Well, it’s never dull, is it?

After almost two weeks of hosting my parents, made homeless by that massive Golders Green fire, this morning as they were on the way to the airport, we got ‘bombed by Iran’.

As far as I can tell, they managed to fly back to the UK. I’ll know for sure by this evening.

In the meantime, the whole world is in a bit of a pickle, and wherever Jews live, it’s getting kinda hot for them.

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In the meantime, I was doing more digging on the Rav’s statement about the letter from the Arabs, welcoming the Z-s to Eretz Yisrael.

And I dug up more info on it, which you can see a lot of HERE, on the Wiki page called this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal–Weizmann_agreement

Here’s a few relevant snippets:

The Faisal–Weizmann agreement was signed by Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, President of the Zionist Organization on 3 January 1919. Signed two weeks before the start of the Paris Peace Conference, it was presented by the Zionist delegation alongside a March 1919 letter written by T. E. Lawrence in Faisal’s name to American Zionist leader Felix Frankfurter as two documents to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.^[3

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These are the boundaries of the future ‘Jewish State’ submitted to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 by the Zionist Organisation – that Faisal agreed to, upon condition that the British would be withdrawing from the whole of the Middle East, and that the Arabs would also have political autonomy in the area:

“The boundaries of Palestine shall follow the general lines set out below: Starting on the North at a point on the Mediterranean Sea in the vicinity South of Sidon and following the watersheds of the foothills of the Lebanon as far as Jisr el Karaon, thence to El Bire following the dividing line between the two basins of the Wadi El Korn and the Wadi Et Teim thence in a southerly direction following the dividing line between the Eastern and Western slopes of the Hermon, to the vicinity West of Beit Jenn, thence Eastward following the northern watersheds of the Nahr Mughaniye close to and west of the Hedjaz Railway. In the East a line close to and West of the Hedjaz Railway terminating in the Gulf of Akaba. In the South a frontier to be agreed upon with the Egyptian Government. In the West the Mediterranean Sea.

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But bottom line, many of the Arab leaders did write letters, publically, welcoming the Jews to Eretz Israel- and even, welcoming the Z-ists.

But then, it all started to go terribly wrong.

Really getting down to the brass tacks of why that really happened is probably a whole PhD in itself, and it’s not something I plan on writing myself, at this point.

But, there’s some interesting scholarly information to add to this.

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Isaiah Friedmann wrote a book in 2000 called: Palestine: A twice-promised land.

If you go HERE, you can read a summary of the main arguments. This is the bit that caught my eye:

Central to Arab claims on Palestine was a letter dated 24 October 1915, from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, to King Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, pledging Arab independence.

Friedman shows that this letter was conditional on a general Arab uprising against the Turks.

Predicated on reciprocal action, the letter committed the British to recognize and uphold Arab independence in the areas of the Fertile Crescent once it was liberated by the Arabs themselves.

As all evidence shows, few tribes rebelled against the Turks. The Arabs in Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia fought for the Ottoman Empire against the British.

In addition to its non-binding nature, McMahon’s letter has been misinterpreted with respect to the territories it covers.

Friedman’s archival discovery of the Arabic version actually read by Hussein indisputably shows that Palestine was not included in the British pledge.

Indeed, Hussein welcomed the return of the Jews just as his son Emir Feisal believed that Arab-Jewish cooperation would be a means to build Arab independence without the interference of the European powers.

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Bottom line, if our hasbara operation wasn’t totally bankrupt, this information would be explained all over the world.

Because different people can have different opinions and interpretations, but facts are still facts.

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Looks like I will now be reading Friedmann’s book…

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Bottom line, tho, is that the inhabitants of the Middle East were all killing each other for centuries before the ‘State of Israel’ showed up, to become the international scapegoat.

Part of the reason Britain and France wanted to create a Jewish State in the first place, was to act as a buffer zone between the warring inhabitants of the Middle East – including the Druze and the Christians.

Go look up what happened in 1845, a century and a half before ‘Sabra and Shatilla’, and many decades before Ariel Sharon was even a glint in his father’s eye.

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Here’s a few small snippets from HERE, just to get you started:

The Massacres of 1840-1860
Fueled by Ottoman Turkish machination and socioeconomic/ religious differences, inter-religious massacres ensued in Lebanon and reaped thousands dead with many cities, towns and villages obliterated.

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[In 1842] representatives of the European powers proposed to the sultan that Lebanon be partitioned into Christian and Druze sections.

On December 7, 1842, the sultan adopted the proposal and asked Assad Pasha, the governor (wali) of Beirut, to divide the region, then known as Mount Lebanon, into two districts: a northern district under a Christian deputy governor and a southern district under a Druze deputy governor. this arrangement came to be known as the Double Qaimaqamate…

This partition of Lebanon proved to be a mistake.

Animosities between the religious sects increased, nurtured by outside powers. The French, for example, supported the Christians, while the British supported the Druzes, and the Ottomans fomented strife to increase their control.

Not surprisingly, these tensions led to yet another conflict between Christians and Druzes. In April 1845, the long gathering storm burst with a Maronite attack on the Druze in the Shouf, burning fourteen villages and advancing as victors to Mukhtara.

All over the region similar engagements occurred with similar results. The Turks acted as a Druze reserve, and then came the old story of villages in flames and Christian fugitives pursued by Druze and Turkish troops were plundered, mutilated, and slain repeating the performance of 1842.

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Where was the ‘State of Israel’ in all this, in 1842 and 1845?

The answer is: absolutely nowhere.

And not even the greatest antisemite in the world, can pretend otherwise.

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The Middle East was burning for centuries before ‘the State’ came into being – that’s part of the reason ‘Palestine’ just couldn’t be settled and developed economically in any real way.

The Bedouin tribes even broke the ancient Solomon’s Aquaduct, to get water for their flocks, and stuffing everyone else who relied on the water downwind.

There was tribal killings and wars going on here 24/7 – that’s why no-one could really start growing food in Eretz Yisrael, on anything like an industrial scale, until well into the 1870s, when the Turkish Empire was already on the ropes and the Europeans had begun to take over ‘Palestine’ to advance their own interests.

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Under Turkish law, only established religions were recognised.

The French said they were protecting the Roman Catholic ‘Latins’ when they meddled in Turkish affairs.

The Russians said they were protecting the Greek Orthodox church.

And Britain… Britain was a nation of ‘new Protestants’, that had no pre-existing legal status in the Ottoman empire.

So, they cast around for a ‘client group’ they could go and ‘protect’ as an excuse for getting their boots on the ground in the Middle East, and who do you think they found?

If you said ‘the Jews’, award yourself a billion brownie points.

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The real history of the modern problems we are still facing in this area started with Napoleon’s conquest, around 230 years ago.

Even most historians don’t start looking that far back for the roots of today’s very real problems.

Which is a real shame, because then more people would understand way more about what really happened here, and why – and how these old issues are still resonating today.

Just today, no-one talks about Druze massacring Maronite Christians in Lebanon, and vice-versa, without somehow blaming it all on the Joooooos.

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Tov.

I will maybe pick this up again soon.

In the meantime, it’s never dull around here.