A Discussion of From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949
February 26, 2010, 5:30PM
Mugar 200, Cabot Intercultural Center
Speaker: Victor Kattan, Palestinian scholar and author

Summary

On Friday, February 26, The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, along with the Arab Students Association hosted Victor Kattan, a Palestinian scholar and author, as well as a teaching fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Kattan presented the results of the research he conducted while writing "From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949," a book which analyzes the Arab-Israeli conflict from a historical perspective. In his presentation, Kattan sought to explain the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict by analyzing the policies of the Great Powers during the early twentieth century.

He began his presentation by giving a thorough review of the diplomatic treaties and correspondence that led up to the creation of the state of Israel. First, he provided brief summaries of the complex and conflicting historical documents concerning the partition and governing of the Middle Eastern territories, including the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915-1916) and the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916). He also discussed British immigration laws, specifically the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1903) and the Alien's Act (1905). His main analysis, however, was of the Balfour declaration of 1917 and the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement of 1919. In the Balfour Declaration, the British Government expressed support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement, Faisal I (an Arab Leader) agreed to cooperate with Zionist leaders who hoped to encourage immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, provided that the rights of existing Arab citizens were also protected.

Kattan used historical documents to reach his central thesis: that neither the Jewish population nor the Arab nations are to blame for initiating the Arab-Israeli conflict, but rather that the conflict was manufactured by outside powers, especially Great Britain. Kattan supports this claim with several pieces of more recent historical literature, notably the Refugee Report of 1946, in which the International Migration Service in Switzerland found that a surprisingly low proportion of Jews in Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom had previously expressed a desire to go to Palestine, but rather preferred migration to other Western countries. Thus, according to Kattan, the idea of Zionism was manufactured and encouraged by Western Powers in order to combat the immigration problem posed by Jewish refugees. He argued that prior to the meddling of outside powers, there was no significant conflict between Arabs and Jews.

Kattan encouraged students and professors in attendance to consult his book for more information (copies of which were available for sale after the lecture). A lunch with several members of the Tufts Arab Students Association followed the presentation in order to further discuss the topics introduced in his lecture and to answer students' questions in a less formal setting.

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