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By Root 2000 0

this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in 50 years, everyone will perceive it.’ Another leading Zionist, Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first president of Israel, was instrumental in lobbying the British government for what became the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whose text assured Jews that the British government would ‘view with favour’ the creation of ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, provided that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Over the years that followed, the WZO funded and otherwise supported the emigration of Jews to Palestine under the catchcry ‘A land without people for a people without land’. The Jews were indeed a people without land, but the rallying cry ignored the presence in Palestine of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had lived on the land for generations. The WZO also set up numerous quasi-state institutions that were transplanted to the new Israeli state upon independence.

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As Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine simmered, Turkey was going its own way, mercifully free of both the Ottoman sultans and their European successors. Stripped of its Arab provinces, the Ottoman monarchy was overthrown and a Turkish republic was declared under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’ (Click here), a soldier who became Turkey’s first president in 1923.

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Orientalism, by Edward Said, is dense and academic but is the seminal work on the history of Western misconceptions and stereotypes about the Middle East from colonial times to the present.

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His drive toward secularism (which he saw as synonymous with the modernisation necessary to drag Turkey into the 20th century) found an echo in Persia, where, in 1923, Reza Khan, the commander of a Cossack brigade who had risen to become war minister, overthrew the decrepit Ghajar dynasty. After changing his name from Khan to the more Persian-sounding Pahlavi (the language spoken in pre-Islamic Persia), he moved to set up a secular republic on the Turkish model. Protests from the country’s religious establishment caused a change of heart and he had himself crowned shah instead. In 1934, he changed the country’s name from Persia to Iran.

Looking back now at the turbulent years between the two world wars, it’s easy to discern the seeds of the major conflicts that would come to define the Middle East in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the broken promises of the West, Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Turkey’s struggle to forge an identity as a modernising Muslim country. If only we could turn back the clock…

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ISRAEL’S INDEPENDENCE

For the past 60 years, no issue has divided the Middle East quite like Israeli independence. Four major conflicts, numerous skirmishes and an unrelenting war of words and attrition have cast a long shadow over everything that happens in the region. If a way could be found to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the Middle East would be a very different place.

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The word ‘Zionist’ comes from Mount Zion, which lay in Jerusalem. ‘Zion’ later became a synonym for Jerusalem, and in the Bible, Jews are often referred to as the sons or daughters of Zion.

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There is very little on which the two sides agree, although the following historical chronology is probably among them: in early 1947 the British announced that they were turning the entire problem over to the newly created UN. The UN voted to partition Palestine, but this was rejected by the Arabs. Britain pulled out and the very next day the Jews declared the founding of the State of Israel. War broke out immediately, with Egypt, Jordan and Syria weighing in on the side of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel won.

Beyond that, the issue has become a forum for claim and counter-claim to the extent that for the casual observer, truth has become as elusive as the peace that all sides claim to want.