cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14068665
Question: When Turk/Ottoman Empire lost the WW I, did it offer Palestinians to move back to the new borders of the Ottoman Empire?
I was just reading the Wikipedia article above and started to wonder if after losing WW I to England the Ottoman Empire offered Palestinans (or whatever easy the name of people living in this area at that time) to come to live in the post-WWI Ottoman Empire, and if it was made clear for them that If they didn’t they would not have protection from the State.
My question might be totally misformulated, as I am no expert on the topic. For instance, I guess that “Ottoman Empire” ceased to exist and broke down into one or more smaller State(s)/Country(is). In this case, supposing it became Turkey, I should ask if Turkey offered Palestinians to come to turkey instead of living in a Stateless area with a dangerous power vacuum. Or if the closed State to it was Jordan, if Jordan made the same offer to Palestinians. Or even if England said to Palestinians they could keep living there forever.
I am getting the impression Palestinians have been constantly cheated by the States which controlled the region and my question will help to know to which extent my suspicion is wrong or not.
There are probably more implicit errors in my question, but my knowledge is not enough even to estimate those errors.
The first important point is that Turks are a very different cultural and linguistic group, quite distant from Palestinians, Syriacs, Lebanese, and further distant still from Arabs or Egyptians.
The main thing they really have in common, besides hummus and olives, is that both groups are largely Muslim with Christian minorities.
During and following WW1, Turkey’s political scene became stridently nationalist focused on Turkey having a Turkish identity, and a secular one at that. The new Turkish nationalists replaced what remained of the Ottoman imperial monarchy with a secular republican government that basically equated secularism with being modern.
The fact most Turks shared a religion with most Palestinians didn’t really count for much. Nationalism and a national identity centered on being Turkish didn’t feel much of a sense of brotherhood with the broader Muslim world. Being overtly or devoutly Muslim was seen as being a bit simple or backwards by the secular intelligentsia who were really in control now.
The Ottoman Empire wasn’t seen as being particularly Turkish. It was a multi-ethnic multi-religious relic of the past. It was viewed as decayed, irrelevant, and something that Turkey had to move forward from. And the Ottoman Empire wasn’t exactly a melting-pot. It was highly multi-ethnic but ethnic boundaries remained pretty firmly in place between communities and there wasn’t a cosmopolitan sense of being “one people” with obligations to each other.
Palestinians lived in Palestine, that was seen as basically the “natural order” of things. The idea that you would just invite a whole population to leave their ethnic region was a fairly foreign concept. Forcing people to leave, like the Armenians, that was understood well enough but inviting a culturally, ethnically, and linguistically foreign group to live in Turkey when they belonged in Palestine was as likely as the USA inviting the Taiwanese to live in the USA.
Finally, and very importantly, Turkey was on the losing side of WW1. France and Britain were claiming the non-Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire as the spoils of war. Syria went to France and Britain got Palestine. Had Turkey sought to interfere in the British and French empires that were in the process of imposing their own imperial mandate over the region, Britain and France would have punished Turkey.
There was no power vacuum. The British and French moved in immediately.
I ask this because some counties, after loosing territory, says to the inhabitants of that territory:
You can either:
- move to the new shrunk borders and have our protection or
- refuse to do so, but then you are on your own - we will not protect you
I was wondering if Turkey or Jordan or whatever country offered the same to Palestinians.
There wasn’t a sense of being part of the same nation. No sense of shared national identity or any foundation for one because they are not related at all in a linguistic, ethnic, or even really much of a cultural sense.
The Turks and Palestinians felt as related to each other as a Greek might feel to a Finn. It would have been seen as very odd to suggest the population of Palestine should be resettled within Turkey.
One imperial ruler was replaced by another.
But what about Jordan?
They are neighbours to Palestine and from 1947 to 1988 Jordan claimed the West Bank to be theirs (with Israel having occupied West Bank since 1967).
Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanian_annexation_of_the_West_Bank
So clearly Jordan felt enough connected to West Bank,. I don’t know if due to the territory or due to the people.
Wikipedia doesn’t show If Jordan offered all or some sort of Palestinians to be protected by it.
Jordan did take in a lot of Palestinian refugees in fact. Especially following the Nakba.
Jordan is certainly much closer to Palestine linguistically and culturally but there is still no sense of shared national identity or anything like that. They are still two distinct national identities with distinct concepts of their ancestry and history. There’s still a divide there although it is more blurry due to the geographical proximity of course.
Jordan until the 60s was still a British vassal / protectorate, functionally still an extension of British power although with its own monarchy and autonomy, so the Jordanian monarchy saw an opportunity to assert control of the West Bank (so called because it is the West Bank of the Jordan River) following the withdrawal of the British direct occupation of Palestine, seeing itself as a kind of de facto inheritor or agent of British power in the region and supported by the UK and the USA in annexing the West Bank because it was seen as a friendly state, even though this went against the UN resolution calling for an independent Palestinian state.
The claim on the West Bank wasn’t due to a sense of shared identity. It was more opportunistic geopolitics. The Jordanian monarch had a powerful army trained, supplied, and led by the British and with the British and the French being forced out of direct occupation of the Middle East the Jordanian monarch saw an opportunity to expand control over Palestine and also had plans to expand into Syria.
For example, although they did give citizenship rights to Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinians were given proportionately half the voting power as Jordanians. Not that this really mattered because Jordan wasn’t really a democracy then anyway but the point is that Jordan still maintained both a de jure and a de facto distinction between the populations.
Jordanians and Palestinians are much closer to each other than Turks, but it’s still distinct. It would be like expecting the Spanish to simply live in France or Italy instead. The expectation of Jordanians and Palestinians alike is that Palestinians should be living in Palestine so inviting huge numbers of refugees, more than Jordan already has, isn’t a viable solution. Jordan couldn’t handle feed and house that population even if it wanted to, and they don’t really want to.
There is also the problem that this would simply be enabling Israel’s ethnic cleansing which is another factor motivating public opinion against this kind of thing. There is a strong belief that the Palestinians have a right to continue living in the land where their ancestors were living up to 5,000 years ago.