(CNN Turk and Sabah Newspaper, 7 April 2014)
//ed. note: another of our occasional looks at Turkish history//
The Ottoman province of Lahsa in 1683, in red.
A proposal was made to England in 1917 for the establishment of
a Jewish state in the Ottoman province of Lahsa, located on the
eastern side of the Arabian peninsula, but England rejected the proposal.
The related documents and letters were discovered by the British Library
and posted on its internet site. A Russian Jew living in Paris by the name of
Dr. M.L. Rothstein made the proposal to Lord Francis Bertie, the British
Ambassador in Paris in September, 1917. The documents show that
Bertie mentioned Rothstein's proposal to British Foreign Minister Arthur
James Balfour in a letter.
According to the documents, Rothstein proposed to Bertie that the Allies
in World War I - France, Britain and Russia - could jointly act to seize
Lahsa province from the Ottomans and establish a Jewish state there.
Rothstein claimed that he could raise an army of 120,000 Jewish soldiers
and occupy Lahsa with the help of the Allies. In response, Britain
characterized Rothstein's proposal as 'unreal and inappropriate" and
rejected it.
Foreign Minister Balfour's chief-of-staff wrote to Bertie on 3 October 1917,
telling him to contact Rothstein and state that the British Government had
rejected his plan. The British Library could not find much information about
Rothstein but noted that the following statement was found in a book
referring to Rothstein's son Amedee, who died in 1916 at the Battle of
Verdun: "He was a young Russian zionist who confirmed Jews' ties to France."
more on Lahsa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahsa_Eyalet
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