Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
30 January
BRITISH TREACHERY LAUNCHED THE CRISIS
This day in 1916, the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence ended, an exchange of letters between the leader of the Arab Revolt, Husayn bin Ali, and Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt. The British promised Husayn an independent Arab state including Palestine after WWI ended if he joined in the war against the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France, however, then carved up the Middle East into British and French spheres of interest, and gave Palestine over to European Jewish colonisation.
خيانة بريطانيا للعرب خلقت اجواء مضطربة منذ قرن من الزمن
30 يناير
في هذا اليوم من العام 1916م، توقفت المراسلات بين الحسين وماكماهون، وكانت عبارة عن خطابات متبادلة بين قائد الثورة العربية حسين بن علي، والسير هنري ماكماهون، المندوب السامي البريطاني في القاهرة. وكان البريطانيون قد وعدوا حسين بدولة عربية مستقلة تشمل فلسطين بعد إنتهاء الحرب العالمية الأولى إذا انضم للحرب ضد الإمبراطورية العثمانية. غير أن بريطانيا وفرنسا قامتا بعد ذلك بتقسيم منطقة الشرق الأوسط إلى مناطق نفوذ بريطاني وفرنسي، وأهدت فلسطين للاستعمار اليهودي الأوروبي.
Betrayal of Arabs after first World War set stage for turbulent century
"In spite of the qualified commitment to Arab independence, Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes opened talks with France’s Georges Picot May 16th, 1916, with the aim of betraying the Arabs, abrogating the McMahon accord, and carving up Ottoman domains between their faltering empires...
"Britain had taken betrayal a step further in November 1917 when foreign secretary Arthur Balfour declared that the government “viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice and civil and religious rights of the existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine”.
How Britain Carved Up the Middle East and Helped Create Saudi Arabia, by Mark Curtis
"After Britain captured India, the Ottoman empire was seen as a convenient buffer to keep out rivals along the military and trade route to the jewel in the crown. London often cast itself as the saviour of the Turkish sultan: in the Crimean War of 1854–6, one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern European history, Britain and France fought on behalf of the Ottomans against Russia. The ‘Eastern Question’ – the imperial struggle for control in the lands dominated by the decaying Ottoman empire – was a process in which Britain essentially tried to shore up the last great Muslim empire against its great power rivals. By the time Ottoman Turkey made the fateful choice of siding with Germany in the First World War, it was already a declining power but still controlled much of the Middle East, including present-day Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, which it had ruled for 400 years. After its defeat, the European powers, led by the British, fell upon its carcass and divided it up between them."
Historian, Mark Curtis, author of Web of Deceit
Duplicity and double-dealing were the hallmarks of British policy towards Palestine from the beginning, says Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University.
"The Palestinians are the victims of the cruel geopolitics of a region in which foreign powers have always played a decisive role. Britain, the pre-eminent Western power in the region in the first half of the 20th century, was no friend to the Palestinians and it is still no friend today. Leaders of both main parties have tended to side with the Zionists in this bitter, bloody, and apparently intractable century-old conflict."
Full article in Al Jazeera
"In 1953, the British MI6 and the American CIA staged a military coup to topple the government of Iranian Prime Minster Mohammad Mosaddegh, and brought back to power a runaway monarch subservient to their oil companies and other economic and strategic interests. Winston Churchill, that mass murderer beloved by British elites, was prime minister of the UK at the time...
In 1956, Anthony Eden's British government, together with Israel and France, invaded Egypt to prevent Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US did the same as they did in Iran, staging yet another coup in 1954 in Guatemala." That little known overthrow of a democratically elected government opened the door to a decades-long genocidal campaign against the country's Mayan population.
15-minute video: the organised crime syndicate that was the British Empire, with Scotland a junior partner, was not restricted to Palestine.