OK I am not even going to go into bias viewpoints. Lets just follow some general facts.
First off lets visit the Crusades and the issue of King Prester John. Well as far as their being a Prester John, there wasn't one. The important part of the Prester John icon is that there was a Christian ideal wrapped up in this fictitious king. The Angevin Emperor, The Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of France all conveniently agreed that King Prester John was the rightful ruler of the lands in and around Jerusalem.
While it served the political end fighting at the time, the idea was that in conjunction with the ascendancy of King Prester, the Jews would return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple and user in the return of Jesus as a heavenly ruler.
Ah so this is where we get the idea in the Western World that the Jews were to return and belonged in Jerusalem. The fact is there already were Jews there and to be honest you would be hard pressed to find a time when the Jews weren't there. But what is important is that we as a civilization took up the belief that the Jews were not in Jerusalem and that eventually they would return.
OK lets skip forwards to the Zionist heydays of the late 1800's and early 1900's. OK why is there a Zionist movement in the first place? Quite simply put, Christian nations were prone to systematically killing Jews during times of national crisis. To be blunt, Jews were common cannon fodder. But to add to the problem, successful Jews were still ostracized because of the Christians long held belief that usury was the primary function of Jews. So if a Jew did become successful he was often viewed with a hatred fathomable only to the ingrained Christian nations which the Jew lived in. The fact that there was a name coined for riots against Jews gives you some indication of the reality of Jewish expectations for liberty and happiness. In a world of pogroms how can you feel secure? And that was really the Zionist argument. No Jew, no matter how educated or economically successful, could be reasonably sure he wouldn't be deprived of both at a moment of national whimsy. Some place must be found to ensure such deprivations from not happening.
OK if your interested in Zionist philosophy you may now depart this thread and search elsewhere. All I am concerned with is setting up the motivation for the Jews as concerns Palestinian land. The wish for a Zionist state free from the strife so prevalent in the rest of the world. A Zionist state was seen as an insurance policy.
But with policy comes conspiracy. Or at least a perception of conspiracy. When Zionist leaders approached various European leaders, they were met with a blanket mistrust. No ruler could quite trust a force which had the goal of concentrating the generally hated Jews in one spot.On top of that was the Christian view that if the Jews rebuilt the Temple, things would invariably prove bad. So as part of the national policy of any self respecting Christian nation was to squelch Zionism any way possible.
Finally scroll forwards a few more years to The First World War. It is here that we truly find the seeds which have germinated into our modern reality. In the western powers the Zionist committed themselves with distinction. And in a sense a sort of blood debt was built up. Thousands of Jews used military service as a means of finally declaring their full worth and value to the nations which had so regularly tried to exterminate them in the past. With each Jewish sacrifice to the war efforts a acknowledgment of worth was forced upon the Christian world. In exchange for that debt, Zionism expected at the very least a hearing of the creation of a Jewish state.
So the war ends and the Paris Peace congress begins. And for Zionism the conference was a disaster. The newly freed Ottoman territories were the subject of hot debate. What was of paramount importance to Britain and France was the security of both the Suez Canal and also the exploitation of the new oil fields which had been developed in spite of the Global War. What was most interesting was the partitioning of the Trans Jordan.
There is absolutely nothing of value in the Trans Jordan, from the perspective of the World powers at the time. In fact, the mandate to rule it was shifted from France and Britain repeatedly. They literally did not want it. Especially Jerusalem. To be honest, it is a true shame the Second World War interrupted the passage of time in Jerusalem, because prior to the war there was no such thing as Arab Israeli conflict.
Back to the Zionist for the time being. As the Paris peace conference dragged on. Zionist clamoured for the chance to establish a nation state in and around Jerusalem. And for but one political fault they might have gotten just that. The fault was Zionist support for the Revolution in Russia. In fact, many Zionist were part of the initial assault against the Romanovs. They believed that a proletariat world would give the Jews of the world the security and equality which was so often deprived & would be insured in a Communist world. It was folly on the part of the Zionist, but at the time revolutionary thought was the rule and not the exception.
When it came time to grant official support to the presumptive rulers of the Transjordan, the British Monarchy and the French Republic choose Kings instead of radicals and libertines.
So the Zionist wound up being stateless and associated with World Communism. An Association which would have dramatic consequences as Europe swung in reaction to the far right wing. Fascism would have a field day with Zionism and Jewry.
So, it is the year 1935, and if you were anything but a Jew, traveling to the Transjordan was routine. If you were Jewish you risked your life. Conservatism ruled, and the oil and canal had to be protected. Zionism was viewed as simply an offshoot of Commitern policy. To England, an independent Jewish state was a thorn to be avoided. The implications of a Jewish state were obvious. Firstly a Jewish state would be a provocation to the Arab Kings and princes in and around the League of Nations Mandate. Any provocation could interfere with the oil. Also, if the Zionists were to create a state would it be communist or democratic? The difference didn't matter since both types of government would be in direct opposition to the autocratic puppet kingdoms which France and Britain had installed. Another problem was a perception that if Jews had a land of their own, they would have the political power to demand world wide respect for all Jews. And that's the real problem, no Jew could be deprived as they had in the past if there was a Jewish state. At Zionist provocation, immigration began in earnest in the 1920's.
From a Jewish perspective, immigration from European servitude to a land where Jews were freed from pogroms was a magical promise. For the local officials, and England in particular, it was a nightmare. In such an undeveloped land, any immigration was a strain. The Jewish influx was more than a strain. Whats more the Jews who heeded the Zionist call were of the perception that they were in fact building a nation which would become independent when the League of Nations Mandate ceased. To add to the general mistrust, the Jews from Europe were installing European technologies and sensibilities which upset the traditional Arab lifestyles. The Arabs began demanding that the English and French do something to curtail the immigration.
And here is where the die gets cast in earnest. Remember the Zionist association with Communism, and the reactionary swing to the right by the western powers after the war? Well this provided the clean excuse to deny immigration and close off the Transjordan to Jews. Since the Zionists were actually Communists, and Communists were bent on destruction of the western democracies, Jews must not be allowed to form a communist state in what had now become a valuable land. It was an entirely false accusation, but it was the excuse used anyway. What is even more problematic is that just as the Western powers were setting up the immigration bans, the ultra right wing fascist states began national policies of encouraged and/or forced emigration. States such as Spain, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Austria began public companies run by Zionists which had the express intent of bringing Jews from Europe to either the Americas or the Middle East. Suddenly, there was no place for them to go to.
And yes, the United States was part of the immigration problem as well. Immigration laws were changed so that immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe were drastically cut. And in the case of American policy, the prevention of Zionist Jews and communist influence seems to have been the central idea behind the laws.
The the war breaks out and we know what happened. So lets just get to June 1945.
The war is over and the magnitude of just what happened to the European Jews becomes apparent. And to make things even more complicated, the Western Democracies are more concerned over the mother land than they were over colonial empires. The Zionists in the United States in particular saw that this was the chance to make a nation and they began financing ships to gather the Jews and deposit them in the TransJordan. And that's when all hell broke lose.
1948.. Great Britain begs The Jordanians to take control of the Trnasjordan area. They refuse.
British cruisers attempt to prevent ships landing Jews. But the Jews kept coming in a race with time.
Create a nation to step into the power vacuum before the mandate was abandoned by Britain. And when it was abandoned guess what? They indeed had a government to take over as the British left.
Which suddenly pissed off Arab sensibilities. Instead of being a land devoid of government, There was a nation state based on religious ideology. And suddenly the idea of Prester John returning in modern guise didn't seem so unlikely. If the Jews rebuilt the Temple.. one of the most sacred Muslim sites would be destroyed.
and ill have to finish latter because a friend just got into some sort of trouble.
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