Transmigration Corsica.”
Corsica had been flooded by refugees from all sides. From Algharb, from France and from Monaco. The camps festered like sores next to Corsica's major towns, Bastia, Bonifacio, Ajaccio and Calvi. They were hot beds of political activity. Corsica was more cut off than ever from the mainland and it was said that le Martel let them suffer the joys of the independence that they had sought for a century.
The transit camps were for non-Gallo Europeans who were rejected by Algharb and unrecognised by their countries of origin. They included persons of almost every nationality who refused to decline their identities or who were impossible to identify. They were sent to camps were the more fortunate found seasonal employment in agriculture, local services and the small industries in the localities of the camps. Almost one million people lived in the misery of the camps that though they were not prisons prevented the freedom of movement on the island with an absolute interdiction to leave the island.
The isolation centres were built to hold those persons of non Gallo-European origin convicted of crimes ranging from simple infractions to the anti-infiltration laws and petty criminals to those convicted for serious crime under the penal laws. In total there were two hundred thousand in the isolation centres.
In addition were the refugee camps. At the time of the rebellion almost a million people had sought refuge from the fighting and retributions fleeing to the island. Years later, a great number of those refugees still remained there, unwilling to take the risk of returning to Bin Ibrani's pseudo state, rejected by both France and Monaco. Amongst them were black Africans, Serbs, Albanians, Kurds and Asians, none of who wanted to return to their countries of origin, preferring to wait for a change in the situation on the mainland.
The refugee camps were deliberately ignored by le Martel's government, they were given the very lowest of their priorities. The camps survived beyond well after they had served their purpose, perpetuated by the humanitarian aid given by the Federation, the UN, the Red Cross, the Green Crescent, and the international aid organisations for refugees but above all those whose political interest it served to see the camps festering like an indictment of the nationalist regime in Paris.
“The plan is that Algharb will be strangled economically, that will result is large scale civil disorder with bankruptcy and rebellion against the bin Brani regime and France will be obliged to intervene imposing marshal law.”
“What is the USA going to do?”
“Nothing, they want the raw materials of South Africa and to safeguard their investments in Europe. They will do nothing to help Algharb, which they see as a temporary aberration. They have never forgotten what Islam has cost them in terrorist attacks and more half a century of black mail by the Middle East oil producing states. The Jews of America are still a powerful force and the Greater Levant for them is a betrayal to the Arabs, the fault of the Turks.”
There has been a lot of construction activity in Corsica; the military bases in Ajaccio have substantially extended up over the last twelve months. Our people have told us that the perimeter fences are being replaced by concrete walls. The naval base facilities have also been extended.
Albignac had become Premier Magistrat de la Nation; he was honoured with the title by a unanimous vote in the National Assembly for his victory against the insurgents and as saviour of the Nation.
The Diaspora
“What have the Jews got to do with that?” asked Steiner.
Ennis had the impression that Steiner always got touchy when the subject of Jews came up.
“Well in that they are part Middle East history.”
“I know that,” he said sounding exasperated. “Tell me what they've got to do with France?”
“I will, but first we have to fill the complete picture with some background.”
Ennis persisted pedantically repeating what Steiner knew as well as he, that there were two and a half billion Muslims in the world and twelve million Jews did not change anything. There were more than one million Jews in France, few of whom were practising and amongst them a few thousand Loubavitch.
What was more interesting however, was the growing number of Jews in Algharb. They had little confidence in d’Albignac whom they saw as little different from Petain, the leader of Vichy France during WWII. France’s history was full of anti-Semitic incidents, though there were moments when enlightened men had spoke out in the defence of the Jews. During the French Revolution on the 27th September 1791, Deputies of the Assembly adopted a decree emancipating the Jews of France, the Deputy Clermont-Tonnerre cried, ‘Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation, as individuals they must be granted everything’.
The Jewish Law explicitly asked them to be real patriots of the country where they lived. Henri Boublil set an example, he was a real patriot of the Nation of France, it could even be said that he was a true zealot applying the laws against the non-Gallos and especially the Muslims with an iron fist.
The Jewish population of France had seen a very slow decline until the creation of the Turkish Protectorate of the Greater Levant, when France opened the door to those who saw the dream of Zion evaporate and preferred Europe to an unpredictable coalition with the Turks. At the same time the holocaust had quit the world’s living memory, fading into history and replaced by the atrocities of the war against the Palestinian-Syrian coalition.
The creation of a Palestinian rump state with little means or political power, with vague frontiers and no agreement on its capital changed little in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It evolved into a running guerrilla war as the Palestinians realised that Israel with all its force could not destroy them. Many factors worked against Israel and not the least was world opinion. The unequal force of the two protagonists shifted the sympathy that had reigned for the Jews since the end of World War II to the Palestinians.
It was a change of roles that was both understandable and incongruous. On the one hand the Jews as a small population were alone, there was no other Jewish state on the planet, their religion was shared with no other people, and they had no natural resources in a country the size of Wales.
The Palestinians on the other hand were part of the Arab peoples; twenty-two independent Arab states existed in the early part of the century with a total population of two hundred and fifty million, at that time many of those states were rich with petro-dollars covering a vast territory from the India Ocean to the Atlantic.
Further the Arabs were the founders of the Islamic religion and Arabia was the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad with Mecca the holy centre of that religion. The faithful counted one third of the world's population amongst them.
The logical conclusion to the Palestinian conflict should have been a political arrangement that would have enabled the two peoples to live and prosper together as they had done at different moments in history. The interests of the Arabo-Muslim world prevented that, as did the stubbornness of the Jews, which could be understood given the fear of the Jews and the hatred of the Muslims who saw their territory and holy places occupied.
However, the stalemate continued, erupting into greater violence as each side struggled to impose its will in the Holy Land. As time passed Israel was weakened politically and economically by the endless war without allies on whom they could depend. The Federation continued its fickle stance on the Turkish question and its attitude towards Israel whilst the Americans were exasperated by an insoluble situation.
Faced with the resurrection of Iran as a Middle East power, Israel and Turkey became odd, but natural allies, Israel offered a nuclear umbrella to Turkey, which in turn menaced Iran.
The Water War, as it was called, started with the damming of the Euphrates by the Turks. Syria had been progressively weakened by the downward slide of the Arab world's power with the slow decline of oil and the collapse of Saudi Arabia. Fourteen hundred years of increasing population with less and less resources for each person the situation of the Arab world had become dramatic, oil had been no mor
e than a mere interlude.
When the Syrian president gesticulated by mobilising his armed forces to threaten Turkey, the Turks in seized the opportunity to invade and crush the Syrian army in a Blitz Krieg, ignoring Iran’s threats and occupying Damascus as Israel invaded the Lebanon and Jordan whilst closing the door from the Sinai.
With the fall of Saudi Arabia and the declaration of an independent Hijaz, the Turkish army swept into Iraq and Jordan and established their rule over much of the Middle East, as had the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. The West looked on approvingly as the region, which had been the cause of so much strife in the struggle for oil, fell under the control of the Turkish-Israeli coalition.
Ankara was encouraged by the European Federation to extend eastwards in compensation for Europe's continued refusal to admit Turkey into the Federation as a full member state.
De facto, the bipolar axis formed between Ankara and Jerusalem, ruled what they called the Greater Levant, with its frontiers reaching south to Egypt and to the Indian Ocean in the East and the Red Sea in the south.
The Treaty of Istanbul signed by the Federation, Russia and the USA, to the chagrin of Iran, recognised a Turkish-Israeli ‘Zone of Influence’ called the Greater Levant, which was in fact a power