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Following are excerpts from an address by British MP George Galloway, which aired on Mayadeen TV on June 26, 2012.
George Galloway: People in the House of Commons, who don't know where Saudi Arabia is on the map, have approached me, over the last year or so, and especially in the last few weeks, asking about the Hejaz and Najd.
I was astonished – how do they even know these terms? Suddenly they learned these terms, and why? Because already they are thinking: Maybe we have to divide what is called Saudi Arabia, and maybe we have to tell the Shiites in the eastern province that actually we might be prepared to support you having your own country, because you've got all the oil, and we're not all that interested in Mecca and Madina, believe me.
The West is very happy to leave that to the Arabs and the Muslims. What they are interested in is Saudi Arabia's wealth, and if it becomes unstable enough in Saudi Arabia, you'll discover a new love in the West for the oppressed Shiites in Saudi Arabia. Trust me on that.
It's already beginning to happen. We'll hear about the oppression of the Shiites in the eastern province. We'll hear about the scandal that it is that they should be governed in this way by these Wahhabi fanatics.
So nobody is safe from this kind of division, nobody is safe from this kind of sectarianism. What will be the result?
Instead of 23 Arab countries, we'll have 33, or 43, or 63. We won't have countries at all. We'll have emirates, like the one currently visible, emerging, in Libya, after the NATO bombardment and the overthrow of the Qadhafi dictatorship.
It would suit them well, because then they could divide and rule the Arabs for another 100 years – more securely, thank you very much.
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I think that social antagonism between classes is as natural as the night following day. I believe that Marx was right when he described the history of all hitherto existing human society as the history of class struggle.
The Arabs have had no meaningful class struggle because the Arab world has been frozen because of the extraordinary national question which has been posed of them.
At the end of the First World War, we had the Arab body dismembered, and cut up by foreigners for their own interests, and it had an implantation into its heart in the settler state of Palestine, which they now call Israel. They inserted this into the heart of the Arab world, and it has poisoned the Arab body politic ever since, so normal politics – the kind we have in Europe or elsewhere – where the people who depend on their labor to live have a ceaseless political struggle with the people who depend on other people's labor to live, has effectively not been present. And the development of a working class in the traditional sense has not actually happened in many Arab countries.
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The presence of this mega petroleum wealth has added to the national question in the Arab world, and has completely distorted political development. You will never get on to normal politics until you resolve this national question, until you resolve the fact that there is a foreign army now surrounding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, from the roof of which the Prophet Muhammad ascended, and returned with the revelation. How can you accept that? Until you deal with the fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is surrounded by a foreign army of largely Western settlers, now buttressed by Russian settlers, how can you accept that? How can you accept that the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was born, can be fired upon and set alight?
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Sykes, in particular, was a very fascinating figure, who managed to combine an intense hatred of Jews with an intense hatred of Arabs. He actually hated both of them almost with equal vehemence, though his remarks about the Arabs were even more insulting than his remarks about Jews.
But that didn't matter. He came up with a scheme… Believe me, I got past the room where he did it, and I can almost hear them laughing, as they sat there with their maps, and said: I wonder if they'll buy this, I wonder if they'll accept that.
They could not have imagined – neither Sykes nor Picot – that nearly a hundred years on – what is it now, it's 95 years on – that there would be Arab armies ready to die to defend the borders which Sykes and Picot drew. There would be Arabs ready to die for a flag which they – Sykes and Picot – gave them.
As I move around the Arab world, I see one people – one Arab people. For me that's obvious. You speak the same language, you watch the same movies, you eat more or less the same food, you like the same music, you worship the same god, and together you could be so much more than you are separately.
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I've never understood this fear, this sense of Iran as somebody that you could unite with the Crusaders against. A group of Muslim countries being ready to unite with the Crusader armies against a fellow Muslim country that never did you any harm.
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There are Arab countries that, for decades now, had peace agreements – surrender agreements – with Israel. Oddly, these governments are not facing Jihad. The Jihadists are not making a Jihad against their own governments, who have signed surrender with Israel, who have Israeli embassies in their capitals, and who have the Mossad operating in their airports. There is no Jihad there.
The Jihad is against the only Arab country which refused to sign the surrender deal, and which refuses to allow Israel into its country. But that's by the by.
The question that you ask has only one answer. The Sykes-Picot 2 will be successful if you allow it to be, if the people watching us tonight allow it to be. If they do as the Arabs did after Sykes-Picot 1, you will be no better off at the end of the 21st century than you were at the end of the 20th.
But because I believe in the Arabs – I believe in the Arabs more than the Arabs believe in themselves – I believe that that will be defeated. I pray that it will be defeated, and I will work that it should be defeated.
With my last breath I will say that the Arab people should be one people, from the Atlantic to the Gulf.
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