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.
16 May
BRITISH AND FRENCH EMPIRES DIVIDE UP MIDDLE EAST
On this day in 1916, Britain and France signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing Arab provinces of Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. Following the October Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks published the Sykes-Picot Agreement (and many other secret treaties). This revelation led to growing distrust with the Arabs, as well as the Zionists since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was made public only three weeks after the Balfour Declaration.
الإمبراطوريتان البريطانية والفرنسية تقتسمان الشرق الأوسط
16 مايو
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1916 ، وقعت بريطانيا وفرنسا اتفاقية سايكس بيكو السرية التي تقسم البلاد العربية في الإمبراطورية العثمانية بين بريطانيا وفرنسا. بعد ثورة أكتوبر الروسية ، نشر البلاشفة اتفاقية سايكس بيكو (والعديد من المعاهدات السرية الأخرى). أدى هذا الافشاء إلى تزايد انعدام ثقة العرب ، وكذلك الصهاينة بالبريطانيين منذ إعلان اتفاقية سايكس بيكو بعد ثلاثة أسابيع فقط من إعلان بلفور.
A secret deal was concluded between Britain and France that plunged the Middle East into a century of bloodshed. Two colonial negotiators, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, agreed to carve up the Middle East between their respective countries in order to secure European control of the failing Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Promises of self-determination that had been made to the Arab peoples by the British in order to secure their help in defeating the Turkish occupying forces were swiftly brushed aside. Instead of national liberation, there would just be a changing of the imperial guard.
The treachery was brutally simple. France and Britain would divide up the Middle East between them by means of a ‘line in the sand’ drawn on the map between Acre on the Mediterranean coast and Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Everything to the north of that line would be controlled by the French, and everything to the south by the British. France would get Syria and Lebanon, while Britain would have Iraq and Transjordan.
People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky seized on the secret treaties and papers of the Tsarist and Provisional governments to expose their complicity in the bloody war whose deserters had been strong supporters of the Bolsheviks.
"In undertaking the publication of the secret diplomatic documents relating to the foreign diplomacy of the tsarist and the bourgeois coalition governments, … we fulfil an obligation which our party assumed when it was the party of opposition.
"Secret diplomacy is a necessary weapon in the hands of the propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to make the latter serve its interests. Imperialism, with its world-wide plans of annexation, its rapacious alliances and machinations, has developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest degree, … The Russian people as well as the other peoples of Europe and those of the rest of the world should be given the documentary evidence of the plans which the financiers and industrialists, together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents, were secretly scheming …"
Izvestiya, No. 221, 23 November 1917.
Sykes-Picot - the lines in the Middle East drawn by Britain.