History HubΒ permalink
A Line in the Sand
This discussion has been closed.
-
Message 1.Β
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Monday, 17th October 2011
I've just picked up this book by James Barr from the library (yes, one of those that this govt is trying to close down! The hours have been halved, much to the annoyance of local residents, but thankfully it's still open).
So far, it makes an interesting read. It covers the period from the turn of the 20th century in the Middle East, and goes right into Messrs Sykes and Picot, what motivated them, the details of the negotiations between the British and French over what to do with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire (while WWI was still going on!), how these negotiations influenced Churchill et al to ill-advisedly invade Gallipoli instead of Alexandretta, and that's about as far as I've reached to date.
My knowledge of this period has always been patchy at best, aided by some stuff my daughter - who's studying history at school - has been able to pass on to me. I've always felt I needed to know more, especially about how this conflict started, especially in light of the continuing conflict in the region today. So far, this book hasn't disappointed - I feel much more informed about what the region was like in the dying days of Ottoman rule, leading up to the First World War.
But it does seem very much a tale of political machinations that tended to thwart military success. For example, quite a few officials in the know in Egypt at the time - including a young TE Lawrence - apparently recommended that the British invade Alexandretta, which is just about where modern-day Syria meets modern-day Turkey along the Mediteranean coast, and it was a useful port which the Turks could use to launch an attack on Egypt. But the French got wind of the proposed attack, and vehemently opposed it, because it was too close to Syria, which the French had designs upon. In order not to offend the French, apparently, Gallipoli suddenly looked more appealing as a target, and we know what disaster happened next....
Is it any surprise then that WWI had so many disasters and so many unnecessary deaths, if this was the way military decisions were being made? It is mind-boggling.... -
Message 2
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Monday, 17th October 2011
the details of the negotiations between the British and French over what to do with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire (while WWI was still going on!)Β
Yes. And bearing this in mind it's quite remarkable that 2 years later the US president Woodrow Wilson was naive enuff to believe that by declaring war on the side of the UK, France and Russia he was somehow going 'to make the world safe for democracy'.
I'm not sure of the scope of Barr's book but a related 'line in the sand' story from that era involves Kuwait. The Iqair Protocol of 1922, for example, was the international agreement whereby the borders of Kuwait were established. It was significant that the final decision was made by Percy Cox the UK's High Commissioner to Iraq and that he travelled south from Baghdad to Kuwait to finalise the details. Many years later during the Kuwait War (1990-1) much was made of this fact. It was suggested by some that Iraq's claim to sovereignty over Kuwait had some justification and that Cox's high-handed action in 1922 had provided this. -
Message 3
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Tuesday, 18th October 2011
That's interesting about Kuwait, Vizzer....
I've just reached the Treaty of Versailles, so we're still three years off from that. But I'll let you know if it comes up....
My perceptions of Wilson, according to what I've read in Barr's book, and what I knew of him from before. Wilson did seem to be on the campaign trail, by his constant assertions that he was standing up for people choosing their own governments, and the whole principle of self-determination. Clemenceau complained that dealing with Wilson and Lloyd George was like dealing with 'Jesus Christ on one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other'!
To me, Wilson was being a bit of a hypocrite, because while he was arguing for self-determination in eastern Europe and the Middle East, he was playing an active role in restricting rights to black people in the US. Wilson was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, and praised their movie 'Birth of a Nation', which portrayed black Americans disgracefully, and even went as far as to proudly show that film in the White House.
But back to what I've been reading....
Interestingly, TE Lawrence nearly threw a spanner in the works of Messrs Sykes and Picot with the way he and Feisal successfully attacked the Turks, and pushed deep into Syria, much to the annoyance of the French, who considered Syria to be theirs. Apparently, Lawrence's main drive was anti-French sentiments, which even influenced his choice of Feisal over his brother Abdullah, who was more keen on conquering Yemen and the Arabian peninsular. Apparently, Lawrence supported Feisal, because the younger brother had designs on Syria and Mesopotamia.
It is interesting that the Arab armies achieved so much, because Allenby was constantly losing men who were being transferred to the Western Front. It is indeed unfortunate that Britain and France shafted them, after the contribution they made to defeating the Ottomans, and is probably the beginning of a long series of betrayals they suffered at the hands of Western nations.... -
Message 4
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Wednesday, 19th October 2011
The more one thinks about it then the more a landing in the vicinity of Alexandretta would seem to have made a lot more sense (both strategic and political) than the actual Dardenelles fiasco which was attempted.
That said - the British Empire forces in Mesopotamia and Palestine found the going a lot heavier than allied propaganda may have led them to believe. On all 3 fronts - at Gallipoli, at Kut and at Gaza - the Ottoman forces were badly underestimated.
Thanks for drawing attention to this book shivfan. I certainly seek it out. Do keep us posted anyway -
Message 5
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Wednesday, 26th October 2011
Back again for an update, Vizzer....
We know that Lawrence accurately predicted that if the British and the French didn't include the Arabs in any post-Ottoman government, that they were courting disaster, and we know how accurate his predictions were. But what I found shocking is how the British and the French were so gung-ho about their acquisitions that they made elementary mistakes that alienated the Arabs.
In Syria, instead of working with Feisal, the French undermined him, and then declared war on him. It seems they may have underestimated him. In fact, it seems that Lawrence himself wrote a letter to the Times, saying that a lot of the public credit that went to Lawrence really should've gone to Feisal. But at the time, it seems that the European public was not prepared to admit that a mere Arab could be such a successful resistance fighter, and could've been the one who was so instrumental in fighting the Ottomans, and not Feisal.
While the fighting was going on in Syria, the British were doing their best to alienate the Arabs in Mesopotamia. When the Ottomans ruled Mesopotamia, they had a lot of loyal Arabs in key civil service positions. When the British came in, they fired all these Arabs, and put Brits in senior positions. This was in spite of their pledge that Mesopotamia was a mandate for the setting up of an Arab government, when in fact Lloyd George was just interested in creating a colony out of Iraq. The Arabs were incensed by the firing of their fellow-Arabs, but even more incensed when it became apparent that Brits, and not Arabs who fought on the side of the Brits, who were reaping the spoils of power. To make matters worse, an incompetent named Arnold Wilson was put in charge of Mesopotamia, and he completely misjudged the mood in Iraq. The Arabs revolted, and actually had the better of some of the skirmishes with the British army, even though they lost more soldiers in the fighting. In the end, the British took Feisal, after he'd been driven out of Syria by the French, and made him king of Iraq.
But even then, you could see the seeds of future problems emerging....
The Brits preferred to work with the Sunnis in Iraq, if you read what Gertrude Bell wrote, because they felt that the SHia were too easily swayed by religious leaders. The Ottomans had worked with the Sunni in the region for religious reasons, and the Brits maintained that status quo. So, when Feisal first appeared in Iraq, he was naturally disappointed at the lukewarm reception he got from the Shia in Basra.
But how did Mosul and the Kurds become a part of Iraq, when it would've more easily fitted into Turkey and Syria? The answer seems to have been oil....
Lloyd George recognised that oil and not coal was the energy supply of the future, and geologists had discovered oil in the land around Mosul. So, even though the Sykes-Picot line put Mosul and Kurds in French hands, and therefore Syria, the Welsh wizard worked his political magic to keep Mosul and the Kurds in Iraq, and as a result, British hands. -
Message 6
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 26th October 2011
Thank you very much shifvan and Vizzer for this interesting thread. I learned a lot from it.
Cheers, Paul. -
Message 7
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Thursday, 27th October 2011
Yes - some fascinating nuggets of information there shivfan.
The UK's involvement with Mesopotamia/Iraq seems to have been a series of unmitigated disasters from Asquith right through to Blair - literally from beginning to end. -
Message 8
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Monday, 31st October 2011
Thanks guys, here we go again....
As bad as the British were in Iraq, it seems that the French in Syria were worse!
They drove Feisal out of Syria, and the British took him and installed him in Iraq, as discussed above. But in the meantime, the French continued to suppress the Syrians, while at least the British tried to curry favour with Feisal and his Sunni cohorts. For example, the French passed a law in Syria which basically said that a Muslim could not give testimony against a Christian in a court of law. The French just went about alienating the Arabs in Syria....
It came to a head when some Arabs tried to assassinate the French general in Syria, Gouraud. The attempt was unsuccessful, and some of the assassins fled to Transjordan, whose king was Abdullah, brother of Feisal. The French asked the British to hunt down the perpetrators and hand them over, but Lawrence advised the British not to do so, because that would make the British even more unpopular with the Arabs, if they were seen to be cooperating with the French. Furthermore, even though Transjordan was a British 'mandate', Abdullah resisted the British efforts to find the assassins, who were protected by the king's men. The British were reluctant to annoy Abdullah, since the British hold on Transjordan and Iraq was a tenuous one.
I've reached the point where the French started hunting down assassins who were still in Syria, and apparently they tried to frame Sultan Atrash of the Druze for the attempts. The Druze, led by Sultan Atrash, took up arms, and started to fight the French. Apparently, because the Druze lived in a fairly inaccessible area of Syria, the French found the fighting difficult, and committed quite a few atrocities in trying to beat Sultan Atrash. In the meantime, all the French succeeded in doing is make Sultan Atrash an Arab hero, for successfully conducting a guerrilla campaign against the French for a number of years. -
Message 9
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Monday, 31st October 2011
Also, it seems that the trio of Britain, France and Turkey missed an opportunity to create a Kurdish homeland, all because of greed....
Believe it or not, the Turks encouraged the Kurds to fight for an independent homeland, and as a result they were causing the British lots of problems in northern Iraq in the first half of the 1920s. In the meantime, the whole question of who had the mandate for Mosul was unresolved, and that just added to the uncertainty.
So, the British cut a deal with the French. If the French backed the British claim for Mosul in the League of Nations, they would cut off any supplies that the rebels of Sultan Atrash was getting from the Transjordan. The French agreed, and the spineless League of Nations gave Mosul and its oilfields to Britain. In return, the British cut supplies to the Druze rebels, and the Turks got nothing. Worse, the Kurds were left without the homeland they thought they were going to get, and continued to fight for their independence. In effect, the Turks stirred up a problem that ended up plaguing them for decades - the Kurdish fight for an independent homeland. -
Message 10
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Wednesday, 2nd November 2011
Something else that I didn't know....
When Petain surrendered to Germany, and was installed as president of Vichy France, he and his regime weren't automatically thought of as traitors. Churchill managed to spirit deGaulle away to London, but he was a relative unknown in France at the time, and given the choice, it seems that the French preferred Vichy to the Free French for a while at least.
When France fell, it seems that one of the first things deGaulle did was contact the leaders of all the French colonies around the world - and as we all know, there were a lot of them - to persuade them to cut their ties with Vichy and their new allies and conquerors, the Germans, and to throw in their lot with the Free French. However, the vast majority of the French overseas colonies, including Syria and Lebanon, preferred to stay loyal to Vichy France. It seems that only Indo-China, French Congo and the black governor of Chad chose to throw in their lot with deGaulle.
So, it came to deGaulle's attempts to conquer Syria and Lebanon from the Vichy with help from General Wavell. I was surprised to read that there was violent and bitter resistance from the Vichy French in these mandates, and they particularly hated the Free French. It seems that a lot of Frenchmen in Syria and Lebanon were quite happy to switch their allegiances to the Germans, and to consider Britain as the 'old enemy'.
So, deGaulle needed British help to conquer Syria and Lebanon, and even then there was strong opposition from the Arabs in these mandates, because as far as the Arabs were concerned, the French were the French, regardless of whether they were Vichy or Free - the Arabs hated them all! So, to get the Arabs support, Churchill had to bully deGaulle into offering Syria and Lebanon their freedom if they fought against Vichy on the side of the British and the Free French, which is what they did, and after some spirited fighting, the British and their allies prevailed over the Vichy in Syria and Lebanon in 1941.
But then came the difficulty of those promised elections....
DeGaulle installed puppet Arab rulers, but they were unpopular with the Arabs, who saw them for what they were. With deGaulle, they resisted the promises to stage elections, and deGaulle even went as far as to put Frenchmen back into top jobs. Such was the animosity that the Vichy French had for deGaulle, even after they were defeated, most of them refused to switch allegiance, and swear support to deGaulle. And yet deGaulle couldn't stomach the idea of appointing Arabs to senior positions in these mandates, so he stooped to re-appointing Vichy Frenchmen to positions of seniority in Syria and Lebanon.
That did not go down well with the British, who saw these Vichy Frenchmen as German allies who'd just been ousted. So, the British pressured deGaulle to fulfil his promise to hold proper elections in Syria and Lebanon. The powder keg was lit.... -
Message 11
Posted by Priscilla (U14315550) on Wednesday, 2nd November 2011
Great stuff, shivfan. Don't stop there - what happened next.
-
Message 12
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
Priscilla
I hope I can satisfy the wait with bated breath....
The elections were held in Lebanon and Syria in 1943, and predictably the anti-French feeling was so strong in these French mandates that nationalist parties were swept into power, and the French puppets were humiliated at the polls. However, deGaulle and his Vichy colleagues in the Middle East were determined not to allow these nationalists to hold sway. The new Lebanese president, al-Khoury, passed a law abolishing French as the national language, and the French swung into action, arresting the president, his prime minister, and his Cabinet, and installing the French puppet Edde as the president. The Lebanese protests were violently put down.
In Syria, the nationalists stayed in power, but it was an uneasy truce with their French masters. Britain's minister in the Middle East, Sir Edward Spears, supplied arms to the Syrian gendarmes, much to the annoyance of the French, and when WWII came to an end, deGaulle was determined to disarm them. DeGaulle sent large numbers of French and Senegalese troops to Lebanon and Syria, and that racheted up the tensions. The French used a minor dispute to open hostilities, and shelled the civilian population of the city of Hama, killing 80 civilians. They then turned their fire on Damascus, and started bombarding the capital, killing nearly a thousand Syrians. That was when the Syrian president, al-Quwatli, appealed to the British for their intervention, and they did so, forcing the French to cease hostilities.
The situation was so bad that it was now dangerous to be French in Syria. The anti-French sentiment was so strong that Syrians were looking to kill any French citizen they could find. The British insisted that the only course of action was for the French to honour their promise to give Syria and Lebanon their freedom, and deGaulle reluctantly agreed. By mid-1946, the French had withdrawn from Syria and Lebanon, and their mandate in the Middle East was over.
But that just led to another chapter of France's intense rivalry with Britain the MIddle East. The French were now free to assist the Jewish terrorists in their desire to throw off the British yoke in Palestine.... -
Message 13
Posted by Priscilla (U14315550) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
Light dawns,. So it wsn'tt just the Normans, the Stuarts, Napolean and Rugby which ignited the tension between Britain and France.
So the current instability in the region still stems back in part to our own power struggles. More pieces of my jigsaw of understanding are in place but there are some loose blank ones and probably the wrong picture on the box.
Thank you for the follow through.... erm is there more... please?
Regards, P. -
Message 14
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
I'll do my best, Priscilla....
Like you, I'm learning something new with every page I read, and I must admit, this book has enabled me to debate issues surrounding the history of the region.
It seems that the Jewish terrorists who resisted the British mandate had a history of working with Nazi collaborators in the region, which was an eye-opener to me. Avraham Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang, made contact with Vichy Syria in 1940, and thru to the German embassy in Ankara, and sent a message to Hitler offering to fight for Germany if Hitler would support, "the re-establishment of the Jewish state in its historic borders, on a national and totalitarian basis, allied to the German Reich." Needless to say, Hitler never replied (I wonder why! ), so Stern resorted to working with former Vichy officers who were now working for deGaulle, despite refusing to accept the Free French leader over their beloved Petain. (Barr, p268)
One of these senior Vichy Frenchmen, Colonel Alessandri, was a serious Anglophobe who was ambivalent about Germany, even though they were occupying his country. Alessandri started funding Irgun (Haganah) and Stern, after the British forces killed its leader. One of the leaders of the Irgun terrorists was Menachem Begin, while one of the leaders of the Stern Gang was Yitzshak Shamir, and as we know, both men went on to become prime ministers of Israel....
Under Roosevelt, the US had tended to have an even-handed view of the Palestine problem, but under Truman, the US veered decisively in favour of the Jews. "I'm sorry gentlemen," Truman told a group of Arab ambassadors who came to complain about his bias, "but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents." Well, at least he's honest! (Barr, pp313-4)
Truman tried to pressure the Attlee govt into allowing hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews in Europe to migrate to Palestine, and he called on Britain to lift the immigration restrictions. However, foreign minister Bevin initially stood up to American pressure, and there were some ill-tempered comments passed back and forth. David Ben-Gurion, head of the lobby group Jewish Agency, persuaded Irgun and the Stern Gang to work together in making a string of terrorist attacks on Brits, which culminated in the bombing of British military HQ at the King David Hotel. In the King David Hotel blast alone, 91 people were killed and there were quite a few seriously injured as well. (Barr, pp315-323)
The bombing of the King David Hotel gave the Jewish resistance a lot of bad press, so Irgun decided to take their PR campaign abroad. They set up the American League for a Free Palestine, which lobbied for support for 'oppressed' Jews to throw off the yoke of British 'tyranny' One of their main spokesman claimed, for example, that if the British left, there would be no hostility between the Jews and the Arabs. In an open letter in the New York Post, the League said, "Every time you blow up a British arsenal or wreck a British gaol, or send a British railroad sky-high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts." (Barr, pp 328-334)
Of course, the Attlee govt protested to Truman, but both the Democrats and the Republicans were trying to outdo each other to see who could offer the better support to the Jews in the face of British 'despotism'. After all, it wasn't just about the votes of Jewish Americans, who were only five million strong. Truman's stance also resonated with the much larger population of Bible-reading Protestants, who saw it as their duty to help the Israelites regain the Promised Land. (Barr, p331) -
Message 15
Posted by Priscilla (U14315550) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
And now you are coming to an even stickier patch. Will be interesting to see what Barr has to say...........
What a great way to update my reading and knowledge. You precis very nicely, shiv.
Regards, P -
Message 16
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
Shifvan,
did some quick research about the book and James Barr:
All I found was from James Barr's own website:
What does he mean with "James Barr "read"(?) modern history at Oxford" ?
An interesting book on the first sight (view?). Did some research in the Belgian libraries but it is not available... (yet?). In any case I will ask the local library to buy it as the first one in Belgium.
What intrigues me a bit that I nowhere read comments from historians on the book. Is Barr a real historian? Nevertheless historian or not it is an interesting approach and it is perhaps too early to receive comments from other historians. And after all Shirer with his stories about the Third French Republic and the Third Reich was only a journalist but wrote historical comments about the interwar period and WWII...
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul. -
Message 17
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
Shivfan, I don't think there was really any Kurdish nationalist sentiment outside a few intellectuals and civil servants until the late 1920s at the earliest. The congresses of the Ottoman opposition during the 1910s seems to have given many observers the impression that there was simmering ethno-nationalist tension within the empire's Asian territories that matched those witnessed in their European possessions, especially with the divergence of the Turkish and Armenian delegates' aspirations. This certainly influenced the thinking of those like President Wilson who favoured the creation of ethnic nation states in place of the supra national Empires. However such sentiments did not translate into grass roots support across the empire as a whole, particularly in the underdeveloped south east of Anatolia where the general level of education was rudimentary at best. As in much of the Ottoman empire, the populace by and large defined themselves through religious, tribal and socio-political relationships rather than any notion of ethnic national identity. Those who were in favour of Kurdish nationalism were only tenuously connected to and had no influence in the region they proposed as Kurdish homeland.
While South eastern Anatolia had seen several uprisings against the authority of the Sultan and then the nascent Turkish republic, up until the 1920s the emphasis was more about throwing off the yoke of a distant central authority rather than an expression of a desire for an ethnic homeland. As an example, Sheik Said's rebellion of 1925 was provoked by Ankara's decision to dissolve the Caliphate and the Sufi brotherhoods and thus should be seen as more of an Islamic protest agianst the secularism of the new state. Kurdish nationalists attached themselves to this rebellion as much to gain some semblance of influence in Southeastern Anatolia. Such sporadic uprisings within Turkish territory reveal the lack of common sentiment and coordination in the region. Indeed it was the Turkish republics attempt to construct a national identity among its diverse subjects through the aggressive promotion of the Turkish language and culture as well as their refusal to recognise any alternative to Muslim Turkish identity within its borders that did much to spread the sense of Kurdish national identity. According to the pan Turkish theory favoured by nationalists in the Turkish Republic, Kurds were simply Turkish hill men. One could argue that it was the harsh treatment involving mass executions and deportations was also as responsible for the subsequent decades of unrest in Southeastern Anatolia.
Those in favour of the creation of ethnic nation states tended to ignore or play down the extent to which separate ethnicities could be isolated into neat homogeneous units. After all part of the Turkish delegations claim to the Mosul vilayet lay in the presence of a fair proportion of people classified by the League of Nations commission as Turkomen living cheek by jowl with Kurdish groups. Given the Turkish Republics desire to impose a uniform Turkish identity at the expense of the other ethnic affiliations within their territory, they were keen to avoid the possibility that this process would be undermined by the presence of a British sponsored Kurdish government. Such fears had developed out of their experience with the Armenians whose population straddled the borders of the Russian and Ottoman empires and had subsequently looked to Russia for protection from the Turks. The establishment of an international border also cut across existing social and economic relationships. These continued to operate but now took on a more clandestine character.
On a related issue the Turkish Republic and the French did come to a mutual accommodation regarding the populations in their respective territories once the latter had been forced out of Cicilia. The Turkish nationalists were not overly concerned about the loss of Syria to the French for the same reason they were prepared cede Baghdad and Basra to the British because of their Arabic identity. However there was still a sizeable Christian minority that retained close links to Damascus within the Turkish Republic. Although the Republic was a Secular state, Islamic culture was still regarded a defining feature of Turkish identity so as not completely alienate the pious majority. Such a view had been compounded by French and Russian use of the Christian minority as a means of interfering in Ottoman affairs. As a consequence the Republic adopted a policy of attempting to strip Christians of citizenship and residency which in practice meant that Christians who sought to leave Turkish territory even for brief period were not allowed to return. The French in Syria were only too happy to offer sanctuary to these Christians as they hoped to use them to diminish the proportion of the population opposed to their takeover. -
Message 18
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
While it may be true that the borders of an independent Kuwait were established in 1922 after the British mandate of Mesopotamia was created, the fact is it was never governed by Iraq. The closest one gets to such a situation lasted less than fifty years from 1871 to the outbreak of the first world war after Abd Allah Al Sabah II adopted the title of Ottoman governor of Kuwait city under the nominal control of the Basra as part of an alliance agreement. Kuwait city remained far more closely integrated with the cities around the Persian Gulf as opposed to the settlements along the Shat Al Arab waterway however. Furthermore the Ottomans made no effort to exercise their influence by interfering with the domestic affairs of the al Sabah clan for the next quarter of a century.
Mubarek al Sabah's rise to power with the murder of his brother in 1896 represents a substantial loosening of what was already a very light Ottoman touch. He went into alliance with Britain from 1899 in order to secure his rule against attempts to replace him as Sheik of Kuwait City. Britain was all too happy to cooperate in the hope of securing a deep water port in the Persian gulf and put obstacles in the way of Germany's proposal for a Berlin to Baghdad railway. As such he remained independent of Ottoman authority until 1913 when the Anglo Ottoman convention finally acknowledged Constantinople's authority over Kuwait City but in turn recognised Mubarak's claim to the throne. Although never ratified due to the outbreak of the First World War it provisionally set the borders of the Sheik's direct authority at 40km radius from Kuwait City.
The issue of resolving the borders of Kuwait was driven more by the threat posed by the House of Saud who refused to recognise the authority of the al Sabah family beyond the walls of Kuwait city itself because of the failure to ratify the Anglo Ottoman treaty. -
Message 19
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Thursday, 3rd November 2011
Paul, the term "read" appears to be a rather pretentious way of referring to the subject he studied while an undergraduate. I dunno, nobody ever says they read media studies while at university except on University Challenge. He combines his role as a journalist with that of a professional scholar as is shown by his time as a Visiting Fellow at St Anthony's College Oxford. This means he is an academic performing research at the institution rather than somebody who walked in off the street.
Personally I wanted to know what it was he took for the first time after reading modern history. I think he might be referring to a passport photo that he deemed suitable for the mast line of his website. -
Message 20
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Friday, 4th November 2011
Thanks for your kind comments, Priscilla, and thanks for your very interesting insights into the Kurds and Kuwait, lolbeeble....
I knew next to nothing about the posts you made on those subjects, and I'm very grateful for the illumination they bring to the subject.
I've finally finished 'A Line in the Sand', and I will post my summary of those last few chapters shortly.... -
Message 21
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Friday, 4th November 2011
Okay, here we go...some more stuff I didn't know....
The Stern Gang, funded and supported by the French, tried to bomb Whitehall in 1947, but luckily that particular device failed to go off. They also sent a letter bomb to Eden, which the former foreign minister actually carried around in his pocket before realising what it was, and Churchill and Bevin were also on their assassination list. (Barr, pp336-7)
The British handling of the ship 'Exodus' was an unmitigated public relations disaster. The French helped hundreds of Jews to board this vessel, which made its way to Palestine, despite British limits on immigration. So, the British impounded the vessel and took it back to France, so only a handful disembarked. The French were not cooperating, so the British took the ship to Germany, of all places, and used Germans to help force the Jewish men, women and children off the ship with the use of water hoses, truncheons and tear gas. (Barr, pp345-8)
In 1947, Bevin admitted that the best way for Britain to get out of this mess was to hand it over to the United Nations. The British were adamant that even if a solution to the fighting couldn't be found, they were not going to continue running the mandate. That put the French and the Americans in a quandry, because despite the criticism that Truman and the French constantly levelled at the British, they didn't want to send troops to Palestine to mediate a solution either. So, in a move that was so typical of the UN in years to come, they voted that Palestine should be partitioned between the Jews and the Arabs, but none of them could be bothered to actually enforce the vote....
The violence between the two groups got worse in 1948, and continued unabated as if the British weren't even there. It was a shameful episode in British history, because at the same time that they were impotent in Palestine, they were displaying a strong line in separating Pakistan from India, despite lots of opposition from Indians. It is unfortunate for the region that the British stiffened their resolve and did the unpopular but necessary thing in the Subcontinent, but were utterly spineless to do the same in Palestine.... -
Message 22
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Friday, 4th November 2011
I'll leave the last words to James Barr himself....
"It was the struggle between Britain and France for the mastery of the Middle East that led the two countries to carve up the Ottoman Empire with the Sykes-Picot agreement, and it was British dissatisfaction over the outcome of this deal that led them, fatefully, to proclaim their support for Zionist ambitions in the Balfour Declaration....It was the flimsiness of their entitlement to redraw the political map of the Middle East that explained why the British now had to use a commitment to a stateless people to camouflage their determination to take over Palestine. When the French realised the depth of Arab opposition to their rule they quickly followed suit, hiving off the Lebanon in supposed deference to the wishes of the Christian community there. Britain's sponsorship of the Jews in Palestine and France's favouritism of the Christians in Lebanon were policies designed to strengthen their respective positions in the region by eliciting gratitude from both minorities. The appreciation they generated by doing so was short-lived, but they deeply antagonised the predominantly Muslim Arab population of both countries, and the wider region, with irreversible effects. As Britain and France became increasingly unpopular, they were forced into oscillating alliances that only polarised Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim further....The wrangling between the British and the Free French throughout the war years had a further, far-reaching consequence when deGaulle returned to power in 1958. As president of France it was he who infamously vetoed Harold MacMillan's application to join the Common Market...It is a tale from which neither country emerges with much credit." (Barr, pp375-7) -
Message 23
Posted by Patrick Wallace (U196685) on Friday, 4th November 2011
It is unfortunate for the region that the British stiffened their resolve and did the unpopular but necessary thing in the Subcontinent, but were utterly spineless to do the same in Palestine....Β
Might it not have been, though, that Palestine was a mandated/trust territory, for which the UK was accountable to the UN in a way that they weren't for India, and therefore wasn't in a position simply to impose a decision of its own - and didn't have the capacity to enforce, on its own, the UN decision? And the horrors of Indian partition could hardly have encouraged British public opinion to think it was a good idea to enforce the same in Palestine. -
Message 24
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Saturday, 5th November 2011
I don't think so, for several reasons....
1) The partition of India and Pakistan occurred in 1947-8, which is later than when British officials were talking about partitioning Palestine.
2) The problems encountered in partitioning the Subcontinent haven't come up in any of the primary sources quoted by Barr.
3) The UN didn't exist until after WWII, and in the early days proved to be just as toothless as the League of Nations before it. Britain seems to have treated the League of Nations with the disdain it deserved during its mandate in Palestine. In effect, even though it was supposed to be a mandate, Britain ran Palestine as a colony, practically....
4) Moyne was gung-ho for partition, and his unfortunate death brought a change of policy. His successor, Grigg, seem to genuinely believe that the Arabs and Jews would live together in harmony in a united, independent Palestine! -
Message 25
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 5th November 2011
shivfan
To go "off thread" for a minute:
I am just reading "Dared and Done. The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning." by Julia Markus- and the chapter "The Runaway Slave" brings out the significance of the West Indian connections of both poets..
The chapter title comes from a poem that EB wrote during her honeymoon to send to the Abolitionist cause in the USA , which had asked her for a contribution. And though Ms Markus finds it a strange poem for a woman to have written on her honeymoon it is easy to understand how Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett might have found herself at a deep emotional level empathising with a black woman running away from her domineering white master.
Her extended family owned most of the Northside of Jamaica including Barrett town. The Brownings too had owned plantations (St.Kitts) though Robert's father had renounced his inheritance and the slavery on which it depended.
Though the long-awaited consummation of the Browning's marriage seems to have been happy and successful, in her poem Elizabeth describes the runaway slave being raped as a punishment and subsequently producing a white baby, in which she finds the face of the hated master who raped her. She hides the babies face, and ultimately smothers it to death.
But by this time Elizabeth was a forty year old woman, who had lived as a virtual prisoner in Wimpole Street under the dominance her her father who inisisted that all of his twelve children could never marry or even have lovers. In the face of such indoctrination her own attitude to sexual intercourse must have been quite complex and overlain with feelings of guilt and betrayal. Interestingly she refused to recognise the symptoms of her own pregnancy around this time until she went through 24 hours of premature labour. Ms Markus comments that Elizabeth was reassured that the morphine to which she had been addicted since her teens had not impacted on the baby's health "and the fetus one assumes was white".
The significance of that remark is that both Robert and Elizabeth may well have had African blood in them, and that the whole extraordinary drama of the "Barrett's of Wimpole Street" etc may have been directly linked to concerns over the implication of two features within that West Indian culture- the marrying of cousins and the cross-racial sexual relations that produced "mullatos", "quadroons" and "creoles".
It seems likely that the mother of those 12 children, who herself died quite young, in addition to being a cousin of her husband, was also a Creole; and that the apparently outrageous conduct of Mr Barrett Moulton Barrett towards his children might have signalled the emergence of the kind of scientific racism that may well have convinced Adolf Hitler that someone with Jewish blood (like himself) had no right to produce children "for the greater good".
Sorry to intrude on this thread.. But I thought that this might be of interest to you for future reference.
Cass -
Message 26
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Saturday, 5th November 2011
Very interesting, Cass....
Would you please start another thread on the subject, so we can discuss it there? -
Message 27
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 5th November 2011
lol,
thank you very much for the explanation.
"Personally I wanted to know what it was he took for the first time after reading modern history. I think he might be referring to a passport photo that he deemed suitable for the mast line of his website."
Do I sense some irony?
Kind regards and with high esteem for all the messages I read from you on these Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ history messageboards during the last ten years (or nearly. I think next January we will close our tenth year? Celebration?
Paul. -
Message 28
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Saturday, 5th November 2011
Paul, it looks to me like James Barr worked in politics and journalism after his modern history studies and has travelled and worked fairly extensively in the areas he writes about. I get the impression he provides a bit of "spice" to his interpretation of things. "Sexing it up" as the modern jargon goes.
Like Priscilla, I find your analysis of this book very interesting and well done, Shifvan. Thanks.
Caro.
About this Board
The History message boards are now closed. They remain visible as a matter of record but the opportunity to add new comments or open new threads is no longer available. Thank you all for your valued contributions over many years.
or Β to take part in a discussion.
The message board is currently closed for posting.
The message board is closed for posting.
This messageboard is .
Find out more about this board's
Search this Board
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ navigation
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ links
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Β© 2014 The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.