cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14068665
Question: When Turk/Ottoman Empire lost the WW I, did it offer Palestinians to move back to the new borders of the Ottoman Empire?
I was just reading the Wikipedia article above and started to wonder if after losing WW I to England the Ottoman Empire offered Palestinans (or whatever easy the name of people living in this area at that time) to come to live in the post-WWI Ottoman Empire, and if it was made clear for them that If they didn’t they would not have protection from the State.
My question might be totally misformulated, as I am no expert on the topic. For instance, I guess that “Ottoman Empire” ceased to exist and broke down into one or more smaller State(s)/Country(is). In this case, supposing it became Turkey, I should ask if Turkey offered Palestinians to come to turkey instead of living in a Stateless area with a dangerous power vacuum. Or if the closed State to it was Jordan, if Jordan made the same offer to Palestinians. Or even if England said to Palestinians they could keep living there forever.
I am getting the impression Palestinians have been constantly cheated by the States which controlled the region and my question will help to know to which extent my suspicion is wrong or not.
There are probably more implicit errors in my question, but my knowledge is not enough even to estimate those errors.
Oh, God, no. The Ottoman Empire, after WW1, was more or less entirely at the mercy of the Entente, who had already decided to carve up the Middle East amongst themselves. The level of control the Ottomans had at the end of WW1 over the territory, or its ability to pursue any kind of policy, foreign or domestic, was about nil.
The Entente’s imperialism actually would have been even worse, save that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and managed to make the modern Turkish Republic out of the war-weariness of Britain and France, and the poor performance of the Greek military.
The resulting Turkish Republic largely regarded Ottoman imperialism as undesirable and non-Turks* as not Turkiye’s concern.
*Who was and was not a Turk was decided by Turkiye, of course, and curiously, a great number of Kurds in desirable areas contiguous with Turkiye were designated as “Mountain Turks” who just needed to get in touch with their “real” roots. For obvious reasons, the Kurds have never been particularly fond of this interpretation, and a great deal of violence has resulted in support of this oppressive position.