During Both World Wars, The Jews Earned A State--What Did The Arabs Do?

The blog My Right Word writes about the importance of the date March 4, 1915 which is when a group of Jews decided to establish a Jewish regiment that would participate alongside the British troops during WWI. He even has a copy of the document they all signed.

The most notable contributions to the British during WWI may well have been through the NILI spy ring, which provided intelligence about the Turkish military as well as the conditions in the area.

In The Palestinian Right to Israel, historian Alex Grobman describes the contributions made by NILI:

In mid-1917, NILI gave the British  the Turkish order of battle, an analysis of their organization, and unit configuration, including the number of forces assigned to Mesopotamia. A report on the availability of water in the Sinai desert was invaluable to General Allenby, since almost half of his soldiers were cavalry and mounted infantry. Knowing where to find water allowed Allenby to assemble his cavalry, infantry and transportation to Beersheba, a town at the eastern edge of Turkish defenses, which was not as securely protected as Gaza. After Allenby captured Beersheba, he attacked from the east and outflanked Gaza. Two previous attempts to capture Gaza a by Allenby's predecessor, Sir Archibald Murray in March-April 1917 had failed.[p127-128]

This raises the question--while the Palestinian Jews were helping the British, what were the Palestinian Arabs doing during WWI?

Isaiah Friedman writes in The question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab relations, 1914-1918 about the Palestinian Arabs:

Their military contribution to Allenby's campaign was marginal, and by June 1918, Wingate concluded that such successes as the Arabs had achieved 'must be attributed almost entirely to the unsparing efforts of the British and Allied officers attached to the Sheriffian forces'. How hazardous was the position of these officers was attested by Lieutenant-Colonel W. F. Stirling: 'We realized that if Allenby's push failed, we should have little or no chance of escaping...The Arabs would be sure to turn against us' Lawrence [of Arabia] complained that the Syrian-Palestinians would rather see the Judean Hills stained with the blood of the London Territorials than take sides in the fight for their own freedom.

Lloyd George recalled that during the deliberations on the Balfour Declaration the British Government wished to consult the Palestine Arabs but this was not possible because they were fighting against the Allied forces." [p330, emphasis added]

The importance of the contrast between what the Jews and Arabs did to assist in both WWI and WWII is of no small importance. Grobman quotes sources at the time on the significance of the Jewish contribution to the winning of both World Wars vis-a-vis then-Palestine, which was under Turkish rule and not under Arab sovereignty.

Lord Robert Cecil, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, believed the Arabs had no basis for refusing to accept the Balfour Declaration, since recognizing the right of the Jews to their national homeland was

part of the terms on which the Arab State was brought into existence. (p. 44)

Monsieur Pierre Ortis, Chairman of the Permanent Mandates Commission states it even more clearly:

Was not consent to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine the price--and a relatively small one--which the Arabs paid for the liberation of lands extending from the Red Sea to the borders of Cilicia on the one hand, Iran and the Mediterranean on the other, for the independence they were not winning or had already won, none of which they would ever have gained on their own efforts, and for all of which they had to thank the Allied Posers and particularly the British forces in the Near East. (p.160)

Dore Gold, in Historical Fiction: Israel is not a Colonialist State is more blunt:

The accusation that Israel has colonialist roots because of its connection to the British Mandate is ironic, since most of the Arab states owe their origins to the entry and domination of the European powers. Prior to World War I, the Arab states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan did not exist, but were only districts of the Ottoman Empire, under different names. They became states as a result of European intervention, with the British putting the Hashemite family in power in two of these countries.[emphasis added]

For the Arabs to claim that the Jewish presence in Israel is an imposition of Europe on the Arab world is to ignore the history of the Arab world and how many of those states came to be--and it shows a lack of gratitude considering how little the Arabs did in order to gain their freedom from the Ottoman Empire.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestine and WWI and WWII.