Creating Arab States from the Ottoman Empire

Nadene Goldfoot
The Sheikhs of Araby
The British had their problems getting their stories straight when they were given the mandate of the land of Palestine in 1918.  The Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by the Turks, had sided with the Axis or German side.  They lost in WWI.  The empire was by then bankrupt and in the hands of the allies who held mandates over the land.  The Arabs didn't like being in the Ottoman Empire under Turks anyway. 

Born in 1853 was a Sheikh, Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca, a city in Saudi Arabia.  He held title to "King of the Arabs."  This leader was the great grandfather of the present day King Hussein, and was the leader of the Great Arab Revolt.  A Sheikh is an Arab chief.  In his case, his family had held this title from 1201CE to 1925.  He died in 1931.  This was at a time when Russian Jews were making aliyah to the land and developing kibbutzeem, draining swamps, planting Eucalyptus trees,  killing mosquitoes, tilling the land and fighting off raiders.  They had bought land from absent Arab land owners who were having a gay old time in Paris, no doubt. 

Abdullah and Faisal were his sons.  There was a great battle between the Turks and the Arabs.   The British made promises to the Arabs and promises to the Jews.  The promises were about the same piece of land.  This Hashemite family, descending from Muhammad,  secured Arab rule over Transjordan, Iraq and Arabia.

Faisal was the 3rd son of the King of the Arabs.  On January 3, 1919, he signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement for Arab-Jewish cooperation.  He knew about the Balfour Declaration as well.  He was the king of Syria in 1920 and then king of Iraq from 1921 to 1933.  He wanted a very large Arab state for himseslf including Iraq, Syria and the rest of the fertile Crescent.

Two weeks prior to signing the agreement, Faisal stated:

The two main branches of the Semitic family, Arabs and Jews, understand one another, and I hope that as a result of interchange of ideas at the Peace Conference, which will be guided by ideals of self-determination and nationality, each nation will make definite progress towards the realization of its aspirations. Arabs are not jealous of Zionist Jews, and intend to give them fair play and the Zionist Jews have assured the Nationalist Arabs of their intention to see that they too have fair play in their respective areas.

 Everything was predicated on the Arabs gaining their independence.  "The Arabs did not obtain their independence and the Faisal-Weizmann agreement survived only a few months."  It wasn't up to the Jews to give them this independence; it was the British. 
 
Though Weizmann argued in 1947 that Britain had given the Arab independence, they actually wanted more.  The catch was that Sharif Hussein formally endorsed the Balfour Declaration in the Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920, along with the other Allied Powers, as King of Hedjaz.  The treaty was still binding.  The UN did not go along with it." 

Transjordan was created in 1922 and Jordan was created in 1946.
Iraq was created in 1958 and Lebanon in 1943.  Syria was under the French mandate and was created in April 1946.  Egypt has been Egypt forever, but also went through changes.  1954 saw a government.  Iran, which was Persia in bible days, had a government in 1953.  Israel was created May 1948. 

If the British had played their cards a little differently, Faisal and Weizmann could have been successful in their goals to bring these two semitic cousins together, but it was not to be.  Weizmann settled for the poorest portion of the original Jewish Homeland promised to the Jews and was rightfully  happy that he had something that had been lost to us.  Each Sheikh in this Hussein family wanted his own kingdom.  If one brother was promised land, the others wanted their fair share as well.  Our forefathers meant well.  Little could they imagine that we'd still be fighting over the right to have Israel after 63 years of their original declaration.  It's too bad that out of all those Sheikhs there isn't another like Faisal, who saw the good in the Jews coming home. 

Resource: http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/sharif_hussein.html
http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/his_arabrevolt.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_I_of_Iraq

Nazi Instigator: Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini 1893-1974

This voice of the Palestinian people, Amin al-Husseini, was more than the leader of the Muslims of Palestine, the most revered defender of Muslim honor in the world. He advised the Nazis in killing Jews. Palestinians today say they had no role in the Holocaust, and Ahmadinejad even refutes it as never happening, but their main leader was an advocate and main leader in bringing about the holocaust.

He made an alliance with Hitler and helped to promote the Holocaust. This is the man admired by Ahmadinejad. When he saw how powerful Hitler was, he decided to copy him by telling the German consul in Jerusalem that the Muslims in and out of Palestine welcomed the new order and hoped for the same fascist anti-democratic system in other countries.

He organized the "Nazi Scouts," which was a copy of the "Hitler Youth." They used the swastika as their symbol. About 1935, Arabs worked on curtailing immigration and Jewish efforts to rescue Jews out of Europe. Husseini and his friends promoted violence. By 1936 their targets were defenseless Jewish civilians in hospitals, movie theaters, stores and homes followed up by strikes, shop closures and bombing of British offices.

Of course Nazis in Germany and Italian fascists supported this action by sending millions to the mufti. Their SS under Heinrich Himmler gave money and offered plans for anti-Semitic pogroms in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann even visted Husseini in Palestine and kept up contact with him. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, got him to broadcast daily pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic speeches from Berlin. He told his Muslim listeners that they could achieve eternal salvation by rising up and killing the Jewish infidels living in Muslim countries. Husseini told Eichmann and Himmler to speed up the pace of mass murder of Jews. He personally stopped 4,000 children shepherded by 500 adults from leaving Europe and had them sent to Auschwitz and gassed. He stopped another 2,000 Jews from leaving Romania for Palestine and 1,000 from leaving Hungary for Palestine who were then sent to death camps. He organized the killing of thousands of Bosnian Jews by Muslims that he had recruited to the Waffen-SS Nazi-Bosnian division. He alone is responsible for more than the death of 20,000 Jewish children and adults .

This Nazi war criminal escaped to Egypt and was given asylum where he helped to organize many former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against Israel.

In 1947 the Arabs were against the Jews in a Nakba. When Israel was declared a state in 1948 the war officially started. The aim was total annihilation. The leaders said this and their actions backed it. Nazis fought with them along with British Army deserters that were anti-semitic. They attacked Jewish civilians. If they surrendered they were massacred, bodies mutilated and women generally raped. Children and the elderly were murdered. Many Palestinian homes had the photograph of Husseini and Hitler together in Berlin on their walls. This George Washington of the Palestinians inspired hatred against Jews everywhere.

Because the Arabs felt Jewish pressure and influence in creating their state, they became friends with the Nazis and Fascists, they say as their excuse to go along with the Axis. They forget that they were offered a state of their own and refused it. Husseini spent the war years in Berlin with Hitler acting as consultant to the Jewish question. He supported the mass murder of Jews and took a tour of Auschwitz with Himmler. He wanted to use the same method in Palestine and other Arab countries. It didn’t matter to him that most of the Jews in Palestine were descendants of Sephardic Jews that had lived there for thousands of years. He was like Hitler in aiming to be rid of "every last Jew."Hitler had told him, "The Jews are yours." He planned on building a death camp near Nablus.

"Arise, Oh sons of Arabia. Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion. That will save our honor," was his call to his followers. In 1944 a German-Arab commando unit in Husseini’s command parachuted into Palestine and tried to poison Tel Aviv’s wells.

On September 21, 1944, he spoke of the 11 million Jews of the world. In 1939 there were 17 million Jews in the world. He knew in 1944 that 6 million had already been killed before the rest of the world was aware of it.

He also was responsible for a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and organized thousands of Muslims in the Balkans into military units, the Handselar Divisions, that carried out atrocities against Yugoslav Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies.

Reference: "The Case Against Israel's Enemies" by Alan Dershowitz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Amin_al-Husayni

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/mufti.html