Adam Curtis spins a single tale out of the middle east..

[madd0ct0r]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2 ... or_me.html

It's a good, if very long blog post that kinda spins out the last hundred years in the middle east into a coherent story.
I can't comment on its accuracy, but the writing is excellent.

The story begins nearly a hundred years ago with one of the great examples of how you can never trust politicians.

The British promised the Arabs that they would create a new and better world for them. The only problem is that they promised the Jews the very same thing.

In 1915, at the height of the First World War, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt made an agreement with the Emir of Mecca. It said that if the Arabs helped the British overthrow the Turks who ruled Palestine - then the British would in return give the Arabs independence. Lawrence of Arabia - TE Lawrence - was one of the British agents sent to help organise the Arab Revolt.

But two years later later the British Foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, promised the Zionist movement that a permanent Jewish homeland would be set up in Palestine. Zionism was in many ways a utopian movement. It had been invented by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, and he believed that a Jewish state would not just rescue Jews from persecution, but it would also transform them. The state of Israel would be a new kind of environment which would turn its people into stronger and better kinds of human beings.

The British didn't care about that kind of thing. They were desperate to get America into the war on their side - and one of the reasons for the Balfour declaration was to curry favour with the Zionists and their supporters in America.

Here is part of a massive TV series made in the 1960s called The Great War. It tells the story of how in 1917 the British came to find themselves marching into Gaza (what is today the Gaza Strip) on their way to conquer Jerusalem - and the nightmare that trapped them in that small strip of land.

It also gives a very good sense of the background pressures that led Britain to making the contradictory promises.


In the 1920s Britain took over the running of Palestine and came face to face with their hypocrisy and deceit.

On the one hand Jewish immigrants began to arrive in their thousands, buying up the land from the old Palestinian families. While the Arabs were furious at what they saw as British treachery and a revolt began to grow against both the British and the Jews.

One of the main leaders of the Palestinian Arab revolt was Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam. He is forgotten in the west today - but not by Palestinian Arabs and above all by Hamas who see him as the first true Islamist revolutionary. The thousands of Qassam rockets that were fired from the Gaza strip last week are named after him, as is Hamas' military wing - the Qassam Brigades.



Qassam had studied at Al-Azhar university in Cairo and had become one of new wave of reformists who argued that Islam should be cleansed of all the rituals and superstitions that had grown up over 1200 years. It could then become a powerful faith that would deal with all the modern forces at play in society - economic and scientific and political.

And he believed it could help lead a revolt against British power and the Jewish immigrants. Qassam went to the city of Haifa and began attracting followers - promoting the idea of a jihad against the occupying powers. You couldn't trust the old families who run Palestinian society, he said, because they had sold out, as had the politicians and the traditional religious leaders.

The Palestine Post recorded one of Qassam's speeches ending angrily: "Jews do not have to take the country by force as the Arabs are selling it to them"

Here is part of a film that gives a powerful sense of the strange world that Qassam was fighting against. It is about one of the surviving members of a grand Palestinian landowning family. She is called Malika Shawa - and when the film was shot in the late 80s she was running the only hotel in the Gaza Strip, playing the piano as all around her the first intifada was erupting.

The film shows how involved the Palestinian elites had become with the British rulers. Malika tells of her time being educated at Cheltenham Ladies College.


In the 1930s Qassam formed The Black Hand Gang. He and a group of followers took to the hills and for five years they launched armed attacks on Jewish settlements and on the British military and police.

The British called him "The Brigand Sheikh" and he became a terrifying figure - it was said that he would send his followers to kill anyone that said anything bad about him. But in November 1935 the British cornered him in a cave and Qassam was killed in a violent shootout.

Much much much more on the other side of the jump.

[Sidewinder]

The complicated way in which the Middle East mess came to being- with Islamists and their Israeli adversary's actions against each other, supporting each other by giving an adversary domestic support for its policies- is like something out of a The Onion article, specifically, Ethniklashistan.

[Stark]

You're like the definition of 'ass backwards'.

The WWI stuff around the middle east is just one part of how the settlements after the war were terrible. But hey, it wouldn't have been the great war if it hadn't left so many powder kegs.

[madd0ct0r]

me or him?

It's a great read, but deserves a good hour to really digest. I liked it a lot though

[mr friendly guy]

Well I certainly didn't know that Israel supported the precursor of Hamas with the aim of weakening the PLO. Hows that working out them?

[PeZook]

Well I certainly didn't know that Israel supported the precursor of Hamas with the aim of weakening the PLO. Hows that working out them?

You know, that circle sounds reeeeeeeeeealy familiar.

I wonder if that scheme has ever worked out for anyone who tried it

[Thanas]

Rome, France, Spain and Imperial Germany.

Of course those were led by somewhat more capable rulers.

[Omeganian]

Let the Middle East people elect - and they'll elect. Once.

[Thanas]

^Are you spouting nonsense again?