‘The Jewish State of Eastern Arabia’

Abstract

• In September 1917, Lord Francis Bertie, British Ambassador to France, received an unusual proposal from Dr M L Rothstein, a Paris-based Russian Jew. Bertie explained to the Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, that Rothstein proposed the Entente Powers should equip and organise an army ‘for the conquest of the Turkish province of El Hassa [Hasa]’, an oasis region on the east coast of modern-day Saudi Arabia, for the ‘creation of a Jewish State on the Persian Gulf’.