Brief Primer on the Arabian Peninsula and Iran

To understand the war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia requires at least some knowledge of the history of that region, knowledge that I doubt is shared by very many people. Thus I am writing this piece to help plug those holes. I'm not going to write a long volume. I'm going to skip over a lot. But I will try to cover the essential knowledge that you need to understand recent and current events. I have been studying and writing about this region since the early 1970s when I became active in supporting a revolutionary movement in Oman, and I spent a week in February 1979 in a country which no longer exists, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, around its capital of Aden.

The Arabian Peninsula is on a separate geological plate which pushed up against Europe and Asia. You can read more about it and its four regions, the Hijaz, the Najd, the Hadhramaut, and Eastern Arabia at this link wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Peninsula  Suffice it to say that the Najd is a central plateau which is fertile and used mainly for grazing herd animals. There are some very large deserts, the Nefud, which borders on the Syrian desert, and the Empty Quarter in the south. Between them is the Dahna. The Hijaz on the western edge next to the Red Sea and the southern edge is mountainous. The highest mountains are as high as the Sierra and Rocky Mountains are are in Yemen. Most of the rainfall on the peninsula falls in the Hijaz, and, for that reason, most of the population has always lived there. This is one of the ancient coffee growing areas, and one of Yemen's ports is Mocha. If you have heard of the queen of Sheba (Saba), she ruled over the mountains of Yemen. On the east, near the Gulf, there are oases and marshes.

We know that when the human species first left Africa many tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors crossed what is now the Red Sea, perhaps on a land bridge to the north, and spread in all directions. The Arabian Peninsula was probably one of the early places where they settled. The Hijaz played a very important role in the beginnings of Islam. Mecca and Medina are there, for example. In the time of the prophet Mohamed, his people were, in his view, very licentious with heavy drinking and polygamy. His movement reacted against those practices and eventually prevailed based on the book of his teachings, the Koran. Mohamed acknowledged that he borrowed a lot from Judaism and Christianity and taught his followers to respect the people of the book, as he called them. The origin of the Sunni/Shi'a split was also in the Hijaz. When Mohamed died, there was a dispute over who would become the new religious leader. The Shi'a followed Mohamed's nephew and son-in-law, Ali, who was the governor of Yemen. The Sunni chose other leaders. Yemen has always been predomimnantly Shi'a since then. Islam and the Arabic language spread mainly through conquest into north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Islam, but not Arabic, spread into Turkey. The same happened in Persia, now Iran, which is almost entirely Shi'a. Islam grew into a political as well as a religious system with a Caliphate ruled from Turkey. That became the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman empire, which was Sunni, controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula until the end of World War I with some important exceptions. The British colonized southern Yemen in 1728 and build a huge seaport and naval base in Aden. With Singapore and Gibraltar, it was one of their main bases. Of course, Islam spread into Europe as well, notably in Spain, Albania, and part of Bulgaria.

During World I, the British signed two treaties. One was public, the Hussein-McMahon treaty, by which Britain promised independence to the Arabs if they fought with them against Germany. The other was the secret Sykes-Picot treaty in which Britain and France decided to divide up the Arab countries according to where each of them had built railroad lines. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they found the Sykes-Picot treaty in the Czar's archives and published it. At first, the British and French denied it. After World War I, Britain took Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq while France took Lebanon and Syria. Starting in 1918 and until 1935, ibn Saud conquered what became Saudi Arabia and became its king. He was ruthless and slaughtered many men and took their women and herd animals. He also took the town of Najran at the foot on the mountains from Yemen. When he took Mecca, the traditional rulers, the Hashemites, were driven out and Britain gave them Jordan and Iraq as kingdoms.

The northern part of Yemen was ruled by a very backward Imam. Southern Yemen remained a British colony. To the east of Yemen along the coast is Oman. Oman had a huge shipping empire which reached down to Zanzibar and across the Indian Ocean. It was ruled by a sultan and divided between his two sons in 1854, one in what is now Oman and one in Zanzibar. British steamships eventually displayed Omani shipping. On the Gulf coast, there were numerous fairly democratic settlements which made their living by diving for pearls and by piracy. These settlements grew into Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and six smaller emirates. The British wanted to stop the piracy and used its military force to impose treaties. Those were called truces, and the six emirates were known as the Trucial States. In exchange for stopping piracy, the British promised to maintain those in rule at the time. The six emirates later merged into the United Arab Emirates. In Kuwait, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran, tremendous oil fields were discovered. Much later oil was also discovered in Oman and Yemen. The British controlled Iran and formed the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company to exploit its oil. The British government owned the company, and the profits went into the British treasury. The British were not interested in Saudi oil, and an American named William D'Arcy arrived in the 1930s and arranged deals between ibn Saud and three American oil companies. Another American oil company later got the franchise in Kuwait. The traditional ibn Saud had modest needs and was paid about $1 million a year to support his port.

During World War II, the Germans blockaded oil exports from the Gulf. The US government wanted to subsidize ibn Saud until oil revenues could resume, but they were too embarrassed to fund a monarch directly. So, they gave the money to Britain which gave it to him. Meanwhile, the British deposed the Shah in Iran because he was pro-German, and a democratic government emerged in Iran. In 1953, the progressive but not communist prime minister Mohamed Mossadegh was elected, and he nationalized Iran's oil. Britain did not have the military strength to prevent that so the British asked Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to help overthrow Mossadegh. Dulles' brother Allen, who was CIA director sent Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Theodore) to Iran to organize a coup. Roosevelt hired thugs to riot against Mossadegh and cultivated ties with the Iranian military. His first attempt failed, and he was told to give up. He ignored those orders and made a second attempt, which succeeded. In place of the formerly democratic government, he installed the son of the Shah who had been deposed. He ruled with a very heavy hand until he was overthrown in 1979.

Also in 1953, ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, died. His successor, one of his sons, decided to follow Mossadegh's example and announced that he was going to nationalize Saudi oil. Under pressure from the US government, his family had him deposed and installed a new king. In 1957, Omanis launched a revolution against the sultan on a mountain in the north of the country. Initially, those rebels had Saudi support because there was oil on the Saudi-Omani border. But in 1958, the King of Iraq was overthrown and replaced by a secular Ba'athist government. About a decade later, Saddam Hussein seized control of Iraq. The Saudis no longer wanted to support an anti-royalist movement in Oman, and that rebellion collapsed in 1959. In 1962, Yemeni military officers deposed the Imam and declared a republic. The Saudis gave support to the Imam's descendants, and Egyptian president Nasser supported the new republic. The Saud family was so unpopular in their own country that some Saudi air force pilots defected and flew their planes to Cairo. Indeed, the Sauds did not trust their own army and had to form another force to defend the royal family. A civil war was fought in northern Yemen until 1967 when Israel destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Meanwhile, in the south of Yemen, former oil workers and the Yemeni army revolted against the British and forced them to withdraw in 1967. At this point, the British had built a huge oil refinery in Aden in response to Mossadegh. Just as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen got its independence, Israel closed the Suez Canal which cut into Yemeni port revenue and the British reneged on a $50 million grant they had pledged to give. The PDRY declared itself a socialist country and had strong ties to the USSR and China.

Another more leftist revolution started in southern Oman's mountains adjacent to south Yemen. The Shah of Iran sent troops to help the sultan defeat them.

In February 1979, the Shah was overthrown, and the Islamic Republic was declared. The two Yemens engaged in armed border conflicts but, eventually, they merged into one republic. The Saudis continued to interfere and dominate Yemen.

That is the background to the present conflict. Iran plays a very minor role in Yemen, and that is used by the Saudis as a pretext for their brutal attempt to reimpose their control over Yemen. There is no Iranian threat in the region, though Iran also has ties to Syria and to Hezbolleh, which is the Shi'a party in Lebanon. Yemenis are fighting against Saudi control, and the Saudis are bombing them to death with no regard for the massive human suffering this is causing. The US government has been aiding the Saudis with weapons, intelligence, and other forms of support and ignoring the reign of terror the Saudis have imposed on Yemen.

The Anti-Semitic Nature of Attempts to Outlaw BDS and Criticism of Israel in the USA

As a Jew, I have written on this subject before, but after watching the four-part Al Jazeera film on the pro-Israel lobby in the USA, censored under pressure by AIPAC because it exposes their abhorrent methods and objectives, I feel a need to go much deeper. Many Jews, and I am one, have never supported political Zionism or the claim that Israel is a "state of the Jewish people" and, therefore, our state just as many people of European descent never accepted slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in the USA or apartheid in South Africa. I have blogged elsewhere (and Israeli history professor Shlomo Sand has published an entire book) on the easily disproven myth that there is such an entity as "The Jewish People." Jews are composed of many disparate groups, often with little in common. As a Jew, I lay claim to an absolute right to oppose political Zionism, which is a blatant form of anti-Semitism because it totally incorporates the position of European anti-Semites that Jews do not belong in the countries where they were born. Zionism is thus fundamentally anti-Jewish, and Israel is equally anti-Jewish because political Zionism is the root ideology of Israel. For any one to pass a law making it illegal to question the right of Israel to exist or to oppose Israeli apartheid is to try to deny me (and others) the right to fight back against this pernicious attack on us as Jews, especially when it comes from other Jews. All the same arguments affirm our right to speak out for Palestinian human, civil, and democratic rights in all of historic Palestine. And they affirm our right to participate in and promote the non-violent BDS movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. I call out those behind these ridiculous attempts to redefine anti-Semitism to include criticism of political Zionism, Israel or our assertion that the right of any state to exist is conditional on its behavior, especially toward those it rules. Apartheid states have no right to exist. Therefore, I say unequivocally that AIPAC is anti-Semitic. The Canary Project is anti-Semitic. The many other organizations with the mission of spreading pro-Israel propaganda in the USA and of smearing activists for Palestinian rights are all anti-Semitic. They are the real hate groups, just as the Israeli government and army are the real terrorists. It is past time to set things right side up, and to stand for what is right.