A mother carries water at a school acting as a shelter for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret treaty Britain and France signed more than a century ago. Many consider it to have seeded a legacy of strife in the Middle East. Photo / Saher Alghorra, The New York Times
When Britain’s foreign secretary declared last week that his government would recognise the state of Palestine if Israel did not agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, he said the British were doing so with the “hand of history on our shoulders”.
His French counterpart also invoked history in explaining why France had taken the same step a week earlier.
French leaders going back to Charles de Gaulle, he said, had called for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on “the recognition by each of the states involved of all the others”.
Neither man mentioned the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret treaty between Britain and France in 1916, under which the European colonial powers carved up the Levantine territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire into spheres of British and French control. And why would they?
Sykes-Picot is cited by historians as an enduring example of Western imperial arrogance — a cynical exercise in drawing borders that cut across religious, ethnic and tribal communities in what are today Israel, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories.
To many Arabs, who view it as a great betrayal, it seeded a legacy of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East.
The real-time crisis unfolding in the Gaza Strip — the starving children, the Israeli restrictions on aid, the Palestinians killed as they try to collect food — undoubtedly had a greater impact on Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Emmanuel Macron of France than the stains of the past.
Yet their momentous decisions have cast a light on the shadowy roles of both countries in a region where they once vied for influence.
“The history is so relevant,” said Eugene L. Rogan, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford in England.
“It shows there’s always a chance for historical actors who screwed up in the past to make up for their mistakes.”
Rogan praised the moves towards recognition for reasons both past and present.
On its current course, he said, Israel was opening the door to unthinkable treatment of the Palestinians: expulsion from Gaza or worse.
Recognising a Palestinian state does Israel a favour by opening the way to “a form of cohabitation that is sustainable”, he said.
Speaking at the United Nations, the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, cited another century-old document in arguing that recognition would redress a historical injustice: the Balfour Declaration, issued a year after the signing of Sykes-Picot, which endorsed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
It had a proviso that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
After 21 months of relentless Israeli attacks in Gaza, with the spectre of famine across the enclave, Lammy said that Britain had a responsibility to act on behalf of the territory’s long-oppressed Palestinian population.
“His argument is that it’s time to make good on the second half of that promise,” said Rogan, whose books include The Arabs: A History.
“At the time of the Balfour Declaration.Britain had a worldwide empire, which in 1917, they could not imagine losing. David Lammy is operating in a postcolonial, post-EU Britain. But he’s using history as a legitimating factor.”
Lammy said that Britain could be proud that it “helped lay the foundations for a homeland for the Jewish people”.
Yet the country’s motive in backing what later became Israel was less moral than strategic, Rogan said.
It was seeking a client community in Palestine that would prevent the territory from falling into enemy hands.
London feared the territory could be used as a launchpad for attacks on the Suez Canal, which was then controlled by Britain.
Moreover, Britain backed away from its pro-Zionist stance as it found it hard to reconcile a Jewish state with preserving relations with the Arab world.
In a later document, the White Paper of 1939, Britain proposed that the Jewish homeland would be created within a majority-Arab Palestinian state and that Jewish immigration to Palestine be limited to 75,000 for five years.
“Israel was not created because of the Balfour Declaration; it was created in spite of the Balfour Declaration,” said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli American historian who served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington and later as a deputy minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Oren argued that the decisions of Britain and France to recognise a state would not hasten an end to the conflict in Gaza but prolong it.
By offering this concession to the Palestinians now, he said, the West had given Hamas even less incentive to agree to a ceasefire. He chalked it up to a bid for relevance by two postcolonial powers.
“These are former Middle Eastern powers that want to feel like Middle Eastern powers,” said Oren, who wrote Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. “There’s a pathetic quality to it.”
Others argue that if these moves had no impact, they would not have drawn the furious reactions they did from Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.
The addition of Britain and France — plus Canada and Malta, which said last week that they, too, would back recognition at the United Nations General Assembly in September — means that more than three-quarters of the UN’s 193 member states will have recognised a Palestinian state.
France had a less direct stake in Palestine than Britain did after ceding its claims in the Sykes-Picot treaty. But its move towards Palestinian recognition represents another fateful turn in its relationship with Israel.
From 1945 to 1967, France was Israel’s biggest backer in the West.
Part of that was rooted in its wrenching experience with decolonisation.
In 1954, France faced an anti-colonial uprising in Algeria, where the nationalists were backed by Egypt’s nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
France, viewing Israel as a bulwark against Nasser, drew close, supplying the country with Mirage fighter planes and nuclear technology that became the foundation of its undeclared nuclear weapons programme.
But in 1967, days before Israel launched a military strike against Egypt, de Gaulle, then France’s president, imposed an arms embargo on Israel and shifted his gaze to the Arab states.
Gérard Araud, who served as France’s ambassador to Israel from 2003 to 2006, said that rupture cast a long shadow. “I felt there was always a sense of ‘Don’t trust the French,’” he recalled.
By supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, the United States had in any case supplanted France as its No. 1 ally.
France went on to become the first Western country to develop close ties to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which represents Palestinians internationally and is led by the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
The decision to recognise a Palestinian state nevertheless carries significant political risk for Macron, Araud said.
France has both the largest Jewish and the largest Muslim communities in Western Europe. It has been scarred by a string of Islamist terrorist attacks.
In recognising Palestinian statehood, historians said, France and Britain would do well to recognise their diminished sway over a region they once ruled.
Such recognition was sorely lacking for decades after the authors of Sykes-Picot divvied up the Middle East, with lasting consequences.
“Neither country understood that the age of colonialism was over,” Araud said.
“They behaved as if they were still all powerful. It’s not the most glorious page of history for either country.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mark Landler
Photographs by: Saher Alghorra
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