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

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هذه الشعوب العربية تنازع هاتين الدولتين في دعواهما ما تسميانه حق الاحتلال والانتداب، ولابد من وصولهما إلى حقهما في الاستقلال المطلق في يوم من الأيام.

(ولا ننسى الممالك العربية الإفريقية الأربع فهي لابد من استقلالها أيضًا؛ فإن استعباد الأمم الكبيرة بالقهر العسكري لن يدوم إذا هي عرفت نفسها وحال العالم وسنن الاجتماع فيه؛ ولكن كلامنا الآن ليس فيها) .

استحالة ظهور اليهود على العرب

(10) عُلم مما تقدم أن الأمة العربية أقوى وأعز وأفضل من الشعب اليهودي ماضيًا وحالاً، وأرجى منه استقبالاً، فهي لا تزال ذات مُلك وسلطان، وممالك وأوطان، ولغة حية، وشرع نافذ وعادل، فإن كانت ثروة اليهود النقدية أكبر؛ فإن ثروة العرب الطبيعية أعظم، ألا وهي ثروة الأرض التي هي أصل كل ثروة بأقواتها ومعادنها، وهم يملكون عشرات الألوف والأميال منها، وإن كان اليهود أقدر على تسخير القوة البريطانية بدهائهم ومكرهم وأموالهم، فالعرب أقدر على إبطال كيدهم هذا بكثرتهم، إذا هم جمعوا كلمتهم، وبنفوذهم في العالم الإسلامي الذي يعطف عليهم لأنهم قوم نبيهم، وأرومة دينهم، وحفظة قبلتهم، وعُمَّار مساجدهم الثلاثة المقدسة: المسجد الحرام والمسجد النبوي والمسجد الأقصى، فإن لم يقدروا على ذلك بالإقناع البرهاني الذي يفضلونه، فسيقدرون عليه بالدفاع الحربي الذي لا يخافونه، وقد علم زعماء الأمتين، أن ما بذلتاه من الدماء والأموال في سبيل الدفاع عن الدولتين، لو بذلتاه في سبيل حريتهما واستقلالهما، لكان كافيًا لهما، وأن تلك الملايين من رجالهم التي سخرتها الدولتان لأنفسهما في الحرب ما كان يمكنهما تسخيرها بالقوة، وأنها لو ثارت عليهما في وقت ضعفهما لما فقدت في قتالهما عُشْر ما فقدته في قتال أعدائهما، وإذًا لخسرتا الحرب وفاز بها أعداؤهما.

وقد رأوا بأعينهم، وخبروا بأنفسهم، ما كان من تأثير الثورة المصرية الصغيرة العزلاء على بريطانية العظمى بعد الحرب الظافرة هي فيها على حين كان جيشها من جميع الأسلحة يموج في أرض مصر، كما تموج أساطيلها في كل بحر، وعلموا أنه لولاها لم ترفع تلك الحماية التي ضُربت عليها، ولم يعترف لهم بالاستقلال المقيد فيها، ثم رأوا ثورة العراق التي فتحتها الدولة البريطانية فتحًا، وأخذتها عنوة لا صلحًا، وجعلتها تابعة للإمبراطورية

English
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to dispute these two states' claim to what they call a right of occupation and mandate. One day these peoples must obtain their right to full independence.

We must not forget the four African Arab kingdoms. They too must become independent. Enslavement of great nations by military force cannot last once they know themselves, the state of the world, and the laws of society within it. But they are not our subject here.

The impossibility of Jewish victory over the Arabs

(10) What has gone before shows that the Arab nation was and is stronger, prouder, and better than the Jewish people, and has greater promise for the future. It still has rule and power, kingdoms and homelands, a living language, and a just law in force. If the Jews have more money, the Arabs have greater natural wealth: land, the source of all wealth through its food and minerals. They own tens of thousands of miles of it. If the Jews can more readily put British power to work through their cunning, scheming, and money, the Arabs, through their greater numbers, can undo this plot if they unite. They also have influence in the Islamic world, which is sympathetic to them because they are the people of its prophet, the root of its religion, the guardians of its prayer direction, and the keepers of its three holy mosques: the Sacred Mosque, the Prophet's Mosque, and al-Aqsa Mosque. If they cannot achieve this by the reasoned persuasion they prefer, they can achieve it by military defense, which they do not fear. The leaders of the Arab and Muslim peoples know that the blood and money their peoples spent defending the two states would have been enough to secure their own freedom and independence. Those millions of their men whom the two states made to serve in the war could not have been compelled to serve by force. Had they risen against those states in their moment of weakness, they would not have lost a tenth as many people fighting them as they lost fighting their enemies. The two states would then have lost the war and their enemies won it.

They have seen with their own eyes and learned from experience the effect of the small, unarmed Egyptian revolt on Great Britain after its victorious war, at a time when its army, drawn from every branch of arms, surged across Egypt just as its fleets surged across every sea. They know that without the revolt the protectorate imposed on Egypt would not have been lifted, nor would its limited independence have been recognized. They then saw the revolt in Iraq, which the British state had conquered and taken by force rather than by agreement, and which it had made subject to the Indian Empire,

Analysis

Riḍā predicts full Arab independence and then argues that Arabs are stronger and better than Jews. He contrasts Arab land and numbers with alleged Jewish money and cunning, invokes Islamic sacred sites, and says military defense can succeed if persuasion fails. This is an antizionist appeal joined to collective claims about יהודים YEHUDIM; it does not measure either side's resources or prove the future result. A British statement on 1922-02-28 confirms that Britain ended the protectorate and recognized Egypt as an independent sovereign state while reserving four major fields. It supports Riḍā's description of limited independence, but it does not prove his counterfactual claim that the 1919 revolt was the necessary cause. His Iraq example continues on p. 465.

The wartime manpower claim needs both confirmation and correction. More than three million Commonwealth soldiers and labourers served alongside the British Army, and more than 2.5 million Africans performed war work. The African record includes forced volunteers and formal conscription, including in Egypt after 1917. This supports a multi-million imperial scale but contradicts Riḍā's claim that Britain and France could not compel service. The totals do not establish that millions of those people were specifically Arab or Muslim combatants.

The three-mosque formula has a clear hadith basis. Reports in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim name al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, the Prophet's mosque, and al-Masjid al-Aqṣā as the three mosques for which a special journey is undertaken. This verifies the religious triad that Riḍā invokes. It does not establish his political conclusions, his collective hierarchy of Arabs and Jews, or an exclusive Arab guardianship claim.

The 1919 revolution materially changed British policy toward Egypt. Scholarship connects the mass uprising and its repression to the Milner mission, negotiations, and Britain's unilateral 1922 declaration of nominal independence. This supports Riḍā's causal link. The record does not prove his absolute counterfactual that the protectorate could not have ended without the revolt, and the reserved matters show that the resulting independence remained limited.

The official 1929 population estimate counted 960,043 people in ארץ ישראל EREẒ YISRAʾEL: 712,343 Muslims, 156,481 Jews, 81,776 Christians, and 9,443 others. It therefore supports a large local numerical imbalance between the Muslim and Jewish categories. The table is organized by religion, not by exact Arab and Jewish nationality, and it cannot establish Riḍā's claims about virtue, effective power, or inevitable victory.

Total territorial extent also did not mean that Arab cultivators possessed abundant viable land. Hope Simpson found no margin for additional agricultural settlement under existing methods, estimated that 29.4 percent of rural Arab families were landless, and judged many holdings too small to support a family. This limits Riḍā's move from a large regional land area to broad Arab agricultural wealth without denying collective Arab ownership or settling every development question.