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During the late 1800s and early 1900s in German territories, Jews had begun to make progress in the movement for emancipation, primarily due to Napoleonic edicts that provided Jews with equal rights and aimed to integrate them into society. In response to the cause and the Jewish plea to the Congress of Vienna for emancipation, the German press, along with politicians and academics, depicted Jews as attempting to take control of the economy. As Jewish rights and activism continued to expand, pogroms broke out throughout Bavarian and German towns and cities in which mobs attacked Jews and destroyed property. Police forces only sometimes prevented the onslaught and Christian citizens rarely took action, resulting in many Jews fleeing their homes to escape the destruction. Many Jews grew more secular and assimilated but there was little outcry or reaction against attacks amongst the Jews, possibly due to trust in the system or law and a lack of focus on the anti-semetic riots amongst upper class Jewry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hep-Hep_riots
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hep-hep-riots
https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-jewish-history-and-culture/hep-hep-riots-COM_0309

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The Hep-Hep riots from August to October 1819 were pogroms against Ashkenazi Jews, beginning in the Kingdom of Bavaria, during the period of Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation. The antisemitic communal violence began on August 2, 1819 in Würzburg and soon reached the outer regions of the German Confederation. Many Jews were killed and much Jewish property was destroyed.

The riots took place in a period of heightened political and social tension, shortly following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the great famine of 1816-17, and on the eve of the repressive Carlsbad Decrees. In many German cities, emancipation of the Jews had only begun in recent years, after centuries of living in the countries of Central Europe as non-citizens with restricted rights. The status of Jews varied throughout the 36 independent German states and free cities; some had revoked the recent Napoleonic era emancipation edicts, others maintained them officially but ignored them in practice. In most German territories, Jews were excluded from posts in public administration and the army and forbidden to hold teaching positions in schools and universities.

Jewish representatives formally demanded emancipation at the Congress of Vienna (1815), and German academics and politicians alike responded with vicious opposition. The Jews were portrayed to the public as "upstarts" who were attempting to take control of the economy, particularly the financial sector. Antisemitic publications became common in the German press. Influenced by the Haskalah, as well as the French Revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and other advancements in civil rights, many Jews and equal rights activists began to demand citizenship and equal treatment. As Jewish Emancipation progressed, German Jews were becoming competitors for Christian guilds in the economy. Immediately before the riots began, the Bavarian Diet had completed a debate on further emancipation of the Jews throughout the Kingdom. Amos Elon writes in his 2002 book The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933:

In some places, attempts were made to return Jews to their old medieval status. The free city of Frankfurt reinstated parts of the medieval statute that restricted the rights of Jews. As of 1816 only twelve Jewish couples were allowed to marry each year. The 400,000 gulden the community had paid the city government in 1811 in return for its emancipation were declared forfeited. In the Rhineland, which had reverted to Prussian control, Jews lost the citizenship rights they had been granted under the French and were no longer allowed to practice certain professions. The few who had been appointed to public office before the war were summarily dismissed.

"Hep-Hep" was the perpetrators' derogatory rallying cry. The most likely explanation is that it was based on the traditional herding cry of German shepherds. Another hypothesis suggests that it is an acronym from the Latin "Hierosolyma est perdita" ("Jerusalem is lost"), said (without verifiable evidence) to have been a rallying cry of the Crusaders. The "acronym theory" was attributed to a single letter published in a British newspaper on 28 August 1819, some weeks after the riots. Cornell's Michael Fontaine disputes this etymology, concluding that the "acrostic interpretation ... has no basis in fact.". Ritchie Robertson also disputes the "false etymology" of the acronym interpretation, citing Katz.

The riots began on 2 August 1819 in Würzburg. After several days troops were called in. The Jewish population fled the city and spent several days in tents in the vicinity. Several Jews were killed during the riots in Würzburg.

The riots swept through other Bavarian towns and villages, then spread to Bamberg, Bayreuth, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Koblenz, Cologne and other cities along the Rhine, and as far north as Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck.

In some towns, the police appeared too late or stood by idly while the mob raged through the streets. In towns where the militia arrived promptly, the riots were put down relatively quickly. In Heidelberg the police were tardy in their response, but two professors and their students took the law into their hands and prevented a bloody pogrom. They restrained the culprits and made citizen's arrests. With the exception of Heidelberg, townspeople generally remained passive bystanders.

In several cities, members of the bourgeoisie, students, and even university professors were among the instigators. Ludwig Robert, a Jewish playwright who had recently converted to Christianity, gave an eyewitness account of the rioting:

"... I walked all the way to the Waldhorngasse. There I caught sight of the commandant of the city, General Bruckner, on horseback, and as there was still sporadic shouting, he told his patrol: "Let the bastards shout away if they insist, but the minute they do something dumb, let them have it!" Everyone in town was standing at their open windows, and I went back slowly, close to the buildings, so that I could hear what was being said and assess the mood.

Children were playing in front of the doorsteps, laughing and giggling; they told about the day's events with childish interest. But none of the men or women admonished them or even engaged them in serious conversation. And there was even less chance of seeing a priest, even though in my opinion this was truly where they ought to have been, as teachers of the religion that holds love in such esteem."

"How corrupt people really are and how inadequate their sense of law and justice not to mention their love of humanity - is clear from the fact that there was no indignation expressed at these incidents, not even in the official papers .... The townspeople are said to have been angry with Bruckner for closing the taverns right away. They threatened to tear him off his horse."

After three days of pogrom in Karlsruhe, the infantry was called in and cannons were deployed in the streets. Ludwig, the Grand Duke of Baden, demonstrated his solidarity with the Jews of his capital by taking up residence at the home of a prominent Karlsruhe Jew. After this, calm was restored.

The riots intensified already existing tensions between Christians and Jews in Germany, as well as internal discord and self-analysis within the German-Jewish community.

Many proponents of emancipation believed that to be treated as equal, German Jews had to become fully "German", and attempts to assimilate and integrate into secular German society increased among German Jews in the aftermath of the hostilities.

Another direction was offered by the movement Wissenschaft des Judentums. Groups such as Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Association for Culture and Science of the Jews) attempted to place secular Jewish culture on par with Western European culture. Founded around 1819 by Eduard Gans, Heinrich Heine, Leopold Zunz and Michael Beer, it was an attempt to provide a construct for the Jews as a people in their own right, and sought to validate their secular cultural traditions as being on an equal footing with those of the German people.

On Jewish reaction, Elon writes:

Jewish reactions to the riots were remarkably restrained. Many Jews were either too cowed or too trusting in the rule of law and order. The detachedness and lack of personal identification with the victims on the part of the Jewish upper middle class is an indication that the rich and the largely converted intellectual Jewish elite were turning their backs on the poor and petite bourgeoisie. The Jewish family magazine Sulamith did not mention the riots at all.

Rahel Varnhagen, another Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote to her brother:

"I am infinitely sad on account of the Jews, in a way I have never experienced before.... What should this mass of people do, driven out of their homes? They want to keep them only to despise and torture them further."

"I know my country. Unfortunately. For the past three years I've said the Jews will be attacked. I have witnesses. The Germans wax bold with indignation, and why? Because they are the most civilized, peace-loving, and obedient people.... Their newfound hypocritical love for Christianity (may God forgive my sin) and the Middle Ages, with its poetry, art, and atrocities, incites the people to commit the only atrocity they may still be provoked to: attacking the Jews!... Their hate does not stem from religious zeal: how can they hate other faiths when they don't even love their own?

Carlsbad Decrees

During the ongoing riots the Carlsbad Decrees were passed. Within a month afterwards, the Hep-Hep riots ended.

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The Hep-Hep riots from August to October 1819 were pogroms against Ashkenazi Jews, beginning in the Kingdom of Bavaria, during the period of Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation. The antisemitic communal violence began on August 2, 1819 in Würzburg and soon reached the outer regions of the German Confederation.

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At the beginning of February 1840 in the Ottoman controlled Damascus, Father Thomas, a Christian monk, and his Muslim servant Ibraham Amrah disappeared. While it was likely that they had been murdered by tradesmen that the Father had fought with, Christians accused the Jews of having killed them for their blood to make matzot. The Blood Libel quickly spread and the French Consul whose responsibility was to investigate the incident sided against the Jews. First, Solomon Negrin, a barber, was tortured and confessed to having murdered them, along with 7 named accomplices who faced similar treatment. The consul concluded that these statements, along with bones found in the sewers of the Jewish Quarter were sufficient evidence of the Jews guilt. In response, 63 Jewish children were taken captive by authorities to coax the parents into confessing the location of the blood and much violence by Christians and Muslims against Jews arose. The event shocked Jews around the world, particularly in the West, and brought to light the prominence of anti-Semitism amongst both Muslims and Christians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-damascus-blood-libel
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/damascus-affair-1840

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Emma Lazarus was an American 19th century poet and Jewish activist, most famous for having authored the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. A wealthy Sephardic Jew from New York, she was privately tutored in literature, poetry and languages. Upon learning of the Russian Pogroms and the living conditions endured in Russia, she wrote poetry advocating for Jews and criticizing what was transpiring. She strived to help Jewish immigrants, founding the Hebrew Technical Institute which offered immigrants education in trades and the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. In addition, she supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine prior to the invention of Zionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emma-lazarus
https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/lazarus

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Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 - November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish causes.

She wrote the sonnet " The New Colossus" in 1883. Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty ( Liberty Enlightening the World). The latter part of the sonnet was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women".

Lazarus was also the author of Poems and Translations (New York, 1867); Admetus, and other Poems (1871); Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia, 1874); Poems and Ballads of Heine (New York, 1881); Poems, 2 Vols.; Narrative, Lyric and Dramatic; as well as Jewish Poems and Translations.

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, July 22, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family. She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant and sugar refiner, and Esther Nathan. One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany; the rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and resident in New York long before the American Revolution, being among the original twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam fleeing the Inquisition from their settlement of Recife, Brazil. Lazarus's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side, Grace Seixas Nathan (born in New York in 1752) was also a poet. Lazarus was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her siblings included sisters Josephine, Sarah, Mary, Agnes and Annie, and a brother, Frank.

Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. She was attracted in youth to poetry, writing her first lyrics when eleven years old.

The first stimulus for Lazarus's writing was offered by the American Civil War. A collection of her Poems and Translations, verses written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, appeared in 1867 (New York), and was commended by William Cullen Bryant. It included translations from Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo. Admetus and Other Poems followed in 1871. The title poem was dedicated "To my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson", whose works and personality were exercising an abiding influence upon the poet's intellectual growth. During the next decade, in which "Phantasies" and "Epochs" were written, her poems appeared chiefly in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and Scribner's Monthly.

By this time, Lazarus's work had won recognition abroad. Her first prose production, Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life, a romance treating of the Friederike Brion incident, was published in 1874 ( Philadelphia), and was followed by The Spagnoletto (1876), a tragedy. Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine (New York, 1881) followed, and was prefixed by a biographical sketch of Heine; Lazarus's renderings of some of Heine's verse are considered among the best in English. In the same year, 1881, she became friends with Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. In April 1882, Lazarus published in The Century Magazine the article "Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" Her statement of the reasons for answering this question in the affirmative may be taken to close what may be termed the Hellenic and journeyman period of Lazarus's life, during which her subjects were drawn from classic and romantic sources.

Lazarus also wrote The Crowing of the Red Cock, and the sixteen-part cycle poem "Epochs". In addition to writing her own poems, Lazarus edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine. She also wrote a novel and two plays in five acts, The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama about the titular figure and The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death. During the time Lazarus became interested in her Jewish roots, she continued her purely literary and critical work in magazines with such articles as "Tommaso Salvini", "Salvini's 'King Lear'", "Emerson's Personality", "Heine, the Poet", "A Day in Surrey with William Morris", and others.

Lines from her sonnet " The New Colossus" appear on a bronze plaque which was placed in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. The sonnet was written in 1883 and donated to an auction, conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" in order to raise funds to build the pedestal. Lazarus's close friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired by "The New Colossus" to found the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.

She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887. On one of those trips, Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, introduced her to William Morris at her home. She also met with Henry James, Robert Browning and Thomas Huxley during her European travels. A collection of Poems in Prose (1887) was her last book. Her Complete Poems with a Memoir appeared in 1888, at Boston.

Lazarus was a friend and admirer of the American political economist Henry George. She believed deeply in Georgist economic reforms and became active in the "single tax" movement for land value tax. Lazarus published a poem in the New York Times named after George's book, Progress and Poverty.

Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, and the poor standard of living in Russia in general, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York. Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish immigrants. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. Lazarus volunteered in the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society employment bureau; she eventually became a strong critic of the organization. In 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews.

The literary fruits of identification with her religion were poems like "The Crowing of the Red Cock", "The Banner of the Jew", "The Choice", "The New Ezekiel", "The Dance to Death" (a strong, though unequally executed drama), and her last published work (March 1887), "By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose", which constituted her strongest claim to a foremost rank in American literature. During the same period (1882-87), Lazarus translated the Hebrew poets of medieval Spain with the aid of the German versions of Michael Sachs and Abraham Geiger, and wrote articles, signed and unsigned, upon Jewish subjects for the Jewish press, besides essays on "Bar Kochba", "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow", "M. Renan and the Jews", and others for Jewish literary associations. Several of her translations from medieval Hebrew writers found a place in the ritual of American synagogues. Lazarus's most notable series of articles was that titled "An Epistle to the Hebrews" ( The American Hebrew, November 10, 1882 - February 24, 1883), in which she discussed the Jewish problems of the day, urged a technical and a Jewish education for Jews, and ranged herself among the advocates of an independent Jewish nationality and of Jewish repatriation in Palestine. The only collection of poems issued during this period was Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems (New York, 1882), dedicated to the memory of George Eliot.

Lazarus returned to New York City seriously ill after her second trip to Europe, and died two months later, on November 19, 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma. She never married. Lazarus was buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Queens. The Poems of Emma Lazarus (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1889) was published after her death, comprising most of her poetic work from previous collections, periodical publications, and some of the literary heritage her executors deemed appropriate to preserve for posterity. Her papers are kept by the American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, and her letters are collected at Columbia University.

A stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus", was issued by Antigua and Barbuda in 1985. In 1992, she was named as a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. Lazarus was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included on a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition about Lazarus in 2012.

Biographer Esther Schor praised Lazarus' lasting contribution. "The irony is that the statue goes on speaking, even when the tide turns against immigration - even against immigrants themselves, as they adjust to their American lives. You can't think of the statue without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her."

Lazarus contributed towards shaping the self-image of the United States as well as how the country understands the needs of those who emigrate to the United States. Her themes produced sensitivity and enduring lessons regarding immigrants and their need for dignity. What was needed to make her a poet of the people as well as one of literary merit was a great theme, the establishment of instant communication between some stirring reality and her still-hidden and irresolute subjectivity. Such a theme was provided by the immigration of Russian Jews to America, consequent upon the proscriptive May Laws of 1882. She rose to the defense of her ethnic compatriots in powerful articles, as contributions to The Century (May 1882 and February 1883). Hitherto, her life had held no Jewish inspiration. Though of Sephardic ancestry, and ostensibly Orthodox in belief, her family had till then not participated in the activities of the synagogue or of the Jewish community. Contact with the unfortunates from Russia led her to study the Bible, the Hebrew language, Judaism, and Jewish history. While her early poetry demonstrated no Jewish themes, her Songs of a Semite (1882) is considered to be the earliest volume of Jewish-American poetry.

A review of Alide by Lippincott's Monthly Magazine was critical of Lazarus's style and elements of technique.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: D. Appleton & Company (1887). Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events (Public domain ed.). D. Appleton & Company.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, Daniel Coit; Peck, Harry Thurston; Colby, Frank Moore (1907). The new international encyclopædia (Public domain ed.). Dodd, Mead and company.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; Adler, Cyrus (1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. 7 (Public domain ed.). Funk & Wagnalls Company.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton; Roberts, Goodridge Bliss (1891). Younger American Poets, 1830-1890 (Public domain ed.). Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh. p. 434.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wheeler, Edward Jewitt (1889). Current Opinion. 2 (Public domain ed.). Current Literature Publishing Company.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: World's Congress of Religions (1893). The Addresses and Papers Delivered Before the Parliament, and an Abstract of the Congresses: Held in the Art Institute, Chicago, Ill., Aug. 25 to Oct. 15, 1893 (Public domain ed.). Conkey.

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Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 - November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish causes. She wrote the sonnet " The New Colossus" in 1883. Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

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Alfred Dreyfus was Jewish, French army caption that was tried and convicted of providing secret official documents to Germany in a closed trial and faced life imprisonment. At first the French people were in favor of the prosecution and viewed Dreyfus as a paradigm of the disloyal French Jew but new evidence came to light that the true culprit was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. Despite the revelation, Esterhazy was acquitted of treason and the French population began to divide over whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent. In 1898, a major document in incriminating Dreyfus was determined to be forged by Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, but when tried again 1899, Dreyfus was found guilty once more. To resolve the issue, the president pardoned Dreyfus but the army which had attempted to suppress the case only declared his innocence by 1995. The affair demonstrated the deep abiding anti-Semitism in France that caused the miscarriage of justice to transpire, as well as its perpetuation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
https://www.britannica.com/event/Dreyfus-affair
https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-dreyfus-affair

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The Dreyfus affair ( French: l'affaire Dreyfus, pronounced [lafɛːʁ dʁɛfys]) was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. "L'Affaire", as it is known in French, has come to symbolise modern injustice in the Francophone world, and it remains one of the most notable examples of a complex miscarriage of justice and antisemitism. The role played by the press and public opinion proved influential in the conflict.

The scandal began in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and was imprisoned in Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent nearly five years.

In 1896, evidence came to light-primarily through an investigation instigated by Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage-which identified the real culprit as a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. When high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army laid additional charges against Dreyfus, based on forged documents. Subsequently, Émile Zola's open letter stoked a growing movement of support for Dreyfus, putting pressure on the government to reopen the case.

In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus (now called "Dreyfusards"), such as Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Henri Poincaré and Georges Clemenceau, and those who condemned him (the anti-Dreyfusards), such as Édouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The new trial resulted in another conviction and a 10-year sentence, but Dreyfus was pardoned and released. In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. He served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He died in 1935.

The affair from 1894 to 1906 divided France into pro-republican, anticlerical Dreyfusards and pro-Army, mostly Catholic "anti-Dreyfusards". It embittered French politics and encouraged radicalisation.

At the end of 1894 French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of the École Polytechnique, a Jew of Alsatian origin, was accused of handing secret documents to the Imperial German military. After a closed trial, he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was deported to Devil's Island. At that time, the opinion of the French political class was unanimously unfavourable towards Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus family, particularly his brother Mathieu, remained convinced of his innocence and worked with journalist Bernard Lazare to prove it. In March 1896, Colonel Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage, found evidence that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The General Staff refused to reconsider its judgment and transferred Picquart to North Africa.

In July 1897 Dreyfus's family contacted the President of the Senate Auguste Scheurer-Kestner to draw attention to the tenuousness of the evidence against Dreyfus. Scheurer-Kestner reported three months later that he was convinced Dreyfus was innocent, and persuaded Georges Clemenceau, a newspaper reporter and former member of the Chamber of Deputies. In the same month, Mathieu Dreyfus made a complaint about Esterhazy to the Ministry of War. In January 1898 two events raised the case to national prominence: Esterhazy was acquitted of treason charges (subsequently shaving his moustache and fleeing France), and Émile Zola published his , a Dreyfusard declaration that rallied many intellectuals to Dreyfus' cause. France became increasingly divided over the case, and the issue continued to be hotly debated until the end of the century. Antisemitic riots erupted in more than twenty French cities and there were several deaths in Algiers.

Despite covert attempts by the army to quash the case, the initial conviction was annulled by the Supreme Court after a thorough investigation. A new court-martial was held at Rennes in 1899. Dreyfus was convicted again and sentenced to ten years of hard labour, though the sentence was commuted due to extenuating circumstances. Dreyfus accepted the presidential pardon granted by President Émile Loubet. In 1906 his innocence was officially established by an irrevocable judgement of the Supreme Court. Dreyfus was reinstated in the army with the rank of Major and participated in the First World War. He died in 1935.

The implications of this case were numerous and affected all aspects of French public life. It was regarded as a vindication of the Third Republic (and became a founding myth), but it led to a renewal of nationalism in the military. It slowed the reform of French Catholicism and republican integration of Catholics. It was during The Affair that the term intellectual was coined. The Affair engendered numerous antisemitic demonstrations, which in turn affected sentiment within the Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe. This persuaded Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism that the Jews must leave Europe and establish their own state.

In 1894, the Third Republic was twenty-four years old. Although the 16 May Crisis in 1877 had crippled the political influence of both the Bourbon and Orléanist royalists, its ministries continued to be short-lived as the country lurched from crisis to crisis: three immediately preceding the Dreyfus Affair were the near-coup of Georges Boulanger in 1889, the Panama scandal in 1892, and the anarchist threat (reduced by the " villainous laws" of July 1894). The elections of 1893 were focused on the "social question" and resulted in a Republican victory (just under half the seats) against the conservative right and the reinforcement of the Radicals (about 150 seats) and Socialists (about 50 seats).

The opposition of the Radicals and Socialists resulted in a centrist government with policies oriented towards economic protectionism, a certain indifference to social issues, a willingness to break international isolation, the Russian alliance, and development of the colonial empire. These centrist policies resulted in cabinet instability, with some Republican members of the government sometimes aligning with the radicals and some Orléanists aligning with the Legitimists in five successive governments from 1893 to 1896. This instability coincided with an equally unstable presidency: President Sadi Carnot was assassinated on 24 June 1894, his moderate successor Jean Casimir-Perier resigned on 15 January 1895 and was replaced by Félix Faure.

Following the failure of the radical government of Léon Bourgeois in 1896, the president appointed Jules Méline as prime minister. His government faced the opposition of the left and of some Republicans (including the Progressive Union) and made sure to keep the support of the right. He sought to appease religious, social, and economic tensions and conducted a fairly conservative policy. He succeeded in improving stability, and it was under this stable government that the Dreyfus Affair occurred.

The Dreyfus Affair occurred in the context of the annexation of Alsace and Moselle by the Germans, an event that fed the most extreme nationalism. The traumatic defeat in 1870 seemed far away, but a vengeful spirit remained. Many participants in the Dreyfus Affair were Alsatian.

Over the previous ten years the army had experienced a significant shift in its twofold aim to democratize and modernize. The graduates of the École Polytechnique competed effectively with officers from the main career path of Saint-Cyr, which caused strife, bitterness, and jealousy among junior officers expecting promotions. The period was also marked by an arms race that primarily affected artillery. There were improvements in heavy artillery (guns of 120 mm and 155 mm, Models 1890 Baquet, new hydropneumatic brakes), but also and especially the development of the ultra-secret 75mm gun.

The operation of military counterintelligence, alias the "Statistics Section" (SR), should be noted. Spying as a tool for secret war was a novelty as an organised activity in the late 19th century. The Statistics Section was created in 1871 but consisted of only a handful of officers and civilians. Its head in 1894 was Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Sandherr, a graduate of Saint-Cyr, an Alsatian from Mulhouse, and a convinced anti-Semite. Its military mission was clear: to retrieve information about potential enemies of France and to feed them false information. The Statistics Section was supported by the "Secret Affairs" of the Quai d'Orsay at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was headed by a young diplomat, Maurice Paléologue. The arms race created an acute atmosphere of intrigue in French counter-espionage from 1890. One of the missions of the section was to spy on the German Embassy at Rue de Lille in Paris to thwart any attempt to transmit important information to the Germans. This was especially critical since several cases of espionage had already hit the headlines of newspapers, which were fond of sensationalism. Thus in 1890 the archivist Boutonnet was convicted for selling plans of shells that used melinite.

The German military attaché in Paris in 1894 was Count Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, who developed a policy of infiltration which appears to have been effective. In the 1880s Schwartzkoppen had begun an affair with an Italian military attache, Lieutenant Colonel Count Alessandro Panizzardi. While neither had anything to do with Dreyfus, their intimate and erotic correspondence (e.g. "Don't exhaust yourself with too much buggery."), which was obtained by the authorities, lent an air of truth to other documents that were forged by prosecutors to lend retroactive credibility to Dreyfus's conviction as a spy. Some of these forgeries even referenced the real affair between the two officers; in one, Alessandro supposedly informed his lover that if "Dreyfus is brought in for questioning", they must both claim that they "never had any dealings with that Jew. ... Clearly, no one can ever know what happened with him." The letters, real and fake, provided a convenient excuse for placing the entire Dreyfus dossier under seal, given that exposure of the liaison would have 'dishonoured' Germany and Italy's military and compromised diplomatic relations. As homosexuality was, like Judaism, then often perceived as a sign of national degeneration, recent historians have suggested that combining them to inflate the scandal may have shaped the prosecution strategy.

Since early 1894, the Statistics Section had investigated traffic in master plans for Nice and the Meuse conducted by an officer whom the Germans and Italians nicknamed Dubois. This is what led to the origins of the Dreyfus Affair.

The social context was marked by the rise of nationalism and of antisemitism.

The growth of antisemitism, virulent since the publication of Jewish France by Édouard Drumont in 1886 (150,000 copies in the first year), went hand in hand with the rise of clericalism. Tensions were high in all strata of society, fueled by an influential press, which was virtually free to write and disseminate any information even if offensive or defamatory. Legal risks were limited if the target was a private person.

Antisemitism did not spare the military, which practiced hidden discrimination with the "cote d'amour" (a subjective assessment of personal acceptability) system of irrational grading, encountered by Dreyfus in his application to the Bourges School. However, while prejudices of this nature undoubtedly existed within the confines of the General Staff, the French Army as a whole was relatively open to individual talent. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair there were an estimated 300 Jewish officers in the army (about 3 per cent of the total), of whom ten were generals.

The popularity of the duel using sword or small pistol, sometimes causing death, bore witness to the tensions of the period. When a series of press articles in La Libre Parole accused Jewish officers of "betraying their birth", the officers challenged the editors. Captain Crémieu-Foa, a Jewish Alsatian graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique, fought unsuccessfully against Drumont and against M. de Lamase, who was the author of the articles. Captain Mayer, another Jewish officer, was killed by the Marquis de Morès, a friend of Drumont, in another duel.

Hatred of Jews was now public and violent, driven by a firebrand (Drumont) who demonized the Jewish presence in France. Jews in metropolitan France in 1895 numbered about 80,000 (40,000 in Paris alone), who were highly integrated into society; an additional 45,000 Jews lived in Algeria. The launch of La Libre Parole with a circulation estimated at 200,000 copies in 1892, allowed Drumont to expand his audience to a popular readership already enticed by the boulangiste adventure in the past. The antisemitism circulated by La Libre Parole, as well as by L'Éclair, Le Petit Journal, La Patrie, L'Intransigeant and , drew on antisemitic roots in certain Catholic circles.

The staff of the Military Intelligence Service (SR) worked around the clock to spy on the German Embassy in Paris. They had managed to hire a French housekeeper named "Madame Bastian" who worked in the building to help in this effort and in September 1894 she found a torn-up note which she handed over to her employers at the Military Intelligence Service. This note later became known as "the bordereau". This piece of paper, torn into six large pieces, unsigned and undated, was addressed to the German military attaché stationed at the German Embassy, Max von Schwartzkoppen. It stated that confidential French military documents regarding the newly developed "hydraulic brake of 120, and the way this gun has worked" were about to be sent to a foreign power.

This catch seemed of sufficient importance for the head of the "Statistical Section", the Mulhousian Jean Sandherr, to inform the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier. In fact the SR suspected that there had been leaks since the beginning of 1894 and had been trying to find the perpetrator. The minister had been harshly attacked in the press for his actions, which were deemed incompetent, and appears to have sought an opportunity to enhance his image. He immediately initiated two secret investigations, one administrative and one judicial. To find the culprit, using simple though crude reasoning, the circle of the search was arbitrarily restricted to suspects posted to, or former employees of, the General Staff - necessarily a trainee artillery officer.

The ideal culprit was identified: Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of the École polytechnique and an artillery officer, of the Jewish faith and of Alsatian origin, coming from the republican meritocracy. At the beginning of the case the emphasis was rather on the Alsatian origins of Dreyfus than on his religion. These origins were not, however, exceptional because these officers were favoured by France for their knowledge of the German language and culture. There was also antisemitism in the offices of the General Staff, and it fast became central to the affair by filling in the credibility gaps in the preliminary enquiry. In particular, Dreyfus was at that time the only Jewish officer to be recently passed by the General Staff.

In fact, the reputation of Dreyfus as a cold and withdrawn or even haughty character, as well as his "curiosity", worked strongly against him. These traits of character, some false, others natural, made the charges plausible by turning the most ordinary acts of everyday life in the ministry into proof of espionage. From the beginning a biased and one-sided multiplication of errors led the State to a false position. This was present throughout the affair, where irrationality prevailed over the positivism in vogue in that period:

From this first hour the phenomenon occurred that will dominate the whole affair. It is no longer controlled by facts and circumstances carefully examined which will constitute a belief; it is the irresistible cavalier conviction which distorts the facts and beliefs.

To condemn Dreyfus, the writing on the bordereau had to be compared to that of the Captain. There was nobody competent to analyse the writing on the General Staff. Then Major du Paty de Clam entered the scene: an eccentric man who prided himself on being an expert in graphology. On being shown some letters by Dreyfus and the bordereau on 5 October, du Paty concluded immediately who had written the two writings. After a day of additional work he provided a report that, despite some differences, the similarities were sufficient to warrant an investigation. Dreyfus was therefore "the probable author" of the bordereau in the eyes of the General Staff.

General Mercier believed he had the guilty party, but he exaggerated the value of the affair, which took on the status of an affair of state during the week preceding the arrest of Dreyfus. The Minister did consult and inform all the authorities of the State, yet despite prudent counsel and courageous objections expressed by Gabriel Hanotaux in the Council of Ministers he decided to pursue it. Du Paty de Clam was appointed Judicial Police Officer to lead an official investigation.

Meanwhile, several parallel sources of information were opening up, some on the personality of Dreyfus, others to ensure the truth of the identity of the author of the bordereau. The expert Gobert was not convinced and found many differences. He even wrote that "the nature of the writing on the bordereau excludes disguised handwriting". Disappointed, Mercier then called in Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of forensic anthropometry but no handwriting expert. He was initially no more positive than Gobert but he did not exclude the possibility of its being the writing of Dreyfus. Later, under pressure from the military, he argued that Dreyfus had autocopied it and developed his theory of "autoforgery".

In the morning of 15 October 1894 Captain Dreyfus underwent this ordeal but admitted nothing. Du Paty even tried to suggest suicide by placing a revolver in front of Dreyfus, but he refused to take his life, saying he "wanted to live to establish his innocence". The hopes of the military were crushed. Nevertheless Du Paty de Clam still arrested the captain, accused him of conspiring with the enemy, and told him that he would be brought before a court-martial. Dreyfus was imprisoned at the Cherche-Midi prison in Paris.

Mrs. Dreyfus was informed of the arrest the same day by a police raid to search their apartment. She was terrorized by Du Paty, who ordered her to keep the arrest of her husband secret and even said, "One word, one single word and it will be a European war!" Totally illegally, Dreyfus was placed in solitary confinement in prison, where Du Paty interrogated him day and night in order to obtain a confession, which failed. The captain was morally supported by the first Dreyfusard, Major Forzinetti, commandant of the military prisons of Paris.

On 29 October 1894, the affair was revealed in an article in La Libre Parole, the antisemitic newspaper owned by Édouard Drumont. This marked the beginning of a very brutal press campaign until the trial. This event put the affair in the field of antisemitism where it remained until its conclusion.

On 1 November 1894, Alfred's brother, Mathieu Dreyfus, became aware of the arrest after being called urgently to Paris. He became the architect of the arduous fight for the liberation of his brother. Without hesitation, he began looking for a lawyer, and retained the distinguished criminal lawyer Edgar Demange.

On 3 November 1894, General Saussier, the Military governor of Paris, reluctantly gave the order for an enquiry. He had the power to stop the process but did not, perhaps because of an exaggerated confidence in military justice. Major Besson d'Ormescheville, the recorder for the Military Court, wrote an indictment in which "moral elements" of the charge (which gossiped about the habits of Dreyfus and his alleged attendance at "gambling circles", his knowledge of German, and his "remarkable memory") were developed more extensively than the "material elements", which are rarely seen in the charge:

"This is a proof of guilt because Dreyfus made everything disappear".

The complete lack of neutrality of the indictment led to Émile Zola calling it a "monument of bias".

On 4 December 1894, Dreyfus was referred to the first Military Court with this dossier. The secrecy was lifted and Demange could access the file for the first time. After reading it the lawyer had absolute confidence, as he saw the emptiness of the prosecution's case. The prosecution rested completely on the writing on a single piece of paper, the bordereau, on which experts disagreed, and on vague indirect testimonies.

During the two months before the trial, the press went wild. La Libre Parole, L'Autorité, Le Journal, and Le Temps described the supposed life of Dreyfus through lies and bad fiction. This was also an opportunity for extreme headlines from La Libre Parole and La Croix to justify their previous campaigns against the presence of Jews in the army on the theme "You have been told!" This long delay above all enabled the General Staff to prepare public opinion and to put indirect pressure on the judges. On 8 November 1894, General Mercier declared Dreyfus guilty in an interview with Le Figaro. He repeated himself on 29 November 1894 in an article by Arthur Meyer in Le Gaulois, which in fact condemned the indictment against Dreyfus and asked, "How much freedom will the military court have to judge the defendant?"

The jousting of the columnists took place within a broader debate about the issue of a closed court. For Ranc and Cassagnac, who represented the majority of the press, the closed court was a low manoeuvre to enable the acquittal of Dreyfus, "because the minister is a coward". The proof was "that he grovels before the Prussians" by agreeing to publish the denials of the German ambassador in Paris. In other newspapers, such as L'Éclair on 13 December 1894: "the closed court is necessary to avoid a casus belli"; while for Judet in Le Petit Journal of 18 December: "the closed court is our impregnable refuge against Germany"; or in La Croix the same day: it must be "the most absolute closed court".

The trial opened on 19 December 1894 at one o'clock and a closed court was immediately pronounced. This closed court was not legally consistent since Major Picquart and Prefect Louis Lépine were present at certain proceedings in violation of the law. The closed court allowed the military to still not disclose the emptiness of their evidence to the public and to stifle debate. As expected, the emptiness of their case appeared clearly during the hearings. Detailed discussions on the bordereau showed that Captain Dreyfus could not be the author. At the same time the accused himself protested his innocence and defended himself point by point with energy and logic. Moreover, his statements were supported by a dozen defence witnesses. Finally, the absence of motive for the crime was a serious thorn in the prosecution case. Dreyfus was indeed a very patriotic officer highly rated by his superiors, very rich and with no tangible reason to betray France. The fact of Dreyfus's Jewishness was used only by the right-wing press and was not presented in court.

Alphonse Bertillon, who was not an expert in handwriting, was presented as a scholar of the first importance. He advanced the theory of "autoforgery" during the trial and accused Dreyfus of imitating his own handwriting, explaining the differences in writing by using extracts of writing from his brother Matthieu and his wife Lucie. This theory, although later regarded as bizarre and astonishing, seems to have had some effect on the judges. In addition, Major Hubert-Joseph Henry made a theatrical statement in open court. He argued that leaks betraying the General Staff had been suspected to exist since February 1894 and that "a respectable person" accused Captain Dreyfus. He swore on oath that the traitor was Dreyfus, pointing to the crucifix hanging on the wall of the court. Dreyfus was apoplectic with rage and demanded to be confronted with his anonymous accuser, which was rejected by the General Staff. The incident had an undeniable effect on the court, which was composed of seven officers who were both judges and jury. However, the outcome of the trial remained uncertain. The conviction of the judges had been shaken by the firm and logical answers of the accused. The judges took leave to deliberate, but the General Staff still had a card in hand to tip the balance decisively against Dreyfus.

On 22 December 1894, after several hours of deliberation, the verdict was reached. Seven judges unanimously convicted Alfred Dreyfus of collusion with a foreign power, to the maximum penalty under section 76 of the Criminal Code: permanent exile in a walled fortification ( prison), the cancellation of his army rank and military degradation. Dreyfus was not sentenced to death, as it had been abolished for political crimes since 1848.

For the authorities, the press and the public, doubts had been dispelled by the trial and his guilt was certain. Right and left regretted the abolition of the death penalty for such a crime. Antisemitism peaked in the press and occurred in areas so far spared. Jean Jaurès regretted the lightness of the sentence in an address to the House and wrote, "A soldier has been sentenced to death and executed for throwing a button in the face of his corporal. So why leave this miserable traitor alive?" Clemenceau in Justice made a similar comment.

On 5 January 1895, the ceremony of degradation took place in the Morlan Court of the Military School in Paris. While the drums rolled, Dreyfus was accompanied by four artillery officers, who brought him before an officer of the state who read the judgment. A Republican Guard adjutant tore off his badges, thin strips of gold, his stripes, cuffs and sleeves of his jacket. Witnesses report the dignity of Dreyfus, who continued to maintain his innocence while raising his arms: "Innocent, Innocent! Vive la France! Long live the Army". The Adjutant broke his sword on his knee and then the condemned Dreyfus marched at a slow pace in front of his former companions. An event known as "the legend of the confession" took place before the degradation. In the van that brought him to the military school, Dreyfus is said to have confided his treachery to Captain Lebrun-Renault. It appears that this was merely self-promotion by the captain of the Republican Guard, and that in reality Dreyfus had made no admission. Due to the affair's being related to national security, the prisoner was then held in solitary confinement in a cell awaiting transfer. On 17 January 1895, he was transferred to the prison on Île de Ré where he was held for over a month. He had the right to see his wife twice a week in a long room, each of them at one end, with the director of the prison in the middle.

At the last minute, at the initiative of General Mercier, a law was passed on 9 February 1895, restoring the Îles du Salut in French Guiana, as a place of fortified deportation so that Dreyfus was not sent to Ducos, New Caledonia. Indeed, during the deportation of Adjutant Lucien Châtelain, sentenced for conspiring with the enemy in 1888, the facilities did not provide the required conditions of confinement and detention conditions were considered too soft. On 21 February 1895, Dreyfus embarked on the ship Ville de Saint-Nazaire. The next day the ship sailed for French Guiana.

On 12 March 1895, after a difficult voyage of fifteen days, the ship anchored off the Îles du Salut. Dreyfus stayed one month in prison on Île Royale and was transferred to Devil's Island on 14 April 1895. Apart from his guards, he was the only inhabitant of the island and he stayed in a stone hut 4 by 4 metres (13 ft × 13 ft). Haunted by the risk of escape, the commandant of the prison sentenced him to a hellish life, even though living conditions were already very painful. Dreyfus became sick and shaken by fevers that got worse every year.

Dreyfus was allowed to write on paper numbered and signed. He underwent censorship by the commandant even when he received mail from his wife Lucie, whereby they encouraged each other. On 6 September 1896, the conditions of life for Dreyfus worsened again; he was chained double looped, forcing him to stay in bed motionless with his ankles shackled. This measure was the result of false information of his escape revealed by a British newspaper. For two long months, Dreyfus was plunged into deep despair, convinced that his life would end on this remote island.

Truth on the march (1895-1897)

Mathieu Dreyfus, the elder brother of Alfred, was convinced of his innocence. He was the chief architect of the rehabilitation of his brother and spent his time, energy and fortune to gather an increasingly powerful movement for a retrial in December 1894, despite the difficulties of the task:

After the degradation emptiness was around us. It seemed to us that we were no longer human beings like others, we were cut off from the world of the living...

Mathieu tried all paths, even the most fantastic. Thanks to Dr. Gibert, a friend of President Félix Faure, he met at Le Havre a woman who spoke for the first time under hypnosis of a "secret file". This fact was confirmed by the President of the Republic to Dr. Gibert in a private conversation.

Little by little, despite threats of arrest for complicity, machinations and entrapment by the military, he managed to convince various moderates. Thus the anarchist journalist Bernard Lazare looked into the proceedings. In 1896 Lazare published the first Dreyfusard booklet in Brussels. This publication had little influence on the political and intellectual world, but it contained so much detail that the General Staff suspected that Picquart, the new head of SR, was responsible.

The campaign for the review, relayed little by little into the leftist anti-military press, triggered a return of a violent yet vague antisemitism. France was overwhelmingly anti-Dreyfusard; Major Henry from the Statistics Section in turn was aware of the thinness of the prosecution case. At the request of his superiors, General Boisdeffre, Chief of the General Staff and Major-General Gonse, he was charged with the task of enlarging the file to prevent any attempt at a review. Unable to find any evidence, he decided to build some after the fact.

Major Georges Picquart was assigned to be head of the staff of the Military Intelligence Service (SR) in July 1895, following the illness of Colonel Sandherr. In March 1896, Picquart, who had followed the Dreyfus Affair from the outset, now required to receive the documents stolen from the German Embassy directly without any intermediary. He discovered a document called the "petit bleu": a telegram that was never sent, written by von Schwarzkoppen and intercepted at the German embassy at the beginning of March 1896. It was addressed to a French officer, Major Walsin-Esterhazy, 27 rue de la Bienfaisance - Paris. In another letter in black pencil, von Schwarzkoppen revealed the same clandestine relationship with Esterhazy.

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was a former member of French counterespionage where he had served after the war of 1870. He had worked in the same office as Major Henry from 1877 to 1880. A man with a personality disorder, a sulphurous reputation and crippled by debt, he was considered by Picquart to be a traitor driven by monetary reasons to betray his country. Picquart communicated the results of his investigation to the General Staff, which opposed him under "the authority of the principle of res judicata". After this, everything was done to oust him from his position, with the help of his own deputy, Major Henry. It was primarily the upper echelons of the Army that did not want to admit that Dreyfus's conviction could be a grave miscarriage of justice. For Mercier, then Zurlinden and the General Staff, what was done was done and should never be returned to. They found it convenient to separate the Dreyfus and Esterhazy affairs.

The nationalist press launched a violent campaign against the burgeoning Dreyfusards. In counter-attack, the General Staff discovered and revealed the information hitherto ignored in the "secret file". Doubt began to surface, and figures in the artistic and political spheres asked questions. Picquart tried to convince his seniors to react in favour of Dreyfus, but the General Staff seemed deaf. An investigation was started against him, he was monitored when he was in the east, then transferred to Tunisia "in the interest of the service".

At this moment Major Henry chose to take action. On 1 November 1896, he created a false document, subsequently called the "faux Henry" [Henry forgery], keeping the header and signature of an ordinary letter from Panizzardi, and wrote the central text himself:

I read that a deputy will call on Dreyfus. If you ask further explanations from Rome, I would say that I never had relations with the Jew. That is understood. If asked, speak like that, because that person should never know what happened with him.

This was a rather crude forgery. Generals Gonse and Boisdeffre, however, without asking questions, brought the letter to their minister, General Billot. The doubts of the General Staff regarding the innocence of Dreyfus flew out the window. With this discovery the General Staff decided to protect Esterhazy and persecute Colonel Picquart, "who did not understand anything". Picquart, who knew nothing of the "faux Henry", quickly felt isolated from his fellow soldiers. Major Henry accused Picquart of embezzlement and sent him a letter full of innuendo. He protested in writing and returned to Paris.

Picquart confided in his friend, lawyer Louis Leblois, who promised secrecy. Leblois, however, spoke to the vice president of the Senate, the Alsatian Auguste Scheurer-Kestner (born in Mulhouse, like Dreyfus), who was in turn infected by doubts. Without citing Picquart, the senator revealed the affair to the highest people in the country. The General Staff, however, still suspected Picquart of causing leaks. This was the beginning of the Picquart affair, a new conspiracy by the General Staff against an officer.

Major Henry, although deputy to Picquart, was jealous and fostered his own malicious operation to compromise his superior. He engaged in various malpractices (making a letter and designating it as an instrument of a "Jewish syndicate", wanting to help Dreyfus to escape, rigging the "petit bleu" to create a belief that Picquart erased the name of the real recipient, drafting a letter naming Dreyfus in full).

Parallel to the investigations of Picquart, the defenders of Dreyfus were informed in November 1897 that the identity of the writer of the "bordereau" was Esterhazy. Mathieu Dreyfus had a reproduction of the bordereau published by . A banker, Castro, formally identified the writing as that of Esterhazy, who was his debtor, and told Mathieu. On 11 November 1897, the two paths of investigation met during a meeting between Scheurer-Kestner and Mathieu Dreyfus. The latter finally received confirmation that Esterhazy was the author of the note. Based on this, on 15 November 1897 Mathieu Dreyfus made a complaint to the minister of war against Esterhazy. The controversy was now public and the army had no choice but to open an investigation. At the end of 1897, Picquart returned to Paris and made public his doubts about the guilt of Dreyfus because of his discoveries. Collusion to eliminate Picquart seemed to have failed. The challenge was very strong and turned to confrontation. To discredit Picquart, Esterhazy sent, without effect, letters of complaint to the president of the republic.

The Dreyfusard movement, led by Bernard Lazare, Mathieu Dreyfus, Joseph Reinach and Auguste Scheurer-Kestner gained momentum. Émile Zola, informed in mid-November 1897 by Scheurer-Kestner with documents, was convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus and undertook to engage himself officially. On 25 November 1897 the novelist published Mr. Scheurer-Kestner in , which was the first article in a series of three. Faced with threats of massive cancellations from its readers, the paper's editor stopped supporting Zola. Gradually, from late-November through early-December 1897, a number of prominent people got involved in the fight for retrial. These included the authors Octave Mirbeau (his first article was published three days after Zola) and Anatole France, academic Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the librarian of the École normale supérieure Lucien Herr (who convinced Léon Blum and Jean Jaurès), the authors of La Revue Blanche, (where Lazare knew the director Thadee Natanson), and the Clemenceau brothers Albert and Georges. Blum tried in late November 1897 to sign, with his friend Maurice Barrès, a petition calling for a retrial, but Barrès refused, broke with Zola and Blum in early-December, and began to popularize the term "intellectuals". This first break was the prelude to a division among the educated elite after 13 January 1898.

The Dreyfus Affair occupied more and more discussions, something the political world did not always recognize. Jules Méline declared in the opening session of the National Assembly on 7 December 1897, "There is no Dreyfus affair. There is not now and there can be no Dreyfus affair."

General Georges-Gabriel de Pellieux was responsible for conducting an investigation. It was brief, thanks to the General Staff's skillful manipulation of the investigator. The real culprit, they said, was Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. The investigation was moving towards a predictable conclusion until Esterhazy's former mistress, Madame de Boulancy, published letters in Le Figaro in which ten years earlier Esterhazy had expressed violently his hatred for France and his contempt for the French army. The militarist press rushed to the rescue of Esterhazy with an unprecedented antisemitic campaign. The Dreyfusard press replied with strong new evidence in its possession. Georges Clemenceau, in the newspaper , asked, "Who protects Major Esterhazy? The law must stop sucking up to this ineffectual Prussian disguised as a French officer. Why? Who trembles before Esterhazy? What occult power, why shamefully oppose the action of justice? What stands in the way? Why is Esterhazy, a character of depravity and more than doubtful morals, protected while the accused is not? Why is an honest soldier such as Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart discredited, overwhelmed, dishonoured? If this is the case we must speak out!"

Although protected by the General Staff and therefore by the government, Esterhazy was obliged to admit authorship of the Francophobe letters published by Le Figaro. This convinced the Office of the General Staff to find a way to stop the questions, doubts, and the beginnings of demands for justice. The idea was to require Esterhazy to demand a trial and be acquitted, to stop the noise and allow a return to order. Thus, to finally exonerate him, according to the old rule Res judicata pro veritate habetur, Esterhazy was set to appear before a military court on 10 January 1898. A "delayed" closed court trial was pronounced. Esterhazy was notified of the matter on the following day, along with guidance on the defensive line to take. The trial was not normal: the civil trial Mathieu and Lucy Dreyfus requested was denied, and the three handwriting experts decided the writing in the bordereau was not Esterhazy's. The accused was applauded and the witnesses booed and jeered. Pellieux intervened to defend the General Staff without legal substance. The real accused was Picquart, who was dishonoured by all the military protagonists of the affair. Esterhazy was acquitted unanimously the next day after just three minutes of deliberation. With all the cheering, it was difficult for Esterhazy to make his way toward the exit, where some 1,500 people were waiting.

By error an innocent person was convicted, but on order the guilty party was acquitted. For many moderate Republicans it was an intolerable infringement of the fundamental values they defended. The acquittal of Esterhazy therefore brought about a change of strategy for the Dreyfusards. Liberalism-friendly Scheurer-Kestner and Reinach, took more combative and rebellious action. In response to the acquittal, large and violent riots by anti-Dreyfusards and anti-Semites broke out across France.

On 13 January 1898 Émile Zola touched off a new dimension in the Dreyfus Affair, which became known simply as The Affair. The first great Dreyfusard intellectual, Zola was at the height of his glory: the twenty volumes of the Rougon-Macquart epic were being distributed in dozens of countries. He was a leader in the literary world and was fully conscious of it. To General Pellieux, he said at his trial, "I ask General Pellieux if there are not many ways to serve France? It can be served by the sword or by the pen. General Pellieux has probably won great victories! I have won mine, too. By my work the French language has been brought into the world. I have my victories! I bequeath to posterity the name of General Pellieux and that of Émile Zola: history will choose!

Outraged by the acquittal of Esterhazy, Zola published a 4,500-word article on the front page of L'Aurore in the form of an open letter to President Félix Faure (Clemenceau thought up the headline ). With a typical circulation of 30,000, the newspaper distributed nearly 300,000 copies that day. This article had the effect of an explosion. The article was a direct attack, explicit and clear, and named names. It denounced all those who had conspired against Dreyfus, including the minister of war and the General Staff. The article contained numerous errors, exaggerating or minimizing the roles of one or another of the figures involved (the role of General Mercier was greatly underestimated, for instance).

J'Accuse...! provided for the first time a compilation of all existing data on the affair in one place. Zola's goal was to make himself a target, to force the authorities to prosecute him. His trial forced a new public review of both the Dreyfus and Esterhazy affairs. Here he went against the strategy of Scheurer-Kestner and Lazare, who advocated patience and reflection. Thanks to the national and international success of Zola's article, a trial became inevitable. From that critical moment the case followed two parallel paths. On one hand, the state used its apparatus to impose a limitation on the trial, restricting it to one of simple libel so as to separate the Dreyfus and Esterhazy cases, which had already been adjudicated. On the other hand, conflicting camps of opinion tried to influence judges and the government-one side pushed to obtain a review and the other to convict Zola. But Zola achieved his aim: the opening of a public debate at the Assize Court.

On 15 January 1898 published a petition calling for a retrial. It included the names of Émile Zola, Anatole France, director of the Pasteur Institute Émile Duclaux, Daniel Halévy, Fernand Gregh, Félix Fénéon, Marcel Proust, Lucien Herr, Charles Andler, Victor Bérard, François Simiand, Georges Sorel, the painter Claude Monet, the writer Jules Renard, the sociologist Émile Durkheim, and the historian Gabriel Monod.

On 20 January 1898, after an anti-Zola speech by rightist politician Albert de Mun at the Chamber of Deputies, the chamber voted 312-22 to prosecute Zola. On 23 January 1898 Clemenceau, in the name of a "peaceful revolt of the French spirit", picked up the term "intellectuals" and used it in L'Aurore, but in a positive sense. On 1 February 1898 Barres lambasted the intellectuals in Le Journal. Anti-intellectualism became a major theme of right-wing intellectuals, who accused the Dreyfusards of failing to put the nation's interests first, an argument that continued throughout the years that followed and which became the basis of the public debate: a choice between justice and truth on the one hand, and the defense of the nation, preservation of society, and superiority of the state on the other. At first, the political left did not echo this mobilization of intellectuals-on 19 January 1898 Socialist Deputies distanced themselves from the "two rival bourgeois factions".

General Billot, Minister of War, filed a complaint against Zola and Alexandre Perrenx, the manager of L'Aurore, to be heard at the Assises of the Seine from 7 to 23 February 1898. Defamation of a public authority was liable to trial in the Cour d'Assises, while insults to private figures-such as journalists and intellectuals-uttered by the nationalist and antisemitic press were limited to the civil adversarial system. (The taxpayer is at risk in the first case, while only the plaintiff is at risk in the second.) The minister referred to only three passages of Zola's article, eighteen lines out of hundreds. He accused Zola of having written that the court martial had committed "unlawful acts [...] by order". The trial opened in an atmosphere of extreme violence-Zola had been the object of "the most shameful attacks" as well as important support and congratulations.

Fernand Labori, Zola's lawyer, intended to call about 200 witnesses. The details of the Dreyfus Affair, unknown to most of the public, were published in the press. Several papers published shorthand notes verbatim of the debates every day to build support in the population. These notes were, for the Dreyfusards, an essential tool for later debates. The nationalists, behind Henri Rochefort, however, were more visible and organized riots, which forced the prefect of police to intervene to protect Zola whenever he left the facility after every hearing.

This trial was also the scene of a real legal battle in which the rights of the defence were constantly violated. Many observers were aware of the collusion between France's political and military worlds. Evidently the court received instructions not to raise the subject of former judicial errors. President Delegorgue, on the pretext of the long duration of the hearings, juggled the law incessantly to ensure that the trial dealt only with the alleged defamation by Zola. Delegorgue's phrase "the question will not be put" was repeated dozens of times.

Labori: I beg your pardon, Mr. President, to intervene, but I would be interested to hear Messrs Couard, Belhomme and Varinard.

President: No, no I have said ...

Labori: But I have a question to put

President : You will not put it.

Labori: I insist Mr. President.

President: I have told you, you may not put it.

Labori: Oh! Mr. President! It is of interest...

President: It is pointless to shout so loudly.

Labori: I shout because I need to be heard.

President : The question will not be put.

Labori: I understand you have said that; but I said that I want to put it.

President: Well! I say no, and it is a case already heard! The president has a right to dismiss this debate. All this prolongs the debate needlessly. It is my right to do this.

Labori: You do not understand the question. You do not know what the question is.

President: I know perfectly well what you are going to ask.

Labori: Well, I have come to the conclusion that the court should be stopped at this point.

President: Come to all the conclusions that you want.

Labori: If you believe you can cut short the debate you deceive yourself.

President: Well, we will decide on the findings during the recess

(To the court bailiff): Another witness.

(Mr. Auguste Molinier presents himself at the bar and takes the oath.)

President: Has the witness been summoned in the normal way?

Court Clerk: Yes, Mr. President.

President: What is the question, Master Labori?

Labori: I beg your pardon. I have written a finding, and I consider it absolutely essential that the testimony of Mr. Paul Meyer and the events described therein finish being discussed before the testimony of another witness. I do not need more than two minutes. I ask respectfully that you allow me to quickly question the witness.

President: But this witness has been sworn; It is absolutely necessary that he be questioned now.

Clemenceau: It is a question of two minutes.

President: Ask your question now! It is useless to waste our time.

Labori: I think that hearing Messrs Couard, Belhomme, and Varinard is essential to the truth and I maintain that the refusal of this order is recorded before the witness testifies: I consider it essential from the standpoint of the defence.

(The President turns the pages in the Code of Criminal practice.)

President to Mr. Molinier: Sir, would you please leave.

(To the court bailiff): Would you remove this witness please.

(Mr. Labori drew his conclusions)

Zola was sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs, which was the maximum penalty. This harshness was due to the atmosphere of violence surrounding the trial. "The excitement of the audience and the exasperation of the crowd in front of the courthouse were so violent that one could fear the worst excesses if the jury acquitted Mr. Zola". However, the Zola trial was rather a victory for the Dreyfusards. Indeed, the affair and its contradictions had been widely discussed throughout the trial, especially by the military. In addition, the violent attacks against Zola and the injustice of the conviction of Dreyfus reinforced the commitment of the Dreyfusards. Stéphane Mallarmé declared, "[I am] imbued by the admirable actions [of Zola]" and Jules Renard wrote in his diary: "From tonight I hold on to the Republic that inspires respect in me, a tenderness in me that I do not know. I declare that Justice is the most beautiful word in the language of men and I must cry if men no longer understand it". Senator Ludovic Trarieux and Catholic jurist Paul Viollet founded the League for the Defence of Human Rights. Even more than the Dreyfus Affair the Zola affair resulted in a regrouping of intellectual forces into two opposing camps.

On 2 April 1898 an application to the Supreme Court received a favourable response. This was the court's first intervention in the affair. The court upheld the appeal, on the formal grounds that as the alleged libel was against the military court, rather than the minister, it was the military court that should have made the complaint. Prosecutor-General Manau supported a review of the Dreyfus trial and strongly opposed the anti-Semites. The judges of the military court, whom Zola had challenged, therefore opened a new suit against him for libel. The case was brought before the Assizes of Seine-et-Oise in Versailles where the public was considered more favourable to the army and more nationalistic. On 23 May 1898, at the first hearing, Mr. Labori appealed to the Supreme Court regarding the change of jurisdiction, which adjourned the trial and postponed the hearing to 18 July 1898. Labori advised Zola to leave France for England before the end of the trial, which the writer did, departing for a one-year exile in England. The defendants were convicted again. As for Colonel Picquart, he found himself again in prison.

The acquittal of Esterhazy, the convictions of Émile Zola and of Georges Picquart, and the continued presence of an innocent man in prison had a considerable national and international effect. France was exposed as an arbitrary state, which contradicted its founding republican principles. Antisemitism made considerable progress and riots were common throughout the year 1898. However politicians were still in denial about the affair. In April and May 1898, they were mostly concerned with elections, in which Jaurès lost his seat of Carmaux. The majority was moderate, though a parliamentary group in the House was antisemitic. Nevertheless the cause of the Dreyfusards was restarted.

Godefroy Cavaignac, the new minister of war and a fierce supporter of anti-revisionism, definitely wanted to prove the guilt of Dreyfus and from there "wring the neck" of Esterhazy, whom he considered "a pathological liar and blackmailer". He was absolutely convinced of Dreyfus's guilt, a conviction reinforced by the legend of the confession (after meeting the main witness, Captain Lebrun-Renault). Cavaignac had the honesty of a doctrinaire intransigent, but absolutely did not know the depths of the affair-the General Staff had kept him in the dark. He was surprised to learn that all the documents on which the prosecution was based had not been expertly appraised and that Boisdeffre had "absolute confidence" in Henry. Cavaignac decided to investigate-in his office, with his assistants-and retrieved the secret file, which now contained 365 items.

On 4 April the newspaper Le Siècle published Lettre d'un Diplomate, the first of four documents, that were of critical importance in exposing Esterhazy's guilt, and enabled the Dreyfusard cause to regain the initiative it had lost with Zola's conviction. The secret information had been provided by Zola, who had received it from Oscar Wilde; Wilde had gained it from best friend Carlos Blacker, who was an intimate friend of Alexandro Panizzardi.

On 7 July 1898 during a questioning in the National Assembly Cavaignac reported three items "overwhelming among a thousand", two of which had no connection with the case. The other was the "faux Henry". Cavaignac's speech was effective: the députés (deputies) gave him an ovation and voted to display copies of the three documents in the 36,000 communes of France. The anti-Dreyfusards had triumphed, but Cavaignac implicitly recognized that the Dreyfus's defence had not had access to all the evidence. The application for annulment made by Lucie Dreyfus became admissible. The next day, Picquart declared in Le Temps to the council president, "I am in a position to establish before a court of competent jurisdiction that the two documents bearing the date of 1894 could not be attributed to Dreyfus and that the one that bears the date of 1896 had all the characteristics of a fake," which earned him eleven months in prison.

On the evening of 13 August 1898, Louis Cuignet, who was attached to the cabinet of Cavaignac, was working by the light of a lamp and observed that the colour of the lines on the "faux Henry" paper header and footer did not correspond with the central part of the document. Cavaignac was still trying to find logical reasons for the guilt and conviction of Dreyfus but was not silent on this discovery. A board of inquiry was formed to investigate Esterhazy, before which he panicked and confessed his secret reports to Major du Paty de Clam. Collusion between the General Staff and the traitor was revealed. On 30 August 1898 Cavaignac resigned himself to demanding explanations from Colonel Henry in the presence of Boisdeffre and Gonse. After an hour of questioning by the minister himself, Henry broke down and made a full confession. He was placed under arrest at the Mont-Valérien fortress, where he killed himself the next day by cutting his own throat with a razor. The request for review filed by Lucie Dreyfus could not be rejected. Yet Cavaignac said "less than ever!", but the president of the council, Henri Brisson, forced him to resign. Despite his apparently entirely involuntary role in the revision of the 1894 trial, Brisson remained convinced that Dreyfus was guilty and made a statement disparaging and offensive to Dreyfus at the Rennes trial.

The anti-revisionists did not consider themselves beaten. On 6 September 1898 Charles Maurras published a eulogy of Henry in La Gazette de France in which he called him a "heroic servant of the great interests of the State". La Libre Parole, Drumont's antisemitic newspaper, spread the notion of "patriotic fake" (" faux patriotique"). In December the same newspaper launched a subscription, in favour of his widow, to erect a monument to Henry. Each gift was accompanied by pithy, often abusive, remarks on Dreyfus, the Dreyfusards, and the Jews. Some 14,000 subscribers, including 53 deputies, sent 131,000 francs. On 3 September 1898, Brisson, the president of the council, urged Mathieu Dreyfus to file an application for review of the military court of 1894. The government transferred the case to the Supreme Court for its opinion on the past four years of proceedings.

France was really divided into two, but no more generalization is possible: the Jewish community was little involved, intellectuals were not all Dreyfusards, the Protestants were divided, and Marxists refused to support Dreyfus. The split transcended religion and social background, as shown in a cartoon by Caran d'Ache A family dinner: before, "Above all, never talk about it !", after, "They talked about it".

Henry was dead, Boisdeffre had resigned, Gonse had no more authority, and du Paty had been severely compromised by Esterhazy: for the conspirators it was a débâcle. The government was now caught between two fires: the nationalist pressure on the street and the higher command. Cavaignac, having resigned for continuing to spread his anti-Dreyfusard vision of the Affair, arose as an anti-revisionist leader. General Zurlinden who succeeded him and was influenced by the General Staff, delivered a negative opinion at the review on 10 September 1898 comforting the extremist press by saying that, "a review means war". The obstinacy of the Government, who voted to revert to the Supreme Court on 26 September 1898, led to the resignation of Zurlinden who was soon replaced by General Chanoine. When Chanoine was questioned in the House he handed in his resignation; trust was denied to Brisson and he was also forced to resign. Ministerial instability caused some governmental instability.

On 1 November 1898 the Progressive Charles Dupuy was appointed in place of Brisson. In 1894 he had covered the actions of General Mercier at the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, and four years later he announced that he would follow the judgment of the Supreme Court, thus blocking the road for those who wanted to stifle the review and divest the Court. On 5 December 1898 in the shadow of a debate in the House on the transmission of the "secret file" to the Supreme Court the tension rose another notch. Insults, invective, and other nationalistic violence gave way to threats of an uprising. Paul Déroulède declared: "If there has to be a civil war so be it."

A new crisis arose at the same time in the heart of the Supreme Court, since Quesnay de Beaurepaire, President of the Civil Chamber, accused the Criminal Chamber of Dreyfusism in the press. He resigned on 8 January 1899 as a hero of the nationalist cause. This crisis led to the divestiture of the Criminal Division in favour of joint chambers. This was the point of blockage for the review.

In 1899 the affair took up more and more of the political scene. On 16 February 1899, Félix Faure, the President of France, died. Émile Loubet was elected, which was an advance for the cause of the review as the previous president had been a fierce opponent. On 23 February 1899 at the funeral for Faure, Paul Déroulède attempted to force a coup at the Élysée Palace. It was a failure as it was not supported by the military. On 4 June 1899 Loubet was assaulted at the Longchamp Racecourse. These provocations plus permanent demonstrations from the extreme right, although it never actually put the Republic in danger, created a burst of Republicanism leading to the formation of a "government of republican defence" around Waldeck-Rousseau on 22 June 1899. The center of French politics, including Raymond Poincaré, had aligned itself with the pro-revisionists. The progressive anti-Dreyfusard Republicans such as Jules Méline, were rejected outright. The Dreyfus affair led to a clear reorganization of the French political landscape.

The Supreme Court considered the affair in the context of press campaigns against the Criminal Division, the magistrates being constantly dragged through the mud in nationalist newspapers from the Panama scandals. On 26 September 1898, after a Cabinet vote, the Minister of Justice appealed to the Supreme Court. On 29 October 1898, after the submission of the report from the recorder Alphonse Bard, the Criminal Chamber of the Court stated that "the application is admissible and will proceed with a supplementary investigation".

The recorder Louis Loew presided. He was subjected to a very violent campaign of antisemitic insults due to his being an Alsatian Protestant accused of being a deserter and tainted by the Prussians. Despite the compliant silence of Mercier, Billot, Zurlinden, and Roget, who hid behind the authority of "already judged" and "state secret", understanding of the affair increased. Cavaignac made a statement two days long, but failed to prove the guilt of Dreyfus. On the contrary, he unwittingly exonerated him by a demonstration of the exact date of the bordereau (August 1894).

Picquart then demonstrated all the workings of the error, then the conspiracy. In a decision dated 8 December 1898 in response to his divestiture announcement, Picquart was protected from the military court by the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court. This was a new obstacle to the wishes of the General Staff. A new furiously antisemitic press campaign burst during the event, while L'Aurore on 29 October 1898 published an article entitled Victory in the same character as J'accuse...! The work of the investigation was still to be taken back by the Criminal Division. The "secret file" was analyzed from 30 December 1898 and the Criminal Division requested disclosure of diplomatic records, which was granted.

On 9 February 1899, the Criminal Division submitted its report by highlighting two important facts: it was certain Esterhazy used the same paper as the bordereau and the secret file was completely void. These two major events alone destroyed all proceedings against Alfred Dreyfus. In parallel, President Mazeau conducted an inquiry by the Criminal Division, which led to divestiture thereof "to not only leave it to bear alone all responsibility for the final decision," so protecting the Criminal Division from actions arising from its report.

On 28 February 1899, Waldeck-Rousseau spoke to the Senate on the floor and denounced "moral conspiracy" within the government and in the street. The review was no longer avoidable. On 1 March 1899, Alexis Ballot-Beaupré, the new President of the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court, was appointed recorder for the consideration of the application for review. He took on the legal files and decided on a further investigation. Ten additional witnesses were interviewed, which further weakened the version of the General Staff. In the final discussion, President Ballot-Beaupré demonstrated the inanity of the bordereau, which was the only charge against Dreyfus. The prosecutor Manau echoed the views of the President. Mornard who represented Lucie Dreyfus argued without any difficulty or opposition from the prosecution.

On 3 June 1899, the joint chambers of the Supreme Court overturned the judgment of 1894 in a formal hearing. The case was referred to the Military Court of Rennes. By that judgment, the Supreme Court imposed itself as an absolute authority capable of standing up to military and political power. For many Dreyfusards, this ruling was the prelude to the acquittal of the captain; they forgot to consider that it was again the army who would judge. The court, in overturning the judgement, believed in the legal autonomy of the military court without taking into account the laws of esprit de corps.

Alfred Dreyfus was in no way aware of what was happening thousands of kilometres from him. Neither was he aware of the schemes hatched to guarantee that he could never return, or the commitment of countless men and women to his cause. The prison administration filtered information deemed confidential. At the end of 1898, he learned with astonishment the actual size of the affair, about which he knew nothing: the accusation by his brother against Esterhazy, the acquittal of the traitor, Henry's confession and suicide, and the reading of the record of investigations of the Supreme Court, which he received two months after its publication. On 5 June 1899 Alfred Dreyfus was notified of the decision of the Supreme Court on the judgement of 1894. On 9 June 1899 he left Devil's Island, heading to France, but locked in a cabin as if guilty, even though he no longer was. He disembarked on 30 June 1899 in Port Haliguen on the Quiberon peninsula in the greatest secrecy, "a clandestine and nocturnal return". After five years of imprisonment, he was on his native soil, but he was immediately locked up from 1 July 1899 in the military prison in Rennes. He was remanded on 7 August 1899 before the military court of the Breton capital.

General Mercier, champion of the anti-Dreyfusards, intervened constantly in the press to confirm the accuracy of the first judgement: Dreyfus was surely guilty. Immediately, however, dissent emerged in the defence of Dreyfus. His two lawyers actually had opposing strategies. Demange wanted to stand on the defensive and just get the acquittal of Dreyfus. Labori, a brilliant lawyer who was just 35 years old, wanted to take the offensive, to aim higher and defeat and publicly humiliate the General Staff. Mathieu Dreyfus imagined a complementarity between the two lawyers. The conduct of the trial revealed the disunity that served the prosecution with a defence so impaired.

On 14 August 1899 Labori was on his way to court when he was shot in the back by an extremist who escaped and was never found. The lawyer was missing from discussions for over a week at the decisive moment of the examination of witnesses. On 22 August 1899 his condition had improved and he returned. Incidents between the two lawyers for Dreyfus multiplied. Labori reproached Demange about his excessive caution. The Government, in the face of the military hardening stance, still had two ways to influence events: call for testimony from Germany or abandon the charge. These negotiations in the background, however, had no result. The German Embassy sent a polite refusal to the government. The Minister of War, General Gaston de Galliffet, sent respectful word to Major Louis Carrière, the government commissioner. He asked him to act in the spirit of the revised judgment of the Supreme Court. The officer pretended not to understand the allusion and helped the nationalist lawyer Auffray to make the indictment against Dreyfus. The defence needed to make a decision because the outcome of the case looked bad, despite evidence of the absence of charges against the accused. On behalf of the President of the Council, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, aided by Zola and Jaurès, Labori was convinced to give up his argument so as not to offend the military. They decided to risk conciliation in exchange for the acquittal that seemed to be promised by the government. Mr. Demange, alone and without illusions, continued the defence of Dreyfus in an atmosphere of civil war. In Paris the antisemitic and nationalist agitators of Auteuil were arrested. Jules Guérin and those who fled and holed up in Fort Chabrol were assaulted by the police.

On 9 September 1899 the court rendered its verdict: Dreyfus was convicted of treason, but "with extenuating circumstances" (by five votes to two) and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and a further degradation. Contrary to appearances, this verdict was on the verge of acquittal by one vote. The Code of Military Justice adopted the principle that a minority vote of three against four was an acquittal.

The day after the verdict, Alfred Dreyfus, after much hesitation, filed an appeal for a retrial. Waldeck-Rousseau, in a difficult position, tackled for the first time the possibility of a pardon. Dreyfus had to accept guilt. Exhausted, having been away from his family for too long, he accepted. The decree was signed on 19 September 1899 and he was released on 21 September 1899. Many Dreyfusards were frustrated by this final act. Public opinion welcomed this conclusion indifferently. France wanted civil peace and harmony on the eve of the Universal Exhibition of 1900 and before the big fight that the Republic was about to take for freedom of association and secularism.

It was in this spirit that on 17 November 1899 Waldeck-Rousseau filed an amnesty law covering "all criminal acts or misdemeanours related to the Dreyfus affair or that have been included in a prosecution for one of these acts" excluding only Alfred Dreyfus himself who was instead pardoned to be able to still seek acquittal. Many Dreyfusards protested as this indemnified not only Zola and Picquart against (further) punishment but also protected the real culprits. Despite these massive protests the bill was passed.

Anti-French demonstrations took place in twenty foreign capitals and the press was outraged. Reactions were twofold. Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg cancelled his concerts in France in protest. The British, as legalists, focused on espionage and challenged rather strongly this conviction devoid of positive arguments in its construction. As such the report of the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Russell of Killowen, on 16 September 1899, was a symbol of the global effect of the Affair in Great Britain. The English judge, who went as an observer to Rennes, criticised the weaknesses of the Military Court:

The Military judges were not familiar with the law or criminal proceedings. They lacked the experience and skill that can see the evidence behind the evidence. They were drowning in prejudice and they acted according to what they saw as the honour of the army. Impressed, full of respect for their superiors, they accorded too much importance to fragile allegations that were only made against the accused." Thus he concluded: "For surely it might have been predicted with certainty that, if the revision trial had taken place before the Cour de cassation ... Dreyfus would now be a free man.

In Germany and Italy, the two countries widely challenged by lawsuits against Dreyfus, there was relief. Even if the Emperor of Germany regretted that the innocence of Dreyfus was not recognized the normalization of future Franco-German relations was seen as a welcome relaxation. Diplomacy of the three powers with the help of England sought to relax in an atmosphere that deteriorated again on the eve of the First World War.

This judicial conclusion also had an unfortunate consequence for the relationship between the Dreyfus family and the branch of ultra dreyfusists. Fernand Labori, Jaures, and Clemenceau, with the consent of Picquart openly accused Alfred Dreyfus of accepting the pardon and only gently protesting the amnesty law.

Rehabilitation, 1900-1906

Preferring to avoid a third trial the government decided to pardon Dreyfus by a decree signed by President Émile Loubet on 19 September 1899 after much hesitation. Dreyfus was not found innocent. The rehabilitation process was not completed until six years later, when passions had cooled. Many books appeared during this period. In addition to the memoires of Alfred Dreyfus, Reinach published his History of the Dreyfus Affair and Jaurès published The Proofs. As for Zola he wrote the third of his Gospels: Truth. Even Esterhazy took advantage of his secrets and sold several different versions of the text of his statement to the consul of France.

On 29 September 1902, Zola, who was the initiator of The Affair and the first of the intellectual Dreyfusards, died, asphyxiated by fumes from his chimney. His wife, Alexandrine, narrowly escaped. It was a shock for the Dreyfusard clan. Anatole France, who demanded that Dreyfus be present at the funeral while the Chief of Police wanted his absence "to avoid problems", read his funeral oration for the author of " J'accuse...!

Before recalling the struggle undertaken by Zola for justice and truth is it possible for me to keep silent about those men bent on the destruction of an innocent man and who, after feeling lost, was saved and overwhelmed with the desperate audacity of fear?

How to depart from your sight then I have a duty to show you
Zola rises up weak and disarmed against them?
Can I hide their lies?
It would silence his heroic righteousness.
Can I hide their crimes?
That would conceal his virtue.
Can I silence the insults and calumnies which they have pursued?
It would silence his reward and honours.
Can I hide their shame?
It would silence his glory.
No, I will speak.
Envy him: he honoured his country and the world by a vast and a great act.
Envy him, his destiny and his heart gave out the greatest.
He was a moment of human conscience.

In 1953, the newspaper Liberation published a death-bed confession by a Parisian roofer that he had murdered Zola by blocking the chimney of his house.

The elections of 1902 saw the victory of the left. Jean Jaurès was re-elected and he revived the Affair on 7 April 1903 while France thought the Affair buried forever. In a speech Jaurès evoked the long list of falsehoods peppering the Dreyfus case, and placed particular emphasis on two things, the letter of resignation from Pellieux, which was worded in very harsh terms. Legally, it formed an admission of the collusion of the General Staff,

[It] dupes people without honour [and] can no longer rely on the trust of subordinates, without which command is impossible. For my side I can not trust any of my chiefs who have been working on falsehoods, I ask for my retirement.

and the note allegedly annotated (by Kaiser Wilhelm II), which General Mercier had alluded to at the Rennes trial, which is reported by the press to have influenced the judges of the Military Court.

Given these developments, General Louis André, the new Minister of War, led an investigation at the instigation of Émile Combes and assisted by judges. The investigation was conducted by Captain Antoine Louis Targe, aide to the minister. During searches of the Statistics Section he discovered numerous documents, most of which were obviously fabricated. In November 1903 a report was submitted to the Minister of Justice by the Minister of War. This was in compliance with the regulations since the Minister found an error committed by the Military Court. This was the beginning of a new review led by lawyer Ludovic Trarieux, the founder of the League of Human Rights, with a thorough investigation to run over two years. The years 1904 and 1905 were devoted to different legal phases before the Supreme Court. The court identified three events (grounds) for review, the demonstration of the falsification of the Panizzardi telegram, demonstration of a date change on a document in the 1894 trial (April 1895 changed to April 1894) and demonstration of the fact that Dreyfus had not removed the minutes related to heavy artillery in the army.

On 9 March 1905 Attorney-General Baudouin delivered an 800-page report in which he demanded the convictions be quashed without further reference to another court and denounced the army. He began a divestiture of the military justice system, which did not conclude until 1982. It was not until 12 July 1906 that the Supreme Court unanimously cancelled the judgment without reference to the military trial at Rennes in 1899 and pronounced "the end of the rehabilitation of Captain Dreyfus". The anti-Dreyfusards protested at this hasty rehabilitation. The goal was obviously political: it was to finish and finally turn the page. Nothing could dent the conviction of the opponents of Dreyfus. This method was the most direct and most definitive. What was annulled not only put a stop to Rennes, but the entire chain of prior acts, beginning with the arraignment order given by General Saussier in 1894. The Court focused on the legal aspects only and observed that Dreyfus did not have a duty to be returned before a Military Court for the simple reason that it should never have taken place due to the total absence of charges:

Whereas in the final analysis of the accusation against Dreyfus nothing remains standing and setting aside the judgment of the Military Court leaves nothing that can be considered to be a crime or misdemeanour; therefore by applying the final paragraph of Article 445 no reference to another court should be pronounced.

Dreyfus was reinstated in the army with the rank of artillery major by law on 13 July 1906. This reflected the rank to which he could reasonably have been expected to have risen had his career not been interrupted by the false charges against him. However Dreyfus and his supporters were disappointed that his five years of imprisonment were not taken into account for the reconstruction of his career and that his promotion to major was back-dated only to 10 July 1903. This decision blocked any hope of a career worthy of his past successes before his arrest in 1894. After serving for a year as commander of the artillery depot at Fort Neuf de Vincennes, Major Dreyfus retired in June 1907; a decision taken in part because of recurrent tropical fevers and chronic fatigue arising from the strain of his imprisonment.

On 4 June 1908 on the occasion of the transfer of the ashes of Émile Zola to the Pantheon, Alfred Dreyfus was the target of an attack. Louis Grégori, an extreme right-wing journalist and assistant of Drumont, fired two shots from a revolver and wounded Dreyfus slightly in the arm. He was driven to do this for Action Française (French Action) not only to disrupt the ceremony for the "two traitors" Zola and Dreyfus, but also to remake the Dreyfus trial through a new trial, a revenge of some sort. The trial was at the Assizes of the Seine, where Grégori was acquitted - the latest in a long series of judicial misconducts. It was an occasion for new antisemitic riots that the government suppressed half-heartedly.

As a reserve officer Dreyfus participated in the First World War of 1914-1918, serving as head of the artillery depot at a fortified camp near Paris and commander of a supply column. In 1917 he saw frontline service at the Chemin des Dames and Verdun. Apart from Major Du Paty de Clam, Dreyfus was the only officer directly involved in the Affair to serve in the war. Having been named as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour at the time of his reinstatement in 1906, Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of officer of the Legion of Honour in 1919. His son, Pierre Dreyfus, also served in World War I as an artillery officer and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Alfred Dreyfus's two nephews also fought as artillery officers in the French Army and both were killed. The same artillery piece (the Obusier de 120 mm C modèle 1890), the secrets of which Dreyfus was accused of revealing to the Germans, was among those used in blunting the early German offensives. He ended his military career as a colonel.

Dreyfus died on 12 July 1935 at the age of seventy-five. His funeral cortège passed through ranks assembled for Bastille Day celebrations at the Place de la Concorde and he was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. Colonel Picquart was also officially rehabilitated and reintegrated into the army with the rank of Brigadier general. Picquart was Minister of War from 1906 to 1909 in the first Clemenceau government; he died in January 1914 in a riding accident.

For some the Dreyfus affair marked French society as a tortured society. All sections of society were affected; some were devastated. According to Katrin Schultheiss, a modern historian:

The enduring significance of the Dreyfus Affair ... lies in its manifest embodiment of multiple narratives and multiple strands of historical causality. It shows how longstanding beliefs and tensions can be transformed ... into a juggernaut that alters the political and cultural landscape for decades. In the interest of increasing our understanding ... the complexities of that transformation should be recognized and analyzed rather than packaged for moral or political usefulness.

The Affair brought the confrontation between two sides of France to life. However, according to most historians, this opposition served the republican order. There was indeed a strengthening of parliamentary democracy and a failure of monarchist and reactionary forces.

The excessive violence of the nationalist parties brought together Republicans in a united front, which defeated attempts to return to the old order. In the short term, progressive political forces from the elections of 1893 and confirmed in 1898 as a result of the Dreyfus affair disappeared in 1899. The shock trials of Esterhazy and Zola created a dreyfusian politics whose aim was to develop a Republican consciousness and to fight against authoritarian nationalism, which expressed itself during the Affair. For the uninhibited growth of populist nationalism was another major result of the event in French politics even though it did not originate from the Dreyfus affair. It grew out of the Boulanger Affair, 1886-1889, and was shaped into a coherent theory by Maurice Barrès in 1892. Nationalism had its ups and downs, but managed to maintain itself as a political force under the name of French Action, among others, until the defeat of 1940 when, after fifty years of struggle, it came to power and tried out the old dream of Drumont, "to purify" the state with the consequences that are well known. On that occasion many Republicans rallied to Vichy, without which the operation of the State would have been precarious, which showed the fragility of the republican institution in extreme circumstances. Upon liberation, Charles Maurras who was convicted on 25 January 1945 for acts of collaboration exclaimed at the verdict: "This is the revenge of Dreyfus!"

The other result was an intellectual mutation of socialism. Jaurès was a late Dreyfusard (January 1898) and was persuaded by revolutionary socialists. His commitment became unwavering alongside Georges Clemenceau and from 1899 under the influence of Lucien Herr. The year 1902 saw the birth of two parties: the French Socialist Party, which brought together jaurésiens; and the Socialist Party of France under the influence of Guesde and Vaillant. Both parties merged in 1905 as the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO).

In addition 1901 saw the birth of the Republican radical socialist Party, the first modern political party, conceived as an electoral machine of the Republican group. It had a permanent structure and relied on networks of Dreyfusards. The creation of the French League for Human Rights was contemporaneous with the affair. It was the hub of the intellectual left and extremely active at the beginning of the century, the conscience of the humanist left.

The final consequence on the political scene at the turn of the century saw a profound renewal of political personalities with the disappearance of great republican figures beginning with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. Those who at the end of the century could weigh heavily on the events of the affair had now disappeared giving way to new men whose ambition was to reform and correct the errors and injustices of the past.

Socially antisemitism was prominent. Existing prior to the Dreyfus affair it had expressed itself during the boulangisme affair and the Panama Canal scandal but was limited to an intellectual elite. The Dreyfus Affair spread hatred of Jews through all strata of society, a movement that certainly began with the success of Jewish France by Édouard Drumont in 1886. It was then greatly amplified by various legal episodes and press campaigns for nearly fifteen years. Antisemitism was from then on official and was exposed in numerous settings including the working classes. Candidates for the legislative elections took advantage of antisemitism as a watchword in parliamentary elections. This antisemitism was reinforced by the crisis of the separation of church and state in 1905, which probably led to its height in France. Antisemitic actions were permitted on the advent of the Vichy regime, which allowed free and unrestrained expression of racial hatred.

Another social consequence was the enhanced role of the press. For the first time it exerted an important influence on French political life. It was possible to speak of a fourth estate since it could act the part of all state organs. Especially as the high editorial quality of the press was mainly derived from the work of writers and novelists who used newspapers as a revolutionary way of expression. The power of the press certainly brought politicians to action, an example of which was Mercier, who appeared to have pushed at the Dreyfus trial in 1894 to please La Libre Parole who attacked ferociously. This being said the role of the press was limited by the size of circulation, influential in Paris but to a lesser extent nationwide. The entire run of the national press appeared to revolve around four and a half million copies whose real influence was relatively strong. There was also assistance through the publication in 1899 of a specific newspaper intended to coordinate the fight (in the dreyfusist camp), with the People's Daily of Sébastien Faure.

The Dreyfus affair created difficulties and blocked the way for improved relations between France and Italy after the customs war as Italy was Europe's most Dreyfusard nation.

The shock of the Dreyfus Affair also affected the Zionist movement "which found fertile ground for its emergence".

The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl appeared profoundly moved by the Dreyfus affair, which followed his debut as a correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna and was present at the degradation of Dreyfus in 1895. "The Affair ... acted as a catalyst in the conversion of Herzl". Before the wave of antisemitism that accompanied the degradation Herzl was "convinced of the need to resolve the Jewish question", which became "an obsession for him". In Der Judenstaat (State of the Jews), he considered that:

[I]f France - bastion of emancipation, progress and universal socialism - [can] get caught up in a maelstrom of antisemitism and let the Parisian crowd chant 'Kill the Jews!' Where can they be safe once again - if not in their own country? Assimilation does not solve the problem because the Gentile world will not allow it as the Dreyfus affair has so clearly demonstrated ...

Herzl's shock was great, for, having lived his youth in Austria, an antisemitic country, he chose to live in France for its humanist image, which made it appear a shelter from extremist excess. He had originally been a fanatic supporter for assimilation of Jews into European Gentile society. The Dreyfus Affair shook Herzl's view on the world, and he became completely enveloped in a tiny movement calling for the restoration of a Jewish State within the biblical homeland in Israel. Herzl quickly took charge in leading the movement.

He organized on 29 August 1897, the First Zionist Congress in Basel and is considered the "inventor of Zionism as a real political movement". Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary (1 September 1897):

Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word - which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly - it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will recognize this.

On 29 November 1947, a little over fifty years after the First Zionist Congress, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish State. The following year the state of Israel was established. Consequently, the Dreyfus Affair is seen as a turning point in Jewish history and as the beginning of the Zionist movement.

In 1985, President François Mitterrand commissioned a statue of Dreyfus by sculptor Louis Mitelberg. It was to be installed at the École Militaire but the Minister of Defense Charles Hernu refused to display it there. Hernu claimed that this was because the École Militaire is not open to the public, but it was widely believed that this was done to avoid provoking the army. It was instead installed at Boulevard Raspail, No. 116-118 at the exit of the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station, where it can be found today. A replica is located at the entrance of Paris's Museum of Jewish Art and History, housing the Fond Dreyfus, more than three thousand historical documents donated by the grandchildren of Captain Dreyfus.

On 12 July 2006, President Jacques Chirac held an official state ceremony marking the centenary of Dreyfus's official rehabilitation. This was held in the presence of the living descendants of both Émile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus. The event took place in the same cobblestone courtyard of Paris's École Militaire where Capitaine Dreyfus had been officially stripped of his officer's rank. Chirac stated that "the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won", and called Dreyfus "an exemplary officer" and a "patriot who passionately loved France". The French National Assembly also held a memorial ceremony of the centennial marking the end of the Affair. This was held in remembrance of the 1906 laws that had reintegrated and promoted both Dreyfus and Picquart at the end of the Dreyfus affair.

All the official records are readily available including reports of all public hearings of the many trials in the Affair. In addition, a large number of records are easily accessible in the French National Archives and in the Military Archives at the fort of Vincennes. The contemporary literature of the case was published between 1894 and 1906. It began with the pamphlet of Bernard Lazare, the first intellectual Dreyfusard.

The Precis of the Dreyfus Affair by "Henri-Dutrait Crozon", a pseudonym of Colonel Larpent, is the basis of all anti-Dreyfusard literature after the Affair to the present time. The author develops the theory of conspiracy, fueled by Jewish finance, to push Esterhazy to accuse himself of crime. Under a scientific exterior there will be found there an elaboration of theories without evidence or support.

The publication of notes by Schwartzkoppen in 1930 shed light on the guilty role of Esterházy in the Affair and exonerated Alfred Dreyfus at the same time, if such vindication was needed. The extreme right questioned the value of this testimony but most historians hold it to be a valid source despite some ambiguities and inaccuracies.

The period of the Occupation throws a veil over the case. The Liberation and the revelation of the Holocaust brought a deep reflection on all of the Dreyfus Affair. Jacques Kayser (1946) then Maurice Paléologue (1955) and Henri Giscard d'Estaing (1960) revived the case without great revelations, a process generally considered insufficient historically.

Marcel Thomas, chief curator at the National Archives, in 1961 provided through his The Affair without Dreyfus in two volumes a complete review of the history of the affair supported by all available public and private archives. His work is the foundation of all subsequent historical studies.

Jean Doise, of the École Normale Supérieure and a military professional with a strong technical background attempts to explain the genesis of the case through the development, between 1892 and 1897, of the French 75mm field gun. Doise proposes in A Secret well guarded. Military History of the Dreyfus Affair that Alfred Dreyfus had been used by French counterintelligence to distract German espionage from the French 75's secret development and furthermore that Esterhazy, who once served in military counterintelligence, had played a role in this manipulation. These hypotheses are regarded with skepticism.

In 1983, the lawyer and historian Jean-Denis Bredin published L'Affair ( The Affair). The interest of the book focuses on a strictly factual relating of the story with documented facts and multifaceted reflection on the different aspects of the event. The book also revealed for the first time the existence of homosexual correspondence in the prosecution case.

Reflecting the intense interest in social history that gripped historians since the 1960s and 1970s, Eric Cahm wrote The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics (1996), an analysis of the sociology of the Affair. Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics, Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, 1886-1900 (1984) does the same in a more limited fashion. Vincent Duclert's Biography of Alfred Dreyfus (2005) includes, in 1300 pages, the complete correspondence of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus from 1894 to 1899.

Expanding on a 2008 article they published in la Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, in 2012 the historians Pierre Gervais, Pauline Peretz and Pierre Stutin published Le dossier secret de l'affaire Dreyfus ( The Secret Record of the Dreyfus Affair). Their research enabled the original contents of the secret file to be established. Their thesis was that historians had neglected the correspondence of Schwartzkoppen and Panizzardi, and that homosexuality played a central role in the slandering of Dreyfus.

In addition the Dreyfus Affair provided the basis for many novels. The last work of Émile Zola (1902), Truth, transposes the Dreyfus affair to the world of education. Anatole France published The Island of Penguins (1907), which recounts the Affair in Book VI: "The Case of 80,000 bundles of hay". Marcel Proust devoted significant passages of his second, third and fourth volumes of In Search of Lost Time to Parisian society's reaction to the Dreyfus affair. Other authors have also contributed, such as Roger Martin du Gard, Maurice Barrès, and Robert Harris.

Many artifacts and documents related to the affair are on display in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.

Early writers marginalized the role of antisemitism. However since the publication of Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (1986) and Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (1982), more attention has been paid to the undercurrent of antisemitism in French society and its effect on the evolution of the case.

The 2013 novel An Officer and a Spy and the 2019 film adapted from it, tells the story of the Dreyfus affair from Picquart's perspective.

1. Dreyfus was from ^ Mulhouse, as were Sandherr and Scheurer-Kestner, Picquart was from Strasbourg, Zurlinden was from Colmar.

2. Acute spy mania? Panic by the General Staff? Brainwashing of the French SR? Smokescreen for the development of ultra secret 75 mm gun?^ [citation needed ]

3. The French word ^ bordereau means simply a note or slip of paper and can be applied to any note. In French many documents in the case were called bordereaux; however, in this translation the term bordereau is used only for this note.

4. ^ Cassagnac, though antisemitic, published an article entitled Doubt (in French) in mid-September 1896.

5. "He had already intervened in ^ Le Figaro in May 1896, in the article "For the Jews".

6. According to the ^ Syndicat of 1 December 1897 and the Minutes of 5 December 1897.

7. At that time the heart of the artistic avant-garde, publishing ^ Marcel Proust, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Renard, Charles Péguy, et al.

8. On 2 February, ^ Octave Mirbeau, Laurent Tailhade, Pierre Quillard and Georges Courteline, among others, in L'Aurore signed an "Address to Émile Zola" assuring him of their support "in the name of justice and truth".

9. Among the experts consulted, the contribution of the mathematician and physicist ^ Henri Poincaré was noted.

Book or article used as a source for writing this article

1961 (in French) Marcel Thomas, The Affair without Dreyfus, Fayard - Idégraf (Geneva), 1961-1979 - 2 volumes.

McMillan, James F. Twentieth-Century France: Politics and Society in France 1898-1991 (1992) pp. 3-12

Sowerwine, Charles. France since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic (2001) excerpt and text search pp. 67-72

1992 (in English) Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, from the French Revolution to the Holocaust, New York: Harper.

1998 (in English) Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's)

1996 (in English) Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics New York: Longman

2010 (in English) Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt and Company)

2008 (in French) Philippe Oriol, History of the Dreyfus Affair - Vol 1 - The History of Captain Dreyfus, Stock, (ISBN 978-2-234-06080-7)

2010 (in English) Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (Alfred A. Knopf)

2012 (in English) Robert L. Fuller, The Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886-1914, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

1989 (in French) Pierre Miquel, The Third Republic, Fayard

1999 (in French) Michel Winock, The School of Intellectuals, Le Seuil, coll. Points

1994 (in French) Pierre Birnbaum, The France of the Dreyfus Affair, Gallimard, Paris

1998 (in French) Pierre Birnbaum, Was the French Army Antisemitic?, pp. 70-82 in Michel Winock: The Dreyfus Affair, Editions du Seuil, Paris, ISBN 2-02-032848-8

1994 (in French) Éric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair, Päperback, coll. "references"

2010 (in French) Vincent Duclert, The Dreyfus Affair. When justice enlightens the Republic, Private

1999 (in English) Martin P. Johnson, The Dreyfus Affair: Honour and Politics in the Belle Epoque (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

2000 (in French) Francis Démier, The France of the Nineteenth Century, Seuil, coll. "Points in History".

2006 (in French) Méhana Mouhou, Dreyfus Affair: conspiracy in the Republic, Éd. L'Harmattan.

1960 (in French) Patrice Boussel, The Dreyfus Affair and the Press, Armand Colin, coll. "Kiosk", 272 pp.

1962 (in French) Henri Guillemin, The Esterházy Enigma, Gallimard

1998 (in French) Philippe-E. Landau, Jewish Opinion and the Dreyfus Affair, Albin Michel, "The Presence of Judaism", paperback

2006 (in French) Pierre Touzin et Francois Vauvillier, Guns of Victory 1914-1918, Volume 1, The Artillery of the campaign. History and Collections, Paris. ISBN 2-35250-022-2

1909 (in French) Henri Dutrait-Crozon, Précis of the Dreyfus Affair, Paris, New National Library, First Editionmière, Final Edition 1924.

1978 (in French) Dreyfusards!: Memories from Mathieu Dreyfus and other novelties (presented by Robert Gauthier). Gallimard & Julliard, coll. Archives No. 16, Paris

1988 (in French) Max Guermann, "The terrible truth", Revue Les Cahiers Naturalistes, No. 62.

1994 (in French) Revue in L'Histoire n o 173, Spécial Dreyfus, January 1994

2005 (in French) Special edition of Le Figaro on 12 July 2005, The centenary of the rehabilitation of Captain Dreyfus

2007 (in French) Thomas Loué, "The Dreyfus Affair", in L. Boltanski et alii éds., Affairs, scandals, and great causes, Paris, Stock, pp. 213-227

1898 (in French) Jean Jaurès, The Evidence, Collection of Articles appearing in La Petite République - available on Wikisource

1899 (in French) Paschal Grousset, The Dreyfus Affair, the word of an enigma. Paris, Stock.

1899 (in French) Georges Clemenceau, The Iniquity, Stock

1903 (in French) Georges Clemenceau, The Disgrace

"Dreyfus" - published in Poet Lore (September 1898) and subsequently in Mine and Thine (1904).

"Dreyfus" - a fugitive poem published in The Independent (16 February 1899).

"Picquart" - published in The Century Magazine (July 1902) and subsequently in Mine and Thine (1904) and Poems Vol II.

"Le Grand Salut" - published in The Living Age (25 August 1906) and subsequently in Lyrics of Life (1909) and Poems Vol II.

1994 (in English) The Dreyfus Centenary Committee, The Dreyfus Centenary Bulletin, London/Bonn.

1996 (in English) George Whyte, The Dreyfus Trilogy, Inter Nationes.

2006 (in English) George Whyte, The Dreyfus Affair, A Chronological History, Palgrave Macmillan.

2007 (in English) George Whyte. Admission is not Acceptance - Reflections on the Dreyfus Affair. Antisemitism. London Valentine Mitchell, 2007; Paris Editions Le Manuscript/Unesco 2008, Buenos Aires Lilmod 2009, Moscow Xonokoct 2010.

2011 (in English) The Dreyfus Affair - A Trilogy of Plays, Oberon Books, London, January 2011.

2013 (in English) Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy, London: Hutchinson. 2013. ISBN 978-0-09-194455-1

1899 (in French) Dereliction of Duty in the Trial at Rennes - Sequence of images

1899 (in French) Mrs Dreyfus and her lawyer at the exit of the prison at Rennes - Sequence of images

1899 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair (reconstructed scenes, 11 episodes, 15 min) by Georges Méliès (a Dreyfusard) - DVD 2008 par Studio Canal

1899 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair (reconstructed scenes, 6 episodes) - Actualités Pathé

1902 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair - French film attributed to Ferdinand Zecca produced by Pathé

1907 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair - French film by Lucien Nonguet produced by Pathé

1965 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair, French film by Jean Vigne, made for schools - Black and White - 18 min

1972 (in English) The Dreyfus Affair, American Documentary Film - Black and White - 15 min

1974 (in French) Dreyfus or the Intolerable Truth, French Documentary Film by Jean Chérasse - Colour - 90 min - DVD 2006 by Alpamedia/Janus Diffusion

1994 (in French) Reasons of State: Chronicle of the Dreyfus Affair, French film in two episodes by Pierre Sorlin - Colour - 26 min

1964 (in English) In the first season episode "Rock-a-Bye Munster", of the TV show The Munsters, Herman and Lilly mention meeting 'that charming Captain Dreyfus' on their honeymoon at Devil's Island.

1968 (in German) Affaire Dreyfus, German film in 3 episodes by ZDF

1978 (in French) Zola or the Human Conscience, French film in four episodes by Stellio Lorenzi - Produced by Antenne 2 - Colour

1991 (in English) Can a Jew Be innocent?, English film in four episodes by Jack Emery - Produced by the BBC - Colour - 30 min (X4)

1991 (in English) Prisoner of Honour, American Film by Ken Russell - Colour - 88 min

1994 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair, French film in two episodes by Yves Boisset - Produced by France 2 - Colour

1994 (in French) Rage and Outrage, by George Whyte, French film - Produced by ARTE - Colour

1995 (in English) Dreyfus in Opera and Ballet, German and English film by arte - Produced by WDR - Colour

1995 (in German) Die Affäre Dreyfus, German film in two episodes by arte.

1895 (in English) Seymour Hicks wrote a drama titled One of the Best, based on the Dreyfus trial, starring William Terriss. It played at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1895. The idea was suggested to Hicks by W. S. Gilbert.

1992 (in English) AJIOM/Captain Dreyfus, Musical. Music and text by George Whyte.

1994 (De En) The Dreyfus Trilogy by George Whyte (in collaboration with Luciano Berio, Jost Meier and Alfred Schnittke) comprising the opera Dreyfus-Die Affäre (Deutsche Oper Berlin, 8 May 1994; Theater Basle, 16 October 1994; The Dreyfus Affair New York City Opera, April 1996); the dance drama Dreyfus-J'accuse (Oper der Stadt Bonn, 4 September 1994) and the musical satire Rage et Outrage (Arte, April 1994; Zorn und Schande, Arte 1994; Rage and Outrage Channel 4, May 1994).

1998 (in English) Dreyfus: Prisoner of Devil's Island - Music Theatre piece - Music and Lyrics by Bryan Kesselman, St Giles Cripplegate, London, November 1998; Part of the 9th London international Jewish Music Festival.

2008 Dreyfus In time by George Whyte, Opernhaus Zurich, December 2008; Jüdisches Museum Berlin, May 2009. Also in German, English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew and Czech.

1995 (in French) The Dreyfus Affair, interview with George Whyte, France Culture, 25 March 1995.

1998 (in French) J'accuse, George Whyte, Canadian Broadcasting Service (CBS), 10 October 1998.

2009 (in English) "In Our Time, The Dreyfus Affair" Downloadable discussion on BBC Radio 4. Melvyn Bragg; Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; Ruth Harris, Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University; Robert Tombs, Professor of French History at Cambridge University.

2010 (in English) Interview with Ruth Harris about her book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, And the Scandal of the Century (2010).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Dreyfus affair ( French: l'affaire Dreyfus, pronounced [lafɛːʁ dʁɛfys]) was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. "L'Affaire", as it is known in French, has come to symbolise modern injustice in the Francophone world, and it remains one of the most notable examples of a complex miscarriage of justice and antisemitism.

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The Correspondence consisted of ten letters sent between the Shariff of Mecca, Hussein Bin Ali, and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner to Egypt. Although unofficial, the letters discussed how to determine independence of Arab lands, for example excluding territories in the French Sphere of Influence from independence. Unresolved disagreements were present in the letters as well, such as limitations in Britain's rule over Baghdad and Basa. The letters intentionally omitted Palestine, allowing for Britain to control the area and disallow Arab independence in the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_Correspondence
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Husayn-McMahon-correspondence
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-hussein-mcmahon-correspondence

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The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence is a series of letters that were exchanged during World War I in which the Government of the United Kingdom agreed to recognize Arab independence after the war in exchange for the Sharif of Mecca launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The correspondence had a significant influence on Middle Eastern history during and after the war; a dispute over Palestine continued thereafter.

The correspondence is composed of ten letters that were exchanged from July 1915 to March 1916 between Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner to Egypt. Whilst there was some military value in the Arab manpower and local knowledge alongside the British Army, the primary reason for the arrangement was to counteract the Ottoman declaration of jihad ("holy war") against the Allies, and to maintain the support of the 70 million Muslims in British India (particularly those in the Indian Army that had been deployed in all major theatres of the wider war). The area of Arab independence was defined to be "in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca" with the exception of "portions of Syria" lying to the west of "the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo"; conflicting interpretations of this description were to cause great controversy in subsequent years. One particular dispute, which continues to the present, is the extent of the coastal exclusion.

Following the publication of the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, which was a letter written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a wealthy and prominent leader in the British Jewish community, which promised a national home for the Jews in Palestine, and the subsequent leaking of the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement in which Britain and France proposed to split and occupy parts of the territory, the Sharif and other Arab leaders considered the agreements made in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence had been violated. Hussein refused to ratify the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and in response to a 1921 British proposal to sign a treaty accepting the Mandate system stated that he could not be expected to "affix his name to a document assigning Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to foreigners". A further British attempt to reach a treaty failed in 1923-24 and negotiations were suspended in March 1924; within six months the British withdrew their support in favour of their central Arabian ally Ibn Saud, who proceeded to conquer Hussein's kingdom.

The correspondence "haunted Anglo-Arab relations" for many decades thereafter. In January 1923 unofficial excerpts were published by Joseph N. M. Jeffries in the and copies of the letters circulated in the Arab press. Excerpts were published in the 1937 Peel Commission Report and the correspondence was published in full in George Antonius's 1938 book The Arab Awakening, then officially in 1939 as . In 1964 further documents were declassified.

The first documented discussions between the UK and the Hashemites took place in February 1914, five months prior to the outbreak of World War I. Discussions were between the Consul-General in Egypt Lord Kitchener and Abdullah bin al-Hussein, the second son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca. Hussein had grown uncomfortable with the newly appointed Ottoman governor in his Hejaz Vilayet, Wehib Pasha, reflecting on rising tensions since the 1908 completion of the Hejaz railway, which threatened to support increased Ottoman centralization in the region. Discussions culminated in a telegram sent on 1 November 1914 from Kitchener-who had recently been appointed as Secretary of War-to Hussein wherein Great Britain would, in exchange for support from the Arabs of Hejaz, "...guarantee the independence, rights and privileges of the Sharifate against all external foreign aggression, in particular, that of the Ottomans". The Sharif indicated he could not break with the Ottomans immediately but the entry of the Ottomans on Germany's side in World War I on 11 November 1914 brought about an abrupt shift in British political interests concerning an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. According to historian David Charlwood, the failure in Gallipoli led to an increased desire on the part of the UK to negotiate a deal with the Arabs. Lieshout gives further background on the reasoning behind the shift in British thinking.

On 23 May 1915, Emir Faisal bin Hussein-the third son of Hussein-was presented with the document that became known as the Damascus Protocol. Faisal was in Damascus to resume talks with the Arab secret societies al-Fatat and Al-'Ahd that he had met in March/April; in the interim he had visited Istanbul to confront the Grand Vizier with evidence of an Ottoman plot to depose his father. The document declared the Arabs would revolt in alliance with the United Kingdom and in return the UK would recognize Arab independence in an area running from the 37th parallel near the Taurus Mountains on the southern border of Turkey, to be bounded in the east by Persia and the Persian Gulf, in the west by the Mediterranean Sea and in the south by the Arabian Sea.

Following deliberations at Ta'if between Hussein and his sons in June 1915, during which Faisal counselled caution, Ali argued against rebellion and Abdullah advocated action and encouraged his father to enter into correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon; over the period 14 July 1915 to 10 March 1916. Ten letters-five from each side-were exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon and Sherif Hussein. McMahon was in contact with British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey throughout; Grey was to authorise and be ultimately responsible for the correspondence.

Historians have used an excerpt from a private letter sent on 4 December 1915 by McMahon halfway through the eight-month period of the correspondence as evidence of possible British duplicity:

[I do not take] the idea of a future strong united independent Arab State ... too seriously ... the conditions of Arabia do not and will not for a very long time to come, lend themselves to such a thing ... I do not for one moment go to the length of imagining that the present negotiations will go far to shape the future form of Arabia or to either establish our rights or to bind our hands in that country. The situation and its elements are much too nebulous for that. What we have to arrive at now is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy and bring them on to our side. This on our part is at present largely a matter of words, and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from academic haggling over conditions - whether about Baghdad or elsewhere.

The ten letters are summarised in the table below, from the letters published in full in 1939 as Cmd. 5957:

1.

Boundaries: Consistent with the Damascus Protocol, requested "England to acknowledge the independence of the Arab countries, bounded on the North by Mersina and Adana up to 37 degrees of latitude, on which degree fall Birijik, Urfa, Mardin, Midiat, Jerizat (Ibn `Umar), Amadia, up to the border of Persia; on the east by the borders of Persia up to the Gulf of Basra; on the South by the Indian Ocean, with the exception of the position of Aden to remain as it is; on the west by the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea up to Mersina."

Caliphate: Requested England to "approve of the proclamation of an Arab Khalifate of Islam."
Other: In return, England to have economic preference in Arab countries, with other foreign privileges in Arab countries being abolished. Both sides to agree to a mutual defense pact and to remain neutral should the other party begin a conflict of aggression.

2.

McMahon to Hussein,
30 Aug 1915

Confirmed British "desire for the independence of Arabia and its inhabitants, together with our approval of the Arab Khalifate"

3.

Hussein to McMahon,
9 Sep 1915

Reiterated the importance of agreeing the "limits and boundaries", such that the negotiations "are dependent only on your refusal or acceptance of the question of the limits and on your declaration of safeguarding their religion first and then the rest of rights from any harm or danger."

4.

McMahon to Hussein,
24 Oct 1915

Boundaries: Acknowledged the importance of agreeing limits, stating "The two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and should be excluded from the limits demanded... As for those regions lying within those frontiers wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally, France... Great Britain is prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca."

Other: Promised to protect the Holy Places, provide advice and assistance on government, with an understanding that only Britain will play such a role. Stipulated an exception for the vilayets of Bagdad and Basra allowing "special administrative arrangements" for Britain.

5.

Hussein to McMahon,
5 Nov 1915

"Vilayets of Mersina and Adana": "we renounce our insistence on the inclusion"

"[T]wo Vilayets of Aleppo and Beirut and their seacoasts": refusing the exclusion since they "are purely Arab Vilayets, and there is no difference between a Moslem and a Christian Arab"
"Iraqi Vilayets": noted that "we might agree to leave under the British troops ... against a suitable sum paid as compensation to the Arab Kingdom for the period of occupation."
Other: The remainder of the letter discusses Arab apprehension over the speed of any revolt, in the context of the risk that the allies were to sue for peace with the Ottomans.

6.

McMahon to Hussein,
14 Dec 1915

"Vilayets of Mersina and Adana": Acknowledged agreement.

"Vilayets of Aleppo and Beirut": "as the interests of our ally, France, are involved in them both, the question will require careful consideration and a further communication on the subject will be addressed to you in due course."
"Vilayet of Bagdad": Proposed to postpone discussion
Other: Responds to apprehension on timing with confirmation that Britain "has no intention of concluding any peace in terms of which the freedom of the Arab peoples from German and Turkish domination does not form an essential condition."

7.

Hussein to McMahon,
1 Jan 1916

"Iraq": proposes to agree compensation after the war

"[T]he northern parts and their coasts": refuses further modifications, stating "it is impossible to allow any derogation that gives France, or any other Power, a span of land in those regions."

8.

McMahon to Hussein,
25 Jan 1916

Acknowledged Hussein's prior points.

9.

Hussein to McMahon,
18 Feb 1916

Discussed initial preparations for the revolt. Appealed to McMahon for £50,000 in gold plus weapons, ammunition and food claiming that Feisal was awaiting the arrival of 'not less than 100,000 people' for the planned revolt.

10.

McMahon to Hussein,
10 Mar 1916

Discussed initial preparations for the revolt. Confirmed British agreement to the requests and concluded the ten letters of the correspondence. The Sharif set a tentative date for armed revolt for June 1916 and commenced tactical discussions with the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon.

Elie Kedourie said the October letter was not a treaty and that even if it was considered to be a treaty, Hussein failed to fulfil his promises from his 18 February 1916 letter. Arguing to the contrary, Victor Kattan describes the correspondence as a "secret treaty" and references that includes the correspondence. He also argues the UK government considered it to be a treaty during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference negotiations with the French over the disposal of Ottoman territory.

McMahon's promises were seen by the Arabs as a formal agreement between themselves and the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour represented the agreement as a treaty during the post-war deliberations of the Council of Four. On this understanding the Arabs, under the command of Hussein's son Faisal, established a military force that fought, with inspiration from T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), against the Ottoman Empire during the Arab Revolt. In an intelligence memo written in January 1916 Lawrence described Sherif Hussein's Arab Revolt as:

beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the break up of the Islamic 'bloc' and the defeat and disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states [Sharif Hussein] would set up to succeed the Turks would be ... harmless to ourselves ... The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion (emphasis in original).

In June 1916 the Arab Revolt began when an Arab army moved against Ottoman forces. They participated in the capture of Aqabah and the severing of the Hejaz railway, a strategic link through the Arab peninsula that ran from Damascus to Medina. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force under the command of General Allenby advanced into the Ottoman territories of Palestine and Syria. The British advance culminated in the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918 and the capitulation of the Ottoman Empire on 31 October 1918.

The Arab revolt is seen by historians as the first organized movement of Arab nationalism. It brought together Arab groups with the common goal to fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire for the first time. Much of the history of Arabian independence stemmed from the revolt beginning with the kingdom founded by Hussein. After the war was over, the Arab revolt had implications. Groups of people were classified according to whether they had fought in the revolt or and their ranks. In Iraq, a group of Sharifian officers from the Arab Revolt formed a political party of which they were head. The Hashemite kingdom in Jordan is still influenced by the actions of Arab leaders in the revolt.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement between the UK and France was negotiated from the end of November 1915 until its agreement in principle on 3 January 1916. The French government became aware of the UK's correspondence with Hussein during December 1915 but were not aware formal commitments had been made.

The agreement was exposed in December 1917; it was made public by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, showing the countries were planning to split and occupy parts of the promised Arab country. Hussein was satisfied by two disingenuous telegrams from Sir Reginald Wingate, who had replaced McMahon as High Commissioner of Egypt, assuring him the British commitments to the Arabs were still valid and that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not a formal treaty. After the Sykes-Picot Agreement was published by the Russian government, McMahon resigned.

Many sources contend the Sykes-Picot Agreement conflicted with the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence of 1915-1916. There were several points of difference, the most obvious being that Persia was placed in the British area and less obviously, the idea British and French advisors would be in control of the area designated as an Arab State. While the correspondence does not mention Palestine, Haifa and Acre were to be British and a reduced Palestine area was to be internationalized.

In 1917 the UK issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The declaration and the correspondence, as well as the Sykes-Picot agreement, are frequently considered together by historians because of the potential for incompatibility between them, particularly in regard to the disposition of Palestine. According to Albert Hourani, founder of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford; "The argument about the interpretation of these agreements is one which is impossible to end, because they were intended to bear more than one interpretation".

Hussein asked for an explanation of the Balfour Declaration and in January 1918 Commander David Hogarth, head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, was dispatched to Jeddah to deliver a letter that was written by Sir Mark Sykes on behalf of the UK government to Hussein, who was now King of Hejaz. The Hogarth message assured Hussein "the Arab race shall be given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the world" and referred to " ... the freedom of the existing population both economic and political ...". According to Isaiah Friedman and Kedourie, Hussein accepted the Balfour Declaration while Charles D. Smith said both Friedman and Kedourie misrepresent documents and violate scholarly standards to reach their conclusions. Hogarth reported that Hussein "would not accept an independent Jewish State in Palestine, nor was I instructed to warn him that such a state was contemplated by Great Britain".

In light of the existing McMahon-Hussein correspondence and in the wake of the seemingly competing Balfour Declaration for the Zionists, as well as Russia's publication weeks later of the older and previously secret Sykes-Picot Agreement with the Russia and France, seven Syrian notables in Cairo from the newly formed Syrian Party of Unity ( Hizb al-Ittibad as-Suri) issued a memorandum requesting clarification from the UK Government, including a "guarantee of the ultimate independence of Arabia". In response, issued on 16 June 1918, the Declaration to the Seven stated that British policy was that the future government of the regions of the Ottoman Empire that were occupied by Allied forces in World War I should be based on the consent of the governed.

On 19 October 1918, General Allenby reported to the UK Government that he had given Faisal:

official assurance that whatever measures might be taken during the period of military administration they were purely provisional and could not be allowed to prejudice the final settlement by the peace conference, at which no doubt the Arabs would have a representative. I added that the instructions to the military governors would preclude their mixing in political affairs, and that I should remove them if I found any of them contravening these orders. I reminded the Amir Faisal that the Allies were in honour bound to endeavour to reach a settlement in accordance with the wishes of the peoples concerned and urged him to place his trust whole-heartedly in their good faith.

In the Anglo-French Declaration of 7 November 1918 the two governments stated that:

The object aimed at by France and the United Kingdom in prosecuting in the East the War let loose by the ambition of Germany is the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.

According to civil servant Eyre Crowe, who saw the original draft of the Declaration, "we had issued a definite statement against annexation in order (1) to quiet the Arabs and (2) to prevent the French annexing any part of Syria". The Declaration is considered by historians to have been misleading at best.

One day before the end of the war with the Ottomans, the British Foreign Office discussed T.E. Lawrence's "Sherifian Plan", in which Hussein's sons were proposed as puppet monarchs in Syria and Mesopotamia. Part of the rationale was to satisfy a belief among the British public that a debt was owed to the Hashemites under the McMahon correspondence. Of Hussein's sons, Faisal was Lawrence's clear favourite, while Ali was not considered a strong leader, Zaid was considered to be too young and Abdullah was considered to be lazy.

The Paris Peace Conference between the allies to agree territorial divisions after the war was held in 1919. The correspondence was primarily relevant to the regions that were to become Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Arabian Peninsula. At the conference, Prince Faisal, speaking on behalf of King Hussein, did not ask for immediate Arab independence but recommended an Arab state under a British mandate.

On 6 January 1920 Prince Faisal initialed an agreement with French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau that acknowledged "the right of the Syrians to unite to govern themselves as an independent nation". A Pan-Syrian Congress, meeting in Damascus, declared an independent state of Syria on 8 March 1920. The new state included portions of Syria, Palestine and northern Mesopotamia, which under the Sykes-Picot Agreement had been set aside for an independent Arab state or confederation of states. Faisal was declared the head of state as king. The April 1920 the San Remo conference was hastily convened in response to Faisal's declaration. At the conference, the Allied Supreme Council granted the mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia to Britain, and those for Syria and Lebanon to France.

The United Kingdom and France agreed to recognize the provisional independence of Syria and Mesopotamia. Provisional recognition of Palestinian independence was not mentioned. France had decided to govern Syria directly and took action to enforce the French Mandate of Syria before the terms had been accepted by the Council of the League of Nations. The French intervened militarily at the Battle of Maysalun in June 1920, deposing the indigenous Arab government and removing King Faisal from Damascus in August 1920. In Palestine, the United Kingdom appointed a High Commissioner and established their own mandatory regime. The January-1919 Faisal-Weizmann Agreement was a short-lived agreement for Arab-Jewish cooperation on the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which Faisal had mistakenly understood was to be within the Arab kingdom. Faisal did treat Palestine differently in his presentation to the Peace Conference on 6 February 1919, saying, "Palestine, in consequence of its universal character, be left on one side for the mutual consideration of all parties concerned".

The agreement was never implemented. At the same conference, US Secretary of State Robert Lansing had asked Dr. Weizmann if the Jewish national home meant the establishment of an autonomous Jewish government. The head of the Zionist delegation had replied in the negative. Lansing was a member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at Paris in 1919; he said the system of mandates was a device created by the Great Powers to conceal their division of the spoils of war under the colour of international law. If the territories had been ceded directly, the value of the former German and Ottoman territories would have been applied to offset the Allies' claims for war reparations. He also said Jan Smuts had been the author of the original concept.

In 1919, King Hussein had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. After February 1920, the British ceased to pay subsidy to him. In August 1920, five days after the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, which formally recognized the Kingdom of Hejaz, Curzon asked Cairo to procure Hussein's signature to both treaties and agreed to make a payment of £30,000 conditional on signature. Hussein declined and in 1921, stated that he could not be expected to "affix his name to a document assigning Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to foreigners".

Following the 1921 Cairo Conference, Lawrence was sent to try and obtain the King's signature to a treaty in exchange for a proposed £100,000 annual subsidy; this attempt also failed. During 1923, the British again tried to settle outstanding issues with Hussein; this attempt also failed and Hussein continued refusing to recognize any of the mandates he perceived as being his domain. In March 1924, having briefly considered the possibility of removing the offending article from the treaty, the UK government suspended negotiations and within six months withdrew support in favour of its central Arabian ally Ibn Saud, who proceeded to conquer Hussein's kingdom.

McMahon's letter to Hussein dated 24 October 1915 declared Britain's willingness to recognize the independence of the Arabs subject to certain exemptions. The original correspondence was conducted in both English and Arabic; slightly differing English translations are extant.

The districts of Mersina and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted from the proposed limits and boundaries.

With the above modification and without prejudice to our existing treaties concluded with Arab Chiefs, we accept these limits and boundaries, and in regard to the territories therein in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to interests of her ally France, I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurance and make the following reply to your letter:

Subject to the above modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca.

The correspondence was written first in English before being translated to Arabic and vice versa; the identity of the writer and translator is unclear. Kedourie and others assumed the likeliest candidate for primary author is Ronald Storrs. In his memoirs, Storrs said the correspondence was prepared by Husayn Ruhi and then checked by Storrs. The Arab delegations to the 1939 Conference had objected to certain translations of text from Arabic to English and the Committee arranged for mutually agreeable translations that would render the English text "free from actual error".

The debate regarding Palestine arose because Palestine is not explicitly mentioned in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence but is included within the boundaries that were initially proposed by Hussein. McMahon accepted the boundaries of Hussein "subject to modification" and suggested the modification that "portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab and should be excluded". Until 1920, British government documents suggested that Palestine was intended to be part of the Arab area; their interpretation changed in 1920 leading to public disagreement between the Arabs and the British, each side producing supporting arguments for their positions based on fine details of the wording and the historical circumstances of the correspondence. Jonathan Schneer provides an analogy to explain the central dispute over the meaning:

Presume a line extending from the districts of New York, New Haven, New London, and Boston, excluding territory west from an imaginary coastal kingdom. If by districts one means "vicinity" or "environs," that is one thing with regard to the land excluded, but if one means " vilayets" or "provinces," or in the American instance "states," it is another altogether. There are no states of Boston, New London, or New Haven, just as there were no provinces of Hama and Homs, but there is a state of New York, just as there was a vilayet of Damascus, and territory to the west of New York State is different from territory to the west of the district of New York, presumably New York City and environs, just as territory to the west of the vilayet of Damascus is different from territory to the west of the district of Damascus, presumably the city of Damascus and its environs.

More than 50 years after his initial report interpreting the correspondence for the British Foreign Office, Arnold J. Toynbee published his perspectives on the continuing academic debate. Toynbee set out the logical consequences of interpreting McMahon's 'districts' or 'wilayahs' as provinces rather than vicinities:

(i) First alternative: McMahon was completely ignorant of Ottoman administrative geography. He did not know that the Ottoman vilayet of Aleppo extended westward to the coast, and he did not know that there were no Ottoman vilayets of Homs and Hama. It seems to me incredible that McMahon can have been as ill-informed as this, and that he would not have taken care to inform himself correctly when he was writing a letter in which he was making very serious commitments on HMG's account.
(ii) Second alternative: McMahon was properly acquainted with Ottoman administrative geography, and was using the word 'wilayahs' equivocally. Apropos of Damascus, he was using it to mean 'Ottoman provinces'; apropos of Homs and Hama, and Aleppo, he was using it to mean 'environs'. This equivocation would have been disingenuous, impolitic, and pointless. I could not, and still cannot, believe that McMahon behaved so irresponsibly.

In the letter of 24 October, the English version reads: " ... we accept those limits and boundaries; and in regard to those portions of the territories therein in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally France" At a meeting in Whitehall in December 1920 the English and Arabic texts of McMahon's correspondence with Sharif Husein were compared. As one official, who was present, said:

In the Arabic version sent to King Husain this is so translated as to make it appear that Gt Britain is free to act without detriment to France in the whole of the limits mentioned. This passage of course had been our sheet anchor: it enabled us to tell the French that we had reserved their rights, and the Arabs that there were regions in which they wd have eventually to come to terms with the French. It is extremely awkward to have this piece of solid ground cut from under our feet. I think that HMG will probably jump at the opportunity of making a sort of amende by sending Feisal to Mesopotamia.

James Barr wrote that although McMahon had intended to reserve the French interests, he became a victim of his own cleverness because the translator Ruhi lost the qualifying sense of the sentence in the Arabic version. In a Cabinet analysis of diplomatic developments prepared in May 1917 The Hon. William Ormsby-Gore, MP, wrote:

French intentions in Syria are surely incompatible with the war aims of the Allies as defined to the Russian Government. If the self-determination of nationalities is to be the principle, the interference of France in the selection of advisers by the Arab Government and the suggestion by France of the Emirs to be selected by the Arabs in Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus would seem utterly incompatible with our ideas of liberating the Arab nation and of establishing a free and independent Arab State. The British Government, in authorising the letters dispatched to King Hussein before the outbreak of the revolt by Sir Henry McMahon, would seem to raise a doubt as to whether our pledges to King Hussein as head of the Arab nation are consistent with French intentions to make not only Syria but Upper Mesopotamia another Tunis. If our support of King Hussein and the other Arabian leaders of less distinguished origin and prestige means anything it means that we are prepared to recognise the full sovereign independence of the Arabs of Arabia and Syria. It would seem time to acquaint the French Government with our detailed pledges to King Hussein, and to make it clear to the latter whether he or someone else is to be the ruler of Damascus, which is the one possible capital for an Arab State, which could command the obedience of the other Arabian Emirs.

Declassified British Cabinet papers include a telegram dated 18 October 1915 from Sir Henry McMahon to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Grey requesting instructions. McMahon described conversations with a Muhammed Sharif al-Faruqi, a member of the Abd party who said the British could satisfy the demands of the Syrian Nationalists for the independence of Arabia. Faroqi had said the Arabs would fight if the French attempted to occupy the cities of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, but he thought they would accept some modification of the north-western boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca. Based on these conversations, McMahon suggested the language; "In so far as Britain was free to act without detriment to the interests of her present Allies, Great Britain accepts the principle of the independence of Arabia within limits propounded by the Sherif of Mecca". Lord Grey authorized McMahon to pledge the areas requested by the Sharif subject to the reserve for the Allies.

The Arab position was that they could not refer to Palestine because that lay well to the south of the named places. In particular, the Arabs argued the vilayet (province) of Damascus did not exist and that the district ( sanjak) of Damascus only covered the area surrounding the city and that Palestine was part of the vilayet of Syria A-Sham, which was not mentioned in the exchange of letters.

Supporters of this interpretation also note that during the war, thousands of proclamations were dropped in all parts of Palestine carrying a message from the Sharif Hussein on one side and a message from the British Command on the other, saying "that an Anglo-Arab agreement had been arrived at securing the independence of the Arabs".

The undated memorandum GT 6185 (from CAB 24/68/86) of November 1918 was prepared by the British historian Arnold Toynbee in 1918 while working in the Political Intelligence Department. Crowe, the Permanent Under-Secretary, ordered them to be placed in the Foreign Office dossier for the Peace Conference. After arriving in Paris, General Jan Smuts required that the memoranda be summarized and Toynbee produced the document GT 6506 (maps illustrating it are GT6506A ). The two last were circulated as E.C.2201 and considered at a meeting of the Eastern Committee (No.41) of the Cabinet on 5 December 1918, which was chaired by Lord Curzon, Jan Smuts, Lord Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff; representatives of the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Admiralty, the War Office, and the Treasury were present. T. E. Lawrence also attended.

The Eastern Committee met nine times in November and December to draft a set of resolutions on British policy for the benefit of the negotiators.On 21 October, the War Cabinet asked Smuts to prepare the summarized peace brief and Smuts asked Erle Richards to carry out this task. Richards distilled Toynbee's GT6506 and the resolutions of the Eastern Committee into a "P-memo" (P-49) for use by the Peace Conference delegates.

In the public arena, Balfour was criticized in the House of Commons when the Liberals and Labour Socialists moved a resolution "That secret treaties with the allied governments should be revised, since, in their present form, they are inconsistent with the object for which this country entered the war and are, therefore, a barrier to a democratic peace". In response to growing criticism arising from the seemingly contradictory commitments undertaken by the United Kingdom in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour declaration, the 1922 Churchill White Paper took the position Palestine had always been excluded from the Arab area. Although this directly contradicted numerous previous government documents, those documents were not known to the public. As part of preparations for this White Paper, Sir John Shuckberg of the British Colonial Office had exchanged correspondence with McMahon; reliance was placed on a 1920 memorandum by Major Hubert Young, who had noted that in the original Arabic text, the word translated as "districts" in English was "vilayets", the largest class of administrative district into which the Ottoman Empire was divided. He concluded "district of Damascus", i.e., "vilayet of Damascus", must have referred to the vilayet of which Damascus was the capital, the Vilayet of Syria. This vilayet extended southwards to the Gulf of Aqaba but excluded most of Palestine.

List of notable British interpretations, 1916-39, showing the debate's evolution

Henry McMahon
26 October 1915

Dispatch to British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey

"I have been definite in stating that Great Britain will recognise the principle of Arab independence in purely Arab territory... but have been equally definite in excluding Mersina, Alexandretta and those districts on the northern coasts of Syria, which cannot be said to be purely Arab, and where I understand that French interests have been recognised. I am not aware of the extent of French claims in Syria, nor of how far His Majesty's Government have agreed to recognise them. Hence, while recognising the towns of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo as being within the circle of Arab countries, I have endeavoured to provide for possible French pretensions to those places by a general modification to the effect that His Majesty's Government can only give assurances in regard to those territories "in which she can act without detriment to the interests of her ally France.""

Memorandum sent by Henry McMahon to the Foreign Office

Interpreted Palestine as being included in the Arab area:"What has been agreed to, therefore, on behalf of Great Britain is: (1) to recognise the independence of those portions of the Arab-speaking areas in which we are free to act without detriment to the interests of France. Subject to these undefined reservations the said area is understood to be bounded N. by about lat. 37, east by the Persian frontier, south by the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, west by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean up to about lat. 33, and beyond by an indefinite line drawn inland west of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo: all that lies between this last line and the Mediterranean being, in any case, reserved absolutely for future arrangement with the French and the Arabs."

The Sherif of Mecca and the Arab Movement

Adopted the same conclusions as the Arab Bureau memorandum of April 1916

Summary of Historical Documents: Hedjaz Rising Narrative

Included the memorandum of April 1916

Arnold J. Toynbee, Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department
November 1918
and
21 November 1918

War Cabinet Memorandum on British Commitments to King Husein
War Cabinet Memorandum Respecting Settlement of Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula

"With regard to Palestine, His Majesty's Government are committed by Sir H. McMahon's letter to the Sherif on the 24th October, 1915, to its inclusion in the boundaries of Arab independence. But they have stated their policy regarding the Palestinian Holy Places and Zionist colonisation in their message to him of the 4th January, 1918."

"Palestine (west of Jordan).... (a.) We are pledged to King Husein that this territory shall be "Arab" and "independent.""

Chairing the Eastern Committee of the British War Cabinet

"First, as regards the facts of the case. The various pledges are given in the Foreign Office paper [E.C. 2201] which has been circulated, and I need only refer to them in the briefest possible words. In their bearing on Syria they are the following: First there was the letter to King Hussein from Sir Henry McMahon of the 24th October 1915, in which we gave him the assurance that the Hedjaz, the red area which we commonly call Mesopotamia, the brown area or Palestine, the Acre-Haifa enclave, the big Arab areas (A) and (B), and the whole of the Arabian peninsula down to Aden should be Arab and independent."
"The Palestine position is this. If we deal with our commitments, there is first the general pledge to Hussein in October 1915, under which Palestine was included in the areas as to which Great Britain pledged itself that they should be Arab and independent in the future... the United Kingdom and France - Italy subsequently agreeing - committed themselves to an international administration of Palestine in consultation with Russia, who was an ally at that time... A new feature was brought into the case in November 1917, when Mr Balfour, with the authority of the War Cabinet, issued his famous declaration to the Zionists that Palestine 'should be the national home of the Jewish people, but that nothing should be done - and this, of course, was a most important proviso - to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Those, as far as I know, are the only actual engagements into which we entered with regard to Palestine."

Peace Conference: Memorandum Respecting Palestine, for the Eastern Committee of the British War Cabinet, ahead of the Paris Peace Conference

Memorandum by Mr. Balfour respecting Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia

Hubert Young, of the British Foreign Office
29 November 1920

Interpreted the Arabic translation to be referring to the Vilayet of Damascus. This was the first time an argument was put forward that the correspondence was intended to exclude Palestine from the Arab area.:
"With regard to Palestine, a literal interpretation of Sir H. McMahon's undertaking would exclude from the areas in which His Majesty's Government were prepared to recognize the 'independence of the Arabs' only that portion of the Palestine mandatory area [which included 'Transjordan '] which lies to the west of the 'district of Damascus'. The western boundary of the 'district of Damascus' before the war was a line bisecting the lakes of Huleh and Tiberias; following the course of the Jordan; bisecting the Dead Sea; and following the Wadi Araba to the Gulf of Akaba.'"

Letter to John Evelyn Shuckburgh, in preparation for the Churchill White Paper
Letter to

"It was my intention to exclude Palestine from independent Arabia, and I hoped that I had so worded the letter as to make this sufficiently clear for all practical purposes. My reasons for restricting myself to specific mention of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo in that connection in my letter were: 1) that these were places to which the Arabs attached vital importance and 2) that there was no place I could think of at the time of sufficient importance for purposes of definition further South of the above. It was as fully my intention to exclude Palestine as it was to exclude the more Northern coastal tracts of Syria."

"I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein."

Churchill White Paper following the 1921 Jaffa riots
House of Commons response

"In the first place, it is not the case, as has been represented by the Arab Delegation, that during the war His Majesty's Government gave an undertaking that an independent national government should be at once established in Palestine. This representation mainly rests upon a letter dated 24 October 1915, from Sir Henry McMahon, then His Majesty's High Commissioner in Egypt, to the Sharif of Mecca, now King Hussein of the Kingdom of the Hejaz. That letter is quoted as conveying the promise to the Sherif of Mecca to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories proposed by him. But this promise was given subject to a reservation made in the same letter, which excluded from its scope, among other territories, the portions of Syria lying to the west of the District of Damascus. This reservation has always been regarded by His Majesty's Government as covering the vilayet of Beirut and the independent Sanjak of Jerusalem. The whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was thus excluded from Sir. Henry McMahon's pledge."

"His Majesty's Government have always regarded and continue to regard Palestine as excluded by these provisos from the scope of their undertaking. This is clear from the fact, to which the hon. Member refers, that in the following year they concluded an agreement with the French and Russian Governments under which Palestine was to receive special treatment... it would not be in the public interest to publish one or all of the documents comprising the long and inconclusive correspondence that took place with the Sheriff of Mecca in 1915-16."

Duke of Devonshire's Colonial Office
17 February 1923

British Cabinet Memorandum regarding Policy in Palestine

Debate in the House of Lords; Viscount Grey had been Foreign Secretary in 1915 when the letters were written

"I do not propose to go into the question whether the engagements are inconsistent with one another, but I think it is exceedingly probable that there are inconsistencies... A considerable number of these engagements, or some of them, which have not been officially made public by the Government, have become public through other sources. Whether all have become public I do not know, but. I seriously suggest to the Government that the best way of clearing our honour in this matter is officially to publish the whole of the engagements relating to the matter, which we entered into during the war... I regarded [the Balfour Declaration] with a certain degree of sentiment and sympathy. It is not from any prejudice with regard to that matter that I speak, but I do see that the situation is an exceedingly difficult one, when it is compared with the pledges which undoubtedly were given to the Arabs. It would be very desirable, from the point of view of honour, that all these various pledges should be set out side by side, and then, I think, the most honourable thing would be to look at them fairly, see what inconsistencies there are between them, and, having regard to the nature of each pledge and the date at which it was given, with all the facts before us, consider what is the fair thing to be done."

Debate in the House of Lords; Buckmaster had been Lord Chancellor in 1915 when the letters were written and voted against the 1922 White Paper in the House of Lords.

An unofficial note given to Herbert Samuel, described by Samuel in 1937, eight years after Clayton's death

Memorandum, 11 March 1919. Lloyd George papers F/205/3/9. House of Lords.

"We are committed to three distinct policies in Syria and Palestine:-

A. We are bound by the principles of the Anglo-French Agreement of 1916 [Sykes-Picot], wherein we renounced any claim to predominant influence in Syria. B. Our agreements with King Hussein... have pledged us to support the establishment of an Arab state, or confederation of states, from which we cannot exclude the purely Arab portions of Syria and Palestine. C. We have definitely given our support to the principle of a Jewish home in Palestine and, although the initial outlines of the Zionist programme have been greatly exceeded by the proposals now laid before the Peace Congress, we are still committed to a large measure of support to Zionism.

The experience of the last few months has made it clear that these three policies are incompatible ... "

Memorandum to Cabinet: "Palestine: McMahon Correspondence"

Drummond Shiels, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies
1 August 1930

House of Commons debate

Memorandum on the Exclusion of Palestine from the Area assigned for Arab Independence by McMahon-Hussein Correspondence of 1915-16

Interpreted Palestine as being excluded from the Arab area:

"...the interests of France so reserved in Palestine must be taken as represented by the origins French claim to possession of the whole of Palestine. And, therefore, that the general reservation of French interests is sufficient by itself to exclude Palestine from the Arab area."

Reginald Coupland, commissioner on the Palestine Royal Commission
5 May 1937

Memorandum on Palestine: Legal Arguments Likely to be Advanced by Arab Representatives

"...it is important to emphasise the weak points in His Majesty's Governments case, e.g. :-

(i) the fact that the word "district" is applied not only to Damascus, &c., where the reading of vilayet is at least arguable, but also immediately previously to Mersina and Alexandretta. No vilayets of these names exist...and it would be difficult to argue that the word "districts" can have two completely different meanings in the space of a few lines.

(ii) the fact that Horns and Hama were not the capitals of vilayets, but were both within the Vilayet of Syria.

(iii) the fact that the real title of the "Vilayet of Damascus" was "Vilayet of Syria."

(iv) the fact that there is no land lying west of the Vilayet of Aleppo.

...It may be possible to produce arguments designed to explain away some of these difficulties individually (although even this does not apply in the case of (iv)), but it is hardly possible to explain them away collectively. His Majesty's Government need not on this account abjure altogether the counter-argument based on the meaning of the word "district," which have been used publicly for many years, and the more obvious defects in which do not seem to have been noticed as yet by Arab critics."

Committee Set up to Consider Certain Correspondence
16 March 1939

Committee set up in preparation for the White Paper of 1939

While some British governments occasionally stated that the intent of the McMahon Correspondence was not to promise Palestine to Hussein[citation needed ], they have occasionally acknowledged the flaws in the legal terminology of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence that make this position problematic. The weak points of the government's interpretation were acknowledged in a detailed memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1939.

A committee established by the British in 1939 to clarify the arguments said many commitments had been made during and after the war and that all of them would have to be studied together. The Arab representatives submitted a statement from Sir Michael McDonnell to the committee that said whatever meaning McMahon had intended was of no legal consequence because it was his actual statements that constituted the pledge from His Majesty's Government. The Arab representatives also said McMahon had been acting as an intermediary for the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Grey. Speaking in the House of Lords on 27 March 1923, Lord Grey said he had serious doubts about the validity of the Churchill White Paper's interpretation of the pledges he, as Foreign Secretary, had caused to be given to the Sharif Hussein in 1915. The Arab representatives suggested a search for evidence in the files of the Foreign Office might clarify the Secretary of State's intentions.

Bennett, G.H. (1995). British foreign Policy during the Curzon Period, 1919-24. Macmillan Press. p. 243. ISBN 978-1-349-39547-7.

Brecher, Frank W. (1993). "French Policy toward the Levant 1914-18". Middle Eastern Studies. 29 (4): 641-663. doi:10.1080/00263209308700971. JSTOR 4283597.

Charlwood, David J (2014). "The Impact of the Dardanelles Campaign on British Policy Towards the Arabs: How Gallipoli Shaped the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence". British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 42 (2): 241-252. doi:10.1080/13530194.2014.936113. S2CID 159974016.

Dockrill; Steiner (1980). "The Foreign Office at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919". The International History Review. 2 (1): 55-86. doi:10.1080/07075332.1980.9640205.

Kalisman, Hilary Falb (2016). "The Little Persian Agent in Palestine: Husayn Ruhi, British Intelligence, and World War I" (PDF). Institute for Palestine Studies (66): 67.

Goldstein, Erik (1987). "British Peace Aims and the Eastern Question: The Political Intelligence Department and the Eastern Committee, 1918". Middle Eastern Studies. 23 (4): 419-436. doi:10.1080/00263208708700719. JSTOR 4283203.

Hadawi, Sami (1991). Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. Olive Branch Press. ISBN 978-0-940793-81-1.

Jeffries, Joseph Mary Nagle (1939). Palestine: The Reality. Longmans, Green and Company. p. 105.

Khalidi, Rashid (1991). The Origins of Arab Nationalism. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-07435-3.

Lieshout, R.H. (1984). "'Keeping Better Educated Moslems Busy': Sir Reginald Wingate and the Origins of the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence". The Historical Journal. 27 (2): 453-463. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00017891.

Mathew, William M. (2011). "War-Time Contingency and the Balfour Declaration of 1917: An Improbable Regression" (PDF). Journal of Palestine Studies. 40 (2): 26-42. doi:10.1525/jps.2011.xl.2.26. JSTOR 10.1525/jps.2011.xl.2.26.

Mousa, Suleiman (1978). "A Matter of Principle: King Hussein of the Hijaz and the Arabs of Palestine". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 9 (2): 183-194. doi:10.1017/S0020743800000052.

Mousa, Suleiman (1993), "Sharif Husayn and Developments Leading to the Arab Revolt", New Arabian Studies, University of Exeter Press, I: 49-, ISBN 978-0-85989-408-1

Prott, Volker (2016). The Politics of Self-Determination:Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe,1917-1923. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191083549.

Smith, Charles D. (1993). "The Invention of a Tradition The Question of Arab Acceptance of the Zionist Right to Palestine during World War I" (PDF). Journal of Palestine Studies. XXII (2): 48-61. doi:10.1525/jps.1993.22.2.00p0188v.

Wilson, Jeremy (1990). Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence. Atheneum. pp. 1188. ISBN 9780689119347.

Yesilyurt, Nuri (2006). "Turning Point of Turkish Arab Relations:A Case Study on the Hijaz Revolt" (PDF). The Turkish Yearbook. XXXVII: 107-8.

The full text of McMahon-Hussein Correspondence at Wikisource

Arab-British Committee (1939), Report of a Committee set up to consider certain correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon [his majesty's high commissioner in egypt] and the Sharif of Mecca in 1915 and 1916, UNISPAL; pdf version (0.3 MB); Original pdf (7.3MB)

McMahon, Henry; bin Ali, Hussein (1939), Cmd.5957; Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, G.C.M.G., His Majesty's High Commissioner at. Cairo and the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, July, 1915-March, 1916 (with map) (PDF), HMG

Lansing, Robert (1921). "Chapter XIII 'The System of Mandates'". The Peace Negotiations. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Palestine Royal Commission (1937), Cmd. 5479, Palestine Royal Commission Report, also known as the "Peel Report" (PDF), HMSO, For further information see the Commission's Wikipedia article at Peel Commission

Storrs, Sir Ronald (June 1937). The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs. G.P.Putnam's Sons.

Toynbee, Arnold; Friedman, Isaiah (1970). "The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence: Comments and a Reply" (PDF). Journal of Contemporary History. 5 (4): 185-201. doi:10.1177/002200947000500411. JSTOR 259872. S2CID 159516218.

UNSCOP (1947). "United Nations Special Committee on Palestine 1947". Official Records of the Second Session of the General Assembly. United Nations.

Council of Ten (1919), "The Council of Ten: minutes of meetings February 15 to June 17, 1919", Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. IV, United States Government Printing Office

Council of Four (1919), "The Council of Four: minutes of meetings March 20 to May 24, 1919", Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. V, United States Government Printing Office

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The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence is a series of letters that were exchanged during World War I in which the Government of the United Kingdom agreed to recognize Arab independence after the war in exchange for the Sharif of Mecca launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

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The San Remo Conference was an international meeting in Italy between the Prime Ministers of Britain, Italy and France, and Ambassadors of Belgium, Japan and Greece following the conclusion of World War I. The assembly officiated a peace treaty with Turkey and an Anglo-French oil agreement, as well as establishing mandates for Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. Syria and Mesopotamia were recognized as independent states, and Palestine was deemed a homeland for all Jews but ensured equal rights for all peoples living there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Remo_conference
https://www.britannica.com/event/Conference-of-San-Remo
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-san-remo-conference

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The San Remo conference was an international meeting of the post- World War I Allied Supreme Council as an outgrowth of the Paris Peace Conference, held at Villa Devachan in Sanremo, Italy, from 19 to 26 April 1920. The San Remo Resolution passed on 25 April 1920 determined the allocation of Class "A" League of Nations mandates for the administration of three then-undefined Ottoman territories in the Middle East: " Palestine", " Syria" and " Mesopotamia". The boundaries of the three territories were "to be determined [at a later date] by the Principal Allied Powers", leaving the status of outlying areas such as Zor and Transjordan unclear.

The conference was attended by the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I who were represented by the prime ministers of Britain ( David Lloyd George), France ( Alexandre Millerand), Italy ( Francesco Nitti) and by Japan's Ambassador Keishirō Matsui.

Prior events

It was convened following the February Conference of London where the allies met to discuss the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the negotiation of agreements that would become the Treaty of Sèvres.

On 30 September 1918 supporters of the Arab Revolt in Damascus had declared a government loyal to Sharif Hussein, who had been declared "King of the Arabs" by religious leaders and other notables in Mecca. During the meetings of the Council of Four in 1919, British Prime Minister Lloyd George stated that the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence was the basis for the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which proposed an independent Arab state or confederation of states. In July 1919 the parliament of Greater Syria had refused to acknowledge any right claimed by the French Government to any part of Syrian territory.

On 6 January 1920 Hussein's son Prince Faisal initialled an agreement with French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau which acknowledged "the right of the Syrians to unite to govern themselves as an independent nation". A Pan-Syrian Congress, meeting in Damascus, had proclaimed an independent Arab Kingdom of Syria on 8 March 1920. The new state included modern Syria and Jordan, portions of northern Mesopotamia which had been set aside under the Sykes-Picot Agreement for an independent Arab state or confederation of states, and nominally the areas of modern Israel-Palestine and Lebanon, although the latter areas were never under Faisal's control. Faisal was declared the head of state. At the same time Prince Zeid, Faisal's brother, was declared regent of Mesopotamia.

The conference was attended by the allies, the US representative joining the meeting later in an observer capacity

British Empire:

France:

Italy:

Francesco Saverio Nitti, Prime Minister (in the Chair)

Secretaries: Signor Garbasso, Signor Galli, Signor Trombetti, Lieutenant Zanchi.

Japan:

Interpreter:

United States of America (as observers):

Issues addressed

The peace treaty with Turkey, the granting of League of Nation mandates in the Middle East, Germany's obligations under the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, and the Allies' position on Soviet Russia.

Agreements reached

Asserting that not all parts of the Middle East were ready for full independence, mandates were established for the government of three territories: Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine. In each case, one of the Allied Powers was assigned to implement the mandate until the territories in question could "stand alone." Great Britain and France agreed to recognize the provisional independence of Syria and Mesopotamia, while claiming mandates for their administration. Palestine was included within the Ottoman administrative districts of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem together with the Sanjak of Nablus and Sanjak of Akka (Acre).

The decisions of the San Remo conference confirmed the mandate allocations of the Conference of London. The San Remo Resolution adopted on 25 April 1920 incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations were the basic documents upon which the British Mandate for Palestine was constructed. Under the Balfour Declaration, the British government had undertaken to favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. Article 22, para.4 of the Covenant, classified certain populations as "communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire" as having "reached a stage of development where their existence as [an] independent nation can be provisionally recognized" (the League_of_Nations_mandate#Types_of_mandates Class A mandates), and tasked the mandatory with rendering to those territories "administrative advice and assistance until such time as they are able to stand alone" . Britain received the mandate for Palestine and Iraq; France gained control of Syria, including present-day Lebanon. Following the 1918 Clemenceau-Lloyd George Agreement, Britain and France also signed the San Remo Oil Agreement, whereby Britain granted France a 25 percent share of the oil production from Mosul, with the remainder going to Britain and France undertook to deliver oil to the Mediterranean. The draft peace agreement with Turkey signed at the conference became the basis for the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. Germany was called upon to carry out its military and reparation obligations under the Versailles Treaty, and a resolution was adopted in favor of restoring trade with Russia.

Whilst Syria and Mesopotamia were provisionally recognized as states which would be given Mandatory assistance, Palestine would instead be administered by the Mandatory under an obligation to implement the Balfour Declaration and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

San Remo Resolution - 25 April 1920

It was agreed -

(a) To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the procès-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine; this undertaking not to refer to the question of the religious protectorate of France, which had been settled earlier in the previous afternoon by the undertaking given by the French Government that they recognized this protectorate as being at an end.

(b) that the terms of the Mandates Article should be as follows:

The High Contracting Parties agree that Syria and Mesopotamia shall, in accordance with the fourth paragraph of Article 22, Part I (Covenant of the League of Nations), be provisionally recognized as independent States, subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The boundaries of the said States will be determined, and the selection of the Mandatories made, by the Principal Allied Powers.

The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust, by application of the provisions of Article 22, the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers. The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on the 8th [2nd] November, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

La Puissance mandataire s'engage à nommer dans le plus bref delai une Commission speciale pour etudier toute question et toute reclamation concernant les differentes communautes religieuses et en etablir le reglement. Il sera tenu compte dans la composition de cette Commission des interets religieux en jeu. Le President de la Commission sera nommé par le Conseil de la Societé des Nations. [The Mandatory undertakes to appoint in the shortest time a special commission to study any subject and any queries concerning the different religious communities and regulations. The composition of this Commission will reflect the religious interests at stake. The President of the Commission will be appointed by the Council of the League of Nations.]

The terms of the mandates in respect of the above territories will be formulated by the Principal Allied Powers and submitted to the Council of the League of Nations for approval.

Turkey hereby undertakes, in accordance with the provisions of Article [132 of the Treaty of Sèvres] to accept any decisions which may be taken in this connection.

(c) Les mandataires choisis par les principales Puissances alliés sont: la France pour la Syrie, et la Grande Bretagne pour la Mesopotamie, et la Palestine. [The officers chosen by the principal allied Powers are: France for Syria and Great Britain for Mesopotamia and Palestine.]

In reference to the above decision the Supreme Council took note of the following reservation of the Italian Delegation:

La Delegation Italienne en consideration des grands interêts economiques que l'Italie en tant que puissance exclusivement mediterranéenne possède en Asie Mineure, reserve son approbation à la presente resolution, jusqu'au reglement des interêts italiens en Turquie d'Asie. [The Italian delegation, in view of the great economic interests that Italy, as an exclusively Mediterranean power, possesses in Asia Minor, withholds its approval of this resolution until Italian interests in Turkey in Asia shall have been settled.]

Subsequent events

While Transjordan was not mentioned during the discussions, three months later, in July 1920, the French defeat of the Arab Kingdom of Syria state precipitated the British need to know 'what is the "Syria" for which the French received a mandate at San Remo?' and "does it include Transjordania?" - it subsequently decided to pursue a policy of associating Transjordan with the mandated area of Palestine but not to apply the special provisions which were intended to provide a national home for the Jewish people West of the Jordan - and the French proclaimed Greater Lebanon and other component states of its Syrian mandate on 31 August 1920. For France, the San Remo decision meant that most of its claims in Syria were internationally recognized and relations with Faisal were now subject to French military and economic considerations. The ability of Great Britain to limit French action was also significantly diminished. France issued an ultimatum and intervened militarily at the Battle of Maysalun in July 1920, deposing the Arab government and removing King Faisal from Damascus in August 1920. In 1920, Great Britain appointed Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel as high commissioner and established a mandatory government in Palestine that remained in power until 1948.

Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, which contained the general rules to be applied to all Mandated Territories, was written two months before the signing of the Versaille Peace Treaty. It was not known at that time to which territories paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 would relate. The territories which came under the regime set up by this article were three former parts of the Ottoman Empire and seven former overseas possessions of Germany referred to in Part IV, Section I, of the treaty of peace. Those 10 territorial areas were originally administered under 15 mandates.

References

Further reading

Fromkin, David (1989). A Peace to End All Peace. New York: Henry Holt.

Stein, Leonard (1961). The Balfour Declaration. London: Valentine Mitchell.

"Conferees Depart from San Remo", New York Times, 28 April 1920, Wednesday. "CONFEREES DEPART FROM SAN REMO; Millerand Receives Ovation from Italians on His Homeward Journey. RESULTS PLEASE GERMANS; Berlin Liberal Papers Rejoice at Decision to Invite Chancellor to Spa Conference."

External links

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The San Remo conference was an international meeting of the post- World War I Allied Supreme Council as an outgrowth of the Paris Peace Conference, held at Villa Devachan in Sanremo, Italy, from 19 to 26 April 1920.

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The Peel Commission was a group of people, headed by Lord Peel, assigned to investigate the root cause of Palestinian unrest between Jews and Arabs in 1936, which had further intensified following the 1920 mandate. Published in 1937, the Commission's report concluded that the coexistence of Arabs and Jews in Palestine was unfeasible. It argued the San-Remo conference could not have known Jewish immigration would be so great, although the report admitted the influx of the Jewish population did not harm Arabs economically, and that both sides harbored intense nationalism. It advised that the land should be partitioned into a Jewish region, an Arab region and a British supervised territory that contained sites and cities of religious significance to both religions. Britain accepted the proposal but it was promptly rejected by Arabs and Jews were divided in their support or disapproval.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Peel-Commission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-peel-commission

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Peel Commission | Palestine, Zionism & Partition

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Peel Commission, group headed by Lord Robert Peel, appointed in 1936 by the British government to investigate the causes of unrest among Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Discontent in Palestine intensified after 1920, when the Conference of San Remo awarded the British government a mandate to control

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Born to an affluent family, Winston Churchill was a British writer, statesman and, most famously, Prime Minister during and after World War II. An ardent supporter of Zionism, having visited Mandatory Palestine during his service as Secretary of State for the Colonies. He strongly rejected the notion of banning or limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine and opposed anti-Jewish Arab Palestinian appeals and government proposals such as the Aliens Bill, accusing them of being of racist intent. He advocated for Jews to retain their faith, culture and values while also integrating into society as British citizens. He published the 1922 White Paper in which he stated the Jews existence in Palestine was" of right, and not on sufferance.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-135/myth-and-reality-what-did-churchill-really-think-about-the-jews/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winston-Churchill

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The Partition of Palestine Plan was a resolution in the United Nations which aimed to divide Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state with the center and Jerusalem under a Special International Regime. It ended the Mandate and made British forces withdraw from the region. It ensured equal rights for all citizens in the newly created states and an economic union between them. The plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine but, once more, the Arab governments repudiated the proposition. The United Nations Committee adopted the plan with 33 in favor, 13 against and 10 abstaining, a decision that Zionist lobbying and bribing may have influenced. The passing of the resolution demonstrated the recognition of the failure of the Mandate of Palestine and the international desire for a Jewish homeland to be established.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine#:~:text=The%20United%20Nations%20Partition%20Plan,as%20Resolution%20181%20(II).
https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations-Resolution-181
https://www.un.org/unispal/history/

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"Partition of Palestine" redirects here. For the partition of Palestine into Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, see 1949 Armistice Agreements.

UN General Assembly
Resolution 181 (II)

UNSCOP (3 September 1947; see green line) and UN Ad Hoc Committee (25 November 1947) partition plans. The UN Ad Hoc Committee proposal was voted on in the resolution.

Date | 29 November 1947
Meeting no. | 128
Code | A/RES/181(II) (Document)

Voting summary

33 voted for

13 voted against

10 abstained

Result | Recommendation to the United Kingdom, as the mandatory Power for Palestine, and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation, with regard to the future government of Palestine, of the Plan of Partition with Economic Union set out in the resolution[1]

The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United Nations, which recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan as Resolution 181 (II).[2]

The resolution recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem. The Partition Plan, a four-part document attached to the resolution, provided for the termination of the Mandate, the progressive withdrawal of British armed forces and the delineation of boundaries between the two States and Jerusalem. Part I of the Plan stipulated that the Mandate would be terminated as soon as possible and the United Kingdom would withdraw no later than 1 August 1948. The new states would come into existence two months after the withdrawal, but no later than 1 October 1948. The Plan sought to address the conflicting objectives and claims of two competing movements, Palestinian nationalism and Jewish nationalism, or Zionism.[3][4] The Plan also called for Economic Union between the proposed states, and for the protection of religious and minority rights.[5]

The Plan, devised in cooperation with Jewish organizations, was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, despite dissatisfaction over territorial limits set on the proposed Jewish State.[6][7] Arab leaders and governments rejected it[8] and indicated an unwillingness to accept any form of territorial division,[9] arguing that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN Charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny.[7][10]

Immediately after adoption of the Resolution by the General Assembly, a civil war broke out[11] and the plan was not implemented.[12]

Background

The British administration was formalized by the League of Nations under the Palestine Mandate in 1923, as part of the Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. The Mandate reaffirmed the 1917 British commitment to the Balfour Declaration, for the establishment in Palestine of a "National Home" for the Jewish people, with the prerogative to carry it out.[13][14] A British census of 1918 estimated 700,000 Arabs and 56,000 Jews.[13]

In 1937, following a six-month-long Arab General Strike and armed insurrection which aimed to pursue national independence and secure the country from foreign control, the British established the Peel Commission.[15] The Commission concluded that the Mandate had become unworkable, and recommended Partition into an Arab state linked to Transjordan; a small Jewish state; and a mandatory zone. To address problems arising from the presence of national minorities in each area, it suggested a land and population transfer[16] involving the transfer of some 225,000 Arabs living in the envisaged Jewish state and 1,250 Jews living in a future Arab state, a measure deemed compulsory "in the last resort".[16][17][18] To address any economic problems, the Plan proposed avoiding interfering with Jewish immigration, since any interference would be liable to produce an "economic crisis", most of Palestine's wealth coming from the Jewish community. To solve the predicted annual budget deficit of the Arab State and reduction in public services due to loss of tax from the Jewish state, it was proposed that the Jewish state pay an annual subsidy to the Arab state and take on half of the latter's deficit.[16][17][19] The Palestinian Arab leadership rejected partition as unacceptable, given the inequality in the proposed population exchange and the transfer of one-third of Palestine, including most of its best agricultural land, to recent immigrants.[18] The Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, persuaded the Zionist Congress to lend provisional approval to the Peel recommendations as a basis for further negotiations.[20][21][22][23] In a letter to his son in October 1937, Ben-Gurion explained that partition would be a first step to "possession of the land as a whole".[24][25][26] The same sentiment, that acceptance of partition was a temporary measure beyond which the Palestine would be "redeemed . . in its entirety,"[27] was recorded by Ben-Gurion on other occasions, such as at a meeting of the Jewish Agency executive in June 1938,[28] as well as by Chaim Weizmann.[26][29]

The British Woodhead Commission was set up to examine the practicality of partition. The Peel plan was rejected and two possible alternatives were considered. In 1938 the British government issued a policy statement declaring that "the political, administrative and financial difficulties involved in the proposal to create independent Arab and Jewish States inside Palestine are so great that this solution of the problem is impracticable". Representatives of Arabs and Jews were invited to London for the St. James Conference, which proved unsuccessful.[30]

With World War II looming, British policies were influenced by a desire to win Arab world support and could ill afford to engage with another Arab uprising.[31] The MacDonald White Paper of May 1939 declared that it was "not part of [the British government's] policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State", sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine and restricted Arab land sales to Jews. However, the League of Nations commission held that the White Paper was in conflict with the terms of the Mandate as put forth in the past. The outbreak of the Second World War suspended any further deliberations.[32][33] The Jewish Agency hoped to persuade the British to restore Jewish immigration rights, and cooperated with the British in the war against Fascism. Aliyah Bet was organized to spirit Jews out of Nazi controlled Europe, despite the British prohibitions. The White Paper also led to the formation of Lehi, a small Jewish organization which opposed the British.

After World War II, in August 1945 President Truman asked for the admission of 100,000 Holocaust survivors into Palestine[34] but the British maintained limits on Jewish immigration in line with the 1939 White Paper. The Jewish community rejected the restriction on immigration and organized an armed resistance. These actions and United States pressure to end the anti-immigration policy led to the establishment of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. In April 1946, the Committee reached a unanimous decision for the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe into Palestine, rescission of the white paper restrictions of land sale to Jews, that the country be neither Arab nor Jewish, and the extension of U.N. Trusteeship. The U.S. endorsed the Commission's findings concerning Jewish immigration and land purchase restrictions,[35] while the British made their agreement to implementation conditional on U.S. assistance in case of another Arab revolt.[35] In effect, the British continued to carry out their White Paper policy.[36] The recommendations triggered violent demonstrations in the Arab states, and calls for a Jihad and an annihilation of all European Jews in Palestine.[37]

United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP)

Further information: UNSCOP

Map showing Jewish-owned land as of 31 December 1944, including land owned in full, shared in undivided land, and State Lands under concession. This constituted 6% of the total land area or 20% of cultivatable land,[38] of which more than half was held by the JNF and PICA[39]

Under the terms of League of Nations A-class mandates each such mandatory territory was to become a sovereign state on termination of its mandate. By the end of World War II, this occurred with all such mandates except Palestine, however the League of Nations itself lapsed in 1946 leading to a legal quandary.[40][41] In February 1947, Britain announced its intent to terminate the Mandate for Palestine, referring the matter of the future of Palestine to the United Nations.[42][43] The hope was that a binational state would ensue, which meant an unpartitioned Palestine. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin's policy was premised on the idea that an Arab majority would carry the day, which met difficulties with Harry Truman who, sensitive to Zionist electoral pressures in the United States, pressed for a British-Zionist compromise.[44] In May, the UN formed the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to prepare a report on recommendations for Palestine. The Jewish Agency pressed for Jewish representation and the exclusion of both Britain and Arab countries on the Committee, sought visits to camps where Holocaust survivors were interned in Europe as part of UNSCOP's brief, and in May won representation on the Political Committee.[45] The Arab states, convinced statehood had been subverted, and that the transition of authority from the League of Nations to the UN was questionable in law, wished the issues to be brought before an International Court, and refused to collaborate with UNSCOP, which had extended an invitation for liaison also to the Arab Higher Committee.[41][46] In August, after three months of conducting hearings and a general survey of the situation in Palestine, a majority report of the committee recommended that the region be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, which should retain an economic union. An international regime was envisioned for Jerusalem.

The Arab delegations at the UN had sought to keep separate the issue of Palestine from the issue of Jewish refugees in Europe. During their visit, UNSCOP members were shocked by the extent of Lehi and Irgun violence, then at its apogee, and by the elaborate military presence attested by endemic barb-wire, searchlights, and armoured-car patrols. Committee members also witnessed the SS Exodus affair in Haifa and could hardly have remained unaffected by it. On concluding their mission, they dispatched a subcommittee to investigate Jewish refugee camps in Europe.[47][48] The incident is mentioned in the report in relation to Jewish distrust and resentment concerning the British enforcement of the 1939 White Paper.[49]

UNSCOP report

On 3 September 1947, the Committee reported to the General Assembly. CHAPTER V: PROPOSED RECOMMENDATIONS (I), Section A of the Report contained eleven proposed recommendations (I – XI) approved unanimously. Section B contained one proposed recommendation approved by a substantial majority dealing with the Jewish problem in general (XI). CHAPTER VI: PROPOSED RECOMMENDATIONS (II) contained a Plan of Partition with Economic Union to which seven members of the Committee (Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden and Uruguay), expressed themselves in favour. CHAPTER VII RECOMMENDATIONS (III) contained a comprehensive proposal that was voted upon and supported by three members (India, Iran, and Yugoslavia) for a Federal State of Palestine. Australia abstained. In CHAPTER VIII a number of members of the Committee expressed certain reservations and observations.[50]

Proposed partition

Land ownership

Population distribution

Two maps reviewed by UN Subcommittee 2 in considering partition

The report of the majority of the Committee (CHAPTER VI) envisaged the division of Palestine into three parts: an Arab State, a Jewish State and the City of Jerusalem, linked by extraterritorial crossroads. The proposed Arab State would include the central and part of western Galilee, with the town of Acre, the hill country of Samaria and Judea, an enclave at Jaffa, and the southern coast stretching from north of Isdud (now Ashdod) and encompassing what is now the Gaza Strip, with a section of desert along the Egyptian border. The proposed Jewish State would include the fertile Eastern Galilee, the Coastal Plain, stretching from Haifa to Rehovot and most of the Negev desert,[51] including the southern outpost of Umm Rashrash (now Eilat). The Jerusalem Corpus Separatum included Bethlehem and the surrounding areas.

The primary objectives of the majority of the Committee were political division and economic unity between the two groups.[5] The Plan tried its best to accommodate as many Jews as possible into the Jewish State. In many specific cases,[citation needed] this meant including areas of Arab majority (but with a significant Jewish minority) in the Jewish state. Thus the Jewish State would have an overall large Arab minority. Areas that were sparsely populated (like the Negev desert), were also included in the Jewish state to create room for immigration. According to the plan, Jews and Arabs living in the Jewish state would become citizens of the Jewish state and Jews and Arabs living in the Arab state would become citizens of the Arab state.

By virtue of Chapter 3, Palestinian citizens residing in Palestine outside the City of Jerusalem, as well as Arabs and Jews who, not holding Palestinian citizenship, resided in Palestine outside the City of Jerusalem would, upon the recognition of independence, become citizens of the State in which they were resident and enjoy full civil and political rights.

The Plan would have had the following demographics (data based on 1945).

Territory | Arab and other population | % Arab and other | Jewish population | % Jewish | Total population
Arab State | 725,000 | 99% | 10,000 | 1% | 735,000
Jewish State | 407,000 | 45% | 498,000 | 55% | 905,000
International | 105,000 | 51% | 100,000 | 49% | 205,000
Total | 1,237,000 | 67% | 608,000 | 33% | 1,845,000
Data from the Report of UNSCOP: 3 September 1947: CHAPTER 4: A COMMENTARY ON PARTITION

The land allocated to the Arab State in the final plan included about 43% of Mandatory Palestine[52][53][54] and consisted of all of the highlands, except for Jerusalem, plus one-third of the coastline. The highlands contain the major aquifers of Palestine, which supplied water to the coastal cities of central Palestine, including Tel Aviv.[citation needed] The Jewish State allocated to the Jews, who constituted a third of the population and owned about 7% of the land, was to receive 56% of Mandatory Palestine, a slightly larger area to accommodate the increasing numbers of Jews who would immigrate there.[53][54][55] The Jewish State included three fertile lowland plains – the Sharon on the coast, the Jezreel Valley and the upper Jordan Valley. The bulk of the proposed Jewish State's territory, however, consisted of the Negev Desert,[51] which was not suitable for agriculture, nor for urban development at that time. The Jewish State would also be given sole access to the Sea of Galilee, crucial for its water supply, and the economically important Red Sea.

The committee voted for the plan, 25 to 13 (with 17 abstentions) on 25 November 1947 and the General Assembly was called back into a special session to vote on the proposal. Various sources noted that this was one vote short of the two-thirds majority required in the General Assembly.[55]

Ad hoc Committee

On 23 September 1947 the General Assembly established the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question to consider the UNSCOP report. Representatives of the Arab Higher Committee and Jewish Agency were invited and attended.[56]

During the committee's deliberations, the British government endorsed the report's recommendations concerning the end of the mandate, independence, and Jewish immigration.[citation needed] However, the British did "not feel able to implement" any agreement unless it was acceptable to both the Arabs and the Jews, and asked that the General Assembly provide an alternative implementing authority if that proved to be the case.

The Arab Higher Committee rejected both the majority and minority recommendations within the UNSCOP report. They "concluded from a survey of Palestine history that Zionist claims to that country had no legal or moral basis". The Arab Higher Committee argued that only an Arab State in the whole of Palestine would be consistent with the UN Charter.

The Jewish Agency expressed support for most of the UNSCOP recommendations, but emphasized the "intense urge" of the overwhelming majority of Jewish displaced persons to proceed to Palestine. The Jewish Agency criticized the proposed boundaries, especially in the Western Galilee and Western Jerusalem (outside of the old city), arguing that these should be included in the Jewish state. However, they agreed to accept the plan if "it would make possible the immediate re-establishment of the Jewish State with sovereign control of its own immigration."

Arab states requested representation on the UN ad hoc subcommittees of October 1947, but were excluded from Subcommittee One, which had been delegated the specific task of studying and, if thought necessary, modifying the boundaries of the proposed partition.[57]

Sub-Committee 2

The Sub-Committee 2, set up on 23 October 1947 to draw up a detailed plan based on proposals of Arab states presented its report within a few weeks.[58]

Based on a reproduced British report, the Sub-Committee 2 criticised the UNSCOP report for using inaccurate population figures, especially concerning the Bedouin population. The British report, dated 1 November 1947, used the results of a new census in Beersheba in 1946 with additional use of aerial photographs, and an estimate of the population in other districts. It found that the size of the Bedouin population was greatly understated in former enumerations. In Beersheba, 3,389 Bedouin houses and 8,722 tents were counted. The total Bedouin population was estimated at approximately 127,000; only 22,000 of them normally resident in the Arab state under the UNSCOP majority plan. The British report stated:

"the term Beersheba Bedouin has a meaning more definite than one would expect in the case of a nomad population. These tribes, wherever they are found in Palestine, will always describe themselves as Beersheba tribes. Their attachment to the area arises from their land rights there and their historic association with it."[59]

In respect of the UNSCOP report, the Sub-Committee concluded that the earlier population "estimates must, however, be corrected in the light of the information furnished to the Sub-Committee by the representative of the United Kingdom regarding the Bedouin population. According to the statement, 22,000 Bedouins may be taken as normally residing in the areas allocated to the Arab State under the UNSCOP's majority plan, and the balance of 105,000 as resident in the proposed Jewish State. It will thus be seen that the proposed Jewish State will contain a total population of 1,008,800, consisting of 509,780 Arabs and 499,020 Jews. In other words, at the outset, the Arabs will have a majority in the proposed Jewish State."[60]

The Sub-Committee 2 recommended to put the question of the Partition Plan before the International Court of Justice (Resolution No. I [61]). In respect of the Jewish refugees due to World War II, the Sub-Committee recommended to request the countries of which the refugees belonged to take them back as much as possible (Resolution No. II[62]). The Sub-Committee proposed to establish a unitary state (Resolution No. III[63]).

Boundary changes

The ad hoc committee made a number of boundary changes to the UNSCOP recommendations before they were voted on by the General Assembly.

The predominantly Arab city of Jaffa, previously located within the Jewish state, was constituted as an enclave of the Arab State. The boundary of the Arab state was modified to include Beersheba and a strip of the Negev desert along the Egyptian border,[51] while a section of the Dead Sea shore and other additions were made to the Jewish State. This move increased the Jewish percentage in the Jewish state from 55% to 61%.[citation needed]

The proposed boundaries would also have placed 54 Arab villages on the opposite side of the border from their farm land.[citation needed] In response, the United Nations Palestine Commission was empowered to modify the boundaries "in such a way that village areas as a rule will not be divided by state boundaries unless pressing reasons make that necessary". These modifications never occurred.

The vote

Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, document A/516, dated 25 November 1947. This was the document voted on by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947, and became known as the "United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine".[64]

Passage of the resolution required a two-thirds majority of the valid votes, not counting abstaining and absent members, of the UN's then 56 member states. On 26 November, after filibustering by the Zionist delegation, the vote was postponed by three days.[65][66] According to multiple sources, had the vote been held on the original set date, it would have received a majority, but less than the required two-thirds.[66][67][68] Various compromise proposals and variations on a single state, including federations and cantonal systems were debated (including those previously rejected in committee).[69][70] The delay was used by supporters of Zionism in New York to put extra pressure on states not supporting the resolution.[65]

Reports of pressure for and against the Plan

Reports of pressure for the Plan

Zionists launched an intense White House lobby to have the UNSCOP plan endorsed, and the effects were not trivial.[71] The Democratic Party, a large part of whose contributions came from Jews,[72] informed Truman that failure to live up to promises to support the Jews in Palestine would constitute a danger to the party. The defection of Jewish votes in congressional elections in 1946 had contributed to electoral losses. Truman was, according to Roger Cohen, embittered by feelings of being a hostage to the lobby and its 'unwarranted interference', which he blamed for the contemporary impasse. When a formal American declaration in favour of partition was given on 11 October, a public relations authority declared to the Zionist Emergency Council in a closed meeting: 'under no circumstances should any of us believe or think we had won because of the devotion of the American Government to our cause. We had won because of the sheer pressure of political logistics that was applied by the Jewish leadership in the United States'. State Department advice critical of the controversial UNSCOP recommendation to give the overwhelmingly Arab town of Jaffa, and the Negev, to the Jews was overturned by an urgent and secret late meeting organized for Chaim Weizman with Truman, which immediately countermanded the recommendation. The United States initially refrained from pressuring smaller states to vote either way, but Robert A. Lovett reported that America's U.N. delegation's case suffered impediments from high pressure by Jewish groups, and that indications existed that bribes and threats were being used, even of American sanctions against Liberia and Nicaragua.[73] When the UNSCOP plan failed to achieve the necessary majority on 25 November, the lobby 'moved into high gear' and induced the President to overrule the State Department, and let wavering governments know that the U.S. strongly desired partition.[74]

Proponents of the Plan reportedly put pressure on nations to vote yes to the Partition Plan. A telegram signed by 26 US Senators with influence on foreign aid bills was sent to wavering countries, seeking their support for the partition plan.[75] The US Senate was considering a large aid package at the time, including 60 million dollars to China.[76][77] Many nations reported pressure directed specifically at them:

United States (Vote: For): President Truman later noted, "The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me."[78]

India (Vote: Against): Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke with anger and contempt for the way the UN vote had been lined up. He said the Zionists had tried to bribe India with millions and at the same time his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian ambassador to the UN, had received daily warnings that her life was in danger unless "she voted right".[79] Pandit occasionally hinted that something might change in favour of the Zionists. But another Indian delegate, Kavallam Pannikar, said that India would vote for the Arab side, because of their large Muslim minority, although they knew that the Jews had a case.[80]

Liberia (Vote: For): Liberia's Ambassador to the United States complained that the US delegation threatened aid cuts to several countries.[81] Harvey S. Firestone, Jr., President of Firestone Natural Rubber Company, with major holdings in the country, also pressured the Liberian government[67][75]

Philippines (Vote: For): In the days before the vote, Philippines representative General Carlos P. Romulo stated "We hold that the issue is primarily moral. The issue is whether the United Nations should accept responsibility for the enforcement of a policy which is clearly repugnant to the valid nationalist aspirations of the people of Palestine. The Philippines Government holds that the United Nations ought not to accept such responsibility." After a phone call from Washington, the representative was recalled and the Philippines' vote changed.[75]

Haiti (Vote: For): The promise of a five million dollar loan may or may not have secured Haiti's vote for partition.[82]

France (Vote: For): Shortly before the vote, France's delegate to the United Nations was visited by Bernard Baruch, a long-term Jewish supporter of the Democratic Party who, during the recent world war, had been an economic adviser to President Roosevelt, and had latterly been appointed by President Truman as United States ambassador to the newly created UN Atomic Energy Commission. He was, privately, a supporter of the Irgun and its front organization, the American League for a Free Palestine. Baruch implied that a French failure to support the resolution might block planned American aid to France, which was badly needed for reconstruction, French currency reserves being exhausted and its balance of payments heavily in deficit. Previously, to avoid antagonising its Arab colonies, France had not publicly supported the resolution. After considering the danger of American aid being withheld, France finally voted in favour of it. So, too, did France's neighbours, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.[65]

Venezuela (Vote: For): Carlos Eduardo Stolk, Chairman of the Delegation of Venezuela, voted in favor of Resolution 181 .[83]

Cuba (Vote: Against): The Cuban delegation stated they would vote against partition "in spite of pressure being brought to bear against us" because they could not be party to coercing the majority in Palestine.[84]

Siam (Absent): The credentials of the Siamese delegations were cancelled after Siam voted against partition in committee on 25 November.[66][85]

There is also some evidence that Sam Zemurray put pressure on several "banana republics" to change their votes.[86]

Reports of pressure against the Plan

According to Benny Morris, Wasif Kamal, an Arab Higher Committee official, tried to bribe a delegate to the United Nations, perhaps a Russian.[87]

Concerning the welfare of Jews in Arab countries, a number of direct threats were made:

Jamal Husseini promised, "The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East".[88] Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, said: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in".

Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Said told British diplomats that if the United Nations solution was not "satisfactory", "severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries".[89]

Concerning the welfare of Jews in Arab countries, a number of predictions were made:

'"On 24 November the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal Pasha, said that "the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state."[90] At the 29th Meeting of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine on 24 November 1947, Dr Heykal Pasha, the Egyptian delegate, said, "if the U.N decide to amputate a part of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state, no force on earth could prevent blood from flowing there… Moreover… no force on earth can confine it to the borders of Palestine itself… Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world… to place in certain and serious danger a million Jews." Mahmud Bey Fawzi (Egypt) said: "… imposed partition was sure to result in bloodshed in Palestine and in the rest of the Arab world".[91]

In a speech at the General Assembly Hall at Flushing Meadow, New York, on Friday, 28 November 1947, Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Fadel Jamall, included the following statement: "Partition imposed against the will of the majority of the people will jeopardize peace and harmony in the Middle East. Not only the uprising of the Arabs of Palestine is to be expected, but the masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world will greatly deteriorate. There are more Jews in the Arab world outside of Palestine than there are in Palestine. In Iraq alone, we have about one hundred and fifty thousand Jews who share with Moslems and Christians all the advantages of political and economic rights. Harmony prevails among Moslems, Christians and Jews. But any injustice imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine will disturb the harmony among Jews and non-Jews in Iraq; it will breed inter-religious prejudice and hatred."[92]

The Arab states warned the Western Powers that endorsement of the partition plan might be met by either or both an oil embargo and realignment of the Arab states with the Soviet Bloc.[93]

Final vote

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions and 1 absent, in favour of the modified Partition Plan. The final vote, consolidated here by modern United Nations Regional Groups rather than contemporary groupings, was as follows:[94]

How UN members voted on Palestine's partition in 1947

In favour

Abstained

Against

Absent

In favour (33 countries, 72% of total votes)

Latin American and Caribbean (13 countries):

Western European and Others (8 countries):

Eastern European (5 countries):

African (2 countries):

Asia-Pacific (3 countries)

North America (2 countries)

Against (13 countries, 28% of total votes)

Asia-Pacific (9 countries, primarily Middle East sub-area):

Western European and Others (2 countries):

African (1 country):

Egypt

Latin American and Caribbean (1 country):

Cuba

Abstentions (10 countries)

Latin American and Caribbean (6 countries):

Asia-Pacific (1 country):

China

African (1 country):

Ethiopia

Western European and Others (1 country):

United Kingdom

Eastern European (1 country):

Yugoslavia

Absent (1 country)

Asia-Pacific (1 country):

Thailand

Votes by modern region

If analysed by the modern composition of what later came to be known as the United Nations Regional Groups showed relatively aligned voting styles in the final vote. This, however, does not reflect the regional grouping at the time, as a major reshuffle of regional grouping occurred in 1966. All Western nations voted for the resolution, with the exception of the United Kingdom (the Mandate holder), Greece and Turkey. The Soviet bloc also voted for partition, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which was to be expelled from Cominform the following year. The majority of Latin American nations following Brazilian leadership[citation needed], voted for partition, with a sizeable minority abstaining. Asian countries (primarily Middle Eastern countries) voted against partition, with the exception of the Philippines.[95]

Regional Group | Members in UNGA181 vote | UNGA181 For | UNGA181 Against | UNGA181 Abstained
African | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1
Asia-Pacific | 11 | 1 | 9 | 1
Eastern European | 6 | 5 | 0 | 1
LatAm and Caribb. | 20 | 13 | 1 | 6
Western Eur. & Others | 15 | 12 | 2 | 1
Total UN members | 56 | 33 | 13 | 10

Reactions

Jews

Most Jews in Palestine and around the world reacted to the UN resolution with satisfaction, but some did not. Jews gathered in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to celebrate the U.N. resolution during the whole night after the vote. Great bonfires blazed at Jewish collective farms in the north. Many big cafes in Tel Aviv served free champagne.[6][96] Mainstream Zionist leaders emphasized the "heavy responsibility" of building a modern Jewish State, and committed to working towards a peaceful coexistence with the region's other inhabitants:[97][98] Jewish groups in the United States hailed the action by the United Nations. Most welcomed the Palestine Plan but some felt it did not settle the problem.[99]

Some Revisionist Zionists rejected the partition plan as a renunciation of legitimately Jewish national territory.[99] The Irgun Tsvai Leumi, led by Menachem Begin, and the Lehi (also known as the Stern Group or Gang), the two Revisionist-affiliated underground organisations which had been fighting against both the British and Arabs, stated their opposition. Begin warned that the partition would not bring peace because the Arabs would also attack the small state and that "in the war ahead we'll have to stand on our own, it will be a war on our existence and future."[100] He also stated that "the bisection of our homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized."[101] Begin was sure that the creation of a Jewish state would make territorial expansion possible, "after the shedding of much blood."[102]

Some Post-Zionist scholars endorse Simha Flapan's view that it is a myth that Zionists accepted the partition as a compromise by which the Jewish community abandoned ambitions for the whole of Palestine and recognized the rights of the Arab Palestinians to their own state. Rather, Flapan argued, acceptance was only a tactical move that aimed to thwart the creation of an Arab Palestinian state and, concomitantly, expand the territory that had been assigned by the UN to the Jewish state.[103][104][105][106][107] Baruch Kimmerling has said that Zionists "officially accepted the partition plan, but invested all their efforts towards improving its terms and maximally expanding their boundaries while reducing the number of Arabs in them."[108]

Addressing the Central Committee of the Histadrut (the Eretz Israel Workers Party) days after the UN vote to partition Palestine, Ben-Gurion expressed his apprehension, stating:

the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment will be about one million, including almost 40% non-Jews. Such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State. This [demographic] fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority... There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%.[109]

Ben-Gurion said "I know of no greater achievement by the Jewish people ... in its long history since it became a people."[110]

Arabs

Arab leaders and governments rejected the plan of partition in the resolution and indicated that they would reject any other plan of partition.[8] The Arab states' delegations declared immediately after the vote for partition that they would not be bound by the decision, and walked out accompanied by the Indian and Pakistani delegates.[111]

They argued that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny.[7][10] The Arab delegations to the UN issued a joint statement the day after that vote that stated: "the vote in regard to the Partition of Palestine has been given under great pressure and duress, and that this makes it doubly invalid."[112]

On 16 February 1948, the UN Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council that: "Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."[113]

Arab states

A few weeks after UNSCOP released its report, Azzam Pasha, the General Secretary of the Arab League, told an Egyptian newspaper "Personally I hope the Jews do not force us into this war because it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades."[114] (This statement from October 1947 has often been incorrectly reported as having been made much later on 15 May 1948.)[115] Azzam told Alec Kirkbride "We will sweep them [the Jews] into the sea." Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli told his people: "We shall eradicate Zionism."[116]

King Farouk of Egypt told the American ambassador to Egypt that in the long run the Arabs would soundly defeat the Jews and drive them out of Palestine.[117]

While Azzam Pasha repeated his threats of forceful prevention of partition, the first important Arab voice to support partition was the influential Egyptian daily Al Mokattam [d]: "We stand for partition because we believe that it is the best final solution for the problem of Palestine... rejection of partition... will lead to further complications and will give the Zionists another space of time to complete their plans of defense and attack... a delay of one more year which would not benefit the Arabs but would benefit the Jews, especially after the British evacuation."[118]

On 20 May 1948, Azzam told reporters "We are fighting for an Arab Palestine. Whatever the outcome the Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as Jewish as they like. In areas where they predominate they will have complete autonomy."[119]

The Arab League said that some of the Jews would have to be expelled from a Palestinian Arab state.[120]

Abdullah appointed Ibrahim Hashem Pasha as Military Governor of the Arab areas occupied by troops of the Transjordan Army. He was a former prime minister of Transjordan who supported partition of Palestine as proposed by the Peel Commission and the United Nations.[121]

Arabs in Palestine

Haj Amin al-Husseini said in March 1948 to an interviewer from the Jaffa daily Al Sarih that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but "would continue fighting until the Zionists were Annihilated."[116]

Zionists attributed Arab rejection of the plan to mere intransigence. Palestinian Arabs opposed the very idea of partition but reiterated that this partition plan was unfair: the majority of the land (56%) would go to a Jewish state, when Jews at that stage legally owned only 6–7% of it and remained a minority of the population (33% in 1946).[122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130] There were also disproportionate allocations under the plan and the area under Jewish control contained 45% of the Palestinian population. The proposed Arab state was only given 45% of the land, much of which was unfit for agriculture. Jaffa, though geographically separated, was to be part of the Arab state.[130] However, most of the proposed Jewish state was the Negev desert.[51][50] The plan allocated to the Jewish State most of the Negev desert that was sparsely populated and unsuitable for agriculture but also a "vital land bridge protecting British interests from the Suez Canal to Iraq"[131][132]

Few Palestinian Arabs joined the Arab Liberation Army because they suspected that the other Arab States did not plan on an independent Palestinian state. According to Ian Bickerton, for that reason many of them favored partition and indicated a willingness to live alongside a Jewish state.[133] He also mentions that the Nashashibi family backed King Abdullah and union with Transjordan.[134]

The Arab Higher Committee demanded that in a Palestinian Arab state, the majority of the Jews should not be citizens (those who had not lived in Palestine before the British Mandate).[88]

According to Musa Alami, the mufti would agree to partition if he were promised that he would rule the future Arab state.[135]

The Arab Higher Committee responded to the partition resolution and declared a three-day general strike in Palestine to begin the following day.[136]

British government

When Bevin received the partition proposal, he promptly ordered for it not to be imposed on the Arabs.[137][138] The plan was vigorously debated in the British parliament.

In a British cabinet meeting at 4 December 1947, it was decided that the Mandate would end at midnight 14 May 1948, the complete withdrawal by 1 August 1948, and Britain would not enforce the UN partition plan.[139] On 11 December 1947, Britain announced the Mandate would end at midnight 14 May 1948 and its sole task would be to complete withdrawal by 1 August 1948.[140] During the period in which the British withdrawal was completed, Britain refused to share the administration of Palestine with a proposed UN transition regime, to allow the UN Palestine Commission to establish a presence in Palestine earlier than a fortnight before the end of the Mandate, to allow the creation of official Jewish and Arab militias or to assist in smoothly handing over territory or authority to any successor.[141][142]

United States government

The United States declined to recognize the All-Palestine government in Gaza by explaining that it had accepted the UN Mediator's proposal. The Mediator had recommended that Palestine, as defined in the original Mandate including Transjordan, might form a union.[143] Bernadotte's diary said the Mufti had lost credibility on account of his unrealistic predictions regarding the defeat of the Jewish militias. Bernadotte noted "It would seem as though in existing circumstances most of the Palestinian Arabs would be quite content to be incorporated in Transjordan."[144]

Subsequent events

The Partition Plan with Economic Union was not realized in the days following 29 November 1947 resolution as envisaged by the General Assembly.[12] It was followed by outbreaks of violence in Mandatory Palestine between Palestinian Jews and Arabs known as the 1947–48 Civil War.[11] After Alan Cunningham, the High Commissioner of Palestine, left Jerusalem, on the morning of 14 May the British army left the city as well. The British left a power vacuum in Jerusalem and made no measures to establish the international regime in Jerusalem.[145] At midnight on 14 May 1948, the British Mandate expired,[146] and Britain disengaged its forces. Earlier in the evening, the Jewish People's Council had gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum (today known as Independence Hall), and approved a proclamation, declaring "the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel".[7][147] The 1948 Arab–Israeli War began with the invasion of, or intervention in, Palestine by the Arab States on 15 May 1948.[148]

Resolution 181 as a legal basis for Palestinian statehood

In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization published the Palestinian Declaration of Independence relying on Resolution 181, arguing that the resolution continues to provide international legitimacy for the right of the Palestinian people to sovereignty and national independence.[149] A number of scholars have written in support of this view.[150][151][152]

A General Assembly request for an advisory opinion, Resolution ES-10/14 (2004), specifically cited resolution 181(II) as a "relevant resolution", and asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) what are the legal consequences of the relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. Judge Abdul Koroma explained the majority opinion: "The Court has also held that the right of self-determination as an established and recognized right under international law applies to the territory and to the Palestinian people. Accordingly, the exercise of such right entitles the Palestinian people to a State of their own as originally envisaged in resolution 181 (II) and subsequently confirmed."[153] In response, Prof. Paul De Waart said that the Court put the legality of the 1922 League of Nations Palestine Mandate and the 1947 UN Plan of Partition beyond doubt once and for all.[154]

Retrospect

In 2011, Mahmoud Abbas stated that the 1947 Arab rejection of United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a mistake he hoped to rectify.[155]

See also

Faisal–Weizmann Agreement

History of the State of Palestine

Israeli Declaration of Independence

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Lausanne Conference of 1949

Minority Treaties

Sykes–Picot Agreement

Two-state solution

United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights

United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine

Footnotes

1. ^ "A/RES/181(II) of 29 November 1947". United Nations. 1947. Retrieved 8 December 2012.

2. ^ "A/RES/181(II) of 29 November 1947". United Nations General Assembly.

3. ^ William B. Quandt, Paul Jabber, Ann Mosely Lesch The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism, University of California Press, 1973 p.7.

4. ^ Part II. – Boundaries recommended in UNGA Res 181 Molinaro, Enrico The Holy Places of Jerusalem in Middle East Peace Agreements Page 78

5. ^ Jump up to: a b "United Nations Special Committee on Palestine: Report to the General Assembly: Volume 1". 3 September 1947. p. 51. A/364(SUPP). Retrieved 20 April 2017. The primary objectives sought in the foregoing scheme were, in short, political division and economic unity: to confer upon each group, Arab and Jew, in its own territory, the power to make its own laws, while preserving both, throughout Palestine, a single integrated economy, admittedly essential to the well-being of each, and the same territorial freedom of movement to individuals as is enjoyed today.

6. ^ Jump up to: a b Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 75. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 24 July 2013. " p. 75 The night of 29–30 November passed in the Yishuv’s settlements in noisy public rejoicing. Most had sat glued to their radio sets broadcasting live from Flushing Meadow. A collective cry of joy went up when the two-thirds mark was achieved: a state had been sanctioned by the international community.  ; p. 396 The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. The Zionist movement, except for its fringes, accepted the proposal".

7. ^ Jump up to: a b c d The Question of Palestine and the UN

8. ^ Jump up to: a b Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. pp. 66, 67, 72. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 24 July 2013. p.66, at 1946 "The League demanded independence for Palestine as a "unitary" state, with an Arab majority and minority rights for the Jews." ; p.67, at 1947 "The League’s Political Committee met in Sofar, Lebanon, on 16–19 September, and urged the Palestine Arabs to fight partition, which it called "aggression", "without mercy". The League promised them, in line with Bludan, assistance "in manpower, money and equipment" should the United Nations endorse partition." ; p. 72, at December 1947 "The League vowed, in very general language, "to try to stymie the partition plan and prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine

9. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 73. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 24 July 2013. "p73 All paid lip service to Arab unity and the Palestine Arab cause, and all opposed partition... p. 396 The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. … The Palestinian Arabs, along with the rest of the Arab world, said a flat "no"… The Arabs refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. And, consistently with that "no", the Palestinian Arabs, in November–December 1947, and the Arab states in May 1948, launched hostilities to scupper the resolution’s implementation ; p. 409 The mindset characterized both the public and the ruling elites. All vilified the Yishuv and opposed the existence of a Jewish state on "their" (sacred Islamic) soil, and all sought its extirpation, albeit with varying degrees of bloody-mindedness. Shouts of "Idbah al Yahud" (slaughter the Jews) characterized equally street demonstrations in Jaffa, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad both before and during the war and were, in essence, echoed, usually in tamer language, by most Arab leaders. ”

10. ^ Jump up to: a b Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine, Olive Branch Press, (1989)1991 p.76.

11. ^ Jump up to: a b Article "History of Palestine", Encyclopædia Britannica (2002 edition), article section written by Walid Ahmed Khalidi and Ian J. Bickerton.

12. ^ Jump up to: a b Itzhak Galnoor (1995). The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement. SUNY Press. pp. 289–. ISBN 978-0-7914-2193-2. Retrieved 3 July 2012.

13. ^ Jump up to: a b Mansfield, Peter (1992), The Arabs, pp. 172–175, ISBN 0-14-014768-3

14. ^ The Palestine Mandate "the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917"

15. ^ Rashid Khalidi (1 September 2006). The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon Press. pp. 181–. ISBN 978-0-8070-0315-2.

16. ^ Jump up to: a b c Palestine Royal Commission report, 1937, 389–391

17. ^ Jump up to: a b Benny Morris. Righteous Victims. p. 139.

18. ^ Jump up to: a b Sumantra Bose (30 June 2009). Contested lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka. Harvard University Press. p. 223. ISBN 978-0-674-02856-2.

19. ^ Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine 1929–1948

20. ^ William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization, 2006, p.391

21. ^ Benny Morris, One state, two states: resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, 2009, p. 66

22. ^ Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 48; p. 11 "while the Zionist movement, after much agonising, accepted the principle of partition and the proposals as a basis for negotiation"; p. 49 "In the end, after bitter debate, the Congress equivocally approved –by a vote of 299 to 160 – the Peel recommendations as a basis for further negotiation."

23. ^ Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency's Partition Plan in the Mandate Era, Yosef Kats, Chapter 4, 1998 Edition, Routledge, ISBN 0-7146-4846-9

24. ^ Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos, written 5 October 1937, Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew, and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut

25. ^ Morris, Benny (2011), Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1998, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, p. 138, ISBN 9780307788054 Quote: "No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. [A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning ….. Our possession is important not only for itself … through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state …. will serve as a very potent lever in our historical effort to redeem the whole country"

26. ^ Jump up to: a b Finkelstein, Norman (2005), Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-semitism and the Abuse of History, University of California Press, p. 280, ISBN 9780520245983

27. ^ Jerome Slater, 'The Significance of Israeli Historical revisionism' in Russell A. Stone, Walter P. Zenner(eds.) Critical Essays on Israeli Social Issues and Scholarship, Vol.3 SUNY Press, 1994 pp.179–199 p.182.

28. ^ Quote from a meeting of the Jewish Agency executive in June 1938: "[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state, we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel." in
Masalha, Nur (1992), Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948, Inst for Palestine Studies, p. 107, ISBN 9780887282355; and
Segev, Tom (2000), One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, Henry Holt and Company, p. 403, ISBN 9780805048483

29. ^ From a letter from Chaim Weizmann to Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, while the Peel Commission was convening in 1937: "We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time ….. this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years." Masalha, Nur (1992), Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948, Inst for Palestine Studies, p. 62, ISBN 9780887282355

30. ^ Palestine. Statement by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty. November 1938. Cmd. 5893. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 3 November 2013. Retrieved 11 November 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

31. ^ Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, (1961) New Viewpoints, New York 1973 p.716

32. ^ Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry – Appendix IV Palestine: Historical Background

33. ^ Benny Morris (25 May 2011). "chp. 4". Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1998 (Hebrew ed.). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-307-78805-4. Capping it all, the Permanent Mandates Commission of the Council of the League of Nations rejected the White Paper as inconsistent with the terms of the Mandate.

34. ^ William roger louis, 1985, p.386

35. ^ Jump up to: a b Morris, 2008, p.34

36. ^ Gurock, Jeffrey S. American Jewish History American Jewish Historical Society, page 243

37. ^ Morris, 2008, p.35

38. ^ Michael R. Fischbach (13 August 2013). Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries. Columbia University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-231-51781-2. By 1948, after several decades of Jewish immigration, the Jewish population of Palestine had risen to about one third of the total, and Jews and Jewish companies owned 20 percent of all cultivable land in the country.

39. ^ "Land Registration in Palestine before 1948 (Nakba): Table 2 showing Holdings of Large Jewish Lands Owners as of December 31st, 1945, British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I – Page 245. Chapter VIII: Land: Section 3. – Palestine Remembered". palestineremembered.com.

40. ^ Nele Matz, 'Civilization and the Mandate System under the League of Nations,' in Armin Von Bogdandy, Rüdiger Wolfrum, Christiane E. Philipp (eds.) Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law . Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 2005 pp.47–96, p.87

'those mandated territories that had been classified as A mandates, with the exception of Palestine, were finally granted full independence in addition to the already established structures for provisional self-governance,'

41. ^ Jump up to: a b Baylis Thomas, How Israel was Won: A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Lexington Books 1999 p.47.

42. ^ David D. Newsom, The Imperial Mantle: The United States, Decolonization, and the Third World. Indiana University Press, p.77.

43. ^ "The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem Part II: 1947-1977 - Study (30 June 1979)". unispal.un.org.

44. ^ William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization. Palgrave/Macmillan 2006, pp.404,429–437.

45. ^ Daniel Mandel, H V Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist. Routledge 2004 pp.73,81. The liaison officers with Aubrey Eban and David Horowitz.(p.83)

46. ^ Mandel, p.88.

47. ^ Morris, 2008, p. 43

48. ^ Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World. Random House, 2007 p.671.

49. ^ "United Nations Special Committee on Palestine: Report to the General Assembly: Volume 1". 3 September 1947. Chapter 2, para. 119, p. 28. A/364(SUPP). Retrieved 20 April 2017. There can be no doubt that the enforcement of the White Paper of 1939, subject to the permitted entry since December 1945 of 1,500 Jewish immigrants monthly, has created throughout the Jewish community a deep-seated distrust and resentment against the mandatory Power. This feeling is most sharply expressed in regard to the Administration's attempts to prevent the landing of illegal immigrants. During its stay in Palestine, the Committee heard from certain of its members an eyewitness account of the incidents relative to the bringing into the port of Haifa, under British naval escort, of the illegal immigrant ship, Exodus 1947.

50. ^ Jump up to: a b "United Nations Special Committee on Palestine: Report to the General Assembly: Volume 1". 3 September 1947. A/364(SUPP). Retrieved 20 April 2017.

51. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 47. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013. The Jews were to get 62 percent of Palestine (most of it desert), consisting of the Negev

52. ^ UN Partition Plan Archived 7 August 2013 at the Wayback Machine at Merip.

53. ^ Jump up to: a b Colbert C. Held, John Thomas Cummings, https://books.google.com/books?id=vcxVDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT287 Middle East Patterns: Places, People, and Politics, 6th ed. Hachette UK, 2013 p.255: It called for three entities: a Jewish state with 56 percent of Mandate Palestine; an Arab state, 43 percent.'

54. ^ Jump up to: a b Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman, Khalil Shikaki, Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East, PalgraveMacmillan 2013 p.50: 'a year before the UN adoption of the Resolution, the Arab population of Palestine comprised 68 percent of the total and owned about 85 percent of the land; the Jewish population comprised about one-third of the total and owned about 7 percent of the land.

55. ^ Jump up to: a b Palestine Division Wins in Committee 25 to 13, 17 Abstain, NY Times, 26 November 1947

56. ^ "1949.I.13 of 31 December 1948". unispal.un.org.

57. ^ Baylis Thomas, How Israel was Won: A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Lexington Books 1999 p.57 n.6.

58. ^ Report of Sub-Committee 2 (doc.nr. A/AC.14/32). 10 November 1947; on [1]
For the Bedouin issue, see par. 61–73 on pp. 39–46 and Appendix 3: Note on the Bedouin population of Palestine presented by the representative of the United Kingdom d.d. 1 November 1947 on pp. 65–66

59. ^ Sub-Committee 2 of the Ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question of the 2nd UN General Assembly 1947 (10 November 1947). "Report: Appendix III: Note dated 1 November 1947 on the Bedouin Population of Palestine Presented by the Representative of The United Kingdom". mlwerke.de. Retrieved 1 March 2016.

60. ^ Sub-Committee 2 of the Ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question of the 2nd UN General Assembly 1947 (10 November 1947). "Report of Sub-Committee 2: Chapter III: Proposals for the constitution and future government of Palestine – Sec.4 Objections to partition on grounds of distribution of population". mlwerke.de. Retrieved 1 March 2016.

61. ^ Sub-Committee 2 of the Ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question of the 2nd UN General Assembly 1947 (10 November 1947). "Report of Sub-Committee 2: Chapter 4: Conclusions, I: Draft Resolution Referring Certain Legal Questions to The International Court of Justice". mlwerke.de. Retrieved 1 March 2016.

62. ^ Sub-Committee 2 of the Ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question of the 2nd UN General Assembly 1947 (10 November 1947). "Report of Sub-Committee 2: Chapter 4: Conclusions, II: Draft Resolution on Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons". mlwerke.de. Retrieved 1 March 2016.

63. ^ Sub-Committee 2 of the Ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question of the 2nd UN General Assembly 1947 (10 November 1947). "Report of Sub-Committee 2: Chapter 4: Conclusions, III: Draft Resolution on the Constitution and Future Government of Palestine". mlwerke.de. Retrieved 1 March 2016.

64. ^ A/PV.128 Minutes of the 128th meeting, page 1424, "We shall now proceed to vote by roll-call on the report of the Ad Hoc Committee (document A/516). A vote was taken by roll-call... The report was adopted by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions."

65. ^ Jump up to: a b c Barr, James (2012). A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East. London: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-84739-457-6.

66. ^ Jump up to: a b c Assembly Delays Vote on Palestine, NY Times, 27 November 1947

67. ^ Jump up to: a b "PALESTINE". millbanksystems.com.

68. ^ "Servant of God". google.co.uk. 1983.

69. ^ U.N. Puts off Vote on Palestine a Day: Compromise is Aim, NY Times, 29 November 1947

70. ^ Unitary Palestine Fails in Committee, NY Times, 25 November 1947

71. ^ John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,(2007) Penguin Books 2008 p.371, n.8. Truman also remarked:'In all of my political experience I don't ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election'.(p.142).

72. ^ Michael Joseph Cohen, Truman and Israel, University of California Press 1990 p.162.

73. ^ Michael Joseph Cohen, Truman and Israel, University of California Press 1990 161–163

74. ^ Michael Joseph Cohen (1990) Truman and Israel University of California Press. pp.163–154: "Greece, the Philippines, and Haiti – three countries utterly dependent on Washington – suddenly came out one after another against its declared policy ...Abba Hillel Silver reported to the American Zionist Emergency Council: 'During this time, we marshalled our forces, Jewish and non-Jewish opinion, leaders and masses alike, converged on the Government and induced the President to assert the authority of his Administration to overcome the negative attitude of the State Department which persisted to the end, and persists today. The result was that our Government made its intense desire for the adoption of the partition plan nown [sic] to the wavering governments."'

75. ^ Jump up to: a b c Bennis, Phyllis (2003). Before and After. ISBN 9781566564625.

76. ^ Chinese Put Needs at Several Billion, New York Times, 30 November 2015

77. ^ House, Debating Aid, Veers to Attacks on U.S. Policies, NY Times, 5 December 1947

78. ^ Lenczowski, George (1990). American Presidents and the Middle East. Duke University Press. p. 157. ISBN 0-8223-0972-6., p. 28, cite, Harry S. Truman, Memoirs 2, p. 158.

79. ^ Heptulla, Najma (1991). Indo-West Asian relations: the Nehru era. Allied Publishers. p. 158. ISBN 81-7023-340-2.

80. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 56. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013. Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, who headed the delegation, occasionally threw out hints that something might change. But Shertok was brought down to earth by historian Kavalam Panikkar, another member of the Indian delegation: "It is idle for you to try to convince us that the Jews have a case. . . . We know it. . . . But the point is simply this: For us to vote for the Jews means to vote against the Moslems. This is a conflict in which Islam is involved. . . . We have 13 million [sic] Moslems in our midst. . . . Therefore, we cannot do it.

81. ^ Quigley, John B. (1990). Palestine and Israel: a challenge to justice. Duke University Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-8223-1023-6.

82. ^ Ahron Bregman; Jihan El-Tahri (1998). The fifty years war: Israel and the Arabs. Penguin Books. p. 25. ISBN 9780140268270. Retrieved 29 November 2011.

83. ^ Benton Harbor News-Palladium, Friday, 25 October 1946, p. 6.

84. ^ Palestine Vote Delayed Times of London, 29 November 1947

85. ^ Political Issues Delay Asia Talks, NY Times, 27 November 1947

86. ^ Rich Cohen. The Fish That Ate the Whale. New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012.

87. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 61. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013. The Arabs had failed to understand the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on the international community—and, in any event, appear to have used the selfsame methods, but with poor results. Wasif Kamal, an AHC official, for example, offered one delegate—perhaps the Russian—a "huge, huge sum of money to vote for the Arabs" (the Russian declined, saying, "You want me to hang myself?”). But the Arabs' main tactic, amounting to blackmail, was the promise or threat of war should the assembly endorse partition. As early as mid-August 1947, Fawzi al-Qawuqji—soon to be named the head of the Arab League’s volunteer army in Palestine, the Arab Liberation Army (ALA)—threatened that, should the vote go the wrong way, "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish". It would be a "holy war", the Arabs suggested, which might even evolve into "World War III". Cables to this effect poured in from Damascus, Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad during the Ad Hoc Committee deliberations, becoming "more lurid", according to Zionist officials, as the General Assembly vote drew near. The Arab states generally made no bones about their intention to support the Palestinians with "men, money and arms", and sometimes hinted at an eventual invasion by their armies. They also threatened the Western Powers, their traditional allies, with an oil embargo and/or abandonment and realignment with the Soviet Bloc

88. ^ Jump up to: a b Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. pp. 50, 66. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 24 July 2013. p. 50,"The Arab reaction was just as predictable: "The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East", promised Jamal Husseini.; at 1947 "Haj Amin al-Husseini went one better: he denounced also the minority report, which, in his view, legitimized the Jewish foothold in Palestine, a "partition in disguise", as he put it." ; p.66, at 1946 "The AHC ... insisted that the proportion of Jews to Arabs in the unitary state should stand at one to six, meaning that only Jews who lived in Palestine before the British Mandate be eligible for citizenship

89. ^ Morris 2008, p. 412

90. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 70. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013.

91. ^ 29th Meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine: 24 November 1947: Retrieved 31 December 2013 Archived 31 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine

92. ^ U.N General Assembly, A/PV.126, 28 November 1947, discussion on the Palestinian question, archived from the original on 16 October 2013, retrieved 15 October 2013

93. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 61. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013. The Arabs had failed to understand the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on the international community—and, in any event, appear to have used the selfsame methods, but with poor results. Wasif Kamal, an AHC official, for example, offered one delegate—perhaps the Russian—a "huge, huge sum of money to vote for the Arabs" (the Russian declined, saying, "You want me to hang myself?”). But the Arabs' main tactic, amounting to blackmail, was the promise or threat of war should the assembly endorse partition. As early as mid-August 1947, Fawzi al-Qawuqji—soon to be named the head of the Arab League’s volunteer army in Palestine, the Arab Liberation Army (ALA)—threatened that, should the vote go the wrong way, "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish". It would be a "holy war", the Arabs suggested, which might even evolve into "World War III". Cables to this effect poured in from Damascus, Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad during the Ad Hoc Committee deliberations, becoming "more lurid", according to Zionist officials, as the General Assembly vote drew near. The Arab states generally made no bones about their intention to support the Palestinians with "men, money and arms", and sometimes hinted at an eventual invasion by their armies. They also threatened the Western Powers, their traditional allies, with an oil embargo and/or abandonment and realignment with the Soviet Bloc

94. ^ "1947–1977". The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917–1988. United Nations. 1990.

95. ^ Friedman, Saul S. (10 January 2014). A History of the Middle East. ISBN 9780786451340.

96. ^ "U.N.O. PASSES PALESTINE PARTITION PLAN". Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (NSW : 1876 – 1954). NSW: National Library of Australia. 1 December 1947. p. 1. Retrieved 24 October 2014. Semi-hysterical Jewish crowds in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were still celebrating the U.N.O. partition vote at dawn to-day. Great bonfires at Jewish collective farms in the north were still blazing. Many big cafes in Tel Aviv served free champagne. A brewery threw open its doors to the crowd. Jews jeered some British troops who were patrolling Tel Aviv streets but others handed them wine. In Jerusalem crowds mobbed armoured cars and drove through the streets on them. The Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem (Dr Isaac Herzog) said: "After the darkness of 2000 years, the dawn of redemption has broken. The decision marks at epoch not only in Jewish history, but in world history." The Jewish terrorist organisation, Irgun Zvai Leumi, announced from its headquarters that it would "cease to exist in the new Jewish state.

97. ^ "Palestine Jewry Joyous at News; Ben-Gurion Voices Attitude of Grateful Responsibility – Jerusalem Arabs Silent". The New York Times. 30 November 1947. p. 58. Retrieved 9 January 2012.

98. ^ "Vote On Palestine Cheered by Crowd". The New York Times. 30 November 1947. Retrieved 9 January 2012.

99. ^ Jump up to: a b "Jewish Units Here Hail Action by U.N." The New York Times. 30 November 1947. Retrieved 9 January 2012.

100. ^ Begin, Menachem (1978) The Revolt. p. 412.

101. ^ Begin, Menachem (1977) In The Underground: Writings and Documents. Vol 4, p. 70.

102. ^ Aviezer Golan and Shlomo Nakdimon (1978) Begin p. 172, cited in Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988. p. 32

103. ^ Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, Pantheon, 1988, ISBN 0-679-72098-7, pages 8–9

104. ^ Sean F. McMahon, The Discourse of Palestinian-Israeli Relations, Routledge 2010 p. 40.

105. ^ P. J. I. M. De Waart, Dynamics of Self-determination in Palestine, BRILL 1994 p. 138

106. ^ Mehran Kamrava, The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War, 2nd edition University of California Press 2011 p. 83

107. ^ Shourideh C. Molavi, Stateless Citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab Citizens of Israel, BRILL 2014 p. 126

108. ^ "Benny Morris's Shocking Interview". History News Network.

109. ^ Jamal K Kanj (2010) Children of Catastrophe

110. ^ Morris 2008, p. 65

111. ^ "Palestine Partition Approved by U.N.", Times of India, 1 December 1947

112. ^ Arab Leaders Call Palestine Vote "Invalid", NY Times, 30 November 1947

113. ^ United Nations Palestine Commission Archived 3 October 2010 at the Wayback Machine First Special Report to the Security Council

114. ^ Akhbar el-Yom, 11 October 2011, p9. The literal English translation is somewhat ambiguous, but the overall meaning is that the coming Arab defeat of the Jews will be remembered in the same way as the past Arab defeats of the Mongols and Crusaders are remembered.

115. ^ Tom Segev (21 October 2011). "The makings of history / The blind misleading the blind". Haaretz.

116. ^ Jump up to: a b Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 187. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013. p. 187 ." Azzam told Kirkbride:... we will sweep them[the Jews] into the sea". Al Quwwatli [ the Syrian president] told his people:"…we shall eradicate Zionism"; p. 409 "Al Husseini…In March 1948 he told an interviewer in a Jaffa daily Al Sarih that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but "would continue fighting until the Zionist were Annihilated"

117. ^ Morris 2008, p. 410

118. ^ "The Egyptian daily "Al Mokattam" supported the partition". The Jerusalem Post. 30 November 1947. the influential daily "Al Mokattam"... supporting partition... this is the first time that any important Arab voice in the middle east has pronounced publicly for partition and Arab circles in Cairo are reported to be amazed at the article... We stand for partition because we believe that it is the best final solution for the problem of Palestine... rejection of partition... will lead to further complications and will give the Zionists another space of time to complete their plans of defense and attack... a delay of one more year which would not benefit the Arabs but would benefit the Jews, especially after the British evacuation.

119. ^ Palestine Post, 21 May 1948, p. 3.

120. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 45. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 24 July 2013. "On 23 July, at Sofar, the Arab representatives completed their testimony before UNSCOP. Faranjieh, speaking for the Arab League, said that Jews "illegally" in Palestine would be expelled and that the future of many of those "legally" in the country but without Palestine citizenship would need to be resolved "by the future Arab government ”

121. ^ Dinstein, Yoram; Domb, Fania (11 November 2011). The Progression of International Law: Four Decades of the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights – An Anniversary Volume. p. 431. ISBN 978-9004219113.

122. ^ Yakobson, Alexander; Rubinstein, Amnon (2009). Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-state and Human Rights – Alexander Yakobson, Amnon Rubinstein. ISBN 9780415464413. Retrieved 20 May 2015.

123. ^ John Quigley, The Six Day War and Israeli Self-Defense: Questioning the Legal Basis for Preventive War, Cambridge University Press, 2012 p.7:'This proposed partition was seen as unfair by the Palestine Arabs, both because they sought a government for the entirety of Palestine and because they found the particular territorial division unfair for allocating the bulk of the territory to the projected Jewish state, even though Jews were less numerous than Arabs.'

124. ^ Fred J. Khoury, 'United States Peace Efforts', in Malcolm H. Kerr (ed.) Elusive Peace in the Middle East, SUNY Press 1975 pp.21–22:'The Arabs attacked the partition resolution as being unfair and contrary to the UN Charter. They contended that the UN had disregarded the rights of the Arab majority in Palestine by giving the Palestine Jews, then representing one-third of the total population, more territory and resources than those allotted to the Arab state and by relegating well over 400,000 Arabs to minority status in the Jewish State.'

125. ^ Sean F. McMahon. The Discourse of Palestinian-Israeli Relations: Persistent Analytics and Practices Routledge, 2009. p.90

126. ^ Youssef M. Choueiri. A Companion to the History of the Middle East. Blackwell 2005 p.281

127. ^ Ahmad H. Sa'di, Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, Columbia University Press, 2013 pp291-292. 'The Palestinians' position remained unchanged from the beginning of the British mandate to its end: they opposed partition and supported the establishment of a political system that would reflect the wishes of the majority.'

128. ^ William B. Quandt, Paul Jabber, Ann Mosely Lesch. The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism Rand Corporation/University of California Press, 1973 pp.46–7.

129. ^ John B. Quigley. The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective. Duke University Press, 2005. p.36.

130. ^ Jump up to: a b Wolffe, John (2005). Religion in History: Conflict, Conversion and Coexistence. Manchester University Press. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-7190-7107-2.

131. ^ Anita Shapira, Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p.239.

132. ^ Itzhak Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement, State University of New York Press, 1994, p.195.

133. ^ Bickerton, Ian J., Klausner, Carla L. (2001) A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 4th edition, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-090303-5, page 88.

134. ^ Bickerton & Klausner (2001), page 103

135. ^ Hillel Cohen (3 January 2008). Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948. University of California Press. p. 236. ISBN 978-0-520-93398-9. ... Musa al-alami surmised that the mufti would agree to partition if he were promised that he would rule the Arab state

136. ^ Morris, 2008, p. 76, 77

137. ^ Morris 2008, p. 73

138. ^ Louis 2006, p. 419

139. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press. p. 74. ISBN 9780300126969.

140. ^ Roza El-Eini (2006). Mandated landscape: British imperial rule in Palestine, 1929–1948. History. Routledge. p. 367. ISBN 978-0-7146-5426-3. They accordingly announced on 11 December 1947, that the Mandate would end on 15 May 1948, from which date the sole task ... would be to ... withdrawal by 1 August 1948.

141. ^ Arthur Koestler (March 2007). Promise and Fulfilment – Palestine 1917–1949. READ BOOKS. pp. 163–168. ISBN 978-1-4067-4723-2. Retrieved 13 October 2011.

142. ^ Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 73. ISBN 9780300126969. Retrieved 13 July 2013. Bevin regarded the UNSCOP majority report of 1 September 1947 as unjust and immoral. He promptly decided that Britain would not attempt to im- pose it on the Arabs; indeed, he expected them to resist its implementation… The British cabinet...: in the meeting on 4 December 1947... It decided, in a sop to the Arabs, to refrain from aiding the enforcement of the UN resolution, meaning the partition of Palestine. And in an important secret corollary... it agreed that Britain would do all in its power to delay until early May the arrival in Palestine of the UN (Implementation) Commission. The Foreign Office immediately informed the commission "that it would be intolerable for the Commission to begin to exercise its authority while the [Mandate] Palestine Government was still administratively responsible for Palestine"... This... nullified any possibility of an orderly implementation of the partition resolution.

143. ^ See memo from Acting Secretary Lovett to Certain Diplomatic Offices, Foreign relations of the United States, 1949. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, Volume VI, pages 1447–48

144. ^ See Folke Bernadotte, "To Jerusalem", Hodder and Stoughton, 1951, pages 112–13

145. ^ Yoav Gelber, Independence Versus Nakba; Kinneret–Zmora-Bitan–Dvir Publishing, 2004, ISBN 965-517-190-6, p.104

146. ^ "Web – Termination of British mandate in Plaestine 14/15 May". nation.com.

147. ^ Declaration of Establishment of State of Israel: 14 May 1948

148. ^ Cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the Secretary-General of the United Nations 15 May 1948: Retrieved 4 May 2012

149. ^ See "Request for the admission of the State of Palestine to Unesco as a Member State" (PDF). UNESCO. 12 May 1989.

150. ^ See The Palestine Declaration to the International Criminal Court: The Statehood Issue "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 July 2011. Retrieved 19 July 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) and Silverburg, Sanford R. (2002), "Palestine and International Law: Essays on Politics and Economics", Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, ISBN 0-7864-1191-0, pages 37–54

151. ^ See Chapter 5 "Israel (1948–1949) and Palestine (1998–1999): Two Studies in the Creation of States", in Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, and Stefan Talmon, eds., The Reality of International Law: Essays in Honour of Ian Brownlie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999)

152. ^ Sourcebook on public international law, by Tim Hillier, Routledge, 1998, ISBN 1-85941-050-2, page 217; and Prof. Vera Gowlland-Debbas, "Collective Responses to the Unilateral Declarations of Independence of Southern Rhodesia and Palestine, An Application of the Legitimizing Function of the United Nations", The British Yearbook of International Law, 1990, pp. 135–153

153. ^ "See paragraph 5, Separate opinion of Judge Koroma" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 June 2011.

154. ^ See De Waart, Paul J.I.M., "International Court of Justice Firmly Walled in the Law of Power in the Israeli–Palestinian Peace Process", Leiden Journal of International Law, 18 (2005), pp. 467–487

155. ^ "Abbas should change his locks before next wave of Palestinian prisoners freed". Haaretz. 6 December 2011.

References

Benny Morris (1 October 2008). 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-14524-3. Retrieved 14 July 2013.

William Roger Louis (2006). Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84511-347-6. Retrieved 16 August 2013.

William Roger Louis (1985). The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-822960-5.

Bibliography

Bregman, Ahron (2002). Israel's Wars: A History Since 1947. London: Routledge.

Arieh L. Avneri (1984). The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878–1948. Transaction Publishers.

Fischbach, Michael R. (2003). Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Columbia University Press.

Gelber, Yoav (1997). Jewish-Transjordanian Relations: Alliance of Bars Sinister. London: Routledge.

Khalaf, Issa (1991). Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration,. University at Albany, SUNY.

Louis, Wm. Roger (1986). The British Empire in the Middle East,: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism. Oxford University Press.

"Palestine". Encyclopædia Britannica Online School Edition, 15 May 2006.

Sicker, Martin (1999). Reshaping Palestine: From Muhammad Ali to the British Mandate, 1831–1922. Praeger/Greenwood.

External links

UN Resolution 181 (II) A: Future government of Palestine. On www.un.org. Retrieved 28 July 2018.

Text of the Resolution at undocs.org

Full text of report of Sub-Committee 2 with all appendices, tables and maps

JFK in Support of Partition, 1948 Shapell Manuscript Foundation

Legal Status of West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem[permanent dead link]

Maps of Palestine Archived 27 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine

Ivan Rand and the UNSCOP Papers

Official Map prepared by UNSCOP

29 November Quiz

Firsthand testimonies from the men and women who helped found the State of Israel on YouTube

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United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine - Wikipedia

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“Partition of Palestine” redirects here. For the partition of Palestine into Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, see 1949 Armistice Agreements.

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Reparations Agreement with Germany: 1952

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Reparations Agreement with Germany: 1952

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Prior to the signing of the arrangement, important Jewish and Israeli leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, advocated for the payment of reparations to Jews to compensate for the loss of property and life during the holocaust. In 1951, the German Chancellor condemned the atrocities committed during the war and stated he sought to financially and morally indemnify the Jews for what transpired. Despite opposition and protests that came from both the right and left, West Germany agreed to pay 3.45 billion marks over the course of the following 14 years. 450 million marks were payed to the World Jewish Congress and the rest of the payments were to the State of Israel which used the money to improve infrastructure and formulate a thriving economy. The reparations greatly helped Israel as it grew from birth, funding major components of Israeli society ranging from it's electrical system to German drilling equipment to developing agriculture and water supply. The Reparations also intitated the positive relationship between Germany and Israel that still exists today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_Agreement_between_Israel_and_the_Federal_Republic_of_Germany#:~:text=Despite%20the%20protests%2C%20the%20agreement,who%20had%20no%20surviving%20family.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/west-german-reparations-agreement
https://www.aicgs.org/2019/11/the-september-1952-reparations-agreement-between-west-germany-and-israel-the-beginning-of-a-remarkable-friendship/

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The Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Luxemburger Abkommen "Luxembourg Agreement" or Wiedergutmachungsabkommen "Wiedergutmachung Agreement", Hebrew: הסכם השילומים Heskem HaShillumim "Reparations Agreement") was signed on September 10, 1952, and entered in force on March 27, 1953. According to the Agreement, West Germany was to pay Israel for the costs of "resettling so great a number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees" after the war, and to compensate individual Jews, via the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for losses in Jewish livelihood and property resulting from Nazi persecution.

In 1952, the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion argued that the reparation demand was based on recovering as much Jewish property as possible " so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well". His other argument was that the reparations were needed to finance the absorption and rehabilitation of the Holocaust survivors in Israel.

According to the website of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, "In response to calls from Jewish organizations and the State of Israel, in September 1951 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany addressed his Parliament: "... unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity ... The Federal Government are prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State of Israel ... to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering."

One month after Adenauer's speech, Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and president of the World Jewish Congress, convened a meeting in New York City of 23 major Jewish national and international organizations. The participants made clear that these talks were to be limited to discussion of material claims, and thus the organization that emerged from the meeting was called the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany-the Claims Conference. The Board of Directors of the new conference consisted of groups that took part in its formation, with each member agency designating two members to the board.

"The Claims Conference had the task of negotiating with the German government a program of indemnification for the material damages to Jewish individuals and to the Jewish people caused by Germany through the Holocaust."

Israel's dilemma

Israel's relations with Germany, already extremely delicate on account of the Holocaust, were complicated further by Cold War politics and the division of Germany into mutually hostile eastern and western states; the former a communist satellite aligned with the USSR, the latter a liberal-democracy oriented towards the west. Due to a variety of factors, it quickly became apparent that West Germany would be the state most willing and able to deal with Israeli claims related to the Holocaust. To complicate matters further, Israel also had to be sensitive to the strategic interests of the United States which, following the breakdown in the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, had come to believe the establishment of a prosperous West German economy was essential to forge a reliable and productive alliance with the postwar democratic government seated in Bonn.

Israel was intent on taking in what remained of European Jewry. Israel was also recovering from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and was facing a deep economic crisis which led to a policy of austerity. Unemployment was very high (especially in the ma'abarot camps) and foreign currency reserves were scarce. David Ben-Gurion and his Mapai party took a practical approach and argued that accepting the agreement was the only way to sustain the nation's economy. "There are two approaches", he told the Mapai central committee. "One is the ghetto Jew's approach and the other is of an independent people. I don't want to run after a German and spit in his face. I don't want to run after anybody. I want to sit here and build here. I'm not going to go to America to take part in a vigil against Adenauer."

Negotiations were held between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

In 1951, Israeli authorities made a claim to the four powers occupying post-war Germany regarding compensation and reimbursement, based on the fact that Israel had absorbed and resettled 500,000 Holocaust survivors. They calculated that since absorption had cost 3,000 dollars per person (equivalent to $31,300 in 2021), they were owed 1.5 billion dollars (equivalent to $15.7 billion in 2021) by Germany. They also figured that six billion dollars worth of Jewish property had been pillaged by the Nazis, but stressed that the Germans could never make up for what they did with any type of material recompense. Negotiations leading to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany began in March 1952 and were conducted between representatives of the government of the Federal Republic, the government of the State of Israel, and representatives of the World Jewish Congress, headed by Dr. Goldmann. These discussions led to a bitter controversy in Israel, as the coalition government, headed by David Ben-Gurion, claimed that reparations were necessary to restore what was stolen from the victims of the Holocaust.

The agreement was signed by Adenauer and Moshe Sharett on September 10, 1952, at Luxembourg City Hall. The German Parliament (Bundestag) passed the agreement on March 18, 1953, by a large majority, 239 for and 35 against, though only 106 of the ruling CDU/CSU's 214 MPs supported the motion, which relied on the unanimous support of the opposition Social Democrats to get through. The Arab League strongly opposed the motion and threatened a boycott of the Federal Republic of Germany after it passed the restitution agreement, but the plan was abandoned due to economic considerations, namely that the Arab League would suffer far more from losing trade with West Germany than West Germany would from the Arab League.

Public debate was among the fiercest in Israeli history. Opposition to the agreement came from both the right ( Herut and the General Zionists) and the left ( Mapam) of the political spectrum; both sides argued that accepting reparation payments were the equivalent of forgiving the Nazis for their crimes.

On 5 November 1951, Yaakov Hazan of Mapam said in the Knesset: " Nazism is rearing its ugly head again in Germany, and our so-called Western 'friends' are nurturing that Nazism; they are resurrecting Nazi Germany ... Our army, the Israel Defense Forces, will be in the same camp as the Nazi army, and the Nazis will begin infiltrating here not as our most terrible enemies, but rather as our allies ..."

At a session of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in September 1952, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, then a Mapam MK, stated, "I am not assuming that there are people who believe that Germany will pay a total of three billion marks, over a period of 12 years, and that this is no empty promise ... The Israeli government will obtain nothing but a piece of paper referring to three billion marks. And all this is only intended to mislead the public and claim the government has attained ...".

Anticipating the debate in the Knesset on 7 January 1952, all adjacent roads were blocked. Roadblocks and wire fences were set up around the building and the IDF was prepared to suppress an insurrection. The rally, gathered by the agreement's opponents drew 15,000 people and the riots that ensued would be the most significant attempt in Israeli history to overturn a democratically made Knesset decision. The decision was ultimately accepted by 61-50 margin, but not before the advancing riots interrupted the plenum debate for the first time in Knesset history.

Following a passionate and dramatic speech, Menachem Begin led the protesters towards the Knesset. Begin referred to the Altalena Affair in 1948, when the IDF shelled a ship carrying arms for the Irgun by order of Ben Gurion, saying, "When you fired at me with cannon, I gave the order: 'Don't [return fire]!' Today I will give the order, 'Do!'" The demonstration turned violent as protesters began throwing stones at the building's windows while the police used force to disperse them. After five hours of rioting, the police took control of the situation using hoses and tear gas. Hundreds were arrested; about 200 protesters and 140 policemen were injured.

The decision did not end the protests. In October 1952 Dov Shilansky was arrested near the Foreign Ministry building, carrying a pack of dynamite. In his trial, he was accused of being a member of an underground organization against the Reparations Agreement and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. Several parcel bombs were sent to Adenauer and other targets, one of which killed a policeman who handled it.

Despite the protests, the agreement was signed in September 1952, and West Germany paid Israel a sum of 3 billion marks over the next fourteen years; 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress. The payments were made to the State of Israel as the heir to those victims who had no surviving family. The money was invested in the country's infrastructure and played an important role in establishing the economy of the new state. Israel at the time faced a deep economic crisis and was heavily dependent on donations by foreign Jews, and the reparations, along with these donations, would help turn Israel into an economically viable country.

The reparations were paid directly to the headquarters of the Israeli purchase delegation in Cologne, which received the money from the German government in annual installments. The delegation then bought goods and shipped them to Israel, receiving its orders from a Tel Aviv-based company that had been set up to decide what to purchase and for whom. A great part of the reparations money went into purchasing equipment and raw materials for companies that were owned by the government, the Jewish Agency, and the Histadrut labor union. Notably, much of that money went into purchasing equipment for about 1,300 industrial plants; two-thirds of this money was given to 36 factories, most of them owned by the Histadrut. At the same time, hundreds of other plants, mostly privately owned ones, received minimal assistance with reparations money. From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded around one-third of investment in Israel's electrical system, helping it to triple its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in Israel Railways, which obtained German-made rolling stock, tracks, and signaling equipment with reparations money. The reparations were also used to purchase German-made machinery for developing the water supply, oil drilling, mining equipment for use in extracting copper from the Timna Valley mines, and heavy equipment for agriculture and construction such as combines, tractors, and trucks. About 30% of the reparations money went into buying fuel, while 17% was used to purchase ships for the Israeli merchant fleet; some fifty ships including two passenger liners were purchased, and by 1961, these vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant marine. Funds from the reparations were also used for port development; the Port of Haifa was able to obtain new cranes, including a floating crane that was named Bar Kokhba. The Bank of Israel credited the reparations for about 15% of Israel's GNP growth and the creation of 45,000 jobs during the 12-year period they had been in effect, though the BoI report also noted that the funds received were not crucial in that Israel would have secured the funds in any case from other sources.

Yad Vashem noted that "in the 1990s, Jews began making claims for property stolen in Eastern Europe. Various groups also began investigating what happened to the money deposited in Swiss banks by Jews outside of Switzerland who were later murdered in the Holocaust, and what happened to the funds deposited by various Nazis in Swiss banks. In addition, individual companies (many of them based in Germany) began to be pressured by survivor groups to compensate former forced laborers. Among them are Deutsche Bank AG, Siemens AG, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), Volkswagen AG, and Adam Opel AG. In response, early in 1999, the German government proclaimed the establishment of a fund with money from these companies to help needy Holocaust survivors. A similar fund was set up by the Swiss, as was a Hungarian fund for the compensation of Holocaust victims and their heirs. At the close of the 1990s, discussions of compensation were held by insurance companies that had before the war insured Jews who were later murdered by the Nazis. These companies include Allianz, AXA, Assicurazioni Generali, Zürich Financial Services Group, Winterthur, and Baloise Insurance Group. With the help of information about Holocaust victims made available by Yad Vashem, an international commission under former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger has been trying to uncover the names of those who had been insured and were murdered in the Holocaust. The World Jewish Restitution Organization was created to organize these efforts. On behalf of US citizens, the US Foreign Claims Settlement Commission reached agreements with the German government in 1998 and 1999 to compensate Holocaust victims who immigrated to the US after the war."

In 1992, Dr. Brozik of the Claims Conference in Frankfurt asked the Ministry of Finance to return all property in East Germany belonging to Jews included in international treaties between Austria, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). These Jews had been paid very little compensation and Germany in 1952 had vowed never to enrich itself again like the Nazis from Jewish property. They refused; Dr. Brozik described the meeting as devastating. An Austrian citizen and her Israeli sister sued the German Government in 2000. The Berlin Court admitted that the property law was unjust/unsatisfactory towards the victims of Nazi Germany who had suffered damage but they were forced to follow the law that the Ministry of Justice had refused to amend. The sisters in question had been promised by the GDR in 1988 that they would receive $44,000 for their 15 unit apartment building in East Berlin. In 1989 they were informed they would only receive 70% as the GDR had no foreign exchange. They received $31,000. In 2000 instead of receiving $14,000 that was owed them, they received $6,000; a total of $37,000 instead of $44,000. The German Ministry of Finance sold the building in 2006 for an estimated $1.4 million making a handsome profit of 38 times more than what they had paid the two sisters. In 2019 the building was estimated to be worth $5 million. Articles were written about the case in the Sunday Express of London, Die Zeit of Hamburg, Judische Wochenzeitung of Frankfurt, Aufbau of New York and News of Austria. In conclusion, the sisters were paid by the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany 2.7% of the value of their building; the German Treasury pocketed 97.3%. Also, both Sabine Leutheusser Schnarenberger, the Minister of Justice and Theo Waigel, the Minister of Finance personally refused to return all Jewish property in East Germany (8 buildings in East Berlin) belonging to a total of 6 Austrian Jewish citizens. The former Minister of Justice in 2018 became a Commissioner Against Antisemitism for the State of North Rhein Westphalia.

In 2007, Israeli MK Rafi Eitan made suggestions that were interpreted as a claim to reopen the agreement, although he insisted that he merely intended to "establish a German-Israeli work team that would examine how Germany could help the financially struggling survivors". Initially, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück rejected any possibility of expanding the agreement, but subsequently German government spokesman Thomas Steg said that Germany was willing to discuss the possibility of making extra pension payments to Holocaust survivors if the Israeli government makes an official request.

In 2009, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz announced that he will demand a further €450 million to €1 billion in reparations from Germany on behalf of some 30,000 Israeli forced labor survivors.

In 2010, according to the German finance ministry, Nazi Germany robbed 120 billion reichsmarks from Jews (approximately US$20 billion in 2010).

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Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany - Wikipedia

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The Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Luxemburger Abkommen "Luxembourg Agreement" or Wiedergutmachungsabkommen "Wiedergutmachung Agreement", Hebrew: הסכם השילומים Heskem HaShillumim "Reparations Agreement") was signed on September 10, 1952, and entered in force on March 27, 1953.

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In 1956, the President of Egypt Abdel Nasser nationalized the formerly international Suez Canal, which provided goods and petroleum to much of Europe. France and Britain allied themselves with Israel, which was also hostile towards Egypt, and planned covert military operations to regain control over the waterway. Israeli soldiers invaded Egypt and Britain and France called on Egyptian and Israeli troops to evacuate the canal, as originally intended. In response, the UN formed the United Nations Emergency Force, a military unit, which the Egyptian government allowed to arrive in Egypt while Prime Minister refused to allow the UNEF to station in Israel. The force assisted in the transition of the Suez Canal, facilitated the removal of Israeli, French and British troops and remained along the borders until 1967. The deployment UNEF, the first military group of the UN, along with the presence of Britain and French soldiers, was a major instance of international involvement in Middle Eastern and Israeli military affairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Emergency_Force
https://www.britannica.com/event/Suez-Crisis

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The first United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was a military and peacekeeping operation established by the United Nations General Assembly to secure an end to the Suez Crisis with resolution 1001 (ES-I) on 7 November 1956. The force was developed in large measure as a result of efforts by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and a proposal and effort from Canadian Minister of External Affairs Lester B. Pearson, who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for it. The General Assembly had approved a plan[1] submitted by the Secretary-General which envisaged the deployment of UNEF on both sides of the armistice line; Egypt accepted receiving the UN forces, but Israel refused it. The first UNEF lasted until 1967. The UN General Assembly later established a Second United Nations Emergency Force in 1973 in response to the Yom Kippur War. UNEF II lasted until 1979.[2]

The UN General Assembly later established a Second United Nations Emergency Force in 1973 in response to the Yom Kippur War.[2]

History[edit]

Swedish peacekeepers evacuating their position at Hill 88 during the Six-Day War

The first UN military force of its kind, UNEF's mission was to:

... enter Egyptian territory with the consent of the Egyptian Government, in order to help maintain quiet during and after the withdrawal of non-Egyptian forces and to secure compliance with the other terms established in the resolution ... to cover an area extending roughly from the Suez Canal to the Armistice Demarcation Lines established in the Armistice Agreement between Egypt and Israel.

UNEF was formed under the authority of the General Assembly and was subject to the national sovereignty clause, Article 2, Paragraph 7, of the U.N. Charter. An agreement between the Egyptian government and the Secretary-General, The Good Faith Accords, or Good Faith Aide-Memoire,[3] placed the UNEF force in Egypt with the consent of the Egyptian government.[4]

Since the operative UN resolutions were not passed under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the planned deployment of a military forces had to be approved by Egypt and Israel. Israel's Prime Minister refused to restore the 1949 armistice lines and stated that under no circumstances would Israel agree to the stationing of UN forces on its territory or in any area it occupied.[5][6] After multilateral negotiations with Egypt, eleven countries offered to contribute to a force on the Egyptian side of the armistice line: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. Support was also provided by United States, Italy, and Switzerland. The first forces arrived in Cairo on 15 November, and UNEF was at its full force of 6,000 by February 1957. The force was fully deployed in designated areas around the canal, in the Sinai and Gaza when Israel withdrew its last forces from Rafah on 8 March 1957. The UN Secretary-General sought to station UNEF forces on the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice lines, but this was rejected by Israel.[7]

The mission was directed to be accomplished in four phases:

1. In November and December 1956, the force facilitated the orderly transition in the Suez Canal area when British and French forces left.

2. From December 1956 to March 1957, the force facilitated the separation of Israeli and Egyptian forces and the Israeli evacuation from all areas captured during the war, except Gaza and Sharm-el-Sheik.

3. In March 1957, the force facilitated the departure of Israeli forces from Gaza and Sharm-el-Sheik.

4. Deployment along the borders for purposes of observation. This phase ended in May 1967.

Due to financial constraints and changing needs, the force shrank through the years to 3,378 by May 1967.

On 16 May 1967, the Egyptian government ordered all United Nations forces – at the time, composed mostly of military contingents from Brazil, Canada, and India, with a smaller Swedish contingent – out of Sinai.[8] Secretary-General U Thant tried to redeploy UNEF to areas on the Israeli side of the border, in order to maintain a buffer, but this was rejected by Israel.[9]

By 31 May, the Canadian contingent had already been completely evacuated by air, with the Brazilian, Indian and Swedish contingents still preparing for evacuation, when Israel invaded Egypt on 5 June 1967, starting the Six-Day War.[10] In different episodes, Israeli forces attacked a UNEF convoy, camps in which UNEF personnel were concentrated and the UNEF headquarters in Gaza.[10] In these episodes, one Brazilian peacekeeper and 14 Indian officials were killed by Israeli forces, with an additional seventeen wounded in both contingents.[10]

The last United Nations peacekeeper left the region on 17 June.[10]

Casualties[edit]

The Brazilian peacekeeper killed by Israeli forces was Sergeant Adalberto Ilha de Macedo.[11][10] The Indian members of UNEF killed in the Israeli attacks were: Captain Vijay Sachar, Subahdar Ajit Singh, Sepoy Sohan Singh, Sepoy Joginder Singh, Sepoy Pritam Singh, Sepoy Sadhu Singh, Sepoy Mohinder Singh, Bandsman Gopal Singh, Sepoy Mukhtiar Singh, L/Naik Sulakhan Singh, Sepoy Jit Singh, Sepoy G. K. Kutty, Nce Sona Baitha, and Sepoy Zora Singh.[10]

Force Commanders[edit]

Stationed in Gaza City.

Nov. 1956 – Dec. 1959 Lieutenant-General E. L. M. Burns (Canada)

Dec. 1959 – Jan. 1964 Lieutenant-General P. S. Gyani (India)

Jan. 1964 – Aug. 1964 Major-General Carlos F. Paiva Chaves (Brazil)

Aug. 1964 – Jan. 1965 Colonel Lazar Mušicki (Yugoslavia) (Acting)

Jan. 1965 – Jan. 1966 Major-General Syseno Sarmento (Brazil)

Jan. 1966 – June 1967 Major-General Indar Jit Rikhye (India)

Contributing countries[edit]

Contributors of military personnel were: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, and Yugoslavia.

Gallery[edit]

UNEF soldiers resting

UNEF soldiers in Sinai

UNEF soldiers in Sinai

UNEF soldiers in Sinai

See also[edit]

Multinational Force and Observers, a somewhat similar, but smaller force instituted to ensure enforcement of the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty

Second United Nations Emergency Force

United Nations Security Council Resolution 340

United Nations Truce Supervision Organization

Yom Kippur War

Notes[edit]

1. ^ Resolution 1001 (ES-1), 5 November 1956

2. ^ a b "Middle East – UNEF II". www.un.org. Department of Public Information, United Nations. Archived from the original on 2018-07-18. Retrieved 14 December 2014.

3. ^ Good Faith Aide-Memoire, 11 UN GAOR Annexes, Supp. 16 U.N. Doc. A/3375 (1956)

4. ^ The Withdrawal of UNEF and a New Notion of Consent, page 5 Archived 31 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine

5. ^ Eisenhower and Israel: U.S.-Israeli Relations, 1953–1960, Isaac Alteras, University Press of Florida, 1993, ISBN 0-8130-1205-8, page 246

6. ^ A Restless Mind: Essays in Honor of Amos Perlmutter, Amos Perlmutter, Benjamin Frankel, Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0-7146-4607-5, Michael Brecher Essay, page 104-117

7. ^ Norman G. Finkelstein alludes to Brian Urquhart's memoir, A Life in Peace and War (ISBN 0060158409), where Urquhart, describing the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis, recalls how Israel refused to allow the UNEF to be stationed on the Israeli side of the line, and labels the Israeli rejection as a "grave weakness for a peacekeeping force." (Finkelstein 2003:277)

8. ^ canada.ca: on 16 May 1967, as was his right, the Egyptian President ordered UNEF to leave his country

9. ^ U Thant in his memoir describes how he met Ambassador Gideon Rafael, permanent representative of Israel to the UN, on 18 May 1967 and asked him, "in the event of the United Arab Republic's official request for a UNEF withdrawal, if the government of Israel would be agreeable to permit the stationing of UNEF on the Israeli side of the line..." The ambassador refused, declaring such a proposal was "entirely unacceptable" to his government. Thant later stated that if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, "even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted." (Thant 1978:223)

10. ^ a b c d e f "UNEF I withdrawal (16 May - 17 June 1967) - SecGen report, addenda, corrigendum". Question of Palestine. Retrieved 2022-05-19.

11. ^ "Folha de S.Paulo - Grupo levou 40 dias para voltar para o Brasil - 10/06/2007". www1.folha.uol.com.br. Retrieved 2022-05-19.

References[edit]

Finkelstein, Norman G. (2003). Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd ed., New York: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-442-1.

Oren, Michael B. (2002). Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-46192-4.

Rikhye, Indar Jit (1980). The Sinai Blunder, London: Frank Cass. ISBN 0-7146-3136-1.

Thant, U (1978). View from the UN, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. ISBN 0-385-11541-5.

Further reading[edit]

Kochavi, Doran (1984). The United Nations' peacekeeping operations in the Arab-Israeli conflict : 1973–1979. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms. OCLC 229042686.

Stjernfelt, Bertil (1992). The Sinai peace front: UN peacekeeping operations in the Middle East, 1973-1980. Translated by Nihlén, Stig. London: Hurst. ISBN 185065090X. SELIBR 6427285.

External links[edit]

Records of the United Nations Emergency Force I (UNEF I) (1956-1967) at the United Nations Archives

UN DPKO

UN document centre

UN SC Resolutions

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United Nations Emergency Force - Wikipedia

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A statement stemming from anti-Semitism and Soviet misinformation of the 1960s, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 "determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". The clause was adopted with 72 in favor, 35 in opposition and 32 abstaining from the vote, primarily supported by the Soviet Bloc, Muslim and African countries. The resolution argued that that the Israeli government was a racist regime and apartheid state, imperialist and repressive of human integrity. It referenced other international declarations in which the elimination of objects such as zionism, colonialism and foreign occupation, as well as a condemnation of racial differentiation and superiority. Although the decision was revoked in 1991, it demonstrated the persistently antagonistic international sentiment towards the state of Israel and Zionism, and received opprobrium from countries such as Israel and the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_3379
https://thejewishnews.com/2018/11/10/un-resolution-3379-is-passed/

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United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on 10 November 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), "determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". The vote took place approximately one year after UNGA 3237 granted the PLO Permanent Observer status, following PLO president Yasser Arafat's "olive branch" speech to the General Assembly in November 1974. The resolution was passed with the support of the Soviet bloc, in addition to the Arab- and Muslim-majority countries, many African countries, and a few others.

The determination that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination", contained in the resolution, was revoked in 1991 with UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86.

Background

In July 1920, at the San Remo conference, a Class "A" League of Nations mandates over Palestine was allocated to the British. The preamble of the mandate document declared:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending "to the United Kingdom, as the mandatory Power for Palestine, and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation, with regard to the future government of Palestine, of the Plan of Partition with Economic Union" as Resolution 181 (II). The plan contained a proposal to terminate the British Mandate for Palestine and partition Palestine into "independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem." On 14 May 1948, the day on which the British Mandate over Palestine expired, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and approved a proclamation which declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.

On 11 May 1949, Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations.

The resolution of 1975

The full text of Resolution 3379:

3379 (XXX). Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination

The General Assembly,

Recalling its resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November 1963, proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures",

Recalling also that, in its resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism,

Taking note of the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace 1975, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women's Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, which promulgated the principle that "international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination",

Taking note also of resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, held at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being",

Taking note also of the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 August 1975, which most severely condemned zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology,

Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly the same day, 10 November 1975, Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog stated:

"I can point with pride to the Arab ministers who have served in my government; to the Arab deputy speaker of my Parliament; to Arab officers and men serving of their own volition in our border and police defense forces, frequently commanding Jewish troops; to the hundreds of thousands of Arabs from all over the Middle East crowding the cities of Israel every year; to the thousands of Arabs from all over the Middle East coming for medical treatment to Israel; to the peaceful coexistence which has developed; to the fact that Arabic is an official language in Israel on a par with Hebrew; to the fact that it is as natural for an Arab to serve in public office in Israel as it is incongruous to think of a Jew serving in any public office in an Arab country, indeed being admitted to many of them. Is that racism? It is not! That ... is Zionism."

Herzog ended his statement, while holding a copy of the resolution, with these words:

"For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such."

As he concluded his speech, Herzog tore the resolution in half.

The name of "The UN avenue" in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was switched to "The Zionism avenue" as a response to the UN's decision.

United States

Before the vote, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, warned that, "The United Nations is about to make anti-Semitism international law." He delivered a speech against the resolution, including the famous line, "[The United States] does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act ... A great evil has been loosed upon the world."

In Campbell, California, in the United States, a group of high school students attempted to solicit signatures on the premises of a local shopping center for a petition against Resolution 3379. The result was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (1980) that supported states' rights to expand the exercise of free speech, which California held was legal in what were considered public areas of a shopping mall.

Mexico's vote in favor of the resolution led some United States Jews to organize a tourism boycott of Mexico. This ended after Mexican foreign minister Emilio Óscar Rabasa made a trip to Israel (Rabasa shortly afterward was forced to resign).

Voting record for Resolution 3379

Revocation

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, adopted on 16 December 1991, revoked the determination in Resolution 3379, which had called Zionism a form of racism. Israel had made revocation of Resolution 3379 a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, in progress in the last quarter of 1991.

The resolution was raised under pressure from the administration of US President George H.W. Bush. The text of the revocation was simply:

"The General Assembly Decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 (XXX) of 10 November 1975."

The motion was supported by 111 (including the 90 nations who sponsored the resolution), opposed by 25 nations and abstained by 13 nations.

Voting record for Resolution 46/86

Statement of revocation

George H. W. Bush personally introduced the motion to revoke 3379 with these words:

UNGA Resolution 3379, the so-called "Zionism is racism" resolution, mocks this pledge and the principles upon which the United Nations was founded. And I call now for its repeal. Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel's right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.

References

External links

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United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 - Wikipedia

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United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on 10 November 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), "determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". The vote took place approximately one year after UNGA 3237 granted the PLO Permanent Observer status, following PLO president Yasser Arafat's "olive branch" speech to the General Assembly in November 1974.

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Recognition of Jerusalem as Capital: 2017

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Recognition of Jerusalem as Capital: 2017

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In a controversial decision, President of the United States Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City. While praised by Israeli leaders such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and disapproved by only 5% of Israeli citizens, only 36% of U.S. citizens supported the change and 45% disapproved. The favorability was distinctly divided along party lines, with 79% of republicans approving and 71% of democrats in opposition. All Palestinian groups
united in enmity and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned Trump of possible perilous consequences to Middle Eastern peace and stability. Internationally, many regional Arab countries, the European Union, Canada and Mexico criticized Trump and 14 out of the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council condemned the decision, including Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and Sweden. The immense backlash in the U.S. and internationally to the change demonstrates the near universal aversion towards the state of Israel and support of Palestinians, in addition to the strength of the U.S.-Israel alliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_recognition_of_Jerusalem_as_capital_of_Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_Jerusalem
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/06/568748383/how-is-the-world-reacting-to-u-s-plan-to-recognize-jerusalem-as-israeli-capital
https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-less-than-half-of-americans-support-jerusalem-recognition/

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A poll released Friday indicated that fewer than half of Americans support US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, with an even smaller number supporting moving the US embassy to the city from Tel Aviv.

On whether they approve of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, 44 percent of respondents told CNN they back Trump's decision, while 45% said they disapprove. Only 36% said they support moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Trump said he would.

Support for the move was sharply split along party lines. Among Republicans, 79% said they approve recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, while two-thirds favor moving the embassy to the city. On the other side of the aisle, 71% of Democrats opposed both decisions.

Friday's CNN poll also asked whether the US should take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with two-thirds of Americans saying it should not. For those who said the US should take sides, 24% said the US should back Israel, with only 2% saying it should side with the Palestinians.

Responses to that question also corresponded closely to party affiliation, with 48% of Republicans saying the US should side with Israel and only 2% saying it should take the side of the Palestinians. Among Democrats, those figures were 12% and 2%, respectively.

With this, 78% of Democrats and 70% of independents said the US should be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as opposed to 44% of Republicans who said they the US should not pick sides.

Asked about the prospects for peace in the Middle East, 56% of poll respondents said they don't believe a time will come when Israel and its Arab neighbors will resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and live in peace, while 39% said it will.

The poll for CNN was conducted between December 14-17, prior to a pair of votes at the United Nations this week on the Jerusalem issue.

On Thursday, the UN General Assembly defied warnings from the US and overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and calling on countries not to move their diplomatic missions to the city.

A total of 128 countries voted in favor of the text, defying Trump's threat - forcefully reiterated in an address before the vote by US envoy Nikki Haley - to cut aid to countries that opposed the motion.

Nine countries - the US, Israel, Togo, Micronesia, Guatemala, Nauru, Palau, Marshall Islands and Honduras - voted against the resolution.

There were 35 abstentions, including a number of countries that had been widely expected to support the move, such as Colombia, Mexico, Malawi and Rwanda. A further 21 countries did not vote at all.

On Monday, in the Security Council, 14 out of 15 members had voted in favor of the resolution, which failed to pass due to an American veto. There are no vetoes at the General Assembly, but - as opposed to the Security Council - resolutions passed there are not legally binding.

Before Thursday's vote, a series of officials addressed the "emergency special session" on "[i]llegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory." The session was called by Yemen and Turkey.

The US ambassador to the UN, Haley, defended the administration's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, said the US had the sovereign right to place its embassies where it wished, and warned that America - the biggest funder of the UN - did not take kindly to being disrespected and paying for the "dubious privilege."

"The decision does not prejudge any final status issues, including Jerusalem's boundaries. The decision does not preclude a two-state solution, if the parties agree to that," she said. "The decision does nothing to harm peace efforts. Rather, the president's decision reflects the will of the American people and our right as a nation to choose the location of our embassy."

"America will put our embassy to Jerusalem," Haley stressed. "That's what the American people want us to do. And it's the right thing to do." No vote at the UN will make any difference on the American decision, she declared. But this vote will be remembered, she vowed, when America is being asked once again to make the single-largest contribution to the UN budget or when "so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit."

Israeli officials had rejected the vote's outcome before it took place.

"The State of Israel flatly rejects this vote even before it is held," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier on Thursday. "Jerusalem is our capital. We will continue to build in it and foreign embassies, led by the US embassy, will move to Jerusalem. It will happen."

In the run-up to Thursday's vote, Israeli diplomats stationed abroad made strenuous efforts to get as many countries as possible to oppose or abstain on the resolution.

On Wednesday, Trump had praised Haley for warning foreign diplomats that she will be "taking names" of countries that support the resolution criticizing America's position on Jerusalem.

"I like the message that Nikki sent yesterday at the United Nations for all of these nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council, or they vote against us potentially at the assembly," the president told members of his cabinet in the White House.

"They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us," he said. "Well, we're watching those votes. Let them vote against us, we'll save a lot. We don't care."

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Poll: Fewer than half of Americans support Jerusalem recognition

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A poll released Friday indicated that fewer than half of Americans support US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, with an even smaller number supporting moving the US embassy to the city from Tel Aviv.