by USSAMA MAKDISI
First devised by the British to disguise colonial rule, the Arab facade now serves US imperial interests shielding Israeli expansion behind a mask of sovereignty
The post-Ottoman Arab states were created after the First World War to serve the interests of western imperialists, rather than those of the region’s native inhabitants.
In 1918, as British domination of the post-Ottoman Middle East took shape, an official in the British India Office admitted: “The old watchwords are obsolete, and the question is how we are to secure what is essential under the new ones. This thing can be done, but a certain re-orientation is necessary. The ‘Arab facade’ may have to be something rather more solid than we had originally contemplated.”
By the time the so-called Paris Peace Conference of 1919 began, British imperialists realised that in an age of ostensible “self-determination”, they needed to disguise their domination and rule behind a facade of native authority.
Some of these imperialists, such as TE Lawrence, indulged their vanity by thinking they were aiding the Arabs, but their one true master was the British Empire.
They sought to continue dominating the Middle East, while also claiming to sincerely comply with the new era of freedom allegedly dawning in the post-Ottoman Middle East.
The mantra of an “Arab facade” was an adaptation of an older British ploy known as “indirect rule”, used in colonised Africa, now attuned to neutralising any emancipatory practice of “self-determination”.
Indirect rule
The British helped the Arabs overthrow the Ottomans.
They subsidised the Arab Revolt led by the Hashemite Sharif Husayn of Mecca in 1916. The Hashemites had served the Ottomans but threw in their lot with the British during the First World War.
The British promised Sharif Husayn an independent Arab kingdom across the Arab East, including Palestine, but they had no intention of granting him any such sovereignty over so vast an area.
The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 directly contradicted British promises to the Arabs, with the term ‘Sykes-Picot’ becoming a metaphor for colonialism
They needed him to undermine Ottoman unity, or what was left of it at that point.
Most people in the Arab world today know that the British and the French simultaneously agreed to partition the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces among themselves.
The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 directly contradicted British promises to the Arabs. The term “Sykes-Picot” is used as a metaphor for colonialism more broadly.
In 1917, the British government further muddied the waters. It granted the European Zionist movement in England an infamous anti-Palestinian declaration of support known as the Balfour Declaration, which committed the British government to support the establishment in Palestine of a vaguely worded “national home for the Jewish people”.
The declaration, in effect, supported a European Jewish nationalist and colonising project in Palestine – where Jews at the time were a small minority of the population – yet denied national rights to the vast majority of the population of Palestine: the Arabs, whom the Balfour Declaration referred to dismissively as “non-Jewish communities”.
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