An Anemone in the King’s Buttonhole
Review of One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev. 612 pp., Little, Brown, 2000.
Avi Shlaim
Literary Review, February 2001.
In 1915 Britain promised Hussein the Sharif of Mecca an
independent kingdom in return for mounting an Arab revolt against the
Ottoman Empire; in 1916 Britain reached a secret agreement with France
to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence in the event of an
Allied victory; and in 1917 Britain issued the Balfour Declaration,
promising to support the establishment in Palestine of a national home
for the Jewish people. Even by the standards of Perfidious Albion, this
was an extraordinary tale of double-dealing and betrayal, a tale that
continued to haunt Britain throughout the 30 years of its rule in
Palestine.
Of the three incompatible
war-time pledges, the most curious one was the Balfour Declaration. At
the time that the declaration was issued, the Jews constituted less
than 10 per cent of the population of Palestine. The proviso that
‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine’ implied that, in British eyes, the Arab majority had
no political rights. As Arthur Koestler wrote, here was one nation
promising another nation the land of a third nation. Britain herself
gained nothing from sponsoring Jewish nationalism towards the end of
the First World War. The Balfour Declaration was not only unfair to the
Arabs but detrimental to the interests of the empire. Indeed, it was
one of the worst blunders in British imperial history. So what lay
behind it?
In his
new book Tom Segev, a distinguished Israeli journalist and historian,
provides a full and fascinating account of the murky roots of British
rule in Palestine. The treatment of the Balfour Declaration is a good
example of the originality, insight, and rigorous objectivity that
shine through the entire book. The prime mover behind the Balfour
Declaration was David Lloyd George. In his memoirs, written some twenty
years after the event, Lloyd George explained his support for the
Zionist movement during the First World War as an alliance with a
hugely influential political power whose good-will was worth paying
for. The common wisdom in Britain at the time was that the country had
erred in supporting the Zionists and Lloyd George was trying to justify
his wartime policy. Segev would have none of it. Lloyd George’s
support for Zionism, he argues, was based not on British interests but
on ignorance and prejudice: he despised the Jews but he also feared
them and he failed to grasp that the Zionists were a minority within a
minority. In aligning Britain with the Zionist movement, he acted in
the mistaken — and anti-semitic — view that the Jews turned
the wheels of history. In fact, as Segev shows, the Jewish people were
helpless, with no influence other than this myth of clandestine power.
Once
Lloyd George’s government had thrown its weight behind Jewish
aspirations in Palestine, it could not have chosen a more suitable man
for the post of High Commissioner. Sir Herbert Samuel was sent to
Palestine not because of — or despite — his Jewishness but
because he was a Zionist. The appointment pleased the Zionists but it
destroyed the last vestiges of Arab faith in Britain’s honesty
and justice. Before Samuel took over from the military government, the
chief administrative officer asked that he sign one of the most quoted
documents in Zionist history: ‘Received from Major General Sir
Louis J. Bols, K.C.B. — One Palestine, complete.’ Samuel
signed.
The
troubled and tangled history of the British Mandate in Palestine has
been told many times before, most recently by Joshua Sherman and Naomi
Shepherd, but Segev makes an immensely valuable contribution to the
existing literature both with the new information he has unearthed and
by suggesting fresh interpretations. Most historians of this period
regard Britain as pro-Arab. Zionist writers go further: they accuse
Britain not only of persistent partiality towards the Arabs but of
going back on her promise to the Jews. Tom Segev puts Britain’s
record as the mandatory power under an uncompromising lens. His verdict
is that British actions considerably favoured the Zionist position and
thus helped to ensure the establishment of a Jewish state.
To
develop his thesis, Segev draws on a great wealth of archival material,
official documents, diaries, and letters. The evidence he presents of
British support for the Zionist position is both rich and compelling.
So is the evidence he adduces for the proposition that once the Zionist
movement came into Palestine with the intention of creating an
independent state with a Jewish majority, war was inevitable. From the
start, Segev notes, there were only two possibilities: that the Arabs
defeat the Zionists or that the Zionists defeat the Arabs. British
actions tended to weaken the Arabs and to strengthen the Zionists as
the two national movements moved inexorably towards the final showdown.
The Palestinian nationalists, under the leadership of Hajj Amin
al-Husseini, despaired of Britain and eventually threw in their lot
with Nazi Germany. The Zionists, under the leadership of Chaim
Weizmann, hitched themselves to the British Empire, advancing under its
sponsorship to the verge of independence.
In
times of crisis, the fledgling Zionist project was protected by the
bayonets of the British army. This was particularly true during the
Arab Rebellion of 1936-39. The rebellion showed that there could be no
compromise between the two rival communities in Palestine: only war
could decide the issue. The Jewish community was weak and defenceless.
It would have easily been defeated had Britain not intervened to
restore law and order. In November 1938 Major General Bernard
Montgomery arrived in Palestine. His task was to crush the revolt.
‘Monty’ was a short-tempered professional soldier with no
inclination to study the details of the conflict in Palestine. He gave
his men simple orders on how to handle the rebels: kill them. This is
what his men did and, in the process, they broke the backbone of the
Arab national movement. So when the struggle for Palestine entered its
most critical phase, following the passage of the UN partition
resolution on 29 November 1947, the Jews were ready to do battle
whereas the Arabs were still licking their wounds.
The
costs of the British presence in Palestine were considerable whereas
the benefits remained persistently elusive. Palestine was not a
strategic asset: it was not a source of power but of weakness. Field
Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the highest ranking British soldier in the
Middle East, reiterated that the British had no business being in
Palestine and the sooner they left, the better. ‘The problem of
Palestine is exactly the same … as the problem of
Ireland’, he wrote, ‘namely, two peoples living in a small
country hating each other like hell.’ Wilson castigated the
civilians — he called them the ‘frocks’ — for
failing to understand that the empire could not afford the luxury of
spreading itself too thin. Again and again he demanded that Palestine,
or ‘Jewland’ as he called it, be abandoned. The logic of
his position became irresistible following India’s declaration of
independence in 1947. For if India was the jewel in the empire’s
crown, Palestine was hardly more than an anemone in the king’s
buttonhole.
Another theme that
emerges clearly from Segev’s wide-ranging and elegantly written
survey is that the British had no coherent or consistent policy towards
Palestine. ‘Their regime’, he writes, ‘was a
kaleidoscope of perceptions and positions and conflicting interests
constantly tumbling over one another and rearranging themselves.
Officials, diplomats, and politicians, military men and journalists
contended and competed in a never-ending torrent of words, intrigues,
alliances, and betrayals’ (p.9). Tom Segev’s own study
sheds a great deal of new light on this policy or rather non-policy of
which the only real beneficiaries were the ungrateful Zionists.
As the
British Mandate approached its inglorious end, the conflicts and
contradictions, the hesitations and the helplessness that had
characterised British policy from the beginning, became even more
pronounced. Most British officials departed Palestine disappointed,
disillusioned, disgruntled, and rather sad. Sir Henry Gurney, the last
of the Mandatory government’s chief secretaries, was left with
but a single word to account for the British presence in Palestine:
stupidity.
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