The collapse of this declining Turkish empire, which had sided with the German allies in the Great War, was met with scant specific regret and loyalty by many in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world, because of the recent brutality of its reign. However the Ottoman foundation in Islam had kept Palestine firmly fixed within the Arab and Muslim world.With the complete political collapse of the Empire in the wake of the armistice, Ottoman territories in the Middle East were carved up into temporary protectorates controlled by the European victors, until more permanent political configurations could be concluded. Palestine fell under British colonial control between 1917 and 1948. While the centuries-long roots of Islamic heritage and allegiance in Palestine were self-evident, strong currents of Zionism had long infiltrated British thinking. As early as 1917 Balfour had expressed his intention to support a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, and with the surge of Jewish refugees fleeing increasingly larger Nazi-controlled parts of Europe, Jewish immigration into British-administered Palestine escalated between the 1920s and 1940s.Fighting what were clearly perceived to be colonial powers, Arab liberation movements across the former Ottoman territories united across their assorted versions of Islam and individual nationalism, and attempted to maximize the mobilization capacities of both tenets. In Palestine, Palestinians revolted against the British mandate during the 1920s to 1940s under just such a blended Islamic banner.But the fate of Palestine would be irrevocably compounded by factors beyond the simple struggle between colonizers and colonized. By 1948 Britain’s control over Palestine was severely compromised by its own state of economic depletion following World War II, and ironically, by the relentless intensity of Zionist terrorist attacks. With mounting international sympathy for Jewish settlement in Palestine, the United Nations proposed a partitioning scheme in 1947 giving the mostly immigrant 600,000 Jews in Palestine the coastal and rich 54 per cent of the land, leaving the remaining part for the 1.4 million Palestinians. At the time of the partion scheme, Jewish ownership of the land was merely 5.5 per cent. In May 1948, a depleted Britain withdrew from a Palestine already descending into Arab/Jewish war. A Jewish state of Israel was declared almost immediately on 15 May, and was recognized instantly by the United States. Palestinians had been dumped into an abyss of chaos in their own land.One of the most popular rebellion movements against the British, often recalled with pride by Palestinians, is the Izzedin al-Qassam movement of the 1930s. Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam was a religious scholar who launched a Jihad against the colonial British and their allies, the increasingly militarized European Zionist settlers who by then were flooding Palestine. Decades on, in the early 1990s Hamas’s military wing would be named after Sheikh al-Qassam.When the Zionist intentions became evident of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, with the strong support of the European powers, Palestinians tried as early as the beginning of the 1920s to mobilize their Muslim brethren the world over to defend Jerusalem and its holy places. In the year 1931, the first Islamic conference to defend Bait al-Maqdes was convened in Jerusalem, with delegations from Muslim countries as far distant as Iran, Tunisia and Pakistan. Muslim organisations and activities intensified in Palestine in parallel with the increase of activities and the militarization of the Zionist organizations and their settlers.
Middle East, Muslims and the Promised Land of Primordial Faith
