sharing condominium guaranteed by the treaty’s three signatories.
The world awoke to a new Middle East when the Turkish and Israeli armies victoriously met at the Syrian frontier. The two countries had long been allies against their common enemy: the Arabs. It was no great surprise when Israel willingly responded to the Turkish request by closing its own frontier with the Caliphate's eastern Emirate of Egypt, preventing any external intervention. They joining forces with the Turks and swooped on Amman crushing the Islamist supporters who had proclaimed a Jihad to fight the Turkish invaders and were prepared to cross the frontier into Syria.
The Greater Levant was further reinforced by a treaty in the Turkey-Israeli axis broke the countries it controlled into administrative regions, separating troublesome ethic and religious groups.
The old enemy of Turkey, Iran was isolated losing the influence it had exercised over the Iraqi Shiites. The Gulf States became protectorates of the new federation, weakened by the loss of oil revenues and their narrow political vision.
A new calm settled over the Levant after more than a century of blood, war and revolution. The only disturbances were the occasional intercommunity violence, which had existed since civilisation had dawned in that region, which erupted from time to time, between Jews and Arabs, between Turks and Arabs, and between the Lebanese Arabs and Christians.
In effect, the Greater Levant transformed the region into a Turkish-Israeli protectorate, offered security at the price of peace and retrograding the Arabs to their position of more than a century earlier.
However, many Jews and Lebanese disapproved of the way the Levant had been redrawn. Mixing with Turks and Syrians was a step backwards, reminiscent of their confused past. They feared the Turks, the Turks were not Arabs, they were strong, organised and determined in their new powerful role that also extended into the Turkmen regions of the Caucuses and Central Asia.
Great numbers of Israelis and Lebanese flocked to Europe, and in particular to France, especially the Sephardim many of whom spoke French.
“The Jews are all over the place in Paris, encouraged by Boublil and Lehmann.”
“The Jews?” Ennis was puzzled.
“Don’t be naive, since the end of the Second World War and the decolonisation of North Africa, they’ve worked their way into dominant positions in all the liberal professions, banking, commerce and show business. From there they’ve moved into politics.”
“There’s no law against that,” said Ennis exasperated by such attitudes.
“No, but from there they’ve used their position to increase the influence of the Jewish community. Let me tell you some facts. Initially they used politicians sympathetic to their ambitions and the special needs of their religion.”
“That’s nothing exceptional.”
“Then with their own candidates with a profile acceptable to the majority in circumscriptions where they were strong in numbers, such as the 12th arrondissement of Paris, little by little they gained influential positions in the other arrondissements, then in the City Hall of Paris.”
“That’s just Paris.”
“You’re right, outside of Paris their only other bastions were Lyon and Strasbourg, but that was enough.”
“So you’re against the Jews.”
“Yes, not only because I’m an Arab, but because they employed the same methods they accused the Germans of, and also the other enemies of Israel. Don’t forget Boublil was the architect of the expulsions, we call it ethnic cleansing and that’s what it is.”
“You’re right, but it’s incomparable to the holocaust.”
“At present I’m talking about plain human rights, God only knows were they will go next with their transportation plans? I know I’m right and there’s not only the expulsions, there are also the Zonards, the Clodos and the Ombres that the French government has thrown on the junk heap of Lehmann’s economic efficiency. This is the reason that Boublil and Lehmann are our enemies, targets to be destroyed.”
“I can understand your attitude against Boublil but that doesn’t mean all the Jews are to Blame.”
“The problem is that most of the Parisian Jews are from North Africa, they never knew the holocaust, they cried out against anti-Semitism from their expensive cars, flashing their gold watches and their women dressed as though they were going to a wedding party. They put up Boublil against us. His family lived off the back of us Maghribis in our countries, which were the home of his likes for centuries, now he pays us back treating us like goats.”
Ennis knew there true some truth in what he said. The European Jews were much more discrete and an old part of the community compared to their extroverted North African cousins.
“Boublil is certainly a sinister individual, hiding behind his corporatist background and the state education system. His rise to power through the left wing teachers union is certainly a contradiction, he’s without any doubt an opportunist.”
It was strange but the Muslims bore many resemblances to Jews. The more a Muslim lives by the Sharia, the more he lives like an Orthodox Jew. Both are surrounded by infinite numbers of minute details of ritual observance. Further, the two groups share much in the ways they dress, greet, speak, gesticulate, celebrate holidays, and the like. The Islamic requirements for halal food resemble those of kosher food. Like Jews, Muslims open butcher shops and restaurants primarily for their own good, whereas Italians and Greeks open ethnic restaurants because those are a fashionable business, catering for non-Italians and non-Greeks.
The Muslims shared many of the Western prejudices built up over the centuries against Jews, however, both sides had always used the Jews as middlemen to settle their affairs in an even handed manner.
In France, Maghribi Arabs and Sephardim Jews shared a common North African culture and life-style, which allowed them to go beyond the conflicts that had divided them elsewhere.
The time was long past when successive waves of pioneers, bonded together by the Zionist ideals and the spirit of the pioneers, had fought to found the state of Israel. They established their kibbutz in the desert, where tens of thousands of young Americans and Europeans had flocked to experience the purity of their spirit to build a new land after the holocaust. The young pioneers were bonded together in the defence of the Promised Land against the overwhelming Arab enemy and commitment to an egalitarian, communal way of life.
Fifty years later Israel was riven by internal divisions. Jews from the Arab countries, Sephardim or Orientals, whose elites emigrated to France rather than Israel, resented the political power of the Ashkenazim. They were housed far from Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv in development towns cleared of their Palestinian inhabitants in 1947-1949, and came to occupy the lowest level of Israeli society, just above Israel's Palestinians.
The difference that separated the Ashkenazim and Sephardim was also in religious attitudes and rivalry between the various communities. The ethnic and cultural differences were accentuated by social differences in a society, following industrialisation and globalisation of the Israeli economy, which had become seriously inegalitarian.
Israelis had become less motivated by the vision of the founding fathers, and for many of them coexistence with a Palestinian state and integration in the regional environment seemed inevitable.
The Palestinians' establishment of an independent state gave them a limited right to self-determination, but the question of their capital in East Jerusalem remained. The questions concerning borders, Jerusalem and the status of the holy places, settlements, the right of return of three and a half million Palestinian refugees, and water rights were unresolved.
The conflicting interests of Israel’s neighbours weighed heavily on the effort to find a lasting solution. As time passed Israel’s neighbours changed, the Caliphate was born, Arabia was rocked by revolution and disintegration, though the interests of Syria and the Lebanon were in the continued status quo.
The events in the Levant ricocheted deep into the heart of French politics. With its
Arabo-Muslim and Jewish populations increased by the mainly impoverished new arrivals from the Caliphate and Israel, intercommunity strife became commonplace, with the attacks on synagogues and reprisals against mosques. The politicians incapable of facing up to the reality of the situation replied with their usual formula by preaching understanding and integration whilst the rightist political groups screamed a halt to the settlement of non-Gallos.
It was too late, twenty five percent of the population was of Arabo-Muslim origin, they represented the poorest part of the French, the least privileged, and the greatest unemployed. A social Apartheid had been unconsciously created as employment fell with the dawn of the third generation technological revolution.
France had been transformed unwittingly into the scene of twenty-first century ethno-religious confrontation with the Europeans ranged on one side and the Arabo-Muslims and their sympathisers on the other where there could be no winner. A conflict that the French colonialists of the early twentieth century could have never imagined even in the wildest dreams.
The Autonomous Region
This Global Focus feature describes the background to the Autonomous Region of Provence or Algharb, as it is called by its government. Amongst the documents that can be discussed is the Evian Peace Agreement that accepted the principle, within the