… while Lord Sydenham warned: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.” It extends all the way to this horror-show 106 years later. What the latest […]
The cycle of empires It is not as if President Macron and his administration needed a new crisis to add to the turmoil of his second term in power. Unlike Mali or Burkina Faso, where French troops were bluntly asked to leave by military juntas, Mayotte is in effect a full-fledged French department. The reminiscence […]
Exits of Netanyahu & Trump: chance to dial down Mideast tensions The Iraqi geopolitical analyst, Ali Fahim, recently said in an interview with The Tehran Times: “The arrival of [newly elected Iranian President] Ebrahim Raisi at the helm of power gives a great moral impetus to the resistance axis.” Further, with new administrations in the […]
On the 17th of April, 1946, Syria gained independence from its French colonial overlords who had ruled the Arab state since the end of the First World War as part of the provisions of the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The secret agreement to carve up the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire among the two leading western European powers was first exposed to the world by Russian Bolsheviks in November of 1917.
Last July, the Palestinian Authority took the unexpected, although belated, step of seeking Arab backing in suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration. That ‘declaration’ was the first ever explicit commitment made by Britain, and the West in general, to establish a Jewish homeland atop an existing Palestinian homeland.
On May 15th of every year, over the past 68 years, Palestinians have commemorated their collective exile from Palestine. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make room for a ‘Jewish homeland’ came at a price of unrelenting violence and perpetual suffering. Palestinians refer to that enduring experience as ‘Nakba’, or ‘Catastrophe’.
However, the ‘Nakba’ is not merely a Palestinian experience; it is also an Arab wound that never ceases from bleeding.
On May 19, 1916, representatives of Great Britain and France secretly reached an accord, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which most of the Arab lands under the rule of the Ottoman Empire were to be divided into British and French spheres of influence upon the conclusion of World War 1. That this agreement was conducted in secrecy, reveals to what extent the voices of the inhabitants of this region were absent from negotiations. It was as if the voices of the ruling Colonial elites were the only ones that had credibility.
It is clear that the Syrian public and their officials, in all 14 of the country’s governorates, are committed to the complete restoration of their nation’s peerless and incomparable archaeological heritage sites as soon as security conditions permit.
