The year 1920, when the San Remo Conference was held, was a fateful year in the history of the conflict between the Arabs and Jews over control of the Land of Israel. To a large extent, this was Year Zero for the war of ownership over this strategic region and for the war of annihilation that the Arab side declared against a Jewish presence in it.
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However, despite the existence of buds of the "Palestinian National Movement" at the time, some of whose founders were not natives of the land but immigrants from neighboring countries, the Arab side did not fight for the establishment of a national entity for Arabs in the Land of Israel, but for the annexation of the Land of Israel to Syria, and more precisely for the short-lived Syrian kingdom established by Emir Faisal, a member of the Hashemite royal family from the Arabian Peninsula.
In other words, Land of Israel Arabs – many of them immigrants and descendants of immigrants from Syria and Lebanon – saw themselves as an integral part of "Greater Syria," which an immigrant with a respectable family pedigree from present-day Saudi Arabia sought to lead. These facts are very far from the "Palestinian native narrative". After all, "Palestine" was created only following the San Remo conference, to fulfill the British promise to establish a national home for the Jews. Due to the political division of the Middle East between the spheres of influence of the victorious powers in the First World War – Britain and France – a separatist national identity of Land of Israel Arabs began to develop, rather slowly, as a mirror image of the strengthening of the Zionist movement.
In retrospect, the Arabs of the Land of Israel continued to see themselves for decades after 1920 as belonging to Greater Syria. And this is how the first bloody events perpetrated by Arabs in Jewish localities in northern Israel and Jerusalem – the 1908 riots, including the massacre in Tel Hai, one of the founding events of the Zionist movement – should be seen. Not as the birth of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but as part of an attempt to create a great pan-Arab Muslim kingdom in the Middle East. This idea also happened to serve about a century later as the guideline of the Islamic terrorist organization ISIS – reminding us that that history is still present.
Blurred boundaries
Over the years, Israelis have developed a great fondness for the Hashemite monarchy, which was expelled from the Arabian Peninsula in 1924 by the Saudi monarchy. Its sphere of control is now limited to Jordan, which in 1920 was part of the territory on which the Jewish national home was to be built as promised by the British. Emir Faisal, the son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and ruler of Hejaz, was the central figure in the attempt to establish the "Kingdom of Greater Syria", and hence played a very significant role in the events that preceded the San Remo Conference and were most dramatically complicated after it.
On January 3, 1919, Faisal signed an agreement in London with the representative of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann – the future President of the State of Israel – expressing Arab support for encouraging broad and speedy immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel, joint and coordinated economic development of this part of the region and of the Arab state-kingdom that was expected to be established in the region, and the implementation of the Balfour Declaration and the preservation of the rights – especially religious – of the land's Arabs. The parties also agreed to later determine the boundaries between the two new entities that were to be established.
However, Faisal added to the agreement a note, in which he relieved himself of any obligation on any word in the agreement, if the Arabs did not receive in the future peace agreements their own independent kingdom-state, whose borders were supposed to include the Land of Israel. What appeared to be a historic Arab recognition document of the Zionist movement's aspirations was in fact a diplomatic exercise designed to mobilize the Zionists' support for the idea of the establishment of Greater and Independent Syria, and since that was not reflected in the San Remo Conference, was immediately negated and the war of ownership over the Land of Israel began.
The roots of this entanglement, which continues to this day, lie in a British initiative to mobilize Arab support in the First World War battles against the Ottoman Empire. Correspondence exchanged between Sharif Hussein of Hejaz and Henry McMahon, the British governor of Egypt from 1915 to 1917, outlined the terms of the Hashemite ruler's mobilization for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans in the Middle East. Hussein conditioned his support for the uprising on the establishment of a large and independent Arab kingdom, which would also include the territory of Land of Israel. The British did not perceive the content of these correspondences as binding, and at the same time planned the division of the Middle East between them and the French into areas of control – a division that was contrary to Hussein's demands. The British later also issued the Balfour Declaration, which further reduced the territorial aspirations of the future "King of the Arabs".
The dream of coexistence ends
At the end of September 1918, the British general Edmund Allenby entered Damascus, which according to the Sykes-Picot agreements on the division of the Middle East between Britain and France, was to belong to France. Allenby allowed Faisal, Hussein's son, who fought alongside the British, to form an Arab government, a move that seemed to support the vision of establishing the great Arab kingdom.
The French, for their part, saw this as a violation of the Sykes-Picot agreements. As time went on, Faisal realized that the British would not enter into a confrontation with the French over the establishment of an independent Arab kingdom, withdrew from the agreement with Weizmann and declared that the Land of Israel was an integral part of Syria. In March 1920, a few weeks before the San Remo Conference, the second Syrian National Congress convened in Damascus, declaring the establishment of the Syrian kingdom "within its natural borders," which also included the Land of Israel, and Faisal's coronation as King of Syria.
At this point, Arab forces were already waging war against the armies of France and Britain to seize control of territories in the name of the Arab kingdom – including the no-man's land in the Upper Galilee. In the chaos created in this area, the Arab attack on the Jewish agricultural farm in Tel Hai was carried out, causing the temporary abandonment of several Jewish settlements in the Galilee – a move that was seen as a great victory by the Arab population in the Land of Israel and which exacerbated its extremism. In early April, riots broke out against the Jewish residents of the Old City of Jerusalem.
While the discussions at the international conference were taking place, Arab elements were carrying out riots against the Jewish community on an unprecedented scale. As the results of the San Remo Conference and the elimination of the dream of establishing a large independent Arab kingdom and dividing its territory emerged, the violent riots against the French and British in Syria, Iraq and the Land of Israel expanded. The dream of coexistence with Israeli Arabs developed by the ancestors of Zionism was cut short.
Asylum for inciters
On July 24, 1920, in Syria, the French defeated the loyalist armies of Faisal, who fled to Iraq, where he was appointed king by the British. To calm the Arabs' feelings of resentment towards them, the British violated the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate Treaty on Israel-Palestine, tore the East Bank from the Land of Israel – which made up two-thirds of the Mandate – and crowned Faisal's brother, Abdullah, as King of the Transjordan.
The kingdom that was to be called Jordan in the future was created out of thin air at the expense of the future national home of the Jews. The Arab defeat by the French in the war on Syria led many Arab nationalists to flee Damascus to the British Land of Israel, where they felt safer. There were those who returned to Israel, such as Amin al-Husseini, who in 1921 was appointed to the position of Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Al-Husseini used these positions to wage a bitter struggle against Zionism and the Jewish community.
Following the riots of 1929, in which al-Husseini played a key role, the Jewish presence in many joint cities such as Hebron (until the renewal of the Jewish settlement there after the Six-Day War), Gaza and Jenin was eliminated. Another "Palestinian national hero", the Syrian cleric Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, also fled Syria, where he was sentenced to death by the French, and found refuge in Haifa, where he began inciting Arab residents against the Jews. If only Britain had cooperated with France in suppressing Arab nationalist extremism, and not allowed the Land of Israel to become a land of asylum.
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