powers believed was underway. The Jews, on the other hand, fit the League of Nations’ liberal narrative and were cooperative, and even friendly, with the British throughout the Palestinian mandate. Minority status was not granted to all populations who constituted a demographic minority within a state; for example, the Kurds, who formed a minority with a distinct language and culture, were not granted minority rights under the British mandate.22 The primary reason for this selectivity was their racial and religious composition. Central to the European support of the Armenians and Assyrians was their shared Christianity with the Western world.23 Though faced with increasing anti-Semitism within Europe, Jews were considered useful to the imperial establishment and were declared national minorities. They were thought of as “white settlers” that would cooperate with the British government in return for the promise of aid in their nationalist goals. Robson discusses racial superiority and prejudice against Arabs in States of Separation, stating that British and French mandate governments “...tended to group together Jewish, Armenian, and Assyrian diasporas as representatives of “civilization and modernity in regions generally lacking both.”24 These ‘civilizing missions’ were by no means a new invention, and the racial and religious superiority of the Great Powers and the League of Nations highlighted the irony of institutions proclaiming to be spreading liberal democracy and promoting sovereignty whilst simultaneously maintaining as firm a group as they could on empire. With regards to resettlement, European powers often ignored the desires of the populations on the ground. This was exacerbated by the role of the diaspora communities scattered throughout Europe who voiced opinions on the settlement of communities to which they belonged to abstractly. Proceeding World War I, the concept of assimilation lost its appeal in favour of the homogenous nation-state due to the promulgation of Wilsonian ideals. This included the spread of democracy through the self-determination of people united by nationality or ethnicity. The Allied powers and the League thus began their attempts at separating the multifarious ethnic and religious groups of the Middle East, through resettlement schemes to alienate them from their regional oppressors; these minorities, however, were not given much say, as is evidenced by the eruption of Assyrian refugee protests against the resettlement and segregation forced upon them by the mandates.25 The desires of many refugees for assimilation in Iraq and Lebanon were ignored in favour of bolstering the European claim as a regional arbitrator. Even as the Assyrians lobbied for integration into Iraq and a return
to Hakkari, the French mandate, along with the voices of their Europeanized diaspora community, lobbied instead for the separatist movement. Robson states how these plans “...reflected the anxieties and needs of a diaspora community trying to demonstrate its whiteness, Christianity, and “civilization” in the context of an often xenophobic and hostile host country that tended to understand Middle Eastern immigrants as part of an undifferentiated Muslim barbarism.”26 This highlights the entrenched racialization of Europeanoriented diasporas, and their lack of authority to represent the desires of those undergoing the lived experience of fighting for their identity in a region delineated by borders drawn up with little regard to the realities of the ground. Lobbying for the creation of an ethnic nation-state for their own benefit rather than for those undergoing the lived experience, the diasporas sought to reduce prejudice and bolster their reputation within their host nations. The mandate system engaged in what can only be described as neocolonialism in the fledgling states of the interwar Middle East. Employing popular nationalist rhetoric of the era, the British and French garnered support for their continued presence in the region by positing themselves as protectors of minorities and chairmen of a new global order. The “minority” title was assigned to the Christian minorities in the Middle East and the white Jewish settlers as they were deemed culturally superior to the local Arab population. Moreover, the projection of their superiority on the global scale provided further fodder for the role of the mandates in their protection. While putting forth a noble image, the British and French paradoxically ignored the pleas of actual inhabitants of the Middle East in favour of appealing to their European diaspora counterparts; it was they who formed voting constituencies and held sway in domestic politics, but whose lived experience was nonexistent. The actions and ideology of these European powers have left a legacy in the region which remains potent to this day. For instance, the intractable problem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be directly linked to the early dealing of the British, while regional conflict between disparate ethnic and religious groups shoddily grouped together within a fabricated ‘nation’ plagues the region to this day. This is not to mention the continued intervention of foreign powers in the Middle East under pretenses incredibly similar to those of the mandate era; the same rhetoric of bringing democracy to the region was used to justify the Iraq and Afghanistan wars by the United States, while nearly all ‘Great Powers’ seek to maintain a foothold in MENA to assure their continued access to oil and oth60
