Part IV

The decision by the British and French to separate Palestine from Syria at the San Remo Conference in April 1920, in order to control both areas, triggered protests throughout Palestine, historian Daniel Pipes points out. Demands were made for independence of a united Syria stretching from Turkey to the Sinai.

After the French seized Damascus in 1920, destroying the Arab kingdom, the Syrians focused their attention on liberating their country from French rule and unifying the Syrian national community, particularly by trying to integrate the formidable Alawi and Druze territorial minorities, historian Moshe Ma’oz asserts.

He adds that Palestine became of far less concern. For the Palestinian Arabs, the attraction of being connected to Syria diminished once it involved answering to Paris. Palestinian Arabs leaders came to recognize that they were on their own against the British and the Zionists. At that point, they focused on establishing an autonomous Arab government in Palestine which they would govern, not politicians in Damascus. This is the origin of Palestinian nationalism.

At the Third Palestinian Congress in December 1920, delegates voted to delete the term “Southern Syria” and cease insisting that Palestine be part of Syria. Palestine thus became acceptable to the Muslims; and not long afterward found the idea attractive. In 1922, they withdrew from the Syrian Congress, the primary organization in exile devoted to building Greater Syria.

Pipes concludes that “ultimately, Palestinian nationalism originated in Zionism; were it not for the existence of another people who saw British Palestine as their national home, the Arabs would have continued to view this area as a province of Greater Syria. Zionism turned Palestine into something worthy in itself; if not for the Jewish aspirations, Sunni Arab attitudes toward Palestine would no doubt have resembled those toward the territory of Transjordan—an indifference only slowly eroded by many years of governmental effort. Palestinian nationalism promised the most direct way to deal with the challenge presented by Zionist settlers—a challenge never directly felt on the East Bank.”

Martin Gilbert notes that when on April 24, 1920, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George accepted a British Mandate for Palestine, he informed the San Remo Conference that the responsibility of governing Palestine “would not be rendered less difficult by the fact that it was to be the national home of the Jews, who were an intelligent race but not easy to govern.”

A New Chapter in the Zionist Movement

Ben Halperin, professor of Near Eastern Studies, said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis believed the San Remo Resolution marked a new chapter in the Zionist movement: “The work of the great [Theodore] Herzl was completed at San Remo … (the nations of the world) have done all that they could do. The rest lies with us.”

Throughout this time, European and American maps of “Palestine” included territory east of the Jordan River. From the late fourth century CE until 1946, “Palestine” included part or all of the land of what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica correctly states that “Western Palestine” was separated by the Jordan River from “Eastern Palestine” and stretched to the beginning of the Arabian Desert.

In an article entitled the “San Remo Resolution,” the Council on Foreign Relation states that there was never any single Turkish administrative entity that clearly corresponded with Western Palestine. Palestine residents were generally referred to as “Southern Syrians,” according Ronald Storrs, military governor of Jerusalem.

Political scientist Gabriel Scheinmann explains that Syria, Libya and Palestine were given names used during Roman times. Libya reappeared in 1934, when the Italians combined Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan. The first time “Syria” had been used as the name of a state followed the establishment of the French mandate. Iraq had been a medieval province of the caliphate, while “Lebanon” referred to a mountain and “Jordan” to a river.

Significantly, these borders were not created by topography, he said, and did not take demography into account. A large Kurdish population—totaling as many as 25 million—was divided between four states: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Shiite Arabs were split between Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia. The Alawites, a heterodox Shiite Arab sect, reside today along the northern Lebanese, Syrian, and southwestern Turkish coasts.

The Druze, Scheinmann adds, were spread between Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon, theoretically a Christian stronghold, comprised large populations of Sunni and Shiites, and Alawites and Druze. Sunni Arabs, who formed the dominant population of the Middle East, were divided into numerous states. Pockets of Turkmen, Circassians, Assyrians, Yazidis and Chaldeans were isolated throughout.

Before Jews began referring to themselves as Israelis in 1948, the term “Palestine” applied almost entirely to institutions founded established by Jews: The Jerusalem Post, founded in 1932, was called The Palestine Post; Bank Leumi L’Israel, incorporated in 1902, was called the Anglo Palestine Company until 1948; Israel Electric Corporation, founded in 1923 by Pinhas Rutenberg, was initially called The Palestine Electric Company; and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936, was originally called the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.

Trusteeships and the Right Of Self-Determination

The San Remo Resolution stated that the “[British] Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] Declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate deliberately make no mention of recognizing Palestinian Arabs as a separate and distinct people with their own national rights, explains Eli E. Hertz. The indigenous people were regarded as residents whose political identity was connected to the larger Arab nation that was divided between 1920 and 1924 by the League of Nations into several states controlled by superpowers: Iraq and Transjordan were under the British, Lebanon and Syria under French rule, and Saudi Arabia was as a separate, autonomous entity.

Hertz says when the British established a Palestinian entity, the Muslims were extremely apprehensive about the implications of what this meant for their future. Aside from viewing this as a victory for the Zionists and a defeat for them, some even assumed this might portend “lingering Crusader desires among the British.” The Zionists rightly understood that when the British defined the term “Palestine,” this became a significant step in realizing the establishment of a Jewish state.

Martin Gilbert said the League of Nations handed international trusteeships to the French and British to prepare those liberated from the Turks for independence. Once the indigenous populations demonstrated their ability to assume control, the mandates were supposed to be self-terminating.

Judge Simon H. Rifkind points out that Jewish self-determination thus became part of a process that decolonized the Middle East leading to Jewish and Arab independence. Repeated associations of Israel with colonialism—a ahistorical canard that erases the millennia-long association of Jews with the Land of Israel as an indigenous people—ignores the benefit that Zionism actually brought to the Arabs through the process of decolonization. Though the Turkish government did not ratify the treaty signed at Sèvres, France on August 10, 1920, it later agreed to renounce its sovereignty over Palestine, which the Allies would administer as they determined by the treaty of Lausanne, ratified on September 28, 1923.

Therefore, Rifkind said, the decision at San Remo and the treaty with Turkey agreed to “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” under the terms of the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration accepted the position that there is a Jewish people and spoke of establishing a national home “for the Jewish people.” The Declaration embraced a basic premise of Zionist ideology and went beyond providing protection for the small community in Palestine by expanding the promise to Jews throughout the world. Winston Churchill made this point in the House of Commons on May 23, 1939: “To whom was the pledge of the Balfour Declaration made? It was made to world Jewry…”

Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.