The Partition Solution

This chapter looks at the emergence of proposals to partition Palestine into a separate Arab and Jewish states. It argues that partition, far from representing a last-ditch effort to solve the problems of Arab-Zionist conflict in Palestine, actually reflected central principles of the imperial state system the mandate governments and the League had long been building across the Middle East. In particular, this chapter examines how the League and the British began to present partition as a mode of protecting minority rights and the principle of national self-determination – the same rationales used to promote the idea of transfer – and traces Zionist, Palestinian Arab, and regional Arab responses to proposals of partition.

The Refugee Regime

This chapter looks at the construction of refugee camps, enclaves, and settlements for displaced “minorities” in Syria and Iraq during the interwar period. It argues that this refugee regime spawned a new category of non-Arab, non-Muslim communities who were permanent fixtures in Iraq and Syria, but whose primary political relationships were with international organizations like the League of Nations, the British and French mandates, and diaspora groups rather than with their Arab compatriots or their own states’ governments.

Diasporas and Homelands

Even as ethnically based transfer and partition schemes were meeting with opposition and anger on the ground in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, they were often hailed by minority diaspora communities scattered through the world. This chapter traces how interwar Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish activists in Europe and the United States lobbied at the national and international levels for the creation of minority ethnic “homelands” supported by the international community – campaigns that became important sources of legitimacy for British, French, and League attempts to remake the demographic order of the Middle East over the protests of local actors.

Origins

This chapter explores three major earlier iterations of proto-separatism that arose almost simultaneously in the context of the late nineteenth-century encounters between the expanding British and French empires and the struggling Ottoman state: British and French communalizing policies in their colonies, the Zionist movement and a new discourse of Jewish ethnicity and nationhood, and ethno-religious violence in the Ottoman-Balkan wars of the early twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, these earlier precedents had helped shape a new set of international structures that emphasized ethnic belonging as a fundamental aspect of modern statehood.

Epilogue

This conclusion suggests that policies of ethnic transfer, resettlement, and partition served less as modes of creating a new regional or global order and more as a way to structure and legitimize international intervention in the post-WWI Middle East and elsewhere.

The Transfer Solution

This chapter traces how the British and French mandates and League drew on Ottoman, Greek/Turkish, and Zionist and “territorialist” models of mass ethnic resettlement to construct plans of removal and resettlement for Assyrian and Armenian communities in Iraq and Syria. These plans, which ranged from regional resettlement in difficult-to-control border areas to mass removal to faraway locations like Brazil or British Guiana, fundamentally relied on imperial frameworks for their implementation. As challenges to empire mounted in the 1930s, such transfer plans were gradually scaled down or abandoned.

Introduction

This introduction summarizes the process by which the British and French mandate governments in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, in collaboration with the League of Nations, proposed, funded, and implemented a series of dramatic plans for “minority” transfer, resettlement, and partition across the Levant. It traces the origins and consequences of these schemes of demographic engineering across the region, arguing that such policies served as symbols of modernity and provided a rationale for a neo-imperial form of international governance, while also serving as a practical mode of colonial population control on the ground.