Arasha

Free State of Arasha
Flag Coat of Arms
Motto: לשוב לארץ אבותינו Lashuv le’eretz avoteinu To return to the land of our fathers
Anthem: La Tornada
Map versions	none
Capital	Y'adya
Largest city	Betar, Shimona, Herut
Official language(s)	Ladino, Arashi
Demonym	Arashi
- Adjective	Arashi
Government	republic
- President	Leon Gambetta
- General	Moshe ben Shayid
- Legislature	House of Arasha
Establishment	1613 AN
Founded by	Y'aakov ben David
Population	1,847,300
Currency	arash
Calendar	Arashi reckoning; Anno Nortone
National forum	[1]
National animal	Desert lion
National food	Flatbread, date wine
National drink	Red wine
National tree	cedar
Abbreviation	AR

Arasha, officially the Free State of Arasha, was a republic in northwestern Eura, on the coast and desert interior around its capital Y'adya. It was proclaimed in 1613 AN over the lands of the former Mahoz Occidental, the western remainder of the Sephardi territory the Republic of Ashkenatza had held in Eura until its fall. Its founder, Y'aakov ben David, led an Arashi independence movement; he died in office and was succeeded by Leon Gambetta, formerly the fourteenth Nohsi of Ashkenatza.

The Free State was a republic with a President as head of state, a unicameral parliament, and a religious court sitting alongside its civil judiciary. Its claim was never entered on the world map, and it left no recorded legislation. The territory it named passed instead through Iteru to the Republic of Alduria, and is today a Region of the Federation of Nouvelle Alexandrie.

History

Two populations had lived alongside each other on this stretch of coast: the Arashi communities of the Y'adya interior, and the Sephardim of the Ashkenatzi territory established among them in the modern period.

The Arashi and the Mahoz

Arashi communities have lived in the coastal areas and deserts surrounding the city of Y'adya for thousands of years, forming small cooperating polities that shared a cultural and religious bond. For centuries the bond went no further than that.

In 1555 AN the Shahanshah of Babkha signed portions of the Babkhan provinces of Alkhiva and Báatharz over to the Republic of Ashkenatza, which organized them as the Mahoz HaSephardim, a Sephardi territory seated at Nueva Sinagoga and administered by a Jajam-Bashi. Ashkenatza afterwards extended the Mahoz eastward along the coast, and Ashkenatzi usage divided the enlarged territory in two: the Mahoz Oriental, the eastern cities, which reverted to Babkha; and the Mahoz Occidental, the western lands that remained Ashkenatzi. The Mahoz raised its own Sephardi battalions, the Tercios Ladino de Zouave.

The Mahoz was established on ground the Arashi already held. Arashi tradition did not reckon the Sephardim as settlers, but as kin long separated from a shared land, and the independence movement of the following century wrote that reading into the motto it adopted.

The return and independence

The Ashkenatzi presence in Eura did not survive its metropolitan state. The Euran Cold War, which began in a dispute over the Mahoz between Ashkenatza and Babkha and drew in allies on both sides, ended in the dissolution of both powers. With the fall of the republic in 1605 AN the Mahoz was left without a state to belong to.

Most of the Mahozi Sephardim dispersed in the years that followed, settling in Alduria, Constancia and the Benacian Union, where their descendants speak Ladino-Martino. A smaller number went the other way. The Arashi movement gained support among the population and was joined by these returning Sephardi families, and took its motto from that return: Lashuv le’eretz avoteinu, to return to the land of our fathers. In 1613 AN, Y'aakov ben David proclaimed the independence of the Free State of Arasha over the lands of the former Mahoz Occidental. The returnees founded or renamed the towns they settled, among them Betar, Shimona and Herut, while the older Sephardi cities of the Mahoz kept the Ladino names they had carried under Ashkenatzi rule.

The Free State did not obtain representation from the Micras Cartography Society, and no Arashan claim was ever recorded on the official map of Micras.

The presidency

Y'aakov ben David died in office and lay in state at the House of Arasha. He was succeeded as second President by Leon Gambetta, formerly the fourteenth Nohsi of Ashkenatza and a named commander on the Ashkenatzi side of the Euran Cold War, whose administration named a Basic Law as its first legislative priority and prepared bills on defense, infrastructure and territorial organization. None of them passed.

Geography and administrative divisions

The Free State lay in northwestern Eura, along the coast and across the desert interior behind it. The older Arashi settlement centered on the capital, Y'adya, recorded in some documents as Y'adiya, and the returnee towns of Betar, Shimona and Herut lay around it.

The state's territory was organized into administrative divisions, among them the Tala Strip, and it kept a coastal settlement at Palm City. Below the state, local government ran through district councils, each seated in its district's largest town and headed by a Mayor.

Government and politics

Executive authority rested with the President, elected by the House. After ben David's death, the presidency became the office through which the Free State conducted what government it managed. The President governed alongside a Council of Ministers whose portfolios were not fixed in law; under the second administration the interior was held by Yossi Ben David. He also held a legislative power of his own, exercised by decree.

Legislative power was otherwise vested in the unicameral House of Arasha, fifty members elected by direct representation for terms of four months, sitting in factions or as independents. The House elected the President, confirmed appointments to the secular bench, and served as the seat of state occasions; it could be dissolved by referendum, by presidential decree, or by its own vote, each triggering immediate elections.

Judicial authority was exercised by the High Court. Alongside it the state maintained the Jajamate, a religious court that named its own bench without reference to the House. The Mahoz had been administered by a Jajam-Bashi, an office religious in title and character, and the Free State gave the Jajamate a comparable standing.

The Free State issued a currency, the arash, and dated its own acts by the Arashi reckoning rather than the Norton year. It claimed a population of some 1.8 million. Neither the currency nor the census was recognized outside its own claim.

The state held general elections to the House; the first, in the founding period, returned a center-right majority, and government was formed by the Union for Arasha, the party of President Gambetta.

Economy

The economy of the Free State was shaped by two facts of its founding: the return, which brought settlers and capital to a small and largely undeveloped territory, and non-recognition, which left the state outside the wider Micras economy. It ran on two sectors that answered to its two populations. In the interior, the returnee towns of Betar, Shimona and Herut were laid out as collective pioneer settlements, their labor turned to reclaiming the desert around Y'adya for cultivation. On the coast, the Sephardi families revived the mercantile traditions they had carried from the Mahoz HaSephardim, where Nueva Sinagoga had been a seat of Ladino commerce.

The founding effort was financed largely from abroad. The dispersed Mahozi communities of Alduria, Constancia and the Benacian Union subscribed to the return through remittances and bond drives, and the returning families brought with them what private wealth they had carried out of the fallen Republic of Ashkenatza and Babkha. To this the government added a development concession, granting the Bank of Luthoria, a house of the Alexandrian province of Luthoria in Eura, rights over Arashan port and land works in return for the capital to build them.

That capital went into the large works: the reclamation of the interior, the harbors of the coast, and the housing of the incoming families. Daily life, by contrast, stayed austere. Because the arash could not be exchanged beyond the state's own claim, the domestic economy leaned on rationing and self-provision even as the foreign-funded projects went forward.

Military

The armed forces of the Free State, the Arashi Defense Force, were headed by a General whom the President appointed on the advice of the military staff; the office was held by Moshe ben Shayid, whose career predated the state. The office continued a tradition from the Mahoz HaSephardim, where the Sephardi territory had raised its own battalions, the Tercios Ladino de Zouave.

Defense policy fell to a minister, Binyamin Meyer, whose department prepared a Defense of the Free State Act; like the rest of the second administration's program, it was drafted but never enacted. Arashi public memory held a formative conflict, the Six Month War, which the state proposed to mark with an annual day of commemoration.

Foreign relations

Foreign affairs were the charge of a minister, Rafiq Najara, seated at Palm City. The state's diplomacy was largely aspirational: its last recorded initiative was a list of nations it hoped to approach, and no formal relations are recorded.

The Free State considered entering a claim to former Ashkenatzi overseas territory with the Micras Cartography Society, but no claim is recorded as having been filed or approved, and Arasha remained absent from the official map throughout its existence.

Legacy

The Free State did not outlast its second presidency, and its claim over the former Mahoz Occidental lapsed with it. The ground it had named passed instead to Iteru, the hydraulic state that rose over the former Babkhan holdings of Alkhiva and Báatharz together with the Mahoz, and which was in turn destroyed in the aftermath of the Second Euran War. Out of that collapse the Republic of Alduria formed, and the Micras Cartography Society accepted the Aldurian claims in 1672 AN. Alduria is today a Region of the Federation of Nouvelle Alexandrie, and Alkhiva is among its major urban areas.

The Sephardi population outlasted every state that governed it. The Cortes Federales of Nouvelle Alexandrie, by the Northern Eura Territorial Organization Act, 1699, established two autonomous states within the Region of Alduria, among them a Ladino Autonomous Region. Nueva Sinagoga, the seat of the old Mahoz, remains a New Alexandrian city.

See also

• Mala'eretz
• Eura
• Leon Gambetta