Anyone who wishes to form an opinion about a controversial subject such as Palestine should do his homework. I am not an historian, but as I was writing my latest novel Contested Land, which is largely set in the Middle East 50 years ago which I often visited at the time, I researched the backgrounds of the endless violence in that unhappy land.
To understand what is really going on there, I had to reach back 150 years to the start of Jewish immigration in Palestine, which lies at the root of the problem. The matter is mainly geopolitical, but is endlessly troubled and polarised by ideology and propaganda. An example is that we have long been made to believe that all Palestinians are terrorists and all Israelis are victims. That idea needs some adjusting.
Tel Aviv knows exactly how to manipulate the Western feeling of guilt over the Holocaust, and how to frame every criticism as antisemitism. Thus, public opinion is being held hostage continually by Israeli propaganda (their word is hasbara, which translates as ‘explanation’), fed by a budget of hundreds of millions. I regard that as a red flag: apparently Israel’s actions often need explaining…
But let us have a look at geopolitics first. I will try to discuss a few things I found in the sources I consulted.
Geopolitics
The 19th Century was a period of imperialism and colonialism. The geopolitical ‘landscape’ in those days is largely responsible for the chaos which grips the Middle East even today. Would there ever have been a State of Israel without the oil reserves in the Gulf, and without the nearby Suez Canal? I have my doubts.
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| Jebel at-Tair, a volcanic island slightly north of Bab-el-Mandeb |
For over a century, foreign powers (originally the French, the British and the Germans, later the US and Russia, now even China and India) have coveted control over the rich oilfields in the Persian Gulf and important shipping routes: the Suez Canal, the narrows at Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, the ‘Gate of Tears’. An appropriate name: too many tears have been shed in that unfortunate region. I passed there often on my way to the Gulf - I even went into Aden, which at the time was a Soviet stronghold.
The Suez Canal and the Baghdad Railway
Originally, the Suez Canal was a French project. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a diplomat who had cultivated relations with the Ottoman authorities in Egypt, approached Said Pasha, the khedive or Ottoman viceroy, to find support for his plans. The British initially didn’t want anything to do with the project, because they feared foreign meddling in their own trade interests.
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| The Suez Canal in 1976, with abandoned military equipment littering the east bank |
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| Ismailia, Suez Canal |
But once the canal project gained a foothold, the British changed their policy after all and went along. The Suez Canal was finally opened in 1869 and became an important trade link to India. Meanwhile, the Germans were making their own plans - at the end of the 19th Century they wanted their own access to the Middle East. They maintained good relations with the Ottomans and steadily worked at their dream of a Berlin-Baghdad Railway to gain access to the navigable Tigris river and the Persian Gulf, thus creating an alternative route to India.
The Arabs and the Ottoman Empire
In the middle of the 19th Century, apart from present-day Turkey, the Ottoman Empire also encompassed Arab lands reaching as far as Baghdad, Mecca and Medina. Some historians maintain that the Berlin - Baghdad railway (although incomplete at the time in the Taurus mountains and Iraq) posed a threat to British India, and thus was one of the causes for the Great War. But one wonders whether the discovery of oil in the Gulf, shortly after the turn of the century, didn’t play a more important part.
Scrapped German-built locomotives in Konya,
along the former Baghdad railway in TurkeyTravelling over a section of the Baghdad railway
in the Anatolian highlands
The first section of the Baghdad railway ran from Berlin through Vienna and the Balkan countries to Constantinople, largely through Austro-Hungarian territory. But in Ottoman territoy the railways became strategic targets during the Great War: not just the Ottoman section of the Baghdad railway, but also the Hedjaz Railway between Damascus and Medina. The Hedjaz railway had been constructed to ensure Ottoman dominance of the pilgrim cities of Medina and Mecca, which didn’t appeal to the Hashemite Amir of Mecca.
In 1916, the British recruited Hashemite fighters to help defeat the Ottoman army after the disaster of Gallipoli. The Hashemites were made promoses of self-governance in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire in exchange for their efforts. They sabotaged the railways, conducted a destructive guerrilla against the Turks and assisted in the conquest of Iraq.
Their liaison officer was one T.E.Lawrence, who described this period in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. One can only wonder whether Lawrence knew of the 1915 Sykes-Picot treaty, in which the French and the British had drawn lines in the Middle East to divide the spoils amongst themselves. Once again, control of a strategically and economically important area was at stake.
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| A map of the Ottoman railways around 1914. Source: Wikipedia |
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| Train of the Hedjaz Railway. Source: Wikipedia - Palestine Railway, 1947 |
The empty land myth and Zionism
The empty land myth turns up in many colonial projects: in South Africa, in the conquest of the West in the US, and also in colonising Palestine, where it is used to justify the Zionist claims to the country.
The ‘empty land’ of Palestine is an invention of a Scottish minister, Alexander Keith, who visited Ottoman Palestine in 1839 and claimed that no one was living there. Perhaps the desert areas that were the abode of Bedouin nomads were thinly populated, but he ignored the fact that in the remainder of the country was a thriving society of nearly half a million people, most of them Islamic, but in part Christian and Jewish.
Sometimes it is suggested that other parts of the Palestinian population were immigrants as well, such as those of Egyptian descent, but one should realise that in the Ottoman Levant migration was the rule. The region was tightly interconnected and not subdivided along present-day borders. Once, it is said, books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Jaffa.
The Zionist idea is centuries old and probably has its origins among orthodox European Christians who believe that the return of the Messiah can only occur after the Chosen People have returned to Zion, a hill in Jerusalem.
In this respect a clear distinction must be made between Christian and Jewish Zionists. The Jewish Zionist Movement, aimed at migration to Palestine and reconstruction of the Temple which was destroyed 20 centuries ago, is the result of social discrimination and pogroms in 19th Century Europe, and was established during the first Zionist congress in Basel of 1897.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes that Zionism initially had little support, because Jewish workers preferred joining the secular socialist movements in their European homelands rather than a part-religiously motivated organisation. Soon however, Zionism became a leading movement in Jewish immigration in Palestine, and leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi embraced the empty land myth.
Migration as a geopolitical weapon
The first known (modern) Jewish migration from Europe to Palestine took place in 1882. The immigrants weren’t farmers, but idealists, and initially, with support from Jewish philantropists, bought unused land to set up farming communities. The ‘city boys’ from Europe didn’t have a great deal of success - Ilan Pappé writes that they had to learn how to till the land from the local Palestinian peasants! But soon, they also bought arable land from Arab and Ottoman landowners, who had rented it out to Palestinian fellahin. The peasants were sent off the land and ended up destitute in poor quarters in the towns. The shape of things to come?
The unrest this caused led to an Ottoman ban on the sale of land to immigrants in 1892. Even so, the sale of land to Jewish land agencies continued undiminished, although there may have been an economic reason, because the Palestinian smallholdings weren’t very profitable. In 1914, Jewish colonists amounted to about 5% of the population, and thousands were deported by the Turks at the start of the war, possibly because some were of Russian extraction and therefore distrusted.
During the Great War, the Zionist movement, headed by their chairman Chaim Weizmann, started to petition the British Cabinet to create a homeland for Jewish immigrants in Palestine. And in 1917, with Allied victory over the Ottomans within reach, the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour came up with the ‘Balfour Declaration’, a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in Britain, which allowed this under certain conditions. The knife cut both ways: it reinforced British influence upon the region and offered a destination for hundreds of thousands stateless Jews in Europe, which the British were loath to allow into their country.
Thus, the door was opened wide to Jewish immigration in Palestine, and eventually to the creation of a Jewish State. Influence in the direct vicinity of the Suez Canal was regarded as a geopolitical weapon, but the British evidently didn’t expect it to backfire upon themselves. Ottoman land rights which were inconsistently documented, were abolished by the British colonial government under pressure from the colonists, and the nineteen-twenties and thirties were marked by large-scale displacement of Palestinians and mutual violence which the British were unable to quell. In 1936 it led to a large Arab uprising in Palestine.
The Holocaust and the State of Israel
After WW2, the geopolitical situation changed drastically. The colonial era was rapidly being dismantled and the world became divided between the Soviet bloc and the Western world, which inevitably manifested itself in the Middle East. The mass murder by the Nazis on 6 million Jewish Europeans gave the Zionist project an important boost. But what is often forgotten or ignored is that in the years leading to the founding of Israel, extreme violence was committed by Jewish terrorist groups, not just against the Palestinians, but also against everyone who tried to keep order and control immigration, including the British.
Eventually they gave up the struggle in 1946 and the newly founded United Nations took back the mandate over the unruly region. The UN also was targeted: the negotiator on behalf of the UN in Palestine, the much respected Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte was murdered by Jewish extremists. The State of Israel was born in a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign now known as the Nakba, that caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes. The Haganah, the Lehi gang and the Irgun all have blood on their hands, and perhaps it should be remembered that in 1948 these terror groups were integrated into the newly founded Israel Defence Force (IDF). Their leaders, respectively David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin were later to assume leading functions in the State of Israel, which I see as another red flag.
The Cold War and the Iranian revolt
The Soviet bloc and the West were at loggerheads soon after 1945, eventually pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1961 (the Cuba crisis). During the Cold War, the Kremlin inevitably chose the side of every liberation movement that challenged the former colonial powers. Naturally this was focused on many sea routes: Southern Africa, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and also the Suez Canal. The Soviets supported Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Yemen and naturally the Palestinians who were ideally placed to destabilise the region. I have a few photos of Soviet ships tied up in various ports - Lebanon and Aden. They were literally everywhere.
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| Soviet cargo ship (left) in Aden, 1976 |
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| Soviet cargo ship undergoing repairs in Aden, 1976 |
When the Egyptian president Nasser annexed the Suez Canal in 1956, the British, the French and… the Israelis intervened militarily. The Suez crisis was jointly quelled by the US and the Soviet Union (an unlikely pact of convenience!) and eventually led to the formal transfer of the Suez Canal to Nasser. But during the Six Day War of 1967 the canal was blocked once again by Egypt, in reaction to the Israeli advance in the Sinai peninsula, right up to the east bank of the canal.
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| Entrance to the Strait of Tiran, the access to the Gulf of Aqaba, where fierce figting took place between Israel and Egypt in 1956 and 1967 |
The blockade was going to last eight years. I was aboard one of the first ships that traversed the canal once more in 1975. In Port Said a year later, as I traversed the canal again in a different ship, the Egyptians handed out stencilled pamphlets celebrating the re-opening of the canal, of which I still have a copy.
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| Pamphlet handed out in Port Said in 1976. Author’s collection. |
Until 1989, the Cold War played a major part in the Levant, the Soviets supporting Syria, Egypt and the Palestinian resistance, and Israel acting as the outpost of the West in the region. The Russian influence in the Middle East continued even after 1989, especially in Syria, where Putin and Iran supported the Assad dictatorship during the civil war of 2011-2024. The Russians had complete control over Aleppo after the siege was broken, as a Syrian refugee once told me.
Beirut harbour, 1973 Lebanese coast at Tripoli, near the Syrian border
Following the Islamic revolution in Tehran in 1979, Iran became a new player on the geopolitical stage in the Middle East. Iran and the US have been enemies ever since, as are Iran and Israel. Iran has supported the Shiite militias in Lebanon during the civil war of the 1980s with training and weapons. Present-day Hezbollah is the product of that. And once again we see a geopolitical game, where the Israeli regime has talked Donald Trump into joining a disastrous war with Iran in 2026. For the moment it seems that Trump and his cronies have shot themselves in the foot with this adventure, and adding insult to injury, now (July 2026) the Houthi rebels in Yemen have joined the fight. The effects are felt worldwide, thank you for nothing Donald, well done.
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| Iranian naval base with hovercrafts on the Shatt al-Arab river, 1976, shortly before the revolution |
The Palestinians
During the 1960s, resistance movements saw the light such as Fatah (later incorporated in the PLO) and other Palestinian militias that hit back at Israel and its Western allies with terror attacks and aeroplane hijackings. The boundary between resistance and terrorism is very narrow, as I have written previously. These organisations, and lately Hamas, regrettably overplayed their hand: the word ‘Palestinian’ in Western idiom almost became synonymous with ‘terrorist’.
But there are two sides to the story - Israel has been bullying the Palestinians into despair for decades. Can one expect them not to retaliate? Let’s remember that every occupying power equals ‘resistance’ with ‘terrorism’, and that the West has remained deaf and blind to the continuing Israeli oppression.
Reading back this analysis from start to end, it is clear that the Palestinians have been duped by geopolitical machinations for over 100 years. Their rights were wilfully ignored since Ottoman times and eroded by a violent apartheid regime ever since the State of Israel was established. Netayahu only wants to carry on until the Palestinians are either eradicated or driven away, supported by American weaponry and the cold shoulder of the entire Western world. But regrettably for Israel there will only be a durable solution if the Palestinians are part of it.
It is an old adage: whoever lives by the sword will perish by it. So isn’t it better, as the Biblical saying goes, to turn swords into ploughshares? Only that sentiment hasn’t yet been grasped by Tel Aviv.
Contested land is available from Bookmundo. Visit my website for information. https://tedpolet.com/epages/5hbl.htm
