Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021. Analyst David Kilcullen pointed instead to Timur Kuran’s theory of the “preference cascade”: the sudden collapse of a regime that had mistaken silence for loyalty and compliance for consent. Assad’s security apparatus – omnipresent, omniscient, yet somehow oblivious – realised too late that its soldiers had no stomach left for the fight. The all-powerful giant had feet of clay.
It didn’t help that Iran, Assad’s indispensable patron, had stumbled into the most grievous strategic miscalculation of its post-1979 history. Flush with revolutionary zeal, Tehran had kicked the hornet’s nest in Lebanon, prompting Israel to pivot from Gaza to Hezbollah with stunning force. Suddenly Iran’s expeditionary assets were exhausted, its proxies over-extended, and its clerical leadership exposed as both ageing and isolated. Even the Ayatollah’s conspiratorial refrain – that the fall of Damascus was all a plot by the Great Satan, the Little Satan, and the Sultan in Ankara – couldn’t mask the fact that this was less Zionist cunning than simple imperial overreach. When the rebels came, neither Iran nor Hezbollah, nor Russia, entangled in its Ukrainian quagmire, could ride to the rescue.
But the rebels, too, were surprised. Their mandate from Ankara was modest – expand the borders of their statelet a little, test the regime’s nerve. Instead, they found themselves virtually unopposed on the road to Damascus. In an Informative article in E-zine Unherd republished below, British writer and investigative journalist Tam Hussein writes how many of the fighters interpreted the victory as divine intervention – not jihadi zealotry, but a sincere theological attempt to explain the inexplicable. The suddenness of Damascus’s collapse felt, to them, like an echo of Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca. And in a land where the eschatological imagination has always saturated politics, it didn’t take long before social media brimmed with end-times speculation. Ahmed al Shara’a – formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, with a $10 million American bounty on his head – was seen by some as “the one”, and the precursor of the Mahdi and the foretold end of days.
Yet as Hussein rightly notes, miracles make poor policy. The survival of the new Syrian administration will depend not on prophecy but on governance, and on whether Shara’a, interim president and ex-jihadi turned statesman, can transform a miraculous seizure into a sustainable state.
To his credit, he has avoided the catastrophic purges that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He has kept the civil service intact, flirted audaciously with Western diplomacy, and allowed at least the theatrical semblance of elections. He has restored the embassy in London, opened channels to Washington, even visiting the White House and played the charm-game with Gulf capitals that only recently readmitted Assad into their fold. As Hussein writes, he has shown political finesse: keeping the constitution, appointing seventy parliamentarians himself, and balancing piety with pragmatism.
But the tightrope is frayed. Sectarian wounds – Druze, Alawite, Sunni, Christian – remain raw and unstitched, with the Latakia massacres now entering their fraught judicial phase, and Israel stirring the Druze pot. Kurdish anxieties simmer: the old “Arab-first” chauvinism must be abandoned if Syria’s patchwork is ever to become a tapestry again. Foreign fighters, once lionised, now loiter between hero and hazard, implicated in sectarian atrocities. Kurds clash with Syrian forces; Turkish troops press deeper into Rojava; Israel remains the unpredictable neighbour bestride the Golan; and Iran, though weakened, is never entirely out of the game. It is not inconceivable that the forces that helped topple Assad could yet turn their sights toward Jerusalem in the belief that prophecy demands it.
And there are darker portents too – those flickering shadows that hint the wind of freedom may be blowing from the wrong quarter. The new government’s early gestures toward Islamisation – the hair-covering admonition, the curriculum purge, the dismissal of women from key posts, the torching of a Christmas tree in Hama – suggest that pro-Russia and anti-western platforms like RT and Mint may have a point when they warn that the leopard has not fully changed its theological spots. Shara’a’s declaration that elections may be four years away, the dissolution of the old constitution, and the folding of all rebel factions into state structures recall less a liberal transition than a consolidation of revolutionary power.
Meanwhile, the country remains a mosaic of mini-wars. In the north, Turkish proxies grind against Kurdish forces in Rojava. In the south, local militias continue to resist HTS’s claim to national authority. In the west, Alawite formations cling to their shrinking redoubts. To the east, Islamic State survivors eye the chaos, waiting for the prison gates to break. And overhead, as ever, the Americans and Israelis fly their competing deterrents, ensuring the war never quite ends.
So: Syria stands at the crossroads. Will Syria’s future be heaven, hell, or merely another circle of the inferno?
Optimism is possible – cautiously so. If the West can avoid its habitual fatalism, if, when sanctions are lifted, investment flows, if Turkey and Israel can be coaxed into tolerable coexistence, if Kurdish autonomy is honoured, if sectarian grievances are handled with equity and not vengeance — then Syria could, in time, become a conservatively stable hub. Shara’a’s Idlib experiment shows he can build an economy under duress.
But the inverse is equally imaginable: a Lebanon-style implosion, a Yugoslav-style partition, or a Gaza-style fortress of permanent mobilisation. As Isreali commentator and contributor to Haaretz Zvi Bar’el wrote a year ago, writes, the warm international “envelope” around Damascus is generous but tentative. Nobody quite knows where Shara’a is heading. They simply assume anyone is better than Assad – the same mistake Syrians once made about the old Ba’athi patriarch Hafez al-Assad himself.
Right now, the future’s not ours to see. Something’s happening, but we don’t know what it is, and anyone with a deep knowledge of the Middle East knows that one must expected the unexpected. The old regional wars – Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Iran’s Axis of Resistance – though seemingly on hold, have not paused to let Syria breathe. The war in Ukraine grinds into winter, the bizarre Gaza peace plan shuffles on, and there are constant political shifts in Washington. Each of these could rewrite the geopolitical chess board yet again.
Still, as Robert Fisk wrote in the final line of the final book he never lived to promote: all wars come to an end, and that’s where history restarts. Syria is restarting now – painfully, precariously, imprecisely – but restarting nonetheless.
Whether Syria walks toward heaven or hell remains to be seen. The choice – as ever in the Levant – will not be its alone.
Syria Today: Walking Through the Wreckage
A year after the Assads fell, Syria still moves through its own ruins – startled by its freedom, and half-afraid of it. The dynasty’s collapse ended the nightmare but did not usher in a dream; it simply exposed, in unforgiving daylight, the damage done over half a century of dictatorship and more than a decade of war. The smashed cities are visible to any passer-by; the deeper wreckage – the traumas, resentments, and debts of blood – is harder to map and harder still to mend.
Sednaya prison’s opened gates remain the sharpest indictment. The men who stumbled out were not just survivors but witnesses, their bodies forcing the nation to acknowledge what many had whispered and few had dared investigate. Yet even this reckoning has not united the country. Sectarian reprisals and atrocities on the coast, more atrocity and calls for Druze autonomy demands in Sweida, tribal restlessness in the south and northwest, Kurdish self-rule in the north, and Alawite fear of collective punishment keep the national psyche taut and divided. Bitterness circulates like a second economy.
The economy, meanwhile, balances on a fraying tightrope. Western aid and investment have brought cranes, reopened highways, and a flicker of commerce, but also inflation that is hollowing out households. Reconstruction glimmers like a desert mirage: real enough to chase, never close enough to touch. Corruption accompanying nepotism and patronage has survived the revolution, and many returnees discover that rebuilding a home now costs more than earning one.
Politically, the country sits in an improvised equilibrium. Al Shara’a rules as both liberator and question mark – trusted by some, tolerated by others, watched by all. His pivot toward Washington, his quiet coordination with US forces, and his break with former comrades offer a new direction, but also a gamble. Around him, sovereignty is nibbled at the edges: Israel digs deeper into Quneitra province; Türkiye tightens its grip in the Kurdish north. Liberation has shifted the map without fully restoring control over it.
So Syria stands on the threshold, like Tomlinson, neither damned nor redeemed, simply called to account. The war is over, but its aftershocks and tremors linger in regional loyalties, local vendettas and regional manoeuvres. The people are free, yet unsure of that freedom’s limits and what it asks of them. And the vast machinery of the state still creaks with old habits and temptation.
And yet – a small, highly qualified yet – Syrians are imagining a future again. Not the predetermined script of dictatorship, nor the fatalism of war, but something open, negotiable, theirs’. For a people long told that nothing changes, the mere possibility of change is its own quiet revolution. Hope is not guaranteed; neither is stability. But the impossible has already happened once, and that alone shifts the horizon.
Postscript: the strange, messianic weather of revolutions
Among the HTS fighters Tam Hussein describes, the astonishingly swift and almost bloodless collapse of Damascus could never be reduced to battlefield arithmetic. After over a decade of stalemate and slaughter, the conquest of Damascus and the fall of Assad felt too abrupt, too neat, too historically implausible to be merely human. And so they reached, perhaps instinctively, for the vocabulary of prophecy that has long circulated in the Levant: the old stories of tyrants toppled in the final days, of a just ruler rising at history’s eleventh hour, of a brief season of peace before a climactic confrontation with “the Romans,” a term that in popular imagination now stretches elastically to include Israel, America, or the West at large.
In this folk-level cosmology – not the carefully parsed doctrine of scholars, but the lived, emotional scripture of men who have lived too long fear, death and loss loss – the victory in Damascus reads like a prophetic epic ballad. When a fighter told Hussein that Syria would enjoy “ten years of peace before the war with Israel,” he was drawing from a hazy amalgam of hadith traditions and battlefield folklore to make sense if the improbable: the idea of a lull before the storm, a breathing space before the world tilts into its final reckoning. It is vernacular eschatology, shaped as much by trauma and longing as by text.
Within that register, the murmurs that Shara’a/Jolani might be “the one” carry an unmistakable Mahdist echo. No fatwas or proclamations like when Da’ish leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi famously declared the caliphate from the minbar of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque in 2014; but the emotional charge behind the phrase is unmistakabl: an intuitive reach for a Mahdi-shaped idea of the righteous restorer, the unifier, the man who appears when everything has fallen apart. It’s not that anyone literally thinks Jolani is the Mahdi; it’s that the mood of the moment makes such thoughts feel briefly within arm’s length. A silhouette on the horizon, nothing more.
And here, Syria is not unique. Revolutionary periods everywhere – the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Arab Spring even, have their magical phase — those jittery days when people begin to speak as if the world has cracked open, meaning is pouring through the seams, and events blur into myth. When a regime that seemed immovable collapses in a fortnight, people fall back on stories larger than themselves. Sudden upheaval, long suffering, and the ascent of a charismatic figure combine to crack open the ordinary world. Prophecy offers a narrative frame when history seems to be behaving like fable.
So the eschatological edge in these fighters’ conversations tells us less about doctrine and more about psychology. It’s a very human response: a form of magical thinking that arises when reality becomes too strange to process, a way of giving shape to chaos, of telling themselves that their suffering fits into a larger story. A coping mechanism, if you like – a mythic vocabulary for a moment when Damascus fell, and the ordinary rules stopped making sense and the earth seemed briefly to tilt on its axis.
A few months ago in Damascus, I discovered a medieval hospital. The door had been left slightly ajar, and I wandered in with my companion Hassan Idlibi — a rebel fighter and old friend. He hadn’t been in the Old City since the fall of Syria’s capital, exactly a year ago today. “When Damascus fell,” he told me, “we were at our lowest ebb. Even the attack on Aleppo was our last gasp. We wanted to break the stalemate. And then we just pushed and pushed, and we ended up sleeping inside the Umayyad Mosque. It was a miracle.”Idlibi, like many Syrians, did not interpret the taking of Damascus through geopolitics — but as divine intervention. This wasn’t because he was a mindless zealot. Far from it. He is one of the most well-read men I know. But, to his mind, the fall of Damascus was so sudden, so unexpected, that only the miraculous could explain it. The victory, he noted, had been achieved by those who had been motivated by Islam. Help had come from foreign fighters, the mujahideen, who travelled from across the globe to aid their co-religionists. And the campaign had been led by a former jihadi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president of Syria. At the time, the old al-Qaeda operative, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million American bounty on his head.
After more than a decade of slaughter, no one had expected the capital to collapse. Assad, then president, had seemed like a stubborn wart: unpleasant but immovable. Jolani’s rebel enclave in the northern city of Idlib looked too small, too besieged, to pose a serious threat — though in fact it was performing better economically than inflation-ravaged Damascus, helped along by a reliable flow of Turkish hard currency. I myself expected the rebels to negotiate. What leverage did they have? Yet this rebel government, roughly the size of Croydon, took over the instruments of state, and since then has avoided stumbling into a new civil war.
The unexpected and largely peaceful victory was attributed to piety, prophecy, steadfastness. Some have even compared the final conquest of Damascus to Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630. The idea of a “miracle”, here, is not mere rhetoric — it shapes political expectations. Some Syrians, at least based on my social media, think all this makes Sharaa “the one”, with my Facebook messages and WhatsApp chats awash with prophetic readings of the present. One believed Syria would now enjoy 10 years of peace before the war with Israel begins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was the prelude to the end of times. After all, so-called “Greater Syria” — encompassing much of the Levant — plays an important role in the Syrian and indeed Muslim sacral imagination. It is where prophets walked and is the place where many of the end of times narratives will play themselves out.
Yet if the fall of Damascus seemed miraculous to many Syrians, the survival of the new administration will depend less on providence than on governance. Despite his past, Sharaa has so far demonstrated an unexpected level of political finesse. He has kept the constitution, held elections — albeit with 70 seats appointed by himself — and all the while has acted the statesman. He is savvy enough to not mind having President Trump spray his latest fragrance on him in the Oval Office, or Syrian Jewish rabbis blessing him.
Sharaa has made some promising early decisions. By keeping the civil service intact, he has avoided the catastrophic purge that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He should continue recruiting highly-educated young Syrians from the diaspora — people familiar with Western administrations and political norms. Even so, the administration still has a tendency to fear scrutiny and behaves as if under siege. It should welcome a regulated free press, which would expose blind spots, not undermine authority. The British press has reported that Jonathan Powell’s Inter Mediate is working with the new government. This should be welcomed rather than criticised — not only for reasons of conflict resolution and soft power, but for its value in statecraft and building institutional capacity.
Sharaa’s priorities for the coming year are clear. The country remains immensely fragile, caught in a regional tug-of-war between Israel and its neighbours, and divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The situation could easily drift into a reprise of Lebanon’s civil war. Sharaa’s first task is therefore to mend Syria’s sectarian and ethnic fractures with a sense of equity. The trials that began this month over the coastal massacres in Latakia will be an important test of how the country intends to move forward. The Druze and Alawite communities — already bruised by conflict and mistrust — require justice delivered without the language of sectarianism.
Meanwhile, Kurdish anxieties must be addressed by ending the Arab-first ideology of the old regime. Syria has never been a purely Arab country: even its favourite son, Saladin, the builder of that hospital I visited and whose grave in Damascus still draws multitudes, was a Kurd. Last year’s tentative permission for Kurdish new year celebrations (Newroz) suggests that a more pluralist future is possible. Yet it remains unclear how far Kurdish cultural expression will be allowed to develop. Already this month, exchanges of fire between Syrian government forces and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units under Kurdish command show how fragile the situation is.
Perhaps the most difficult balancing act involves the foreign fighters who fought on Sharaa’s side. They carry immense symbolic weight in Syrian society — and are the cause of immense fear in the West. Many are ready to resume normal life, but others still see themselves as Islam’s warriors. Recent clashes in the Idlib countryside involving French foreign fighters reflect anxieties that any rapprochement with the West might see them handed over to their home governments. The image of Sharaa standing beside Trump, receiving a symbolic “anointing” of his new fragrance, alarms them even if such engagement is politically necessary.
Granting these fighters legal status, regularising their papers, integrating some into the national army or demobilising them with stipends and educational opportunities — not unlike the GI Bill for US veterans — could go a long way toward neutralising one of Syria’s most volatile pressures.
Then there is the conundrum of Israel. On this, Sharaa has cultivated deliberate ambiguity. At the United Nations, Syria has repeatedly noted its restraint regarding Israel’s illegal strikes on Syrian territory, yet Sharaa has resisted pressure to join Trump’s flagship Abraham Accords. Signing them now would be political suicide. But ambiguity buys him room to manoeuvre — and time to consolidate the state. The question is how long this can last.
For its part, the West has worked to prevent Syria from sliding into another civil war — one that would inevitably spill over into Europe, potentially replaying the exodus of 2015. With regional partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Western governments have effectively restrained Israeli escalation, aware that renewed instability would eventually reach Jerusalem’s door. It’s not impossible to imagine rebels, having overthrown a “pro-Western stooge” like Sharaa and aided by foreign fighters, actually marching toward Israel, convinced that “the infidels” will never allow them to determine their own future. As they did in Damascus, so too — in their imagination — must they do in Jerusalem.
Thus far Sharaa has governed with surprising openness. He has welcomed Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, met American diplomats and General David Petraeus, played basketball with US soldiers, and cooperated in counter-terrorism operations. He has also restored relations with London, with foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani reopening the Syrian embassy.
If Western governments refuse to work with him because of his Islamist roots, they will share responsibility should Syria fracture again. Sharaa’s past is not erased; he may remain an uncomfortable partner. But what is the alternative? That he be excluded from political life and drift into a Castro- or Maduro-like role on the sidelines? If the Saudi Crown Prince can be brought in from the cold after the Khashoggi murder, then almost anything is possible.
Here I recall a meeting with former Saudi spy chief Turki al-Faisal in his South Kensington apartment after the release of his memoir. Faisal lamented how his advice went unheeded after the Afghan-Soviet war. He had urged the international community to launch something akin to a Marshall Plan — an investment programme to stabilise Afghanistan. Had that happened, the region might not have unravelled. Instead, the country collapsed into years of civil war.
Likewise, fully lifting sanctions on Syria and providing a major investment programme, coupled with training and cultural exchange, could restrain the country’s more radical elements. Reining in Israeli escalation, de-escalating the Druze conflict, and mediating between the SDF and Damascus would all help prevent new wars. On this, the West could also spare itself a future security headache by helping Damascus regularise or demobilise foreign fighters rather than leaving them to drift. This would all help to displace messianism.
What, then, would such investment bring the West, beyond avoiding another gaping wound on its eastern flank? For sure, it will not turn Damascus into another Beirut, a place for foreign journalists to party, nor into a Deano-friendly Dubai. Syria will likely remain socially conservative, more like Muscat in Oman. Given time, however, it could become a commercial hub with a distinct cultural life, just as it has been for much of its epic history. This isn’t mere optimism: Sharaa turned Idlib, once a distant town, into a magnet for Damascenes seeking commercial opportunity. Investment now would bring the West a friendly partner, business prospects and political influence. The choice is stark. With support, Syria could become a kind of West Germany: rebuilt, integrated, and stable. Without it, the country risks becoming a new Jerusalem — a battleground charged with fire and prophecy.
Tam Hussein is an award winning investigative journalist and writer. His work has been recognised by the Royal Television Society Awards.
A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”
American poet and author Stephen Crane, 1899
Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic.
But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction.
In what can only be described as a melancholy case of selective blindness, the gaze of western mainstream and social media, distracted by other conflicts and causes has been turned away. The global conscience has appeared unmoved. The numbers are obscene, the silence more so.
El Fasher, in Sudan’s far western province of Darfur, is once again the world’s unacknowledged abyss. The UN warns of genocide; videos show unarmed men executed in cold blood, hospitals shelled, aid workers vanished, women violated, and civilians starved into submission. The Rapid Support Forces – the Janjaweed (colloquial Arabic for “devil riders”) in new fatigues – are methodically annihilating ethnic groups such as the Masalit. El Fasher was the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur and its capture marks a milestone in the two yea long civil war, giving the RSF de facto control of more than a quarter of the territory.
Why the silence?
Because Sudan resists the narrative template that powers modern activism. There is no imperial villain, no clear coloniser or colonised, no simple choreography of oppression and resistance. The slaughter of black Africans does not fit the anti-Western moral geometry upon which contemporary protest movements are built. Sudanese bodies fall outside the moral lens of the global North even as they fall in their thousands.
This is not to rank suffering but to note the selectivity of empathy. Sudan’s tragedy lacks the aesthetic of victimhood that flatters Western guilt. The WHO pleads for hospitals; journalists beg for their detained colleagues. It all sounds chillingly familiar – yet no outrage follows. Perhaps because Sudan offers no convenient villain, no redemption arc, no social currency.
At the heart of the moral selectivity of the globalised conscience lies outrage as performance, empathy as branding. Sudan exposes the performative element of protest: empathy contingent on narrative utility. Its tragedy has no liturgy, no public ritual of belonging. It shows what our age truly worships: not justice, but self-expression masquerading as it. And in El Fasher’s unmarked graves lies the measure of this hypocrisy – a mute testimony to the moral vanity of a world that rages for Palestine, hashtags for Ukraine, and sleeps through Sudan.
In That Howling Infinite has touched on this dissonance before in The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality We wrote back then, in December 2023, when the Sudanese civil war has been raging for the best part of a year: “Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims … There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists”.
Journey to an civil war
American journalist Anne Applebaum wrote very long essay the August edition of The Atlantic: Sudan … the most nihilistic war ever. She believes that Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed. Her essay reads like a missive from a civilisation already past the point of rescue. The country she describes is less a state than a geography of ruin — a landscape where the coordinates of morality, nationhood, and even information itself have come apart. The title is no exaggeration; it is diagnosis and prognosis both. Sudan, she argues, is not an aberration but a preview — the shape of the world when the liberal order finally collapses, when wars are fought not for gods or ideas but for bullion and bodies.
Sudan’s civil war began, at least formally, as a contest between two men: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the regular army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who rose from the Janjaweed militias to command the Rapid Support Forces. Both were products of the same regime; both were once partners in repression. When they turned upon each other in 2023, the result was not ideological conflict but a kind of mutual devouring. Each accused the other of betrayal; each proceeded to loot, starve, and bomb the very population he claimed to protect.
Applebaum’s Sudan is not one country but many — an archipelago of fiefdoms and frontiers, each governed by whoever holds the nearest airstrip or gold mine. And gold, indeed, is the keyword: the new oil of an old desert. Sudan possesses vast deposits of it, and with them a vast invitation to corruption. Wagner mercenaries mine and smuggle it northward to fund Russia’s war in Ukraine. The United Arab Emirates bankrolls Hemedti’s RSF in exchange for access and influence. Egypt and Chad manoeuvre for position; Iran quietly re-enters the game. The Sudanese warlords themselves fight not to win the nation but to control the veins of the earth — the alluvial goldfields of Darfur and the Nile Basin that glitter beneath the dust like a curse.
Western governments, overstretched and inward-turned, offer gestures in place of policy. Applebaum notes that the world’s great democracies — once self-appointed custodians of human rights — now behave like distracted landlords. There is a knock at the door, another tenant murdered in the basement, but the owner is on the phone about something else.
In this sense, Sudan is less an anomaly than a mirror. It shows us what happens when international law becomes theatre, when moral outrage is rationed by proximity and profit. It is not merely a humanitarian disaster but a philosophical one: a demonstration that without belief — in justice, in shared reality, in the notion that human suffering still obliges response — politics decays into predation.
Applebaum’s prose, always measured, carries a note of exhausted mourning. The old ideological world — that twentieth-century drama of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy — at least believed in something, even if those beliefs destroyed millions. Today’s warlords believe in nothing at all. They are not even tyrants in the grand style; they are contractors of chaos, CEOs of slaughter, men who weaponise hunger for leverage and sell access to ruins.
What makes her essay so haunting is that Sudan’s nihilism feels contagious. The war may be geographically distant, but morally it is next door. The same disintegration of purpose infects the international response — the shrugging cynicism, the moral fatigue, the slow erosion of empathy. Applebaum’s Sudan is what remains when the “rules-based order” becomes a slogan muttered by people who no longer believe it themselves.
Coda: A Mirror in the Sand
The desert, Applebaum implies, has turned into a mirror of the world’s soul — reflecting its avarice, its indifference, its slow retreat from meaning.
What lingers after Applebaum’s account is not simply pity for Sudan, though that would be reason enough, but unease — the feeling that the world’s moral compass has slipped its pole and is spinning uselessly in our hands. Sudan is not the exception; it is the precedent. It is the world without illusion: borders drawn in dust, governments as rackets, truth dissolved into overlapping transparencies.
Once, wars were waged for empire, for creed, for revolution — each claiming, however falsely, to serve a higher cause. Now they are fought for metal, for markets, for motion itself. The soldiers are mercenaries, the civilians collateral, the nations staging grounds for someone else’s ledger. Applebaum’s overlapping maps are more than an image of Sudan’s confusion; they are an x-ray of a civilisation that no longer shares a moral reference point. We are all now drawing our own maps, colouring the world according to our comfort zones, overlaying them until the truth beneath is invisible.
And so Sudan becomes both tragedy and parable. Its gold mines glitter like tombs of the old order — the liberal dream of rules, rights, and reason — while above them drones and scavengers circle. A century ago, Conrad called it the horror; today it is merely another tab on a newsfeed. The anarchy is not confined to Khartoum or Darfur. It is spreading quietly through the arteries of global indifference, through our own fatigue, our own appetite for distraction.
Postscript: selective empathy in a world of sorrow
Comparing the international outcry over Gaza to the silence on Sudan has been condemned as intellectual dishonesty. One comment on this post ran this:
“The mainstream media can stir outrage on any topic when its political masters and financial backers want it to. Why has it not done so in this instance? Follow the money is one rule of thumb. I assume it suits the powers that be to let the slaughter continue. I hope more people are inspired to become activists against this dreadful situation, but public opinion tends to follow the narrative manufactured by the media more than impel it. When it comes to pro-Palestinian activism it is the story of a long hard grind of dedicated protestors to get any traction at all against the powerful political and media interests which have supported the Israeli narrative and manufactured global consent for the genocide of Palestinians over many years. And still, although the tide is gradually turning, the West supports Israel to the hilt and crushes dissent. Using the silence in the media and in the streets over the slaughter in Sudan as an excuse to try and invalidate pro-Palestinian activism is a low blow and intellectually dishonest”.
This particular response is articulate and impassioned, but it also illustrates precisely the reflexive narrowing of moral vision that the comparison between Gaza and Sudan was meant to illuminate. The argument hinges on a familiar syllogism: that Western media outrage is never organic but always orchestrated (“follow the money”), that silence on Sudan therefore reflects elite indifference rather than public apathy, and that to highlight that silence is somehow to attack or “invalidate” the legitimacy of pro-Palestinian activism. It is a neat, closed circuit—morally reassuring, rhetorically watertight, but intellectually fragile.
For one thing, the claim that outrage over Gaza is a product of “a long hard grind” of dissenters battling pro-Israel hegemony may be partly true, but it fails to account for the asymmetry of moral attention. Why, if media outrage can be manufactured at will, does it attach so selectively? Why is one tragedy magnified until it becomes the world’s moral touchstone, while another, numerically and humanly no less immense, barely registers? This is not to invalidate solidarity with Gaza—it is to interrogate the mechanisms by which empathy itself is distributed, channelled, and constrained.
The “follow the money” thesis also misses something subtler and more disturbing. Western silence on Sudan is not an act of conspiracy but of exhaustion: no villains clearly marked, no sides easily named, no tidy narrative of good and evil to moralise upon. Sudan’s war—fragmented, internecine, post-ideological—does not lend itself to hashtags or flags on Instagram profiles. It is a horror too complex to package and too distant to own. By contrast, Gaza offers clarity, identity, and the reassuring architecture of blame: victims and oppressors, martyrs and monsters, the colonial morality play in perfect focus.
Thus, when critics accuse those who draw this comparison of “intellectual dishonesty,” they mistake the argument. To juxtapose Gaza and Sudan is not to weigh one body count against another, or to diminish Palestinian suffering. It is to expose the limits of our moral imagination – how empathy becomes performative when it is contingent on narrative simplicity or political fashion.
In Sudan, the gold glitters under the rubble. Warlords, mercenaries, and foreign patrons all claw for it while millions starve. In Gaza, the ruins are televised, moralised, and weaponised. Both are human catastrophes, but only one has an audience.
The point, then, is not that activists for Gaza are wrong—it is that they are lonely. If their struggle truly seeks a universal human justice, it must be capacious enough to include Darfur, Khartoum, El Fasher—to grieve what the cameras do not show. Otherwise, our compassion becomes another form of exceptionalism: the selective virtue of those who need their tragedies to fit the script.
In truth, to compare Gaza and Sudan is not to rank suffering or diminish solidarity, but to expose the limits of our moral bandwidth. Gaza compels because its story is legible—villains, victims, a script the world knows by heart. Sudan confounds because it is too fractured, too many nations within one, too little meaning to hold. There is no clear narrative, only greed, hunger, and gold buried beneath the ruins.
The real dishonesty is not in caring for Gaza, but in mistaking selective empathy for universal conscience. If our outrage depends on simplicity, we risk turning compassion into performance – mourning only what the cameras show, and averting our eyes from what they cannot.
The featured image of this post is a profile in crystal of Kemal Atatürk that sits on my bookshelf as a reminder of my late friend and academic colleague Mehmet Naim Turfan. Naim, like millions of his compatriots, harboured a deep affection and respect for the legacy of Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye and its first president. It was gifted to me by His wife soon after his passing by his wife Barbara. His doctoral thesis was published posthumously in 2000 as Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Miliary and Ottoman Collapse. He is cited several times in the book that is the subject of this article. I thought of Naim often while reading the book and writing what follows.
Enver Pasha, soldier, politician and member of the troika that ruled the Ottoman Empire before and during WW1
Ottoman Endgame
Many believe that prior to the outbreak of World War 1 in August 1914, Europe had been at peace. In matter of fact, brutal and bloody little wars had raged in Eastern Europe three years prior, whilst Italy fought the Ottoman Empire for Tripoli and Cyrenaica, both now modern Libya and yet also presently two warring parts of a fractured whole and now being triggered by the aftermath of equally nasty little wars in the same lands in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The Ottoman Empire’s entry into alliance with the Central Powers in 1915 against the Entente of Britain, France and Russia was the direct outcome of what we know refer to generically as The Balkan Wars – which aided and abetted by Russia, saw the emergence of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, they were the beginning of what we might now refer to as The Wars of the Ottoman Succession. They are not over.
The empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers against the Entente of Britain France and Russia was a devious, drawn-out business as it sought to take advantage of its potential allies in recovering why it lost in the preceding Balkan Wars that had deprived it of its European provinces,
Few have told the story of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Türkiye as well as English historian Sean McMeekin in his geographically sprawling and historically enthralling book The Ottoman Endgame. He juxtaposes military operations in the empire with those on Europe’s eastern and western fronts, demonstrating how, in the shifting fortunes of war in Europe, each impacted the other from the first offensives in France and on the eastern front to the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue sets the scene well in a brief but compelling review (published in full below with some excellent pictures, along with a article by the author himself):
”For the historian of the first world war, the Ottoman theatre is a blur of movement compared to the attrition of the western front. Its leading commanders might race off to contest Baku and entirely miss the significance of events in the Balkans, while the diffuse nature of operations tended to encourage initiative, not groupthink. The war of the Ottoman succession, as Sean McMeekin calls it, was furthermore of real consequence, breaking up an empire that had stifled community hatreds, and whose absence the millions who have fled sectarian conflict in our age may rue …
For the Ottomans, the “great war” of western historiography was part of a much longer period of conflict and revolution, and arguably not even its climax. The process started with the collapse of the Ottomans’ Balkan empire – encouraged by Russia, moderated by Britain – and it brought to power the militaristic regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP. When Turkey entered the European war on 10 November 1914, Ottoman innocence was long gone, the army fully mobilised, the people benumbed by loss and refugees and the empire hanging in the balance. And yet, for the CUP and its triumvirate of leading pashas, the Young Turk troika of Enver, Talat and Djemal, the moment was as fraught with opportunity as it was with danger. On the opportunity side of the ledger was the prospect of riding Germany’s coat tails to victory, overturning the Balkan reverses and winning back provinces in the east from the old enemy, Russia. Enver, the CUP’s diminutive generalissimo, even spoke of appealing to Muslim sentiment and marching all the way to India.
For the Russians, the game was about winning Constantinople (or Tsargrad, as they presumptuously called it) and with it unimpeded access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus; it was with “complete serenity”, Tsar Nicholas II informed his subjects, that Russia took on “this ancient oppressor of the Christian faith and of all Slavic nations”
The European war on the eastern and western fronts was characterized by attrition and stalemate, but that waged by the Ottomans and the Russians, and soon, the British and French, was in contrast, highly mobile and constantly shifting, with the exception perhaps of the allied assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula which very soon resembled the trench warfare and brutal but futile offensives that characterized the Western Front. It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the war fought in the Middle East in terms of its territorial extent. From Baghdad to Baku, Gallipoli to Gaza, the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Caspian Sea. It was waged across European and Asian Ottoman lands including present day Greece, Bulgaria and Romania in the west, in the Caucasus in the east, in present day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and Iran, and in the south in present day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.
Though the Sultan departed, and with him, the Islamic Caliphate, and most of the empire’s non-Turkish lands – were lost, under the leadership of former Ottoman commander and war hero Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Anatolian heartland resisted and ultimately repelled invading foreign armies, and the Turkish state he created endures today as an influential participant in world affairs.
Casting new light on old narratives
McMeekin, writes de Bellaigue, is an old-fashioned researcher who draws his conclusions on the basis of the documentary record. In the case of a conflict between Ottoman Turkey and Germany on one side, and Russia, Britain and France on the other, and involving Arabs, Armenians and Greeks, this necessitates linguistic talent and historical nous of a high order. McMeekin is at home in the archives of all major parties to the conflict and his accounts of some of the more contested episodes carry a ring of finality. Access to previously closed Russian and Turkish archives has provided new and potentially controversial insights into accepted narratives regarding the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging long accepted narratives, he addresses three of the most enduring shibboleths of the First World War.
He jumps right in even before he begins his wide-ranging story, leaves hanging in the air like a predator drone until he returns to it in chronologically due course. The Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 – the bête noir of most progressive narratives of the modern Middle East, and to many ill-informed partisans, the causus bello of the intractable Arab Israeli conflict – was not the brainchild of perfidious Albion and duplicitous France, but rather a plan for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire concocted by the foreign minister of Imperial Russia. France’s Monsieur François-George Picot and Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes played second and third violin to the “third man” Sergei Sazonov. Both Russia and France had for decades sought to establish their political, strategic and economic interests at the expense of the so-called “sick man of Europe”, an ostensibly terminal invalid who throughout the nineteenth century, had experienced many deathbed recoveries. Czar Nicholas II, in common with his Russian Orthodox predecessors, dreamt of bringing Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the heart of the orthodox patriarchate, or Tsargrad into the empire. It was no coincidence that the infamous Sykes Picot pact was outed by Russia’s Bolshevik regime after the collapse of the Czarist regime to discombobulate the revolution’s foremost European enemies.
The second icon of “received history” in McMeekin’s sights, is one Australia’s foundation stories – the ill-starred Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 and particularly, the the ANZAC’s Gallipoli legend. It was, from McMeekin’s perspective, a misconceived, poorly planned endeavour to capture the Ottoman capital, to relieve pressure on Russian forces engaged in bitter fighting in Eastern Anatolia, and potentially, to knock the Ottomans out of the war. Contrary to popular conceptions, the British were not exactly enthused by the idea. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s preference was for an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the empire – the port of Alexandretta in Ottoman Syria (now Turkish Antakya), with its strategic and logistic proximity to the Hijaz railway and the hinterland of the Levant. One indisputable fact about Gallipoli is that it assured the ascent Mustafa Kemal, a key commander who had already distinguished himself in the Balkan Wars, who would go on to conduct a fighting retreat of Ottoman Armies through what is now present-day Palestine and Syria, lead Turkish forces to victory in the war of liberation that followed, and, as Kemal Atatürk, would become the founder of modern Türkiye.
The third widely held narrative concerns the Armenian Genocide. Unlike the rulers of modern Türkiye, McMeekin does not deny its occurrence. Nor does he downplay or even ignore it, as does Israel for the idiosyncratic reason that it potentially minimises the horrors of the Shoah. Rather, he places it in the context of events in the empire’s Anatolian heartland. Two predominantly Armenian provinces in Eastern Anatolia were home to active nationalist independence movements, and these gave tacit and actual support to the Russian forces encroaching on the empire from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea (in present day Azerbaijan and Georgia). Armenian militias fought alongside Russian forces on the Caucasian front whilst partisans operated behind ottoman lines, and cities, town and villages were actually “liberated”, fostering fears in the Istanbul government of an treasonous” fifth column”. McMeekin acknowledges the death toll of what we now recognise the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity which was spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and implemented primarily through the mass deportation and murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Whilst most probably died of inhumane treatment, exposure, privation and starvation, unknown numbers were murdered.
Kemal Pasha and Ottoman offices at Gallipoli
Parallels
Reading The Ottoman Endgame, I was reminded often of his compatriot Anthony Beevor’s harrowing tale of the Russian Revolution (reviewed in In That Howling Infinite’s Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. That Revolution and the end of the Ottoman Empire converged. McMeekin notes that with regard to the war in Anatolia and the Caucasus, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Czarist Russia and the Central Powers, was poisoned chalice for both Russia and Turkey and as significant as any of the treaties that followed the end of the war.
I found it fascinating that many individuals who were to play a significant part in the Russian Civil war also feature in Ottoman Endgame. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the imperial Black Sea fleet and General Anton Deniken, commander of Russian forces on the Caucasian front, became leaders of the Tsarist cause and were to command the counter-revolutionary White forces against the Red Army with the Siberian People’s Army and the Volunteer Army in Ukraine.
None were more prominent or as controversial in western narratives, however, as Winston Churchill. As noted above, McMeekin lays to rest the notion that the Dardanelles campaign and Gallipoli were Churchill’s sole doing and his folly – though he did blame himself later on and has been pilloried for it ever since. Ironically, once disgraced, and having volunteered to serve on the Western Front, at the end of the war, he was brought back into Lloyd George’s cabinet as Secretary of State for War. There, he advised against military intervention against Kemal’s nationalist forces and indeed mused about the option of dumping the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot dispensation imposed on the moribund empire’s Arab provinces after the armistice and of restoring the prewar territorial status quo, a kind of circumscribed Ottoman Redux. And yet, as civil war broke out and spread in the nascent Soviet Union, he was alone of his cabinet colleagues in advocating for a full-on allied intervention. Critics claimed that he dreamt, – though some believed that he fantasized – about of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers, and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats. It is not without reason that admirers and critics alike would agree that Winston had more positions than the Karma Sutra.
The Russian Revolutions – there were two, in February and October 1917 – and the Civil War that followed it, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire followed by foreign intervention, the war of liberation, and the creation and endurance of Türkiye can be said to have defined the contours of modern Middle Eastern geopolitics, setting the stage for many if not most of the conflicts that have inflicted the region since, including three Gulf wars, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, the Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, and the Arab-Israel conflict, arguably the most intractable conflict of modern times. Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war.
In the wake of the fall of the Russian Empire, the Twentieth Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”. Nor was it kind to the heirs and successors of the Ottoman Empire. Though the tyranny and oppression and the death and destruction wrought by rulers and outsiders upon the lands and peoples of the Middle East has been significantly less than that endured by the people of Eastern Europe and Russia, the region would fit Snyder’s sombre soubriquet.
TE Lawrence, General Allenby, Kemal Ataturk, and Ben Gurion
Clone of Russia returns to a Middle East it never really left
Sykes and Picot have taken the blame but actually it was a Russian who drew the map of the Middle East, writes Sean McMeekin
The World Today, 7 December 2018
To judge from press coverage, the emergence of Islamic State has brought about a cartographic revolution in the Middle East. With the borders of Syria and Iraq in flux, journalists have resurrected the legend of Sykes-Picot, wherein Britain and France are said to have divided up the Ottoman empire between them in an agreement signed 100 years ago, in May 1916. Russia’s intervention in Syria, by upstaging the United States and her allies, seems in this view to be completing the rout of western influence in the Middle East, putting the final nail in the coffin of ‘Sykes-Picot’.
Rarely has history been more thoroughly abused. In reality, none of the contentious post-Ottoman borders of the Middle East was settled by Sykes and Picot in 1916: not the Iraq-Kuwait frontier notoriously crossed by Saddam’s armies in 1990, not those separating the Palestinian mandate from (Trans) Jordan and Syria, not the highly contested and still-in-flux Israeli/Palestinian partition of 1948, nor, in the most relevant example from today, those separating Syria from Iraq.
To take an obvious example from recent headlines, Mosul, the Iraqi city whose capture in June 2014 led Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Islamic State to proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim, was actually assigned to French Syria in the 1916 agreement.
Journalists are even more spectacularly wrong in describing the Ottoman partition agreement as exclusively (or even primarily) a British-French affair, omitting the driving role played by Tsarist Russia and her Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.
The final terms of what should more accurately be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement were actually hashed out in the Russian capital of Petrograd in the spring of 1916, against the backdrop of crushing Russian victories over the Turks at Erzurum, Erzincan, Batum, and Trabzon (the British were reeling, having been humiliated at Gallipoli and in Iraq, where an expeditionary force would shortly surrender).
The conquest of northeastern Turkey in 1916 left Russia, unlike her grasping allies, in possession of most of the Ottoman territory she was claiming – barring only Constantinople (called ‘Tsargrad’ by the Russians), which still needed to be taken.
At the dawn of 1917, Tsarist Russia was poised to inherit the crown jewels of the Ottoman empire, including Constantinople, the Straits, Armenia, and Kurdistan, all promised to her in the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement. Along the Black Sea coast, Russian engineers were building a rail line from Batum to Trabzon, with the latter city a supply base for the Caucasian Army, poised for a spring assault on Sivas and Ankara. With Russia enjoying virtually uncontested naval control of the Black Sea, preparations were underway for an amphibious strike at the Bosphorus, spearheaded by a specially created ‘Tsargradskii Regiment’.
After watching her allies try, and fail, to seize the Ottoman capital during the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign of 1915 (when Sazonov had first put forward Russia’s sovereign claim on Constantinople and the Straits), Russia was now poised to seize the prize for herself – weather permitting, in June or July 1917.
Of course, it did not turn out that way. After the February Revolution of 1917, mutinies spread through the Russian army and navy, including the Black Sea fleet, just as it was poised to strike.
In a remarkable and little-known coincidence, on the very day the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov, first aroused the anger of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks by refusing to renounce Russia’s territorial claims on the Ottoman empire – April 4, 1917 – a Russian naval squadron approached the Bosphorus in ‘grand style’, including destroyers, battle cruisers, and three converted ocean liner-carriers which launched seaplanes to inspect Constantinople’s defences from the air. The amphibious plans were not abandoned until fleet commander Admiral AV Kolchak threw his sword overboard on June 21 during a mutiny. Even after ‘revolutionary sailors’ had taken control of the Black Sea fleet, a Russian amphibious strike force landed on the Turkish coastline as late as August 23, 1917, in one last sting by the old Tsargrad beast.
After the Bolsheviks took power, Russia collapsed into civil war, which left her prostrate, at Germany’s mercy. By signing a ‘separate peace’ with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia forfeited her treaty claims to Armenia, Kurdistan, Constantinople, and the Straits, throwing the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 into chaos, even as new claimants were appearing on the scene, such as Italy and Greece – not to mention local actors: Jewish, Arab, and Armenian troops were attached as national ‘Legions’ to General Allenby’s mostly British army as it rolled up Palestine and Syria. These forces, along with French, Italian, and Greek expeditionary forces sent after the war, and the Turkish nationalists who regrouped under Mustafa Kemal in Ankara to oppose them, would determine the final post-Ottoman borders in a series of small wars between 1918 and 1922, with scarcely a nod to the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement.
While Russia’s forfeiture of her claims in 1918 was welcome, in a selfish sense, to the other players vying for Ottoman territory, it was not necessarily a positive one for the region. In the absence of Russian occupying troops to police the settlement, the
Allies, in 1919, offered Russia’s territorial share, now defined (in deference to Woodrow Wilson) as mandates, to the United States – only for the Senate to vote down the Versailles Treaty, rendering the arrangement moot. Lacking Russian or American troops as ‘muscle’, the Allies leaned on weaker proxies such as the Italians and, more explosively, local Greeks and Armenians, which aroused the anger of the Muslim masses and spurred the Turkish resistance led by Kemal (the future Atatürk). Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, too, could only lament the vacuum left behind by the departing Russians, which left them to face Turkish wrath alone.
Soviet Russia re-emerged as a player in the Middle East fairly quickly, not least as Mustafa Kemal’s key diplomatic partner during his wars against the West and its proxies from 1920-22. In a reminder of the enduring prerogatives of Russian foreign policy, the Cold War kicked into high gear when Stalin made a play for Kars, Ardahan, and the Ottoman Straits in 1946: these moves, along with the British withdrawal from Greece, Turkey, and Palestine, inspired the Truman doctrine.
In an eerily similar replay of the history of 1917-18, the collapse of Soviet power in 1991 led Moscow to turn inward, withdrawing from the Middle East and inaugurating a period of US and western hegemony in the region, which turned out no less well than the Middle Eastern free-for-all of 1918-22. A prostrate and impoverished Russia put up no objection during the First Gulf War of 1991, and did little more than sputter during the Iraq War of 2003. Russia’s recovery of strength and morale in the Putin years led, almost inevitably, to her return in force to the Middle East – from which, in reality, she never truly left.
The Russian return to the region, along with Turkey’s increasingly overt hostility over her Syrian intervention, resurrects historical patterns far, far older than Sykes-Picot. For centuries, the Ottoman empire was the primary arena of imperial ambition for the Tsars, even as Russians were the most feared enemies of the Turks. In many ways, the Crimean War of 1853-56, which saw western powers (Britain, France, and an opportunistic Piedmont-Sardinia) unleash an Ottoman holy war against the Tsar to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Middle East, is a far more relevant analogy to the present crisis in Syria than the pseudo-historical myths of 1916. It is time we put the Sykes-Picot legend in the dustbin where it belongs.
Diplomatic carve-up: the third man
In David Lean’s 1962 film, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a cynical British official explains how the carcass of the Ottoman Empire was to be divided at the end of the First World War under the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
‘Mr Sykes is an English civil servant. Monsieur Picot is a French civil servant. Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and they agreed that after the war, France and England would share the Turkish Empire, including Arabia. They signed an agreement, not a treaty, sir. An agreement to that effect.’
This summary of wartime diplomacy has proved long-lived. It encapsulates the less than honest dealings of the British government with the Arabs – who wanted independence after being liberated from Turkish domination, rather than rule by the European colonial powers – but it leaves out the key figure in the deliberations, Sergei Sazonov, Russian foreign minister, 1910-1916.
Sazonov was one of the most significant diplomats both before and during the Great War. It was thanks to his adroit manipulation that Britain and its allies came to accept that Russia would gain the Ottoman capital Constantinople, in the event of an Allied victory, an outcome that Britain had tried for decades to prevent.
At the talks in the Russian capital Petrograd in 1916, the British and French emissaries were far lesser agents of empire than their host.
Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted linguist, travel writer and Conservative politician, but no top-flight diplomat. As for François Georges-Picot, he was an experienced diplomat and lawyer and noted advocate for a greater Syria under French rule.
But with France having no troops in the eastern theatre of war, he had to accept Russia’s demand to swallow up large parts of what is now eastern Turkey, but which Paris had set out to claim.
Sykes died of influenza in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, where Sazanov represented the White Russians. He died in Nice in 1927
Legal Legacy, WordPress August 6, 2016 by rhapsodyinbooks
Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe” to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm.
A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative.
Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled.
We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.
Winston Churchill in 1914
At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.”
Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, 1915
The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia.
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey.
McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described.
Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.
Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2015
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
L Cohen
The second coming is certainly interesting. President Donald Trump doing everything he said he’d do – in spades.
His proposal for the reconstruction of the destroyed enclave of Gaza is, as Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu says, out of the box. It looks like a case of “you guys have had years to sort this out for yourselves! Now let a very stable genius and the greatest nation in the universe to have a go”.
But is it an imperial tantrum or an actual initiative? As Israeli commentator Alon Pinkas states in the article republished below, it is incomprehensible, impractical, illogical, unviable – and illegal. He writes:
“So what does Trump want? Distraction. He thrives in the chaos and constant distractions he creates … Trump is a preeminent agent of chaos. That’s a trademark he has always paraded, boastfully and defiantly. As he said he would, he is actively generating and promoting chaos in America, discord within alliances, and is out to undermine the world order. Agents of chaos sow chaos. It’s that simple. They instill discordance, confusion, controversy and uncertainty. That’s a modus operandi, not a tailored policy or crisis management technique. Agents of chaos and anarchy are by definition out to disrupt the status quo by floating outrageous ideas, based on a simple principle: Everyone viscerally understands the status quo has exhausted its usefulness, more-of-the-same doesn’t work anymore”.
Juxtaposed to this article, we also republish an opinion piece by British broadcaster and journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti. He reckons that Trump’s proposal is at once breathtaking and groundbreaking. I’d like to have some of what he is smoking! But then again, maybe not …
Trump said in the Oval Office that he wants Palestinians to leave Gaza, and that ideally they would not return to the war-torn region. But the ambitious plan is not about to be implemented. Gazans, who survived 15 months of punishing attacks by Israel, largely don’t want to live in exile, and Trump isn’t going to send US troops to push almost 2 million people out of the Strip. Nor will Egypt and Jordan go along with it, despite Trump’s confidence that their reliance on US aid and military support gives him enough leverage to push them to take in massive numbers of Gazan refugees. For both countries, Trump’s proposal crosses red lines.
It is all probably a ploy to “change the game”, and perhaps, to strong arm the wealthy Gulf Arabs into financing Gaza’s reconstruction – though not a dollar will be offered by anyone until Hamas is out of the picture. As for Jordan and Egypt taking the ejected population, they both depend on US economic and military aid, so there’d be heavy Trumpian pressure on them too, though neither are keen to offer the Gazans a home: from past experience, they have no desire to import potential security threats from thousands of exiled jihadis and their families and hundreds of thousands of traumatized and angry refugees.
Meanwhile, the world justifiably hyperventilates in reaction to Donald Trump’s statement that the United States will “own” a Gaza Strip that has been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians”. Indeed. The left is hysterically outraged and the right hysterically jubilant. There is ignorance on all sides of the land and its people, their history and culture, needs and aspirations, their resilience and determination to have and to hold.
How people, especially in Gaza, can be so glibly reduced to chattels with no history, no identity, no connection to their land. At least no connection as deep as Trump’s connection to real estate. The two property tycoons are advancing the American Dream for Palestinians – nice big houses, well-paying jobs, upward financial mobility – not the Palestinian dream, which is to return home. They are also selling the renovator’s dream for Gaza: a knock-down-rebuild.
For all his talk about his and others’ “humanitarian hearts”, he probably gives little thought to them as human beings – he asks the world to reframe the rubble of Gaza as a real estate opportunity. He has neither empathy for a people nor an understanding of history and probably sees no personal need nor desire for either. He does not get the power and importance of blood and soil, of religious faith, and a people’s attachment to their homeland, be they Arabs or Israelis. Nor does he understand nor care that to many Arabs and Israelis, this, the modern world’s most intractable conflict, is both existential and sacred. For them, it is much, much more than a real estate deal, but part of their lives and their identity. It does not have a monetary value. See the Qatari carton below, hi ‘ashya’ la tushtaraa.
But never mind that. As republican congresswoman and MAGA acolyte Nancy Mace said in support of Trump’s proposal, “let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Largo!”
هي أشياء لا تشترى hi ‘ashya’ la tushtaraa Some things are not for sale. Qatari cartoon
Impractical, Incomprehensible, Illegal: Trump Traps Netanyahu and Sows Chaos With U.S. Takeover Plan for Gaza
Trump’s plan for the Gaza Strip that includes the relocation of 2 million Palestinians is not logical or viable. Whether it’s an imperialist tantrum or an actual ‘out of the box’ initiative, there is really no way to endorse, refute or examine it
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Leonard Cohen
You have to admire the noble attempts to instantly try and make sense of something U.S. President Donald Trump says one day, only to furiously rebuke and deride him the next. Oh wow, the sheer creativity and sublime “out of the box” innovation of proposing to relocate over 2 million Gazans and then “take over Gaza.” Genius.
Makes sense, right? Of course it does, because Gaza truly is uninhabitable. Oh no, but it’s not practical or viable. In fact, it’s incomprehensible.
So what does Trump want? Distraction. He thrives in the chaos and constant distractions he creates. Did he not impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and then grant them a 30-day extension since they promised they would do the things they are already doing?
Trump is a preeminent agent of chaos. That’s a trademark he has always paraded, boastfully and defiantly. As he said he would, he is actively generating and promoting chaos in America, discord within alliances, and is out to undermine the world order.
Agents of chaos sow chaos. It’s that simple. They instill discordance, confusion, controversy and uncertainty. That’s a modus operandi, not a tailored policy or crisis management technique. Agents of chaos and anarchy are by definition out to disrupt the status quo by floating outrageous ideas, based on a simple principle: Everyone viscerally understands the status quo has exhausted its usefulness, more-of-the-same doesn’t work anymore.
As for the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the endless, irrelevant and incoherent mumbling about “the two-state solution” is just an exercise in futility. Trump only said what many are thinking, right?
Yet still, you might have missed three critical points in Tuesday’s reality TV sitcomin the East Room of the White House. First, until the United States “takes over Gaza,” the cease-fire and stage two of the hostage release agreement need to continue – otherwise how will the Americans take over Gaza?
Second, the United States is applying “maximum pressure” on Iran to compel it to engage in a new nuclear deal. So, no U.S. war in Iran for the time being.
That’s not a bad harvest for two weeks by the “America First” president of a superpower that has always prided itself on being “a reluctant empire.” Are these imperialist tantrums, common-sense truisms aimed at provoking and stirring emotions, a coherent plan? Or are they just outlandish and left-field comments with a life expectancy of several days at best? It could very well be all of the above.
The realtor-in-chief came up with an amazingly simple idea: empty the Gaza Strip so that reconstruction can begin. This real-estate development process evolved throughout Tuesday. First Trump called it a “demolition site,” repeating things he said a few days earlier about how the devastated-to-rubble Strip was uninhabitable. Then his aides said Gaza effectively required 15 years and billions of dollars for reconstruction, so the Palestinians would have no alternative but to move out. That makes sense when you come from real estate.
By noon, Gaza was a “hellhole,” which means that 2 million Palestinians must quickly move to Egypt and Jordan – who, according to Trump, will agree to accept them.
By late afternoon in the White House, Trump was proclaiming that America will take over and turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” But if the Palestinians are relocated, who will this Mar-a-Gaza be built for? Ah, that’s easy according to Trump: “Palestinians, mostly,” though it would also be “an international, unbelievable place.” So maybe Greenlanders fed up with the cold, or Canadians who want an NHL expansion team in Rafah.
Even if you’re not instinctively dismissive of or resistant to Trump’s idea, the total lack of details and specificity make it impossible to endorse or repudiate.
There is no reference to legal matters: By what power and authority can the United States take over Gaza? Logistics: How do you relocate 2 million people, most of whom may not want to leave? Political: Who will manage this process? Financial: Who will fund this monumental undertaking? Regional: Most Arab countries have already vehemently rejected the idea.
Beyond the intuitive inclination to deride the concept, there is really no way to endorse, refute or examine its feasibility. So here’s the bottom line: Do not try to find logic, coherence or patterns. Just wait a few weeks. It may all change.
What Netanyahu did not get
Throughout his career, Benjamin Netanyahu always followed the sage advice of Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Years of solipsism, manipulation, deceit, duplicity, confabulation, interpolation and retraction, all woven into a modus operandi that provided him with success.
The indecision-maker would always come up with a speech, delivered with a tormented face and melodramatic baritone, describing the excruciating dilemmas he faced before making no decision. But not making a decision is a decision in and of itself, and he was good at it. Now Trump, for better or worse, is making decisions for him.
Netanyahu’s jig is up. He was nothing more than a prop in the Trump White House show. Trump upended the playing field on Gaza, Iran and everything else. It may not be sustainable, but as of today Netanyahu has to play by Trump’s rules.
Before going to Washington and after his meeting with Trump, he was presented with a fork in the road, a binary choice: desert the hostages, resume a goalless war and save his government in the immediate time frame. Or adhere to the cease-fire agreement he signed, move on to stage two and risk losing his ruling coalition.
Sometimes, making contradictory promises and giving inconsistent assurances is impossible to square. Now Netanyahu will try to market a mirage, according to which he was in on Trump’s plans. Maybe he was.
How does that change the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations? It doesn’t. Can he now annex the West Bank? He cannot. Does it add stability and predictability to relations with the United States? It doesn’t.
So what did Netanyahu get out of his Washington trip? A few days reprieve for his coalition, during which he can persuade them that Trump proved he’ll allow Israel to resume the war. And did Trump do that? No
Some moments in history demand recognition, not just for their weight in the present but for the seismic shifts they herald. The Trump-Netanyahu press conference was one such moment – not a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, nor a routine reaffirmation of alliance, but an unambiguous declaration of intent. It was a disruption of long-entrenched, failed orthodoxies and the unveiling of a vision that dares to reimagine the Middle East in starkly different terms.
For decades, world leaders have clung to exhausted formulas – peace processes built on illusion, agreements predicated on fantasy, and a wilful refusal to acknowledge the fundamental realities of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. That era is now over. Standing together, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel made it unmistakably clear: they are not here to mollify, to equivocate, or to perpetuate the cycles of appeasement that have long defined western diplomacy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are here to reset the board entirely.
Amid the declarations that emerged from this historic moment, one stood above all: Trump’s unequivocal statement that the goal is not to reform Gaza, not to manage it, but to remove its population entirely. No more illusions of Palestinian self-rule, no more diplomatic contortions to accommodate an irredeemable status quo. Trump’s is not another failed experiment in Palestinian self-rule – but a move to dismantle the population that carried out the most brutal attack on Jews since the Holocaust and to relocate them elsewhere.
The gravity of this pronouncement cannot be overstated. As Israeli commentator Amit Segal astutely observed, had the hard-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir proposed such a policy as part of coalition negotiations merely two years ago, it would have ignited an international firestorm. Yet here it was, calmly, deliberately articulated as the official position of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Nor was this an offhand remark – no Trumpian improvisation to be explained away later. The president read from prepared notes, delivering the statement with the deliberation and gravity of a policy long in the making. This was not casual hyperbole, nor an idle provocation; it was a calculated, official pronouncement. It was an act of political theatre designed to break the bubble of denial and intransigence.
But that was only the beginning. Alongside this, Donald Trump laid out an unambiguous multi-part framework: no to a Palestinian state. The old paradigm, a fixture of failed diplomatic orthodoxy, is now irrelevant – a fantasy proven ever more unworkable each time it has been forced into action. Yes to an enduring peace with Saudi Arabia – without Palestinian preconditions. The old linkage between Arab-Israeli normalisation and Palestinian statehood is gone, though the Saudis swiftly denied this. Yes to permanently ending Hamas and ensuring Gaza can never again pose a threat. The destruction will be total. There will be no ‘rebuilding’ for Hamas to rule over, only American led efforts. Yes to stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions – by any means necessary. Iran will be weakened, its regional reach crushed.
This is not a strategy of containment, nor an effort to sustain the perpetual diplomatic holding pattern that has defined western policy for decades. It is a vision of finality – an approach that seeks not to manage conflict but to bring it to a decisive and irreversible conclusion. If Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than eight months into his presidency, Trump must surely be worthy just three weeks into his.
Trump’s ability to impose his will upon seemingly intractable situations is no accident. He understands that power is not merely about policy but about the mastery of organised chaos – the capacity to disrupt, to destabilise, and in doing so, to force a new reality into being. He has demonstrated time and again that resistance to his demands – whether from allies or adversaries – eventually bends to his will. Just ask Mexico, Canada, or the growing list of others. The question, therefore, is not whether this plan is feasible. The question is how long it will take before the world accepts that it is already in motion. Trump’s pronouncement is the emperor’s new clothes of Middle Eastern geopolitics: a reality that exists the moment he dares to name it.
Trump is set now to meet with Egypt’s President and Jordan’s King – two leaders whose cooperation will be critical in reshaping Gaza’s fate. These are not symbolic meetings. They show the seriousness of his intent, and are part of a rapidly unfolding strategy. If past is prologue, their initial resistance will give way to accommodation.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu stood beside Trump not as a mere ally but as a statesman fully aligned with the vision before them. He was not a leader reacting to a surprise American policy shift, but the co-architect of a new regional order. Together, these two men have already upended decades of Middle Eastern diplomacy with the Abraham Accords. What they now propose is even more ambitious.
Furthermore, by means of yet another executive order, Trump gave a forceful rejection of longstanding UN biases against Israel, removing financial and diplomatic support from institutions that have systematically worked against Israel’s legitimacy on the world stage. He cut all US funding to UNRWA, citing its infiltration by designated terrorist groups and the involvement of its employees in the 7 October attack. This move effectively ends American financial support for an agency long accused of fostering anti-Israel narratives and aiding Palestinian terrorism. The order also withdraws the United States from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), halting American participation in a body that has consistently shielded human rights abusers while disproportionately targeting Israel. In addition, the US will conduct a review of its membership of UNESCO, withholding its share of funding and assessing the body’s history of anti-Israel bias, including its efforts to erase Jewish historical ties to significant sites like the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
Trump’s vision will terrify those who have grown comfortable with the status quo. It will unsettle those who prefer diplomatic inertia to hard truths. And it will enrage those who have built careers, reputations, and fortunes upon the perpetuation of the unsolvable. But what he and Netanyahu propose is not reckless; it is reality-based. It acknowledges the unspeakable truth that policymakers have long whispered but never dared articulate: that Gaza, under its current governance and population, is a failed experiment that cannot be salvaged.
Ever the salesman, Trump frames this all as an opportunity for Gazans to build peaceful, prosperous lives – just somewhere else. Many will recoil at the audacity of this proposition. But is it not more audacious to continue pretending that Palestinian self-rule in Gaza can exist without terror, that this small strip of land under continued Palestinian rule can be anything other than a launchpad for perpetual war?
History will remember this moment not merely for what was said, but for what it signified: the point at which two leaders, long derided by their critics, once again proved that their vision is neither naïve nor impractical, but bold, comprehensive and daring.
Jonathan Sacerdoti (born 1980) is a British broadcaster, journalist, and TV producer. Born in London, his father was a Holocaust survivor, and his grandfather had been an Italian Rabbi.
In December, In That Howling Infinite published Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants, an analysis of the downfall of the Assad dynasty. It observed: “…the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is … Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and skepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question”.
Syria’s political transition is literally a regime change: not simply the switching out of personalities on the throne, but a total philosophical and conceptual reordering of governance. Maybe it’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus.
Russian-oriented media platforms like RT and Mint have been saying for two months now that despite their friendly noises, including pragmatic contacts with western countries like the USA, Britain and France that once treated the Assad regime as a pariah and also regarded Hayat al Tahrir al Shams as a terrorist outfit, and wealthy Gulf states that had only just made up with the old regime, whilst hedging on the thorny issue of relations with Turkey and Israel on the one hand, and former enables of the regime, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah, on the other, Syria’s new rulers are Islamists at heart and will soon show their true colours.
Maybe they have a point …
In late December, Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the Syrian transitional government, said that women’s “biological and physiological nature” rendered them unfit for certain governmental jobs, sparking demonstrations in Damascus and other cities. At a press conference, the new Syrian leader asked a female reporter to cover her hair. There are reportsthat the new authorities are purging the school curriculum of pre-Islamic history and content deemed contrary to Islamic strictures. Before Christmas, foreign jihadis allied to Hayat al Tahrir al Sham torched a Christmas tree in Hama, leading to protests by Syrian Christians.
Syria’s de facto ruler Ahmed al Shara’a declared that free elections could be four years away, and in late January, seven weeks after he led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad. he was named president for the “transitional period“. Rebel military commander Hassan Abdul Ghani also announced the cancellation of Syria’s 2012 constitution and the dissolution of the former regime’s parliament, army and security agencies, according to the Sana news agency. As president, Sharaa would form an interim legislative council to help govern until a new constitution was approved, he said. Meanwhile, he added, all rebel groups which opposed Assad in the 13-year civil war would be dissolved and integrated into state institutions.
This may provie difficult if not impossible. in the north, Turkish proxy forces battle with Kurdish forces in semi-autonomous Rojava. in the south, rebel militias oppose the imposition of HTS authority. In the west, Alawite militias who supported the Assads engage in firefights with HTS. In the east, meanwhile, the Americans bombing surviving pockets of Islamic State fighters who may be encouraged by the chaos to stage a jailbreak of tens of thousands of jihadis held in camps guarded by the embattled Kurds.
Maybe it’ll be business as usual in the middle eastern axis of awful. It may be the wind of freedom that is blowing, but then again, maybe not. So far so bad …?
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Fears Syria is the next Mid-East humanitarian nightmare
Henry Ergas, The Australian, December 13, 2024.
To describe the current Syria situation as combustible is consequently an understatement.
No one mourns the wicked, says the song. But, while the end of Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked rule is undoubtedly welcome, his overthrow is not likely to solve Syria’s crippling problems.
That Syria’s descent into a murderous civil war was partly triggered by economic factors is clear. Far-reaching land reforms in 1958 and 1962-63 created a vast number of small to very small farms, which accounted for 60 per cent of all agricultural holdings but only 23 per cent of cultivated land. That structure was always precarious; what destroyed it was a trebling in Syria’s population.
With inheritance laws subdividing those holdings as more and more sons survived into adulthood, the marginal farms, which accounted for the bulk of agricultural employment, became completely unviable. Steadily worsening water shortages, culminating in a disastrous drought from 2005 to 2010, then delivered the final blow, precipitating a flight to the cities, particularly from the Sunni areas, that left many rural villages without young men.
But Syria’s heavily regulated, corruption-ridden economy could scarcely absorb the inflow, so more than half of those young men became unemployed, eking out tenuous livelihoods in illegally built complexes on the urban fringes.
People gather to celebrate in Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024
None of that would have provoked the civil war had the rural collapse, and the subsequent rise in poverty, not aggravated deep-seated ethnic and religious conflicts. Exactly like Lebanon and Iraq, the country that gained independence in 1946 was a state without a nation. Nor were there any broadly shared goals or ideas that could shape a unifying national identity.
The extent of the differences became obvious in 1954, when a Sunni-dominated government enacted centralising laws that sparked a Druze revolt. The revolt was quickly suppressed but the inability to define a workable balance between the conflicting groups fuelled six military coups in rapid succession.
It was only in 1966, when the Baath (Resurrection) party seized power, and then in 1970, with the so-called Corrective Revolution, which vested undivided power in Hafez al-Assad, that a degree of stability prevailed. The Baath had secured just 15 per cent of the vote in 1963, the last more or less free election; but, at least initially, it managed to coalesce a viable, if never broad, base of support.
At the heart of that support was the army, whose officer corps, like the Baath, was dominated by Alawites, who replaced the Sunnis decimated in the military purges that followed the coups and countercoups of the previous decade. Complementing that core was a tidal wave of Baathist patronage as sweeping nationalisations in 1964-65 and a 20-fold increase in the size of the public service – enacted in the name of “the scientific Arab way to socialism” – politicised employment decisions.
There is, however, no doubt that the Sunnis, who derived few benefits from that patronage, were left behind, at a time when Islamic fundamentalism was gaining lavish funding from the newly wealthy petro-monarchies. Although a shadowy battle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood had raged for some years, the Hama revolt in 1982 proved the key turning point.
Suppressed in a sea of blood, the revolt of Hama’s Sunnis induced Assad to rely even more heavily on a pervasive security apparatus manned by Alawites and controlled by members of his family: of the 12 key officers who ran the military-security complex between 1970 and 1997, seven were linked to Assad by blood or marriage.
That pattern persisted when Bashar al-Assad acceded to the presidency in 2000. By then, however, the transition from “Arab socialism” to an especially degenerate form of crony capitalism had made the cracks in the regime’s foundations ever more glaring.
To begin with, because the Sunni birthrate was much higher than that of the ethnic and religious minorities, the minorities’ share of the Syrian population was a third lower than in 1980, narrowing the regime’s power base, heightening its paranoia and increasing its dependence on outside support (which eventually came from Iran and Russia).
At the same time, the growing concentration of young, unemployed Sunni men in the major towns created an immensely receptive audience for radical imams, who – repeating the Al-Jazeera sermons of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi – denounced the Alawites as “even more defiled than the Jews”.
It is therefore no accident that it was a broadcast by al-Qaradawi, calling, on March 25, 2011, for an uprising to root out the unbelievers, that transformed highly localised demonstrations into a national civil war.
Retracing that civil war’s history would take too long. What matters is that each of its many protagonists sought to create a safe base for its constituency by ruthless ethnic cleansing.
The regime readily accepted – when it did not force – the displacement of some eight million people, mainly Sunnis, out of its area of control. That not only removed potential adversaries; it also allowed the regime, through a special law passed in mid-2018, to expropriate the displaced, reselling their assets (at bargain basement prices) to its Alawite, Christian and Druze supporters. That those minorities, which effected much of the regime’s dirty work, feel threatened by the victims’ return is readily understandable.
Nor was the ethnic cleansing any less brutal in the areas controlled by the regime’s Islamist opponents. In Turkish-controlled Afrin, for example, where Kurds previously comprised 90 per cent of the population, there are virtually no Kurds left, as Turkey’s military has replicated the “demolish and expel” strategy it implemented in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. To make things worse, it has, in what were relatively secular regions, enforced conformity to Islamic precepts to an extent unthinkable in Turkey itself.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham chief Ahmed al-Sharaa
Equally, in Idlib, which is governed by HTS (the Movement for the Liberation of the Levant), Christians, who were treated as dhimmis, have fled, as have any surviving Alawite, Ismaili and Yazidi “heretics”. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who heads HTS, presents himself as a technocratic nation-builder; the reality is that he never abandoned his jihadi outlook, reined in the Islamist fanaticism of HTS’s followers or relaxed the sharia-inspired prohibitions that dominate Idlib’s daily life.
Far from being a model of modernity, Idlib under Sharaa (who has reverted from Abou Mohammed al-Jolani to his original name) closely resembles Gaza under Hamas – an authoritarian, Islamist enclave that survives by diverting humanitarian assistance to fund HTS’s operations. There is every reason to fear Sharaa will try to take Syria down that road, provoking (in a repeat of the Iraqi scenario) a renewed conflict with the former regime’s supporters, as well as with the US-backed Kurds.
To describe the current situation as combustible is consequently an understatement. And it is an understatement too to say that Israel’s precautionary measures, which include strengthening its grip on the Golan Heights, are eminently rational.
Of course, that won’t stop the UN, and Australia with it, condemning the Israeli moves, while staying mum about Turkey’s expansion of its so-called “self-protection zone” in Syria and its indiscriminate bombing of Kurdish villages. But if the Syrian tragedy has a lesson, it is this: in the Arab Middle East, with its deep hatreds, long memories and searing fractures, only sheer power counts. To believe anything else is just a childish fantasy
“We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale”.
Thus wrote Unherd columnist and former war correspondent Aris Roussinos in December. 2023, but he would draw the same conclusion in 2024 and in 2025. He notes that ethnic cleansing is taking place on a vast scale in many parts of the world. Yet, apart from the current outrage at Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, turbocharged as it is by unprecedented and arguably one-sided mainstream and social media coverage, international reaction has been muted to the point of indifference. Roussinos’ article is republished below, and the following overview is inspired by and draws on his observations.
The term ethnic cleansing is elusive and politically charged. In an age of endemic conflict, identity politics and competing narratives, it has become a contested and often diluted concept invoked with increasing frequency. Yet, it remains undefined in law. Unlike genocide or war crimes, it has never been codified as a distinct offence under international law, and so its use is contested.
A United Nations Commission of Experts investigating violations during the wars in the former Yugoslavia offered the most widely cited descriptions. In its interim report it defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” In its final report the following year, the Commission elaborated: it is “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” What is clear in these descriptions is that ethnic cleansing is deliberate, systematic, and political in nature.
The Commission also catalogued the methods through which such policies are carried out. They include murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual violence, severe injury to civilians, confinement of populations in ghettos, forcible deportation and displacement, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilian areas, the use of human shields, the destruction and looting of property, and assaults on hospitals, medical staff and humanitarian organisations such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent. The Commission concluded that these acts could amount to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and in some instances, fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.
Many people today use the term ethnic cleansing interchangeably with genocide, since both involve the violent removal and destruction of communities and often lead to similar outcomes of death, displacement, and cultural erasure. Ethnic cleansing, which refers to the forced expulsion of a group from a territory through intimidation, violence, or coercion, frequently overlaps with acts that fall under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, such as mass killings and the destruction of cultural or religious life. This blurring of concepts reflects not only the moral outrage provoked by such crimes but also frustration at the narrowness of legal categories, which can leave survivors feeling their suffering has been minimized by technical distinctions. Historical cases illustrate how the line between the two has often been perilously thin: the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915, which many scholars and states regard as genocide and even describe as a holocaust – though Türkiye denies it and Israel avoids official recognition for fear of diluting the unique status of the Shoah – the expulsions and massacres of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and the flight of the Rohingya from Myanmar all show how ethnic cleansing has so often carried genocidal dimensions – as is particularly the case today with the war in Gaza which has polarized and politicized ordinary people and activists alike worldwide who have through lack of knowledge or opportunism conflated the two.
Yet it is important to recognize that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not strictly interchangeable. Genocide requires proof of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, whereas ethnic cleansing focuses primarily on expulsion, which may or may not involve that deeper intent to annihilate. Ethnic cleansing can amount to genocide when the purpose is to eradicate a group, but not all instances meet this threshold. In public discourse, however, people motivated more by empathy and emotion than by detailed knowledge of history or law are often inclined to conflate the two, since the lived experience of the victims—violence, displacement, and cultural obliteration – appears indistinguishable from destruction itself. More informed observers, by contrast, emphasize legal precision and historical context, recognizing that while the outcomes often overlap, preserving the distinction remains vital for accurate analysis and accountability.
The moral revulsion ethnic cleansing excites is the natural and humane reaction, but historically and also presently, it is not an uncommon phenomenon. For the American sociologist and academic Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”: a recurring temptation of the modern nation-state. The following sections provided examples from the last thirty years, followed by a survey of instances of ethnic cleansing during the early to mid Twentieth Century. They describe how ethnic cleansing is not only a crime of forced removal and murder but also an assault on identity, memory, and the very visibility of a people.
[The featured picture at the head of this blog post is one of Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout’s striking illustrations of Al Nakba, the dispossession of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs during Israel’s war of independence, from In That Howling Infinite’s Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]. More of his art is included below]
Expulsion, eradication and exile
The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s – encompassing Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – offer a clear illustration of ethnic cleansing in a modern European context. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, political and military leaders pursued campaigns aimed at creating ethnically homogeneous territories, often through the systematic targeting of civilians. In Bosnia, Serb forces carried out mass killings, forced deportations, rape, and the deliberate destruction of homes, schools, and cultural heritage sites, culminating in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. In Croatia and Kosovo, similar tactics were deployed: ethnic minorities were expelled, villages razed, and communities terrorised into flight. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) documented and prosecuted these actions as crimes against humanity and war crimes, establishing that the campaigns were not chaotic consequences of war, but deliberate, coordinated policies of ethnic removal. The tribunal’s rulings provide a legal benchmark for understanding ethnic cleansing as the purposeful removal of populations through violence, intimidation, and coercion, a pattern that recurs across history and geography—from the forced expulsions of Armenians in 1915, to the population exchanges of Greece and Turkey in 1923, to the contemporary displacement of Rohingya, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Afghans. These cases demonstrate that ethnic cleansing combines physical violence, forced migration, and cultural erasure, often leaving long-term social, political, and demographic scars that endure generations after the immediate conflict.
Sudan has witnessed repeated waves of ethnic cleansing over recent decades, most infamously in Darfur in the early 2000s, when government-backed Arab Janjaweed militias targeted non-Arab communities with systematic violence. Villages were burned, civilians massacred, women subjected to mass rape, and more than 2.5 million people displaced, in what the International Criminal Court later described as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The displacement and destruction in Darfur followed earlier campaigns of forced removal during Sudan’s long north–south civil war, where entire communities in the south and Nuba Mountains were uprooted by aerial bombardment, scorched earth tactics, and starvation sieges. Today, ethnic cleansing has returned with devastating intensity: since April 2023, renewed fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (successors to the Janjaweed) has triggered mass atrocities, including the killing of thousands and the flight of more than 7 million civilians, many across borders into Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt. Reports of targeted massacres against non-Arab groups in West Darfur suggest continuity with earlier campaigns, underscoring how ethnic cleansing in Sudan is not an isolated event but a recurring feature of its violent political landscape.
The Rohingya expulsions in Myanmar provide a stark contemporary example of ethnic cleansing. Since 2017, Myanmar’s military has carried out systematic campaigns of violence, including mass killings, sexual violence, arson, and the destruction of villages, aimed at driving the Rohingya Muslim population from Rakhine State. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The violence has been accompanied by measures of cultural and social exclusion: denial of citizenship, restrictions on movement, and the erasure of Rohingya identity from official records. The United Nations and international observers have described these actions as ethnic cleansing, noting the deliberate intent to remove an entire ethnic group from a geographic area, while some investigators have determined that elements of the campaign meet the criteria for genocide.
Armenia and its surrounding regions have been scarred by cycles of ethnic cleansing for more than a century. The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916, carried out by the Ottoman Empire, combined forced deportations, massacres, and cultural destruction with the intent of removing Armenians from their ancestral lands in Anatolia. More than a million were killed or died on death marches, and countless others were scattered into diaspora communities across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Later, in the Soviet period, Armenians and Azerbaijanis experienced repeated forced movements, with pogroms and expulsions erupting during times of political instability. Most recently, the 2023 offensive by Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in the flight of almost the entire Armenian population of the enclave—around 120,000 people—into Armenia proper, effectively erasing a centuries-old community. These waves of displacement illustrate how ethnic cleansing in Armenia is not confined to the past but has recurred across generations, leaving lasting demographic, cultural, and political consequences for the region.
During the past two years, mass expulsions from neighbouring countries returned large numbers of Afghans to Taliban-run Afghanistan. Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghans; Iran has driven out hundreds of thousands more. What is packaged as “repatriation” is, in many cases, forced displacement: exiles who had tenuous livelihoods, access to education, or limited civil freedoms in exile are now returned to a polity where the rights — especially the rights of women and girls — are ruthlessly curtailed. The Taliban’s record on gender is well known: it controls a society where women are barred from education and work, forced into early marriages, and denied even minimal public freedoms. Public-life prohibitions and systematic punishments disproportionately harm women and girls. Returning families are therefore being pushed into what many observers describe as among the worst possible places in the world for women — a profoundly gendered and life-threatening form of displacement.
The erasure of culture and historical memory
Like genocide, ethnic cleansing may not be limited the physical expulsion or eradication of people. It can be political, cultural and geographical, and often works through more insidious forms of erasure.
China’s policies in Xinjiang are an example. It has renamed at least 630 villages in Xinjiang, erasing references to Uyghur culture in what human rights advocates say is a systematic propaganda rebrand designed to stamp out the Muslim minority group’s identity. Human Rights Watch has documented a campaign of renaming thousands of villages across the region, stripping out references to Uyghur religion, history and culture. At least 3,600 names have been altered since 2009, replaced by bland slogans such as “Happiness,” “Unity” and “Harmony.” Such bureaucratic changes appear mundane, but they are part of a systematic project to erase Uyghur identity from the landscape itself.
Ukraine illustrates another, more violent dimension of contemporary ethnic cleansing. Russia is coercively integrating five annexed Ukrainian regions — an area the size of South Korea — into its state and culture. Ukrainian identity is being wiped out through the imposition of Russian schooling and media, while more than a million Russian citizens have been settled illegally into the occupied zones. At the same time, some three million Ukrainians have fled or been forced out. Torture centres have been established, with one UN expert describing their use as “state war policy.” Russian forces have employed sexual violence, disappearances and arbitrary detentions, and carried out massacres. Civilian deaths officially stand at around 10,000, but independent estimates suggest a figure closer to 100,000. Homes and businesses have been seized and redistributed to the cronies of Russian officials and officers. On top of these abuses, thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their families and deported into Russia for adoption and assimilation, with the threat that when they reach 18 they will be conscripted into the Russian military. This programme of child transfers has been declared a war crime by international courts, and represents perhaps the most chilling element of the campaign to erase Ukrainian identity across generations. Russian propagandists, including ideologues such as Alexander Dugin, routinely describe Ukrainians as “vermin” to be eliminated — language that many experts say is consistent with genocidal intent.
The long arm of history
Historical precedent is sobering, underscoring how entrenched practices definable as ethnic cleansing are. Some examples follow.
The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 is a historical example where the term “ethnic cleansing” can be applied alongside, though not identical to, the legal concept of genocide. Ottoman authorities systematically deported, massacred, and starved Armenians from their ancestral homelands in Anatolia, often under the guise of military necessity. Entire villages were emptied, survivors forced on death marches into the Syrian desert, and cultural and religious heritage deliberately destroyed. These actions aimed to remove the Armenian population from the territory of the Ottoman Empire, making the region ethnically and religiously homogeneous, which aligns closely with contemporary definitions of ethnic cleansing. The genocide combined mass killing with forced displacement and cultural erasure, illustrating how ethnic cleansing and genocide can overlap in both intent and method. (See The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye)
The Armenian case also illustrates how recognition of genocide is often bound up not only with history but with contemporary politics. Türkiye continues to deny that the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide, framing them instead as wartime relocations within the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Israel, despite wide acknowledgment among its own scholars of the genocidal character of the events, has avoided official recognition, partly out of diplomatic considerations toward Türkiye, once a key regional ally, but also out of concern that equating the Armenian tragedy with the Shoah might dilute the unique historical and moral status attached to the Holocaust in Jewish memory and international discourse. This reluctance is not unique to Israel: several states have long hesitated to employ the term “genocide” for fear of straining relations with Ankara or complicating their own foreign policy priorities. Such debates demonstrate how the line between ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only a matter of legal precision but also of political narrative, with governments and institutions sometimes reluctant to apply the most condemnatory labels even where evidence overwhelmingly supports them.
As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty, finalizing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”, and in effect, One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, the heartland of the new republic of Türkiye, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later – perhaps ironically – evolve into today’s UNHCR.
During the Second World War, Soviet Union alone deported half a million Crimean Tatars and tens of thousands of Volga Germans to Siberia. In 1945, the victorious Allied powers oversaw the removal of some 30 million people across Central and Eastern Europe to create ethnically homogeneous states. At Yalta and Potsdam, Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union endorsed the expulsion of 12 million Germans, over 2 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Finns.
The partition of British India in 1947 produced one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in modern history. As the new states of India and Pakistan were created, an estimated 12 to 15 million people crossed borders in both directions – Muslims moving into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs into India – in a desperate effort to reach what they hoped would be safer ground. The upheaval was marked by extreme communal violence, massacres, abductions, and sexual assaults. Between 500,000 and 1 million people are thought to have been killed, and millions more were uprooted from ancestral homes they would never see again. The trauma of Partition continues to shape Indian and Pakistani national identities, as well as the politics of South Asia to this day. (See Freedom at Midnight (2): the legacy of partition) and Freedom at Midnight (1): the birth of India and Pakistan
The dismemberment of Mandate Palestine by the new state of Israel, Jordan and Egypt in 1948 brought two simultaneous mass displacements that remain unresolved. During the first Arab–Israeli war more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what became Israel. Known as the Nakba or “catastrophe,” this created a vast refugee population now numbering in the millions, many still stateless. Jews living in what is now the Old City and East Jerusalem, and the West Bank seized by Jordan were expelled. Jews living across the Arab world in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere – faced growing hostility, persecution, and expulsion. Between 1948 and the 1970s, an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews left or were forced out, many stripped of property and citizenship. Most resettled in Israel, where their presence profoundly altered the country’s politics and culture. Palestinians and Jews alike endured dispossession, trauma and exile, and both experiences fuel competing narratives of grievance that continue to define the conflict.
Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But unlike the Mizrahim, and displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, the Palestinians have no Israel to go to. There is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences cannot at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.
Conclusion: The Age of Dispossession
In many historical cases, expulsions, however brutal, were stabilized by the existence of ethnic homelands ready to absorb the displaced. Refugees were incorporated into nationalist projects in Greece and Türkiye, or into newly homogenized states such as Poland and Ukraine, where they became central to the shaping of modern politics. The Karabakh Armenians driven into Armenia may follow this precedent, potentially reshaping the political order of a small and embattled state.
Ethnic cleansing in the twenty-first century, however, combines these older methods with new techniques. Violence, rape, deportation, and massacre continue, but are now accompanied by cultural erasure, bureaucratic renaming, engineered resettlement, propaganda, and the deliberate targeting of children for assimilation. Unlike many twentieth-century precedents, today’s displaced populations often have nowhere safe to go, forced into territories with no protective homeland or into environments of repression, creating open-ended cycles of dispossession. The erasure of identities in Xinjiang, the coercive integration of Ukrainian territories, the expulsion of Rohingyas and Afghans, the depopulation of Karabakh, and the looming threat of Gaza – where Palestinians face the looming threat of another mass displacement, echoing the 1948 Nakba – collectively demonstrate that ethnic cleansing is not a relic of the past.
It remains a recurring feature of our age – modern history is indeed built upon exodus and displacement – and its human cost is profound and incalculable.
Postscript … Al Nakba, a case study in dispossesion
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European Jews came to a land that was already inhabited by another, different people. Over two decades, they forced the guarantor power out by terrorism and took the land by conquest, expelling most of its original inhabitants by force. They have sowed their share of wind, too. Both sides want all the land for themselves.
Al Nakba, is the Arabic name for the “catastrophe” that befell the Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine during the war that was fought between Arabs and Jews in 1947-1948, resulting in the expulsion of upwards of 700,000 Arab Palestinians. That it happened is incontrovertible. But the facts, even those that are attested to by all reputable politicians and academic authorities, including Israelis, have long been subject to doubt and distortion by all sides of what has since been called “The Middle East Conflict” – notwithstanding that there have been conflicts in the Middle East more devastating and bloodier in terms of destruction and mortality including in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Sudan.
I do not to intend here to retell the history of Al Nakba. There many accounts available in print including those by Arab and Israeli authors, and in film, particularly an excellent documentary broadcast by Al Jazeera in May 2013 and repeated often?
June 17th, 2018, I wrote about it in a Facebook post:
Al Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….
So begins this award-winning series from Al Jazeera, a detailed and comprehensive account of al Nakba, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians who lived within its borders.
It is a well-balanced narrative, with remarkable footage, that will not please the ardent partisans of both sides who prefer their story of 1948 to be black and white.
Revisionist Israeli historians Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Teddy Katz describe the ruthless and relentless military operations to clear and cleanse “Ha’aretz”, the land, of its Arab inhabitants and their history, whilst Palestinian historians tell the story from the Palestinian perspective, describing the critical failings of Palestinian’s political leaders and neighbouring Arab governments. Elderly Palestinians who were forced into exile and to camps in Jordan and Lebanon tell their sad stories of starvation and poverty, violence and death, and of terrible sadness, homesickness and longing that the passing years and old age have never diminished.
“When I left my homeland, I was a child. Now, I’m an old man. So are my children. But did we move forward? Where is our patriotism? Patriotism is about the pockets of our current leaders. They build high buildings and go to fancy banquets. They pay thousands for their children’s weddings”. Refugee Hosni Samadaa.
“We’re repeating the same mistakes. Before 1948 the Palestinian National Movement was split on the basis of rival families. Today, it is split into different parties over ideology, jurisdiction and self-interests. We didn’t learn our lesson. We were led by large, feudal landowners. Today, we are led by the bourgeoisie. Before 1948, we were incapable of facing reality. Today, we are just as inept. Before 1948, people chose the wrong leadership. And today, we are following the wrong leaders”. Researcher Yusuf Hijazi.
The truth about the ethnic cleansing in Gaza – modern Europe was built on exodus and displacement
Aris Roussinos, Unherd, December 18 2023
We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. In just the past few months, Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghan migrants, while Azerbaijan has forced 120,000 Armenians — the statelet’s entire population — from newly-conquered Karabakh, both to broad international indifference. As the UNHCR has warned, the forced expulsion — that is, the ethnic cleansing — of Gaza’s Palestinian population is now the most likely outcome of the current war.
With no prospect of Palestinians and Israelis living together peaceably, anything short of absolute military victory unacceptable to both the Israeli government and its voters, but no meaningful plan for who will rule the uninhabitable ruins of post-war Gaza, the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, for Israel, is the total removal of the Palestinians. As Israel’s former Interior Minister has declared: “We need to take advantage of the destruction to tell the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000. We need all two million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”
Israeli officials have not been shy in promoting this outcome to a war, according to the President Isaac Herzog, for which “an entire nation… is responsible”. Israel’s agriculture minister Avi Dichter has asserted that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding for emphasis that the result of the war will be “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”Israel’s Intelligence Ministry has published a “concept paper” proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai desert, and Israeli diplomats have been trying to win international support for this idea. According to the Israeli press, Israeli officials have sought American backing for a different plan to distribute Gaza’s population between Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Yemen, tying American aid to these countries’ willingness to accept the refugees. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, two Israeli lawmakers have instead urged Western countries — particularly Europe — to host Gaza’s population, asserting that: “The international community has a moral imperative—and an opportunity—to demonstrate compassion [and] help the people of Gaza move toward a more prosperous future.” The outcome for Gaza’s Palestinians does not appear to be in doubt: what remains to be haggled over is their final location.
The only actor that can prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the United States, and for domestic political reasons it is disinclined to do so. While the Biden administration declaresit does not support “any forced relocation of Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip”, it is not taking any action to prevent it. If the expulsion of Gaza’s 2.3 million population comes to pass, the result will be the most significant instance of ethnic cleansing in a generation, which will define Biden’s presidency for future historians. Yet outrage over such events is selective. It is not entirely true, as some Middle Eastern commentators claim, that Western complicity in the looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza highlights a lesser interest in Arab or Muslim lives: the Armenian case highlights that eastern Christians also barely flicker on the world’s moral radar.
This week’s awarding of the right to host next year’s COP29 climate conference to Azerbaijan, just a few months after its ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, reminds us that the supposed international taboo on the practice does not, in reality, exist. When ethnic cleansing is permissible, and when it is a war crime, depends, it seems, on who is doing it, and to whom. Azerbaijan is oil-rich, useful to Europe, and able to buy favourable Western coverage; Armenia is poor, weak and friendless in the world. Similarly, the extinction of much of the Christian population of the Middle East as a result of the chaos following the Iraq War won very little international attention or sympathy: communities which survived in their ancient homelands from Late Antiquity, riding out the passage of Arab, Mamluk, Ottoman and European imperial rule, did not survive the American empire.
Yet while the moral revulsion such events excite is the natural and humane reaction, ethnic cleansing is less rare an event than the crusading military response to its Nineties occurrence in the Balkans may make us think. For the sociologist Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”. As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty “which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”. One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later — perhaps ironically — evolve into today’s UNHCR.
It was a cruel process, wrenching peoples from ancestral homelands in which they had lived for centuries, even millennia— and by the end of it half a million people were unaccounted for, presumably dead. Yet it was viewed as a great diplomatic triumph of the age, perhaps with good reason: without meaningful minorities on each side of each others’ borders to stoke tensions, Greece and Turkey have not fought a war in a century. Indeed, as late as 1993, the Realist IR scholar John Mearsheimer could propose a “Balkan Population Exchange commission” for the former Yugoslavia explicitly modelled on the 1923 precedent, asserting that “populations would have to be moved in order to create homogeneous states” and “the international community should oversee and subsidize this population exchange”. For the younger Mearsheimer, ethnic cleansing was the only viable solution to Yugoslavia’s bloody and overlapping ethnic map: “Transfer is a fact. The only question is whether it will be organized, as envisioned by partition, or left to the murderous methods of the ethnic cleansers.” Thirty years later, however, Mearsheimercondemns Israel’s planned expulsions from Gaza outright.
There is a dark irony here: the forced expulsion of peoples is an affront to liberal European values, yet it is rarely acknowledged that our modern, hitherto peaceful and prosperous Europe is built on the foundation of ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the ramifications of such a truth are too stark to bear, yet it is nevertheless the case that the peaceable post-1945 order depended on mass expulsions for its stability. Using the 1923 exchange as their explicit model, the victorious allies oversaw the forced removal of 30 million people from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe towards newly homogeneous ethnic homelands they had never seen. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union settled upon the expulsion of 12 million Germans, more than 2 million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians and Finns from their ancestral homes.
As Churchill declared in Parliament in 1944, “expulsion is the method that, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been in the case of Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made.” Only two years later, once the Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union and its vassal Poland become a rival, did Churchill fulminate against the “enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of” by “the Russian-dominated Polish Government”. In ethnic cleansing, as in so many other things, political context is the final arbiter of morality.
But as a result, Germany has never since unsettled Europe with revanchist dreams; both Poland and Western Ukraine became, for the first time in their histories, ethnically homogenous entities. As the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny has observed, the forced separation of Poles and Ukrainians, once locked in bitter ethnic conflict against each other, has led to today’s amicable relationship: “It seems that the segregation of the two peoples was a necessary precondition for the development of a mutually beneficial relationship between them. Apparently the old adage that ‘good fences make for good neighbors’ has been proven true once more.” That we have forgotten the vast scale of the forced expulsions which established Europe’s peaceful post-war order is, in a strange way, a testament to their success.
Yet what made the mass expulsions following the First and Second World Wars broadly successful was that those expelled at least had ethnic homelands to receive them. In Greece and Turkey, the refugees fully adopted the ethnic nationalism of their new countries, in Greece providing the bedrock of later republican sympathies, and in Turkey the core support for both secular Kemalist nationalism and occasional bouts of military rule. In the newly-homogenous Poland and Ukraine, refugees shorn of their previous local roots and at times ambiguous ethnic identities fully adopted in recompense a self-identification with their new nation-states which has helped define these countries’ modern politics. The 120,000 Karabakh refugees will likely become a political bloc in tiny Armenia, affecting the country’s future political order in ways yet hard to discern.
Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But the Palestinians, like the ethnic French narrator of Houellebecq’s Submission, have no Israel to go to. Unlike the 20th century displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, there is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences can not at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.
Egypt’s disinclination to host two million Gazan refugees is not merely a matter of solidarity, but also self-preservation: flows of embittered Palestinian refugees helped destabilise both Lebanon, where their presence set off the country’s bloody ethnic civil war, and Jordan, where they make up the demographic majority. It is doubtful too, given the recent tenor of its politics, that Europe will be eager to receive them, no matter how humanitarian the language with which Israeli officials couch their planned expulsion. Rendered stateless, driven from their homes and brutalised by war, Gaza’s refugees remain unwanted by the world, perhaps destined to become, as the Jews once were, a diaspora people forever at the mercy of suspicious hosts.
A terrible injustice for the Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing may yet provide Israel with a measure of security, even as it erodes the American sympathy on which the country’s existence depends. The broader question, perhaps, is whether or not the looming extinction of Palestinian life in Gaza, like the expulsion of Karabakh’s Armenians, heralds the beginning of a new era of ethnic cleansing, or merely the settling of the West’s unfinished accounts. Like the movements which bloodily reshaped Central Europe, Israel’s very existence is after all a product of the same nationalist intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1923, while acknowledging its necessity, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon called the Greco-Turkish population exchange “a thoroughly bad and vicious [idea] for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come”. Exactly a century later, Gaza’s Palestinians look destined to become the final victims of Europe’s long and painful 20th century
Nakba, where Palestinian victim mythology began
‘Nakba Day’ was commemorated this week with even more vehemence than usual. The greatest tragedy is that the Palestinian people who fled remain frozen in time.
Protestors at a Sydney rally to mark the anniversary of the ‘Nakba’. David Gray/AFP
On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.
What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.
It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.
Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.
That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.
The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.
Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.
It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.
The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.
Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.
As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.
All that formed the context in which the planned partition of Palestine was to occur. The 1937 Peel Commission, which initially proposed partition, had recommended a mandatory population exchange but the entire issue was ignored in UN Resolution 181 that was supposed to govern the creation of the two new states.
When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.
Arabs flee in 1948 ahead of the ‘war of extermination’ against Israel.
History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.
Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.
In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.
Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.
That vast population movements have inflicted enormous costs on those who have been ousted from their homes is undeniable. Nor have the tragedies ended: without a murmur from the Arab states, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s support of Saddam Hussein. More recently, Myanmar has expelled 1.2 million Rohingya.
But the greatest tragedy associated with the plight of the Palestinians is not the loss of a homeland; over the past century, that has been the fate of tens of millions. Rather, it is the refusal to look forward rather than always looking back, an attitude encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
That has suited the Arab leaders, but it has condemned ordinary Palestinians to endless misery and perpetual war. Until that changes, the future will be a constant repetition of a blood-soaked past
Two Islamic terms and one Hebrew have been making the media rounds of late.
Taqiyyah is the employment of deception and dissimulation in an ostensibly Islamic cause. The term تقیة taqiyyah is derived from the trilateral root wāw-qāf-yā, literally denoting caution, fear, prudence, guarding against a danger), carefulness and wariness. It is related to kitmān (كتمان), the act of covering or dissimulation. While the terms taqiyya and kitmān may be used synonymously, kitmān refers specifically to the concealment of one’s convictions by silence or omission. Kitmān derives from Arabic katama “to conceal, to hide”.
The Hebrew word ishasbara. It has no direct English translation, but roughly means “explaining”, a communicative strategy that seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified). It is often interpreted by critics of Israel as public relations or propaganda. It has even been described as the fool’s gold version of diplomacy.
The Hamas’ assault of October 7 2023 was an almost perfect act of Taqiyyah, It used unprecedented intelligence tactics to mislead Israel over months, by giving a public impression that it was not willing to go into a fight or confrontation with Israel while preparing for this massive operation. As part of its subterfuge over the past two years, Hamas refrained from military operations against Israel even as another Gaza-based armed group known as Islamic Jihad launched a series of its own assaults or rocket attacks.
It has been said before and often, that the Qatari-owned news platform Al Jazeera presents the non-Arabic speaking world with a markedly different narrative of to what it relays to its Arabic readers – it is the most popular news source in the Arab world, particularly among Palestinians. Viewing or reading Al Jazeera English, you would think that Israel’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza is directed entirely against the defenceless and helpless civilians of the unfortunate enclave. There are very rarely images of the militants who are engaged on a daily basis in fierce battles and deadly firefights with the IDF. Al Jazeera Arabic on the other hand, posts pictures and videos of the fighters, illustrating their courage, their resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, and their successes in the face of overwhelming military odds. In that Howling Infinite recently covered the issue of divergent narratives in Al Aqsa Flood and the Hamas holy war.
The following opinion piece published this week in Haaretz suggests that the gas-rich and influential emirate of Qatar, erstwhile mediator in many contemporary of conflicts has indeed need playing a much more subtle long game of taqiyyah and kitmān.
I leave it to the reader to determine whether there is some truth in the author’s case or whether this is part of some deceptive hasbara.It would indeed be in Israel’s interests to propagate a narrative that emphasises the existential threat posed by its Muslim neighbours.
Personally, I am inclined to take this opinion piece with a large pinch of salt. For a start, it is badly written and many of its historical references are inaccurate. And then there is the matter of ascribing caliphate ambitions to the Gulf emirate of Qatar, a tiny autocracy, albeit one of the richest, and until recently at odds with its equally autocratic Gulf neighbours with regard to it’s having given support and succour to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood – from which Hamas evolved in Palestine – which is similarly reviled and repressed by the rulers of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who have dealt brutally with the organisation in the past. Other Sunni Muslim regimes were, moreover, unimpressed by Qatar’s cordial relationship, political and economic, with The Shia Islamic Republic of Iran – although the Gulf regimes have of late been increasingly conducive to improving their relationships with the hardline theocracy. Indeed, it was not so long ago that Qatar’s neighbours endeavoured to impose a blockade on the recalcitrant emirate. They would be hardly inclined to countenance Qatar as the leader of an Islamic Caliphate – even if the Muslim street in most Arab states were enthusiastic about the idea.
In a brief article in Haaretz the following week, also republished below, a former Israeli diplomat took issue with Ronit Marzan’s “one-dimensional approach” to Qatar: “…Israel’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “bad” is not a good approach to intelligent foreign policy. Skillful diplomacy identifies common interests shared by diverse and often opposing players – partners in one area who are adversaries in another. That is precisely why the term “frenemies” exists. Qatar is a classic example”.
On October 7, 2023, the idee fixe that Hamas was deterred was shattered. But Israel is still mired in another idee fixe – that Qatar is a friendly country that helps resolve conflicts.
Israel is ignoring the hearts-and-minds campaign Qatar is waging against it and against the entire Western world by arguing that liberating all of Palestine will liberate the Middle East from colonialism, liberate the world from the unipolar order of American hegemony and liberate the human psyche from Western culture.
The hashtags “Spain,” “Andalusia,” “Palestine” and “history and culture,” which Qatar’s online influencers regularly use, are not understood by either Israel or Spain.These hashtags are part of a historical, cultural and psychological campaign that links two central narratives. It seeks to convince Muslims worldwide that the medieval Islamic empire in Andalusia fell as a result of jealousy and rivalry among Muslim kings. Additionally, historical Palestine isn’t being liberated because of the rivalry among Arab countries and their cooperation with the Israeli enemy against Palestinian resistance organizations.
Tweets posted online by Qatari influencers such as “Haifa is beautiful, but it will be more beautiful when it burns down,” “Don’t dream about a happy world as long as Israel exists” and “Liberating all of Palestine is possible, and it has begun” have also not been met with any effective response by Israel’s official public diplomacy network.
And Qatar’s threats that it is considering deporting Hamas leaders from the country should not be taken seriously so long as senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who lives there, keeps telling Muslims around the world that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is “the explosive that sets off intifadas”; inciting residents of the West Bank and “the 1948 Arabs” (i.e. Israeli Arabs) to resume suicide bombings; urging the Arab nation to embark on both a jihad of the soul and an armed jihad against the Zionist enemy, which isn’t a natural part of the region; encouraging the Arab masses to take to the streets and pressure their leaders to sever ties with Israel; and urging student leaders worldwide to renew street protests to put an end to Zionist and American hegemony.
It’s not only Israel that has fallen asleep while on guard duty. European and American leaders also don’t understand that Qatar is working via its agents of change to bring about a clash between the global north and the global south by exploiting the distress of failed states and the woke movement in the West. They are failing to recognize that it is undermining the Western model of the modern nation-state whose borders were drawn in the past.
Its goal is to replace this Western model with that of a traditional Arab state, meaning one where the regime’s legitimacy would come from its willingness to put the interests of the Arab-Islamic nation above those of its own country, first and foremost in the battle against Israel.
Tawakkol Karman, an Islamic activist from Yemen, received aid from Qatar to promote a revolutionary discourse in her country during the Arab Spring and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Now, she is helping Qatar incite a revolt against Western governments among young people and indigenous peoples. At the One Young World Summit in Canada, she argued that democracy, human rights and the rule of law are in retreat in the United States, Canada, Britain and France and urged action against powerful companies and governments that had stolen the resources of indigenous peoples.
In an edited Al Jazeera video of a speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at an Arab League summit, the following chyrons were prominently displayed: “Guterres urged the Arab states to unite and not let outside parties manipulate them,” “Guterres highlighted the golden age of Islamic culture and praised the Arab contribution over the course of hundreds of years, from the Andalusian renaissance in the Iberian peninsula to Baghdad, which was a global center of culture and civilization,” “The secretary-general blamed the Arab states’ backwardness on colonialism and the war of liberation that the Arab nation had to wage.”
All of the above show that Guterres, like many former UN employees who are today employed at Azmi Bishara’s research institute in Doha, don’t represent the values in whose name the United Nations was established. Instead, they have become Qatar’s water carriers.
Israel and the United States erred when they let Qatar send aid to the Gaza Strip.And they are erring now by allowing it to send aid to Lebanon. Now that Gaza has been devastated, and the chances of Hamas returning to power are low, Qatar is racing ahead towards Lebanon.
It is part of the five-member committee that was established to help resolve Lebanon’s political crisis, along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, America and France.
Qatar is embracing veteran Druze politician Walid Jumblatt, the former head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party, in the hopes that the Druze community will provide help in the future to topple Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.
It is giving millions of dollars to the Lebanese army to help pay soldiers’ salaries ($100 a month per soldier). And it is cooperating more closely with Lebanese government ministries – for instance, the internal security ministry, which is responsible for training police officers – while moving forward on agreements in the field of solar energy.
Israel’s ground operation in Lebanonis giving Qatar an opportunity to settle itself in the hearts of the Lebanese people. After Israel dismantles Shi’ite Hezbollah for it, along with the ring of fire Iran has for years nurtured in the region, Qatar will appear in the role of the “savior” and repeat what it did with Sunni Hamas in Gaza.
But this time, it will do so with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. And Iran’s Shi’ite ring of firewill be replaced with Qatar’s Sunni ring, which will be no less dangerous, and might well lead Israel to new versions of the October 7 attacks, just as Meshal has been promising.
Saladin liberated Palestine, Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa after securing geographic and demographic depth for himself in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan. That’s what Meshal and Mohamed El-Shinqiti, a faculty member at Qatar University, have been saying, and presumably not by chance.
Lolwah Al-Khater, the country’s minister for international cooperation, landed in Beirut a few days ago with a generous supply of aid and promises of “plans for the medium and long term.” We should believe what she says, because Qatar is a long-distance runner, and patience is a key value in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology.
Ronit Marzan is a researcher of Palestinian society and politics at the Tamrur-Politography
Qatar Can Be Part of the Solution, and Not Just Part of the Problem
In her article “Qatar is preparing a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel to supplant Iran’s,” (Haaretz, October 15), Dr. Ronit Marzan takes a one-dimensional approach toward Qatar. However, Israel’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “bad” is not a good approach to intelligent foreign policy. Skillful diplomacy identifies common interests shared by diverse and often opposing players – partners in one area who are adversaries in another. That is precisely why the term “frenemies” exists.
Qatar is a classic example. It does indeed support the Muslim Brotherhood, but the conclusion that it therefore supports terrorism is mistaken and misleading. The Muslim Brotherhood spans a wide spectrum. Anyone who understands the dramatic difference between MK Mansour Abbas and Hamas, or Raed Salah and the late Mohammed Morsi, the former Egyptian president who, during his presidency, upheld the peace agreement with Israel, realizes this. Unlike Iran, Qatar has never sought to promote terrorism, even though it has not avoided connections with those involved in it.
The transfer of Qatari aid to Hamas was carried out in response to an Israeli-American request to create Western leverage over Hamas and mechanisms for ending the fighting in Gaza. Hosting the political leadership of Hamas in Qatar was part of a broader approach, aimed at distancing the movement from Iran.
Qatar’s assistance is highly valued by Israeli and American negotiators in the efforts to release hostages held by Hamas and this is a good example of the importance of working with Qatar. But even after the war, we will still need the Qataris as mediators and stabilizers, because Hamas will not disappear from Gaza and other Palestinian territories.
Qatar hosts the largest U.S. airbase in the Middle East, Al-Udeid Air Base. It is also home to branches of some of the most important American universities. Qatar and Iran are partners in a large offshore gas field, which allows it to influence and moderate Iran. Being the richest country per capita in the world enables Qatar to invest significant resources in rebuilding countries like Syria and Lebanon, and in Gaza – a capability that may be critical to any political settlement following the war.
Qatar’s soft power diplomacy could serve as an alternative to the ongoing military conflicts, which is perhaps a strategy Israel should also consider adopting. We should also learn from the U.S., which utilizes Qatar for diplomatic moves with hostile countries and organizations. For example, Qatar helped release American citizens from Iranian prisons and facilitated the agreement that allowed U.S. forces to exit Afghanistan.
After the Oslo Accords, Israel opened an Israeli interest office in Doha, Qatar’s capital. From this and other actions, we learned that Qatar is interested in helping create processes that promote peace and stability in the region through soft power. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used Qatar to fund Hamas with the declared goal of weakening the Palestinian Authority and the chances of a political settlement, I propose using Qatar to help advance a settlement with the Palestinians as part of a regional agreement. Similarly, it is important to leverage Qatar, one of the five key countries assisting governance in Lebanon, to help weaken Hezbollah domination in Lebanon.
A country does not choose its surroundings and Qatar is not a friendly state, but it is a state that can serve as a counterforce to Iran’s rise. Qatar is an actor with economic and political interests in both the Western and Arab-Muslim worlds. It should be approached with caution but utilized rather than kept away.
Therefore, instead of denigrating Qatar’s significant influence in the region, we should consider how to leverage its skills in navigating among different regional alliances, which give Qatar unique capabilities – not as a sole player or even central one but as a country with influence that even much larger nations, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, don’t posses
In 1929, there is violence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem – then a narrow alley named for Buraq, the steed with a human face that bore the Prophet Mohammed on his midnight journey to Jerusalem, and not the Kotel Plaza of today. The event, which was actually called the Buraq rising was incited by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. A massacre of Jews in Hebron in the south followed. These were a bleak precursor of the wars to come.
Fast forward to mid-April 1936. Following two incidents of killing carried out in by both Arabs and Jews, an Arab National Committee declared a strike in the city of Jaffa. National Committees were formed in other Palestinian cities and representatives of Arab parties formed the “Arab Higher Committee” led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. A general strike spread throughout Palestine, accompanied by the formation of Palestinian armed groups that started attacking British forces and Jewish settlements. Thus began the “Great Palestinian Revolt. It lasted for three years.
British troops run through Jerusalem’s’ Old City during the Great Revolt
Roots and fruits
The ongoing struggle with regard to the existence Israel and Palestine is justifiably regarded the most intractable conflict of modern times. Whilst most agree that its origins lie in the political and historical claims of two people, the Jewish Israelis and the predominantly Muslim Palestinians for control over a tiny wedge of one-time Ottoman territory between Lebanon and Syria in the north, Jordan in the east, and Egypt to the south, hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea. There is less consensus as to when the Middle East Conflict as it has become known because of its longevity and its impact on its neighbours and the world in general, actually began.
Was it the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising a national home for Jews in an Ottoman governate already populated by Arabs, or the secretive Sykes Picot Agreement that preceded it in 1916, staking imperial Britain’ and France’s claim to political and economic influence (and oil pipelines) in the Levant? Was it the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine after the Treaty of Sèvres of 1922 which determined the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Or was it the end of that British mandate and the unilateral declaration of Israeli independence in 1948 and the war that immediately followed?
In his book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Israeli journalist and author Oren Kesslerargues powerfully that the events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. The book identifies what was known at the time as The Great Revolt as the first Intifada, a popular uprising which actually sowed the seeds of the Arab military defeat of 1947-48 and the dispossession and displacement of over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century.
It is a tragic history shared with knowledge in hindsight of the decades of violence and bloodshed in the region that followed. It begins in the time before Palestine became political entity, when mainly Eastern European Jews began settling in progressively larger numbers to the consternation of the Arab populace.
The 1936 conflict stemmed from questions of how to divide the land and how to deal with the influx of Jewish people – questions that remain relevant today. In an extensive interview coinciding with the book’s publication (republished below) Kessler notes that, for the Arab residents, the problem was one of immigration and economics; for the Zionists, it was about finding a home. These two positions soon became irreconcilable issues, leading to sporadic violence and then to continual confrontation.
He believes that the Revolt is the point when both sides really came to see the conflict as zero sum. insofar that whichever community had the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews threatened to become a majority, and this was the immediate precursor to the rising. There was no way that the objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.
It is Kessler’s view that it was during revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extended beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – united in the same cause against Zionism and against its perceived enabler, the British Empire. The Arab public in Palestine was becoming increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.
The British government made early efforts at keeping the peace, but these proved fruitless. And when the revolt erupted in 1936, it sent a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt. It proposed in effect the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepted this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signaled that they were amenable – not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies held the mayorships of many important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition.
Kessler believes that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line became the default position amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with dire consequences for the Palestinians themselves, and when Yishuv leader David Ben Gurion saw an opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – neither British or Arabs. When the Arabs called a general strike and boycott, cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies and closed the port of Jaffa in Spring 1936, he lobbied successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv, ultimately causing a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and helping the Jews in their state-building enterprise.
This is a mosaic history, capturing the chaotic events on the ground through snippets of action. And also, the people involved.
There are heroes and villains aplenty in this relatively untold story. The urbane and erudite nationalists Muhammed Amal and George Antonius who strive for middle ground against increasingly insurmountable odds, and who died alone and exiled having failed to head off the final showdown that is today known as Al Nakba. The farseeing, resolute, and humourless Ben Gurion and the affable, optimistic Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first prime minister and president respectively. The New York born Golda Meyerson, more of a realist than either leader, who would also one day become prime minister. The irascible revisionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinski, the forebear of today’s virulent rightwing nationalists
The hardliner Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, whose uncompromising stance, malign political influence, and conspiratorial association with the Nazis set the stage for a long general strike, the Great Revolt, and ultimately, the débâcle of 1948. The flamboyant rebel leaders, Syrian Izz al Din al Qassam, who is memorialized in the name of the Hamas military wing and a Gaza-made rocket, and Fawzi al Qawuqji. Qassam was gunned down by British soldiers during the revolt whilst Qawuqji lived on to become one of the most effective militia leaders in the war of 1948, and to perish therein. Both are remembered today as Palestinian martyrs whilst the Mufti is an arguably embarrassing footnote of history. There’s an article about his relatively unremarked death at the end of this post.
Amin al-Husseini in 1929
And in the British corner, the well-intentioned high commissioners who vainly endeavoured to reconcile the claims of two aspirant nations in one tiny land, and quixotic figures like the unorthodox soldier Ord Wingate who believed he was fulfilling prophecy by establishing the nucleus of what would become the IDF (like many charismatic British military heroes, and particularly General Gordon and Baden-Powell, both admirers and detractors regarded him a potential nut-case); and the Australian-born ex-soldier Lelland Andrews, assistant district commissioner for Galilee, who also conceived of his mission as divinely ordained. Lewis was murdered by Arab gunmen and Wingate went down in an aeroplane over Burma during WW2.
There are appearances from among many others, Lloyd George, Winton Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Franklin D Eisenhower and Joseph Kennedy.
The book highlights the work of powerful British functionaries in handling early confrontations: they are memorialized for starting commissions to study the matter and to generate ideas, though many of their ideas weren’t followed or were followed to ill effect. None solved the problem, making this account of the earliest days of the conflict all the more heartbreaking.
All under the shadow of the impending Shoah, and the inevitable showdown that would culminate in al Nakba.
The road to Al Nakba
Kessler argues that the Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.
The final paragraphs of Kessler’s enthralling book are worth quoting because they draw a clear line between the events of the Great Revolt and the catastrophe, al Nakba, of 1948:
“For the Jews, perhaps the greatest shift was psychological. they had withstood of powerful sustained assault and lived to tell about it. One book on Zionist leaders” thinking in this era is titled Abandonment of Illusions. The belief of material gains would bring Arab consent now naïve and, worse, dangerous. Instead, by the end of the revolt and the start of the world war, much of Palestine’s Jewish mainstream had accepted the fact that the country’s fate would ultimately be determined and maintained by force.
“By 1939, the Yishuv had achieved the demographic weight, control of strategic areas of land, and much of the weaponry and military organization that would be needed as a springboard for taking over the country within less than a decade”, writes the Palestinian American historian Rasheed Khalidi.
Khalid argues that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1947 -1949 was predicated on a series of previous failures: “a deeply divided leadership, exceedingly limited finances, no centrally organized military forces or centralized administrative organs, and no reliable allies. They faced a Jewish society in Palestine which although small relative to theirs, was political unified, had centralized para-state institutions, and was increasingly well-led and extremely highly motivated”.
For Palestinians, he maintains, the Nakba – the catastrophe of their military drubbing, dispossession and dispersal – was but a forgone conclusion. For them, the terrible events that bookended the year 1948 “were no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936- 39”.
The Great Revolt, Kessler says, has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. It is still remembered by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my he regards the. BDS movement as direct descendant of the general strike that preceded the revolt. The two-state solution that is still the international community’s favoured solution to the conflict is but a variation of that original partition plan of 1937.
In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.
The picture at the head of this post shows British troops marching through Ibn Khatib Square in 1936 past King David’s Citadel and towards the Jaffa Gate
British policemen disperse an Arab mob during the Jaffa riots in April 1936 (The Illustrated London News)
Jews evacuate the Old City of Jerusalem after Arab riots in 1936.
Oren Kessler’s new book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues powerfully that events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 have shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. Called ‘the definitive study’ by Michael Oren, Kessler’s book identifies the revolt as the true first intifada, an uprising which laid the ground for the Arab defeat in 1947-48 and which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century. He sat down with Fathom deputy editor Jack Omer-Jackaman to discuss the book, recently released in the UK.
Jack Omer-Jackaman: The general reader, in English at least, has lacked a history of the Great Revolt and its repercussions. What have they been missing and with what consequences for our understanding of the conflict?
Oren Kessler: I argue that although this is an Arab revolt, it is as much a Jewish story as an Arab story. From the Arab perspective it’s an extremely formative event – it’s the crucible in which Palestinian Arab identity coalesced as virtually all strands of Arab society came together in a common purpose against a common foe. But on the Jewish side this is an equally seminal and decisive event. It’s often forgotten but this is the period in which the words ‘Jewish State’ first appear on the international agenda – not just the ‘national home’ promised in the Balfour Declaration, but a Jewish state to all intents and purposes, as part of a ‘two-state solution.’ It’s also the period in which the British Empire sows the seeds for a Jewish army. So, in all of these ways this is a hugely formative chapter in the history in the Land of Israel/Palestine, for the conflict itself, and for attempts to resolve it. The degree to which this chapter hasn’t gotten its due is actually quite startling. It’s not entirely clear to me why such a pivotal event right before the Second World War hasn’t gotten its due in English outside of a handful of academic works.
JOJ: And why has the 1936-1939 Revolt been relatively ignored?
OK: It’s a very good question. In the book I quote Professor Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel, who argues that in the Palestinian narrative and consciousness, the revolt has been side-lined, marginalised by the overwhelming primacy of the Nakba. The Nakba is much ‘easier’ to fit into the narrative because, from the Palestinian perspective, it’s the moment at which they are betrayed and unjustly treated by Zionism, by British Imperialism, even by their fellow Arabs who fail to rescue them from the Zionist menace. Whereas dealing with 1936-39 requires a lot more soul-searching. There is a huge convulsion of Arab infighting in this period – there is much Arab bloodshed at the hands of fellow Arabs. That is a lot more difficult for a national narrative to rationalise.
Every national movement has its narrative and its storyline, and the Jewish national narrative tends to be quite forward moving: from the first wave of immigration in the late 19th Century, on to the Balfour Declaration, the start of the British Mandate and the Jewish state-building of the 1920s and 30s, then the agony of the Holocaust and finally the redemption of statehood. That’s essentially the Zionist story, and I think a large-scale, concerted nationalist uprising against that story is a somewhat unwelcome blip in the narrative arc.
JOJ: Let’s set the geopolitical scene at that time: talk to us about the connections between European and local events.
OK: Throughout the book, I bounce back and forth between the situations in Palestine and Europe, because they’re inseparable – certainly from a British perspective, and equally from a Jewish one. The revolt begins only three years after Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933. There are also other antisemitic movements ascendent across Europe, in places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, and very many Jews are desperate to leave. But almost all potential sanctuaries in the world have been closed; the US has been almost closed to immigration since the Immigration Act of 1924. In many ways, Palestine is the only significant possible refuge left for the Jews of Europe. So Jewish immigration into Palestine is skyrocketing in these years – the Jewish population there doubles in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935, 60,000 Jews come into Palestine, which is nearly double that of the year before, so the Jews are approaching 30 per cent of the population by the time the revolt erupts. The revolt is thus a direct result of the European situation, since it’s very clear to the Arabs of Palestine that if things continue this way, Palestine will have a Jewish majority before long.
From a British perspective, the war clouds looming over Europe make it very difficult for the British army to quash the revolt. They simply don’t have the manpower for it, at least until the Munich Agreement of 1938, granting Hitler the Sudetenland. With the appeasement of Hitler, Britain and all of Europe breathe a sigh of relief and buy some time (at least that’s how it felt at the time). After Munich the British are able to send two divisions to Palestine, which constitutes the largest British army deployment in the interwar period. This is another reason it’s startling that this era has been so overlooked.
JOJ: That leads us neatly onto the next topic, which looks at the balance of power post and ante the revolt. How does each side – and let’s include the British – go into the period and how do they emerge?
OK: Until Munich, the British are severely undermanned in Palestine, and this directly benefits the Jews because this is the period in which the British finally accede to a long-standing demand by the Haganah – the Jewish self-defence group that is technically illegal but tolerated by the British – to arm and train Jews in large numbers. And that’s what happens: 15,000-20,000 Jews join the Palestine Police as Jewish Supernumerary Police. And though they receive their weapons, training and part of their salary from the British government, it’s clear to everyone that they’re ultimately answerable to the Haganah. So the Jews, led by David Ben-Gurion – already in this era the clear leader of Palestine’s Jews – are able to turn adversity to advantage and make tremendous gains, militarily and otherwise, throughout the Arab revolt.
it’s the mirror image for the Arab side. The revolt to crush Zionism crushes the Arabs instead. The initial unity of the revolt’s first phase under the leadership of Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini – which includes a six-month general strike – gives way in the second phase (from Autumn 1937) to a convulsion of infighting and score settling. Several thousand Arabs are killed by their fellow Arabs, and the Arab leadership – namely the mufti and his associates – is driven into exile. And of course the British begin taking very heavy-handed measures – including a number of incidents that qualify as atrocities – to quash the revolt. Huge numbers of Arab men are put in prison or killed by the British, and thousands of homes demolished. The Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt. I argue in the book, and this is an argument that has also been made by the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.
JOJ: The popular narrative is that Palestinian nationalism – as distinct from wider Arab or Syrian nationalism – was a product of the 1930s. What did your study of the period tell you about this?
OK: I think Palestine is sui generis in many ways, including the development of nationalism there. In my view it is during the Arab revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extends beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – unite in the same mission against Zionism and against its perceived handmaiden: the British Empire.
The Arab public in Palestine is growing increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.
JOJ: So was the 1936-1939 Revolt the crucial event in the origins of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was this the point at which it became zero sum for both sides? Or was it just the first time there was a wider realisation of this?
OK: I’ve lost track of how many people who, when I start telling them about my book, assume I’m referring to the Hebron massacre of 1929. In my view the Hebron riots were just that: they were riots, they were an outburst of terrorism, but not a sustained nationalist uprising in the way that the Great Revolt of 1936 is – not an intifada in the parlance of today. I think in many ways, the Revolt is when both sides really come to see this conflict as zero sum. But it was always in a way zero sum in that whichever community has the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. This is an age in which the world is moving, however haltingly, from imperialism towards self-determination, and it is clear to both Jews and Arabs alike that having a majority would be absolutely key. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews are threatening to become a majority, and that’s the immediate precursor to this revolt erupting.
JOJ: Is it fair to say that the tone was set at this time, on the Palestinian side, for this being a conflict that demands hardliners? That the tone was set of leadership by extremists like Qassam and Hajj Amin[1] and not more moderate figures like Faisal or the Nashashibis?
OK: Yes, I do think that this is the period in which the intransigent line taken by Hajj Amin becomes not just mainstream but one from which it is very dangerous to deviate. Hajj Amin, even after fleeing the country in Autumn of 1937, manages to exert his will over the revolt from afar, and anyone who dares step out of line or contemplate reaching some sort of modus vivendi with the Zionist movement tends to find himself dead or in some other serious trouble. A prime example of that is the reaction among prominent Arabs to the partition plan. In late 1936, the British government sends a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt, and famously it proposes the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepts this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signal that they are amenable; not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies hold the mayorships of quite a few important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition. So yes, I do think that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line becomes the default one amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with really devastating results for the Palestinians themselves.
JOJ: Let’s look to the Jewish side. Is it the first, or at least a formative, time when differing approaches to state-building and self-defence within the Zionist movement are clearly exposed?
OK: Absolutely. During the Arab Revolt the Haganah adheres to a policy called havlagah, meaning self-restraint, despite the revolt’s very high toll in Jewish blood. Some 500 Jews are killed in this revolt; these are huge numbers, comparable to those in the Second Intifada in much more recent times. The logic is to convince the British that they can be trusted with weapons and, as mentioned earlier, that’s exactly what happens. The Irgun – the Revisionist, right-wing dissident Zionist group, whose ideological leader is Vladimir Jabotinsky – has a very different view, much more in line with ‘an eye for an eye’. They believe that it has to be made very clear to the Arabs that Jewish blood could not be shed unanswered, and that taking the fight to the Arabs, including civilians, would have a deterrent effect. We see dozens of Irgun attacks targeting Arab civilians during the revolt. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than terrorism – this isn’t ‘collateral damage’ in an attempt to target militants, but a mentality in which ‘If the Arabs target our civilians, we’ll target theirs’. So, there’s a real schism between these two Zionist movements, but the Haganah are able to convince the British that they are in control and are the mainstream, and that the Irgun is merely a fringe group. And that’s how this crucial British-Jewish military cooperation begins.
JOJ: Could the Yishuv leadership have acted any differently in the years prior to the revolt and forestalled it? Or not without sacrificing immigration?
OK: A very good question, and one which gets back to this question of whether it’s a zero sum conflict. I don’t agree with the rose-tinted analyses of history that I sometimes hear, which claim that in the Ottoman and early Mandate eras the two communities were able to get along in peace and it is somehow British mismanagement that prompted the conflict. Rather it seems to me that when the Jews were a minority, they didn’t present too much of a disruption to the status quo, but as soon as they began to threaten to reach a majority, there is almost no alternative to this conflict breaking out. That’s how Ben-Gurion looks at this situation throughout, and he never agrees to even slowimmigration. By contrast, Chaim Weizmann, head of the world Zionist Organisation, is willing to slow immigration to try to cultivate Arab goodwill and cooperation. I don’t see how that objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.
JOJ: To what extent was the Arab general strike self-defeating in allowing Ben-Gurion unprecedented opportunities for a key Zionist priority: the conquest of labour?[2]
The general strike starts almost at the very beginning of the revolt and lasts six months – still one of the longest general strikes anywhere in history. It is a source of great Arab pride. As I mentioned, Ben-Gurion really is an expert in turning adversity into advantage. He sees a tremendous opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – not the British or the Arabs. In the strike, the Arabs cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies, and when Jaffa port closed in Spring of 1936, Ben-Gurion pleads successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv. The British agree and Ben Gurion is euphoric, hailing the fact that the Jews now have an outlet to the world as a second Balfour Declaration. That’s just one example of how the Arab strike and boycott ultimately cause a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and help the Jews in their state-building enterprise.
JOJ: You benefited tremendously from the declassification of the Peel Commission’s secret testimonies, which threw up some fascinating revelations. What did we learn about the origins of the Balfour Declaration, for example?
This was one of the most interesting troves of archival documents that I found in my research. The British Government kept the Peel Commission documents classified for 80 years, and they were very quietly declassified only in 2017. I wrote an article in Fathom in 2020 about the 1937 secret testimony of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, on why the government had issued that historic and controversial document. Explaining his decision of two decades earlier, he says the Jews ‘are a dangerous people to quarrel with, but they are a very helpful people if you can get them on your side.’ He says that he and his ministry were very concerned, in the midst of the First World War, that the Jews of America and Russia might not support the allies but go over to the German side. There were even murmurings that the Germans were thinking of a ‘Balfour Declaration’ of their own. Lloyd George makes very clear in this testimony that that was a primary reason that the Declaration was given at that time. And he says that, in his opinion, the declaration more than paid for itself by the help that the Jews of America and Russia gave in various ways during the war.
JOJ: Herbert Samuel’s testimony was interesting, too.
OK: Samuel was the first High Commissioner for Palestine, as well as a Jew and a Zionist. In his testimony he is asked why he appointed Hajj Amin as Grand Mufti in the first place in the early 1920s – this is the only occasion I’ve ever seen him asked about this decision, which is one of the most fateful taken in the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. He basically says, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘look, I had no choice. We had to appoint someone from the Husseini family because we had already given the other great Arab families various other perks, and so the Husseinis needed to get the muftiship. And Amin was the only Husseini with the requisite religious education having studied at al Azhar in Egypt.’ Samuel doesn’t admit it was a mistake but defends the decision and says that Hajj Amin had more or less behaved well until that point. (That is not quite true: the British had sentenced him in absentia for rabble rousing in 1920.) These are fascinating documents that were originally slated for destruction; the witnesses who give testimony do so on that understanding. But one very forward-looking British official has the foresight to stow them away,scribbling in the marginsthat they chronicle ‘an important chapter in the history of Palestine and the Jewish people, and will, no doubt, be of considerable value to the historians of the remote future.’
JOJ: Let’s look at Peel’s partition proposals a little deeper. We tend, optimistically, to think that decisions taken by high level politicians and civil servants are subject to forensic detail and informed by expert knowledge. How does the British process for proposing the first two-state solution correct us on this?
OK: That is one of the most fascinating discoveries contained in the secret testimonies: just how this two-state solution is arrived at. One of the commission members is an Oxford don by the name of Professor Reginald Coupland, an Africa-focused historian not particularly well-versed in the Middle East. He arrives at the idea that just as the Greeks and Turks were separated after World War One, in what he referred to as a ‘clean cut’, so Jews and Arabs need to be separated in that same way. It is really Coupland, with the help of a few British colonial servants in Palestine, who pushes through this idea of a two-state solution. And they do so quite hastily – when you look at the minutes of these secret testimonies, it’s just a few pages in which they discuss the practicability and the details of such a solution. It’s Coupland, an irrigation advisor by the name of Douglas Harris, and the assistant district commissioner for Galilee, Lewis Andrews (who shortly thereafter is assassinated) who draft the first two-state solution, which becomes the ideological template for every subsequent attempted solution to the conflict, from the UN’s exactly a decade later onto the various subsequent iterations until our time.
JOJ: Let’s talk about another piece of Mandate administration,the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, which barred Jews entry to Palestine just months before the outbreak of World War Two. Does your book have anything to say on this that is new?
OK: There’s a general familiarity, at least among Jews, with the White Paper and that it is a bad an unjust thing. But the genesis of the White Paper has not been researched to the degree it deserves, and in the book I devote a whole chapter to it. The Colonial Secretary at the time is Malcolm MacDonald, who is only 37 years old (he is the son of the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald). This is the Chamberlain government, which is dedicated to appeasement, not just in Europe but in the Middle East. Even though MacDonald is a member of the National Labour Party, he is a loyal member of the ministry and determines, with the advice of senior officials in the army and the government, that some drastic changes need to be made to Britain’s Palestine policy in such a crucial period. There is a feeling that world war would break out at any point and that Muslim opinion, particularly in India, has to be appeased, lest Muslim subjects of the empire side with Hitler.
When you look at the discussion, you see that the British policy makers plan to go far in the direction of Arab demands when they call the St James’s Conference in 1939. And yet, throughout these negotiations, they go quite a bit farther even than they originally intend. So, where 60,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1935, the 1939 White Paper limits Jewish immigration to a total of 75,000 over five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state. The White Paper doesn’t say an independent Arab state, but of course if Jewish immigration is limited to keep the Jews under 35 or 40 per cent of the population, it’s clear to everyone that this would be a de facto Arab state. This is mid-1939, when the Jews of Europe are most desperate to find sanctuary outside of Europe, and the White Paper is seen by the Jews and their supporters as a tremendous betrayal, and a reneging not just on the Peel Commission plan of two years previous, but on the Balfour Declaration itself.
This is one of the tremendous ‘what ifs’ of history: what would have happened had the White Paper not been passed, or had the Peel partition plan of 1937 gone through? Ben-Gurion, after the Holocaust, said that had the Jews had the small state promised to them in 1937, six million could have been saved. I think that’s perhaps an overstatement: I’m not sure that the very small state offered to them was developed enough to absorb six million people. It was Golda Meir who said that had the Jewish state been established (and the White Paper not implemented), hundreds of thousands could have been saved: I think that’s a plausible reading of history. The White Paper is what finally turns Ben-Gurion against the British. It’s when he decides that the British-Zionist partnership is essentially over and when he starts to look across the ocean to America as the great potential supporter of Zionism.
JOJ: Finally, it’s fascinating to see how the 1936-1939 Revolt and this period lives in the iconography of both Israelis and Palestinians. You don’t have to look too hard to see it referenced or deployed in the present day. It occupies a place of glory for Palestinians, which is rather ironic given its role in the catastrophe of 1948. And on the Israeli side, it was referenced not too long ago by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
OK: I argue that the revolt has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. Just recently, for example, in the Gaza conflict of May 2021, you may remember that the war extended to the battlefield of social media. When the Arabs of Israel and the West Bank joined together in a one-day strike, Twitter was abuzz with comparisons to 1936. And, as you mention, Bezalel Smotrich tweeted: ‘the riots of the Arab enemy take us back many years to the great Arab revolt. Back then a hostile British government protected rioters. Today a worthless, weak Jewish government, a contaminated judiciary and a law enforcement system emasculated by dangerous post-national and post-modern notions…’ Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my view the BDS movement is a direct descendant of the general strike. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the two-state solution that is still the international community’s the favoured solution to the conflict is simply a variation of the original partition plan of 1937. In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.
[1] Editor’s note: Hajj Amin al Husseini, appointed by the British Mandate as Grand Mufti in 1921, would become a determined supporter of Nazi Germany. At his 1941 meeting with Hitler, Hajj Amin declared himself ‘fully reassured and satisfied’ with Hitler’s reassurance that once having achieved the ‘total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe… Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere’. In 1943, the SS enlisted Hajj Amin to lead a recruitment drive among Bosnian Muslims, SS Main Office Chief Berger noting the ‘extraordinarily successful impact’ of the Mufti’s activities.
[2] Editor’s note: The concept of Kibbush Haavoda, the conquest of labour, was a key plank in Labour Zionism. Its priorities were the encouraging of manual and agricultural labour amongst Jewish immigrants to Palestine and a reliance on Jewish labour for the Jewish economy
In 1936, widespread Palestinian dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance erupted into open rebellion. Several key dynamics and events can be seen as setting the stage for this uprising. In Palestine, as elsewhere, the 1930s had been a time of intense economic disruption. Rural Palestinians were hit hard by debt and dispossession, and such pressures were only exacerbated by British policies and Zionist imperatives of land purchases and “Hebrew labor.” Rural to urban migration swelled Haifa and Jaffa with poor Palestinians in search of work, and new attendant forms of political organizing emerged that emphasized youth, religion, class, and ideology over older elite-based structures. Meanwhile, rising anti-Semitism—especially its state-supported variant—in Europe led to an increase of Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, in Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, the combination of these various trends produced periodic upheavals, from the 1929 al-Buraq Uprising to multicity demonstrations in 1933 against the British Mandate. In October 1935, the discovery of a shipment of arms in the Jaffa port destined for the Haganah fueled Palestinian concerns that the Zionist movement was introducing the human and military resources necessary for its state-building project under the nose of the British. Meanwhile, the popular and populist Syrian Shaykh Izzeddin al-Qassam , who preached to the slum-dwelling rural transplants near Haifa’s rail yards and who had spent the early 1930s building a cell-based paramilitary network, was killed in a firefight with British forces in November 1935. Qassam’s funeral in Haifa elicited a mass outpouring of public outrage. These events are often seen as direct predecessors of the mass Palestinian uprising that took place in 1936.
The Great Palestinian Rebellion , or the Great Arab Revolt, as this uprising came to be known, lasted for three years and can be generally divided into three phases. Thefirst phase lasted from the spring of 1936 to July 1937. With tensions throughout Palestine running high since the fall of 1935, the revolt was ignited in mid-April 1936 when followers of Qassam attacked a convoy of trucks between Nablus and Tulkarm , killing two Jewish drivers. The next day, the Irgun killed two Palestinian workers near Petah Tikva , and in the following days, deadly disturbances ensued in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In Nablus, an Arab National Committee was formed and a strike was called on 19 April. National Committees in other cities echoed the call to strike, and on 25 April the Arab Higher Committee (Lajna) (AHC) was formed, chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini , to coordinate and support a nationwide general strike, which was launched on 8 May.
The strike was widely observed and brought commercial and economic activity in the Palestinian sector to a standstill. Meanwhile, Palestinians throughout the countryside came together in armed groups to attack—at first sporadically, but with increasing organization— British and Zionist targets. Some Arab volunteers joined the rebels from outside Palestine, though their numbers remained small in this period. The British employed various tactics in an attempt to break the strike and to quell the rural insurrection. The ranks of British and Jewish policemen swelled and Palestinians were subjected to house searches, night raids, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and deportation. Large areas of Jaffa’s Old City were demolished, and the British called in military reinforcements.
Concurrent with military operations and repressive measures, the British government dispatched a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel to investigate the root causes of the revolt. In October 1936, under the combined pressure of British policies, other Arab heads of state, and the effects of a six-month general strike on the Palestinian population, the AHC called off the strike and agreed to appear before the Peel Commission . A period of lower intensity conflict prevailed as the Peel Commission toured the country, but tensions continued to build in anticipation of the commission’s report. In July 1937, the Peel Commission published its report, recommending Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states. Dismayed by this negation of their desires and demands, the Palestinian population relaunched their armed insurgency with renewed intensity, initiating the second phase of the revolt.
This second phase, lasting from July 1937 until the fall of 1938, witnessed significant gains by the Palestinian rebels. Large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem , fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle. The British, meanwhile, imposed even harsher measures to try to quash the revolt. The AHC and all Palestinian political parties were outlawed, political and community leaders were arrested, and a number of high-profile public figures exiled. The military aspects of counterinsurgency intensified, and British tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery were deployed throughout Palestine. The British also meted out collective punishment: thousands of Palestinians were relegated to “detention camps”; residential quarters were destroyed; schools were closed; villages were collectively fined and forced to billet British troops and police. Zionist military institutions took advantage of the situation to build up their capacities with British support. By early 1939, members of the Jewish Settlement Police (about 14,000) were subsidized, uniformed, and armed by the British government as a thinly veiled front for the Haganah, and so-called Special Night Squads comprising Jewish and British members launched “special operations” against Palestinian villages.
Thethird phaseof the rebellion lasted roughly from the fall of 1938 to the summer of 1939. The British dispatched another commission of inquiry, this one headed by Sir John Woodhead , to examine the technical aspects of implementing partition. In November 1938, the Woodhead Commission report concluded that partition was not practicable, marking a certain British retreat from the Peel recommendation. At the same time, however, the British launched an all-out offensive: in 1939 more Palestinians were killed, more were executed (by hanging), and nearly twice as many were detained than in 1938. Such brutality placed immense pressure on the rebels, exacerbating rifts between the political leadership of the AHC exiled in Damascus and local leadership on the ground, between rebel bands and village populations that were expected to support and supply them, and ultimately between Palestinians who remained committed to the revolt and those willing to reach a compromise with the British. British-supported Palestinian “Peace Bands” were dispatched to battle their compatriots.
In May 1939, the British government published a new White Paperthat proposed the following: Britain’s obligations to the Jewish national home had been substantially fulfilled; indefinite mass Jewish immigration to and land acquisition in Palestine would contradict Britain’s obligations to the Palestinians; within the next five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country, after which Jewish immigration would be subject to “Arab acquiescence”; land transfers would be permitted in certain areas, but restricted and prohibited in others, to protect Palestinians from landlessness; and an independent unitary state would be established after ten years, conditional on favorable Palestinian-Jewish relations.
The combined impact of Britain’s military and diplomatic efforts brought the rebellion to an end in the late summer of 1939. Over the revolt’s three years, some 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another. At the same time, the White Paper—despite its limitations—offered certain concessions to the rebels’ demands. Whatever gains Palestinians might have made through the revolt, however, were quickly overtaken by the larger geopolitical processes of World War II , and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact.
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.
A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.
The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.
When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.
“ARAB DEMONSTRATIONS ON OCT. 13 AND 27, 1933. IN JERUSALEM AND JAFFA. RETURN OF GRAND MUFTI FROM INDIA. MET BY HUNDREDS OF CARS AT GETHSEMANE, NOV. 17, 1933.” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4218.
In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]
Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.
The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.
THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, SAYID AMIN AL HUSSEINI, MEETS WITH HITLER, NOVEMBER 1941.
Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.
Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.
And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.
Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,
it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.
British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:
We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.
So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.
A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”
But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.
The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]
Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.
Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.
Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.
1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:
Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.
The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.
2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)
3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel[Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël[Investig’Action, 2019] Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]
4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August 1941
Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.
The day the Mufti died
Yes, Hajj Amin al-Husayni collaborated with the Nazis, but that’s not why he was dropped from the Palestinian narrative
Martin Kramer, Times of Israel Blogs, July 5, 202
Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse,
“To His Eminence the Grand Mufti as a memento. H. Himmler. July 4, 1943.” Israel State Archives.
Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1974, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University Hospital. At age 79, he died of natural causes. The Mufti had faded from the headlines a decade earlier. In 1961, his name had resurfaced numerous times during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. But a couple of years later, the Palestinian cause gained a new face in Yasser Arafat. With that, the Mufti entered his final eclipse.
When he died, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem asked the Israeli authorities for permission to bury him in the city. Israel refused the request. Any Palestinian who wanted to attend the funeral in Lebanon would be allowed to do so, but the Mufti of Jerusalem would not be buried in Jerusalem. Instead, the Mufti was laid to rest in the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in Beirut.
The Mufti was appointed to his position by the British in 1921. Within the British Empire, authorities preferred to work through “native” institutions, even if they had to create them on the fly. So they established a supreme council for Palestine’s Muslims and placed the Mufti at its helm. Although he lacked religious qualifications, he came from a leading family and appeared capable of striking deals.
In fact, he used his position to oppose the Jewish “National Home” policy of the Mandate. The “Arab Revolt” of 1936 finally convinced the British that he had to go, and in 1937 he fled the country.
After a period in Lebanon, he ended up in Iraq, where he helped foment a coup against the pro-British regime. When British forces suppressed the coup, he fled again, making his way through Tehran and Rome to Berlin. There, the Nazi regime used him to stir up Arabs and Muslims against the Allies. He was photographed with Hitler and Himmler, recruited Muslims to fight for the Axis, and attempted to secure promises of independence for colonized Arabs and Muslims. None of his efforts met with much success. His role, if any, in the Holocaust is a contested matter. Hitler and his henchmen hardly needed any prompting to execute their genocidal plans. Clearly, though, the Mufti rooted for Jewish destruction from the fifty-yard line.
After the Nazi collapse, he fell into French hands and spent a year in comfortable house detention near Paris. Later, he fled to Egypt and subsequently moved in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Following the Arab debacle of 1948, Egypt established an “All Palestine Government” in the refugee-choked Gaza Strip, leaving the presidency open for the Mufti. It didn’t last long. He continued to maneuver through Arab politics, but he was yesterday’s man to a new generation of Palestinians born in exile. During the Eichmann trial, the prosecution sought to implicate the Mufti as an accomplice. Yet the Mossad never came after him, and he didn’t die a martyr’s death.
Man without a country
The Mufti was a formidable politician. In 1951, a State Department-CIA profile of him opened with this evocative enumeration of his many talents, which is worth quoting at length:
King of no country, having no army, exiled, forever poised for flight from one country to another in disguise, he has survived because of his remarkable ability to play the British against the French, the French against the British, and the Americans against both; and also because he has become a symbol among the Arabs for defending them against the Zionists. His suave penchant for intrigue, his delicate manipulation of one Arab faction against another, combined with the popularity of his slogan of a united Muslim world, has made him a symbol and a force in the Middle East that is difficult to cope with and well nigh impossible to destroy. The names of Machiavelli, Richelieu, and Metternich come to mind to describe him, yet none of these apply. Alone, without a state, he plays an international game on behalf of his fellow Muslims. That they are ungrateful, unprepared, and divided by complex and innumerable schisms, does not deter him from his dream.
Profilers would later write similar things about Arafat, but the Mufti had none of Arafat’s cultivated dishevelment. He was manicured, even chic:
The Mufti is a man of striking appearance. Vigorous, erect, and proud, like a number of Palestinian Arabs he has pink-white skin and blue eyes. His hair and beard, formerly a foxy red, is now grey. He always wears an ankle length black robe and a tarbush wound with a spotless turban. Part of his charm lies in his deep Oriental courtesy; he sees a visitor not only to the door, but to the gate as well, and speeds him on his way with blessings. Another of his assets is his well-modulated voice and his cultured Arabic vocabulary. He can both preach and argue effectively, and is well versed in all the problems of Islam and Arab nationalism. His mystical devotion to his cause, which is indivisibly bound up with his personal and family aggrandizement, has been unflagging, and he has never deviated from his theme. For his numerous illiterate followers, such political consistency and simplicity has its advantages. The Mufti has always known well how to exploit Muslim hatred of ‘infidel’ rule.
So why did the Mufti fade into obscurity? (By 1951, he was on his way out.) Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the Mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.
The above-quoted American report expressed this view perfectly: “While the Zionists consider him slightly worse than Mephistopheles and have used him as a symbol of Nazism, this is false. He cared nothing about Nazism and did not work well with Germans. He regarded them merely as instruments to be used for his own aims.” If so, why not open a discreet line to him and let him roam the world unimpeded?
Nakba stigma
What finally discredited the Mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t. He explained:
As regards the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, we would not mind. We do not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah. We might lose at first. We would have many losses, but in the end we must win. Remember Mussolini, who talked of 8,000,000 bayonets, who bluffed the world that he had turned the macaronis back into Romans. For 21 years he made this bluff, and what happened when his Romans were put to the test? They crumbled into nothing. So with the Zionists. They will eventually crumble into nothing, and we do not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America or some other Great Power intervenes. Even then we shall fight and the Arab world will be perpetually hostile. Nor do we want you to substitute American or United Nations troops for the British. That would be even worse. We want no foreign troops. Leave us to fight it out ourselves.
This underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.
Upon his death in 1974, he received a grand sendoff in Beirut from the PLO. In 1970, Arafat had transferred the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, and the funeral finalized his status as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Four months later, Arafat addressed the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly, achieving an international legitimacy that the Mufti could never have imagined.
The PLO then dropped the Mufti from the Palestinian narrative; nothing bears his name. Even Hamas, which inherited his uncompromising rigidity and Jew-hatred, doesn’t include him in their pantheon. (Their man is Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a firebrand “martyr” killed by the British in 1935.)
If anyone still dwells on the Mufti, it’s the Israelis, including their current prime minister, who find him useful as a supposed link between the Palestinian cause and Nazism. One can understand Palestinians who push back on this; the Mufti was no Eichmann. But that doesn’t excuse Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the Mufti’s legacy. He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Bob Dylan, Chimes of Freedom
Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon
When Freedom Comesis a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War forCivilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).
The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Parisand Chicago in 1968orKristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.
The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.
In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:
“Freedom must crawl over broken glass”
Freedom Comes
… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts. Robert Fisk
There goes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Here comes the rocket launcher,
There runs the bullets path,
The revolution’s father,
The hero psychopath.
The wanting seed, the aching need
Fulfill the devil’s pact,
The incremental balancing
Between the thought and act.
The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
There rides the mercenary,
Here roams the robber band.
In flies the emissary
With claims upon our land.
The lesser breed with savage speed
Is slaughtered where he stands.
His elemental fantasy
Felled by a foreign hand.
The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On heaven and on earth,
And each shall make his sacrifice,
And each shall know his worth.
In stockade and on barricade
The song will now be heard
The incandescent energy
Gives substance to the word.
Missionaries, soldiers,
Ambassadors ride through
The battlegrounds and graveyards
And the fields our fathers knew.
Through testament and sacrament,
The prophecy shall pass.
When freedom runs through clubs and guns,
She crawls on broken glass.
The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
Thursday July 15, 1948, began as another ordinary day for the Ali family in the Palestinian village of Saffuriyya in the Lower Galilee. It was during Ramadan and Umm Taha was busy preparing mulukhiyah for the iftar meal to break the daily fast at sundown. The eldest son, Taha – who was also the family breadwinner – returned after a busy day at the shop. After finishing his meal, he washed his hands and went out to the field to graze two goats he had recently bought. Taha found them to be restless, but couldn’t understand their strange behavior. Suddenly, he heard a strange whirring sound. This sound intensified and then he saw two planes approaching his village. I heard a terrifying boom. I fell to the ground, my knees shaking. Then another boom, and another boom,” he would later recall. Then he heard wailing and saw smoke in the distance, and parents and children scattering in terror. He left the goats and ran toward home to find his family, but found no one there.
Sheren Falah Saab, Haaretz
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the village of Saffuriyya in the Galilee, then in the British Mandate of Palestine, and now, northern Israel. He fled to Lebanon with his family after their village came under heavy bombardment during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, part of Operation Dekel (the 10-day Israeli military campaign that captured the Lower Galilee),
They were among more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine‘s Arab population – who from their homes or were expelled by Jewish militias and, later, the Israeli army.
We did not weep when we were leaving – for we had neither time nor tears and there was no farewell. We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting so where would our weeping have come from?”
Unlike most who fled, he returned the following year – to Nazareth, where he lived until his death in 2011. During the 1950s and 1960s, he sold religious souvenirs to pilgrims and tourists during the day to Christian pilgrims, and studied poetry at night. Self-taught, through his readings of classical Arabic literature, including Despite ending his formal studies, Ali continued to be interested in reading and writing. He was self-taught and learned the Quran and Arabic grammar and adored classical Arabic poetry. He read American fiction, and English poetry in translation. He began his poetry career in his forties. His shop in Nazareth, near the Church of the Annunciation, became a meeting place for local and visiting writers. his family settled in Nazareth and he opened a souvenir shop.
In fact, his door was always open to intellectuals and cultural figures of that era. “My shop turned into a literary salon,” he told his biographer. Prominent intellectuals and authors like Rashid Hussein, Emile Habiby and Hanna Abu Hanna visited him regularly. He mentioned that even Mahmoud Darwish, the most celebrated of Palestinian poets, and Samih Al-Qasim, who were high school students at the time, visited him and conversed with him about current events.
The Saffuriya of his youth and the political and social upheavals he endured served as inspiration poetry and fiction that is grounded in everyday experience and driven by a storyteller’s vivid imagination.
“Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humor and an unflinching, at times painfully honest approach; his poetry’s apparent simplicity and homespun truths conceal the subtle grafting of classical Arabic onto colloquial forms of expression. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences have been powerfully moved his poems of political complexity and humanity. He has published several collections of poetry and is also a short story writer.
In a direct, sometimes humorous, and often devastating style, He combines the personal and political as he details both village life and the upheaval of conflict. Comparing Muhammad Ali to his contemporaries, John Palattella commented in a review in The Nation: “Whereas Darwish and al-Qasim, like most Palestinian poets, have favoured the elevated and ornate rhetoric of fus’ha, or classical Arabic, Muhammad Ali writes non-metrical, unrhymed poems that blend classical fus’ha with colloquial Arabic’.”
Amongst contemporary Palestinian poets, Taha was an atypical. His aversion to performing poems that referred to intifada and resistance raised numerous questions in the hothouse atmosphere Israeli and Palestinian politics and conflict. When asked his opinion on what he called “placard like-poetry”, he declared: “The poetry of the stones is fleeting, and the true poetry that lasts is that which depicts what’s behind the stones and what’s behind the intifada, which shows life brimming with feeling and sensation and pain.”
His collections in English include Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story (2000) and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (2006), both translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. He traveled to read his work in Europe and the United States, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In 2009, the writer Adina Hoffman published a biography, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which won the 2010 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Meeting at an airport
I made my first acquaintance with the poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali with a poem about a chance meeting at an airport. Aware of his background, and the tumultuous times he lived through, it spoke to me on many levels.
In common with much contemporary Palestinian poetry, it portrays thepain of separation and of leaving home – and of exile. It recounts a chance meeting four decades after an event which we are to assume is al Nakba.
Two friends are taking their customary walk to a village spring. The language suggests that they are more than friends – he recalls how is his companion surprises with him questions that send his blood rushing. He answers and she laughs – her laughter startles the starlings into flight,
They part or are parted – we do not know which – and do not see each other again until forty years later when they just chance to bump into each other at a foreign airport in what we assume from the Arabic title of the poem, liqa’ fi matar mahayid , is a “neutral” or “friendly” airport. Are they just travelers or is his old friend an exile? Again we are not told – although Taha did not leave what became Israel, living in Nazareth all his life, so we assume it was the latter.
He is absolutely shocked to encounter his old friend. “Ya lalmuhal min al muhali!” he exclaims, using the a high Arabic idiom equivalent to “Oh my god!
“ or “wow!” He doesn’t think she recognizes him – but it is not so. She asks the very same questions she asked all those years ago. Again his blood rushes. He gives the very same answer. But this time, she does not laugh – instead, she weeps, and there no birds to sing, but invisible, heartbroken doves.
And so, two people meet at last and harbour the same feelings for each other as the first time they met long, long ago. But in life as in art, reconnecting with a loved one does not just bring joy – it can also bring sorrow and regret. It is a timeless theme – think Rick and Lisa reunited unexpectedly and ultimately temporarily in the “gin joint” in Casablanca.
I could go out on a limb and suggest that the lost love encountered at the airport could also be construed as a metaphor for the lost Palestine.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz provides some further insight into the poem:
“He was in love with his cousin Amira, who would later become a central figure in his poems. He wanted to ask for her hand in marriage, but decided to wait until he was financially stable and had the dowry to offer her family.
On that fateful night when Saffuriyya was bombed as, his hopes of marrying Amira were shattered. He continued to carry her in his heart after his family fled to Lebanon, and he got to meet her again in the refugee camp. However, after a year, Ali’s father decided to try his luck and returned to Israel with his children. Thus, Ali’s love for Amira was buried on the day the family left the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.
We were not awake, and we did not fall asleep
on the night we left, that night was not a night for us
No fire was lit, no moon rose
He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain.”
Meeting at an Airport follows, in English and in Arabic, together with a selection of Taha Muhammed Ali’s poems – all translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin
Arab poets and exile
A million spaces in the earth to fill, here’s a generation waiting still – we’ve got year after year to kill, but there’s no going home. Steve Knightley, Exile
Historical and social memory, and indeed, remembrance and commemoration, and their opposites, forgetfulness and letting go, are intrinsic to our human story … For the exile, the refugee, the involuntary migrant, theirs’ is a yearning, a longing, an absence of belonging – an existential homelessness and rootlessness, that is almost like a phantom limb. It is a bereavement, a loss, a spiritual and cultural death that could qualifies for descriptors drawn from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief: (Shock and disbelief), denial, anger, bargaining, depression, (testing) and acceptance.
One way the refugee can assuage his or her anguish is through writing. Chicago librarian and writer Leslie Williams notes: “The literature of exile encompasses bitter, impassioned indictments of unjust, inhumane regimes, but also includes wrenching melancholy for lost homes, lost families, and a lost sense of belonging. The pervasive feeling of rootlessness, of never being quite at home echoes across centuries of exile writing” (read here her The Literature of Exile).
See also, No Going Home – the refugee’s journey (1) and Hejira – the refugee’s journey (2)
You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”
And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.
. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .
And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”
And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.
From So What New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005
لقاء في مطار محايد
طه محمد علي
سألتني
وكنا من ضُحى النبعِ
مرة
عائديْْنْ
‘ماذا تكره
ومن تُحِب؟
سؤآلٌ
عُمرُه الآن عقودٌ أربعةْ
يا للْجواب من السؤالْ
وجوابٌ
عُمرُه عُمرُ رحيلك
يا لَلْسؤآلِ من الجوابْ
واليومَ
يا للْمُحالْ
ها نحن في مطارٍ مُحايِِدْ
على شفا صُدفةٍ
نَلتَقي
وّيحيْ…؟
نلتقي…؟
وها أنتِ
تُعيدين السؤالْ؟
يا لَلْمُحالِ من المُحالِْ
عَرَفْتُكِ
ولم تعرفيني
‘أهذا أنتَ؟
ولم تُصَدِّقي
وفجأة
انفجرتِ تسألين
‘إن كنتَ أنتَ أنتَ
فماذا تكره
ومن تُحبْ؟
At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
Poetry hides
somewhere
behind the night of words
behind the clouds of hearing,
across the dark of sight,
and beyond the dusk of music
that’s hidden and revealed.
But where is it concealed?
And how could I
possibly know
when I am
barely able,
by the light of day,
to find my pencil?
from SO WHAT New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005, Copper Canyon Press, 2006,
Empty Words
Ah, little notebook,
yellow as a spike of wheat
and still as a face,
I’ve protected you
from dampness and rodents
and entrusted you with
my sadness and fear,
and my dreams—
though in exchange I’ve gotten from you
only disobedience and betrayal…
For otherwise where are the words
that would have me saying:
If only I were a rock on a hill…
unable to see or hear,
be sad or suffer!
And where is the passage
whose tenor is this:
I wish I could be
a rock on a hill
which the young men
from Hebron explode
and offer as a gift to Jerusalem’s children,
ammunition for their palms and slings!
And where is the passage
in which I wanted
to be a rock on a hill
gazing. out from on high
hundreds of years from now
over hordes ,.
of masked liberators!
And where is what belongs
to my dream of being
a rock on a hill
along the Carmel—
where I call on the source of my sadness,
gazing out over the waves
and thinking of her
to whom I bade
farewell at the harbor pier
in Haifa forty years ago
and still…
I await her return
one evening
with the doves of the sea.
Is it fair, little notebook,
yellow as a spike of wheat
and still as a face,
that you conceal
what you cancel and erase,
simply because it consists of empty words—
which frighten no enemy
and offer no hope to a friend?
From Never Mind – Twenty Poems and a Story,
Twigs
Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.
My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
Abd al Hadi Fights a Superpower
In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”
Nevertheless—
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.
The Palestinian poet who never lamented the occupied land
The play ‘Taha’ offers a glimpse into the life of a poet who eschewed politics, preferring to write about personal pain and lost masculinity
The late poet Taha Muhammad Ali. Nina Subin
Thursday July 15, 1948, began as another ordinary day for the Ali family in the Palestinian village of Saffuriyya in the Lower Galilee. It was during Ramadan and Umm Taha was busy preparing mulukhiyah for the iftar meal to break the daily fast at sundown.
The eldest son, Taha – who was also the family breadwinner – returned after a busy day at the shop. After finishing his meal, he washed his hands and went out to the field to graze two goats he had recently bought. Taha found them to be restless, but couldn’t understand their strange behavior. Suddenly, he heard a strange whirring sound. This sound intensified and then he saw two planes approaching his village.
“I heard a terrifying boom. I fell to the ground, my knees shaking. Then another boom, and another boom,” he would later recall. Then he heard wailing and saw smoke in the distance, and parents and children scattering in terror. He left the goats and ran toward home to find his family, but found no one there.
The story of Taha, from an eponymous play that was recently published in Hebrew (as part of the Maktoob project that translates Arabic literature into Hebrew), is based on the life of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who died in 2011 at age 80.
The village of Saffuriyya in the lower Galilee in 1948. נדב מן, ביתמונה. מ?
Amer Hlehel, the actor and playwright who wrote the play, takes the reader on a reflective journey through the poet’s personal life: from his escape from Saffuriyya as a teenager in 1948 following the occupation of the village, through his adaptation to life in a Lebanese refugee camp, to his return to Israel, which was fraught with dangers.
The play was first produced in 2014 and performed in Arabic at the Al-Midan Theater in Haifa. It was subsequently staged in Nazareth, Jerusalem and Ramallah, and was well-received by Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. In the play, Hlehel incorporates quotes from things Ali said in interviews and in his meetings with him, as well as excerpts from his poetry.
Writing about leaving their Galilee village, Ali writes: “We did not weep / when we were leaving – for we had neither / time nor tears / and there was no farewell. / We did not know / at the moment of parting / that it was a parting / so where would our weeping / have come from?”
In the play, just as in real life, Ali does not manage to overcome the personal pain, but confronts it by writing poetry. He does not weep for the stones of the house that were destroyed, nor for the land that was occupied, but for the love that he lost and the life that ceased to exist.
Taha Muhammad Ali. ‘He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain. Alex Levac
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in Saffuriyya in 1931. At age 10, he stopped his formal education in order to help his father support the family. Later, he opened a grocery store in the village, as described by Hlehel in the play: “I opened the diwan [central room] in our house, which overlooked the main road. I filled the shelves with cigarettes and chocolate and halvah and chewing gum and pens, and the crown jewel was a block of ice inside a bowl with bottles of orange-, apple- and lemon-flavored soda.”
Despite ending his formal studies, Ali continued to be interested in reading and writing. He was self-taught and learned the Quran and Arabic grammar thanks to his neighbor, il-Hajj Taher. “He had a shelf of books and called it a library: the people of the village would read and return them,” he recounted in an interview with Adina Hoffman, who wrote the biography of Ali’s life, “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century.”
It was through Taher’s books that Ali learned about the poets of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties (between the seventh and eighth centuries, and eighth and 13th centuries, respectively), and fell in love with classical Arabic poetry.
The sacrifices Ali made on behalf of his family reveal a generous and reserved personality. He was in love with his cousin Amira, who would later become a central figure in his poems. He wanted to ask for her hand in marriage, but decided to wait until he was financially stable and had the dowry to offer her family.
Dr. Daniel Behar. ‘Taha Muhammad Ali had a talent to separate himself from the bitterness and political performance that surrounded Palestinian poetry.’runo Charbit/The Hebrew Universe
On that fateful night when Saffuriyya was bombed as part of Operation Dekel (the 10-day Israeli military operation that captured the Lower Galilee), his hopes of marrying Amira were shattered. He continued to carry her in his heart after his family fled to Lebanon, and he got to meet her again in the refugee camp. However, after a year, Ali’s father decided to try his luck and returned to Israel with his children. Thus, Ali’s love for Amira was buried on the day the family left the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.
In an interview with Hoffman, Ali described that moment as really tough. He immortalized this moment in a poem that is quoted in the play: “We were not awake, and we did not fall asleep / on the night we left, that night was not a night for us / No fire was lit, no moon rose.”
“Taha Muhammad Ali dedicates space to personal sadness in his poetry,”says Daniel Behar, a lecturer in modern Arabic literature at the Hebrew University who translated Ali’s poems for the play. He stresses that Ali’s poems distance themselves from performative-collective lamentation. “He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain.”
According to Behar, Ali decided to write in such a personal style as he was not writing with a specific audience in mind.
Ali confirmed these observations while speaking with Hoffman, when he said he would throw his writing “in the drawer and forget about it.” He said he had never thought of becoming a poet or publishing his poems, even though he was interested in culture and literature. After his return from Lebanon in the fall of 1949, his family settled in Nazareth and he opened a souvenir shop. In fact, his door was always open to intellectuals and cultural figures of that era.
‘As I read his poems, I felt it was important for the Hebrew audience to get to know him,’ says Guy Elhanan, a theater director, actor and translator of the play ‘Taha.Noa Elhannan
“My shop turned into a literary salon,” he told Hoffman. Prominent intellectuals and authors like Rashid Hussein, Emile Habiby and Hanna Abu Hanna visited him regularly. He mentioned that even Mahmoud Darwish and Samih Al-Qasim, who were high school students at the time, visited him and conversed with him about current events.
But, adds Behar, Ali’s poetry was different from the works of well-known Palestinian poets like Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad and Al-Qasim, who often focused on Palestinian heroism. “Taha Muhammad Ali had a talent to separate himself from the bitterness and political performance that surrounded Palestinian poetry,” he notes. According to Behar, “his writing was intended to fill the silence of the archive for marginalized forms of life and nameless experiences, and whose voices were absent from written history.”
In 1983, Ali published his first collection of poems, “The Fourth Qasida [ode] and Ten More Poems.” This happened only after his friends urged him to publish his work. He later published a collection of stories, “Fooling the Killers” (1989), and three more collections of poetry: “Fire in the Convent Garden” (1992), “God, Caliph and the Boy with Colorful Butterflies” (2002) and “No More” (2005). A collection of his poems was published in Hebrew in 2006, translated by the author and poet Anton Shammas (published by Andalus).
The cover of Hebrew translation of the play ‘Taha.Maktub / Fares Shehada
“As I read his poems, I felt it was important for the Hebrew audience to get to know him,” says Guy Elhanan, a theater director, actor and translator of the play “Taha.”
One of the key motifs in Ali’s poetry was his native village. “Saffuriyya was dear to his heart and his love for it stood out in all his poems,” says Behar. Taha’s brother, Amin Muhammad Ali, said in an interview with the Al-Raed channel in 2016 that “the village never left him.” He added that his brother documented the small and large details in Saffuriyya throughout his life – in conversations with people, in his poetry, both day and night. The Palestinian poet Naji Daher from Nazareth added in an interview with the same Arab channel that “Ali carried Saffuriyya in his heart everywhere, and he also succeeded in conveying it to the world at large.”
The poem “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” written by Ali in 1973 and published in Hebrew in 2006, embodies his approach as a poet. He does not write about Palestinian heroes seeking revenge against the Jews, nor does he try to conceal the sense of defeat and lost masculinity. In the poem, he portrays the character of the village fool Abd el-Hadi as an illiterate person who does not even know what The New York Times is. Between the lines, Ali reveals parts of himself, drawing the reader closer to him. “You can see aspects of Taha Muhammad Ali in the character of Abd el-Hadi – he has a joy and love of life that punctures the sadness and gives value to human love,” says Behar.
Ali concludes the poem with a description of Abd el-Hadi’s forgiving behavior: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury / about his enemies my client knows not a thing / And I can assure you / were he to encounter the entire crew of the aircraft carrier Enterprise / he’d serve them eggs sunny-side up / and labneh fresh from the bag.”
According to Behar, in this poem (and others), Ali plays with words and sounds that were not customary in Palestinian poetry, offering sharp transitions between dialect and a high literary language.
In 2007, in an interview with the U.S. television program “PBS NewsHour,” Ali talked about his attempts to write poetry in the years after he left school. “This went together, reading and trying to write,” he said. “You have to take the pen and to take a paper, and to be ready to wait for it – otherwise it will come and you are not there. As a writer, you have to train yourself to write. Write anything, but everyday.”
Eight months after the outbreak of the second intifada at the start of the 2000s, Ali was published in London. He and Al-Qasim gave poetry readings to audiences in the British capital. Al-Qasim read his “Poem of the Intifada,” an indictment of those he called “Occupiers Who Do Not Read.” Ali, on the other hand, read distinctly different poems. “None of the poems he read contained a single direct reference to the uprising, to the ‘struggle,’ to children or to stones,” Hoffman wrote in her book.
His aversion to performing poems that referred to the intifada raised numerous questions. Hoffman noted in her book that he was indeed asked his opinion on what she called “placard like poetry.”
“The poetry of the stones is fleeting,” he declared, “and the true poetry that lasts is that which depicts what’s behind the stones and what’s behind the intifada, which shows life brimming with feeling and sensation and pain.”
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.
In That Howling Infinite 