ثورة فلسطين - أسبابها ونتائجها
The Palestine Revolt: Its Causes and Consequencesby Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā

Page 455

Normalized
transcript

Printed page 455

بنقض غزلهم، ونكث فتلهم، بل بتقليص ظلهم الاستعماري من الوجود، وهذا ما أفادت الحرب شعوب الشرق في مقابلة ما خسروا بها.

كان سبب نجاح الإنكليز في الاستعمار الذي استولوا به على ما يقرب من ربع البشر أنهم لم يكونوا يدخلون قطرًا إلا بدعوى قصد الخير له ولأهله: تارة لإنقاذ الشعب من ظلم أمرائه وحكامه، وتارة لحفظ عروش أولئك الأمراء من الثورات والفتن والفوضى، كما كان سبب نجاحهم في السياسة أنهم لم يكونوا ينقضون عهدًا أو يتفصون من عقاله إلا بضرب من التأويل يظهرون فيه أنهم على حق، كما قال أعظم ساسة أوربة في القرن التاسع عشر البرنس بسمارك وزير ألمانية ومؤسس وحدتها للسنيور كريسبي وزير إيطالية في حديث لهما في تسيير سياسة أوربة: وماذا نفعل بإنكلترة؟ قال كريسبي: نقيدها بمعاهدة، قال بسمارك: ولكن الإنكليز أبرع الناس في التفصي من عُقَل المعاهدات بالتأويل ... ونقول نحن: إنهم إنما يحتاجون إلى التأويل مع الدول القوية، وأما الشعوب الضعيفة كالعرب فلا يحتاجون معهم إلى تأويل، على أنهم سمُّوا استعباد البلاد العربية التي وعدوها الاستقلال: انتدابًا يراد به المساعدة على النهوض بأعباء الاستقلال بعد زمن غير طويل! !

لكن هذا الظلم والاستبداد الذي ابتدعوه في فلسطين شيء غريب في تاريخهم وتاريخ الاستعمار والاستعباد، لم يخلق مثله في البلاد، وهو لا يتفق في صورة من الصور ولا معنى من المعاني التي وضع لها لفظ الانتداب.

هو خَلْق شعب جديد يُجتلب من أوشاب أوطان كثيرة في مشارق الأرض ومغاربها إلى وطن شعب آخر لينزعه منه ويحل محله فيه، وتمكينه من ذلك بالظلم والمحاباة في هاتين السنتين، ولا سيما أثناء الثورة الفلسطينية ما عجب منه واستغربه جميع الناس في جميع أقطار الأرض.

فلئن كان هذا من غرائب ظلم الإنكليز، فأغرب منه قدرة اليهود على توريطهم فيه، وإصرارهم عليه بعد ظهور فضيحتهم، وهتك سريرتهم، ولهذا يخاف اليهود أن لا يدوم هذا الإصرار، وأن يُكره الشعب الإنكليزي حكومته

English
translation

it undid what they had woven, broke what they had spun, and even reduced their colonial shadow to nothing. This was what the war gave the peoples of the East in return for their losses.

The English succeeded in colonial rule over nearly a quarter of humanity because they entered no country without claiming to intend good for it and its people. At times they claimed to save a people from the injustice of its princes and rulers; at other times, to protect those princes' thrones from revolts, strife, and disorder. They succeeded in politics because they never broke or escaped a treaty without an interpretation that made them appear right. In a discussion about European affairs, Prince Bismarck, the German minister who unified Germany, asked Signor Crispi, an Italian minister, “What shall we do about England?” Crispi replied, “Bind it by a treaty.” Bismarck answered, “But the English are the most skilled people at escaping the bonds of treaties by interpretation.” We say that they need interpretations only when dealing with strong states. With weak peoples such as the Arabs they need none. They did, however, call the enslavement of Arab countries to which they had promised independence a “mandate,” supposedly meant to help them bear the burdens of independence after a short time.

Yet this injustice and despotism they devised in Palestine is strange even in their own history and in the history of colonialism and enslavement. Nothing like it had ever been created in any land, and it fits none of the forms or meanings assigned to “mandate.”

It consists of creating a new people, brought from the motley elements of many homelands in East and West to the homeland of another people, to take it from them and replace them. They enabled this through injustice and favoritism in the past two years, especially during the Palestinian revolt, astonishing people in every part of the earth.

If this is among the strange injustices of the English, stranger still is the Jews' ability to entangle them in it and their persistence after their disgrace and hidden aims were exposed. Thus the Jews fear that this persistence will not last, and that the English people will force their government

Analysis

Riḍā says the English use protective language and treaty interpretations to govern weaker peoples, while the mandate in ארץ ישראל EREẒ YISRAʾEL serves a different end. Article 22 of the League Covenant supports his general description of the former Ottoman mandate model: it allowed provisional recognition of independent nations, with administrative advice and assistance until they could stand alone, and made the communities' wishes a principal consideration in selecting the Mandatory. The 1922 Mandate for ארץ ישראל EREẒ YISRAʾEL also gave Britain full legislative and administrative powers and required conditions securing the Jewish national home, self-governing institutions, civil and religious rights, a recognized Jewish agency, Jewish immigration, and close Jewish settlement. Article 25 allowed the national-home provisions to be withheld east of the Jordan. This confirms a distinct legal structure. It does not support Riḍā's claims that the mandate planned to replace the existing population or that Jewish influence secretly controlled English policy. His criticism of English colonial rule is separable from these sweeping claims about יהודים YEHUDIM. He says the revolt might change English public opinion; the claim continues on p. 456 and is not evidence that such a change occurred.

His scale for British rule is plausible. The Statesman's Year-Book for 1921 gives the British Empire a population of 445,590,000, while the U.S. Census Bureau's historical compilation gives the 1920 world population as 1,860,000,000. The empire figure is about 24 percent of the world estimate. The sources therefore support “nearly a quarter,” subject to uncertainty in historical population estimates and the several forms of British control included in the imperial total. They do not establish Riḍā's explanation of British political success.

The reported Bismarck-Crispi exchange remains unresolved. The Otto von Bismarck Foundation transcript confirms their 1887-10-02 meeting and diplomatic discussion, but the exact treaty exchange was not located there or in the searchable text of Crispi's published foreign-policy papers. This is not proof that the anecdote is false. It should remain attributed to Riḍā rather than quoted as independently verified Bismarck speech.