Faisal-Weizmann Agreement
The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement is an agreement reached on January 3, 1919 in advance of the Paris Peace Conference between Emir Faisal and Chaim Weizmann on the political reorganization of Palestine , which never came into force.
The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement determined the mutual determination of state borders for the Arab kingdom sought by Faisal and the Jewish state sought by Weizmann in accordance with the Balfour Declaration . Faisal thereby agreed in principle to the detachment of Palestine from the Arab kingdom and the existence of a Jewish-Zionist state.
The agreement emphasized the common ancestry of the Jews and Arabs of Palestine and also established freedom of religion and free access for Muslims to the holy Islamic sites in Palestine. Great Britain was intended as an arbitration body in disputes.
In the closing remarks, however, Faisal made it clear: “I will make the clauses of this treaty effective as soon as the Arabs have achieved their independence under the conditions which are recorded in my memorandum, which I sent on January 4, 1919 to the British Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. However, if [the terms of my memorandum] were subjected to even the slightest change, I would no longer be bound by a word to the then null and void contract and no longer obliged to comply with it. "
Faisal made the effectiveness of the entire treaty dependent on the Arabs receiving their promised independence; however, this condition was not met. Instead of achieving political independence, the Levant and what is now Iraq were divided between France ( League of Nations mandate for Syria and Lebanon ) and Great Britain ( British mandate over Palestine , British mandate Mesopotamia ) at the Sanremo Conference .
The agreement from the agreement was short-lived. During the First World War, the British and French had agreed in the (secret) Sykes-Picot Agreement on the division of their spheres of interest in the Middle East, and France was now pushing for the agreements to be fulfilled. For this reason, the British withdrew from the Syrian-Lebanese coastal area at the end of 1919 and the French took over the mandate for Syria and Lebanon.
The Arabs were hostile to this development, their goal was the establishment of a Greater Syrian kingdom. After the Syrian Congress called for independence from Greater Syria in the Kingdom of Syria on March 7 and 8, 1920 and Faisal was proclaimed king, mass demonstrations broke out in Jerusalem and all of Palestine. The majority opinion called for Palestine to be South Syria for the Arab kingdom and expected Faisal to distance himself from the agreement. After the anti-Jewish riots on April 4, 1920 at the latest , the aims of the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement had become obsolete.
literature
- Thomas G. Fraser: Chaim Weizmann: The Zionist Dream ( Makers of the Modern World series: The Peace Conferences of 1919-23 and their aftermath ). House Publishing, London 2009, ISBN 1-905791-67-4 .
Web links
- Text of the agreement (Engl.)