ARAB ISRAELI LECTURE-SEMINAR NUMBER 2 THE BRITISH MANDATE,
1919-1948 So, having done a bit about the early origins of Zionism and Arab
nationalism, we now have to go through how those two ideologies first came into
direct conflict with each other, and how this lead to the first violent
Arab-Jewish conflicts in the region, which actually predated the creation of
Israel by several decades. There was a major third party in all this, which was
the British Empire, because Palestine, having been taken from the Turks on the
final break-up of the Ottoman Empireafter the First World War, was
administered, from 1919 to 1947, by the British Colonial Officeacting under a
Mandate from the League of Nations, it was garrisoned by the British Army and
theRAF, and was policed by a mainly British police force which also contained
large minorities from both the Jewish and Arab communities. The major
dominating political dispute during theMandate Period, as it is known to
historians, arose from the Jews and the Arabs both believing thatthe British,
during the First World War, had promised Palestine to them, and there were
extremelyviolent guerrilla and terrorist insurgencies against the British from
both groups, culminating in thegreat Arab uprising of 1936-1939, in which
Palestine was, to all intents and purposes, in a state of open civil war, with
Arab nationalists, and a small number of Islamic fundamentalists, on one
side,and the British, the Jews and moderate Arabs on the other. After this,
from 1939 right through to1948, the British were on the receiving end of a
Zionist insurgency making extensive use of terrorism directed against the
British – including assassinating British military personnel in London
– and the Arabs. Now, the British themselves, it has to be said, were in a pretty
impossible position: they were stuck between two utterly uncompromising
ethno-religious nationalisms, eachof which saw any attempt at even-handedness
or conciliation as betrayal. So, another thing weneed to assess is the British
role in the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and how far they might be
culpable: interestingly enough, this was taken as a given not only by David
Ben-Gurion, but alsostill is by most of the Palestinian elite, so this issue
still exercises people today.
.Now then, before proceeding, some recap is necessary about
how this situation arose. Sir HenryMacMahon, the British Consul-General in Egypt ,
and Hussein, the Grand Sherif of Mecca, begancorresponding in 1917. Hussein was
an important figure, as he was head of the Hashemite clan,descended directly
from the Prophet, and was also the guardian of the two Holy Cities,
andtherefore had some right to speak for all Muslim Arabs. MacMahon’s aim was
to get him to jointhe Allied side in the First World War and rise up against
the Ottoman Empire . This was a success,as it led to a
major uprising in the Hejaz region of western Arabia ,
led by Hussein’s son, Faisal,with his other son, Abdullah, also playing a
prominent part. The Arabs believed that MacMahonhad promised them independence
apart from ‘portions of Syria laying to the west of Damascus’,when, it emerges
from documents at the time, the British had little intention of handing over
controlof so vast an area to such a new force. It would appear in retrospect
that the wording of MacMahon’s letters was actually rather vague and lost in
translation from English, which tends to be a very precise language, to Arabic,
which tends often to be highly poetic and allusional, and cantake an indirect
approach to its objective. What is interesting is that Hussein knew that the
Allieshad already drawn up plans for carving up the Middle East
the year before. In May 1916, Britain ,France
and Russia had
secretly signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, named for Sir Mark Sykes of the
British Foreign and Colonial Office and Francois Picot of the French Foreign
Ministry, who had
largely drawn it up. Under this agreement, France would get
direct control of much of Syria, andwould have a zone of influence comprising
Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul, while Britain would rulelower Iraq directly and
would ‘advise’ an Arab government laying between Egypt and easternArabia, which
would, therefore, be a British protectorate as the Gulf States had been for
over ahundred years. Hussein had been informed about this by Turkish agents
trying to persuade him tostay neutral, but he also felt that Alliance
with the British was the best means of getting rid of theOttomans – it was a
start, if you like. This is in stark contrast with the absolutely
uncompromising,all-or-nothing approach adopted by many other Arab leaders since
and which, in some cases, can be show to have hindered the Palestinian cause on
a number of identifiable occasions.As we know, the British had made a third
promise. Now, the road to the creation of Israel
is tracedto 1917, and the declaration by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur
Balfour, to British Zioniststhat Britain
would ‘use their best endeavours' to assist the creation of a Jewish national
homeland inPalestine, a majority Arab region. The Declaration was made in
pursuit of Allied war aims, and wasshaped more by common suppositions about the
power of Jews worldwide than the reality of thesituation in Palestine, where
they made up just 10% of the population in 1917. There was awidespread belief
in the early 20 th century that Jews around the world constituted a single,
well-organised international community, and that the leaders of this community
- ‘International Jewry' -Jewish bankers, financiers and businessmen -
manipulated the global economy and through it,global politics. Now, as of 1914,
the myth of ‘International Jewry’ was taken for granted by mostof the world’s
leaders, and it was actually being encouraged and used by a number of
prominentZionists to exert pressure and influence upon them, on a basis of ‘If
you can’t beat ‘em, then join‘em.’ When war broke out, both sides thought that
the support of ‘International Jewry’ would beessential if they were to win. As
of 1914, the two main centres of the international Zionistmovement were Berlin
and Vienna , and most politically
active Jews lived in the Central Powers,Germany ,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire . Now,
these powers wereengaged in a war against the Russian Empire, which had been
pursuing openly anti-Semitic socialand religious policies of generations and
was the very power which had carried out the pogromsfrom which the families of
many Western European and American Jews had fled and which hadalso provoked the
first waves of Jewish emigration to Palestine. We have records that Rabbis
inLondon told their congregations to remember that they were in England, not
Russia, and that theyshould support the British war effort against Germany, and
up to 1917, indications from theAmerican press indicated that most American
Jews were sympathetic to Germany, who were notonly fighting the Russians,
incidentally, but also had the best-integrated Jewish community inEurope, its
Minister for Armaments, Walther Rathenau, for instance, being Jewish. Now, it
sohappens that the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, also wanted the support of
‘International Jewry’ (and he hadalso previously proclaimed himself ‘the
Protector of Islam’), but could not become a Zionist due tohis military
alliance with the Ottomans.From the British point of view, supporting Zionism
made sense. The Prime Minister, David LloydGeorge, was a Christian religious
Zionist, and so was open to persuasion to begin with. Theleading British
Zionist was a scientist, Dr Chaim Weizmann, President and spokesman of theWorld
Zionist Organisation, who became a very important figure early in the war when
hedeveloped a means of synthesising acetone, a chemical used in making
explosives and for whichBritain had relied previously on imports from Germany .
Weizmann became something of a hero inthe British press because of this and
through this, was able to meet with members of the Cabinet
headman of Jurdieh asked Hanita for a truce,
which was upheld. In July, Wingate carried out a larger and more ambitious
operation, involving a force of nearly 100 men attacking the village of
Dabburiya,killing twelve known insurgents and for which Wingate was awarded his
first DSO.Jewish police participated initially as guides, scouts and
interpreters: however, as operationscontinued, they took a more prominent role
and eventually Jewish police sergeants were to command patrols. Yigal Allon -
who did not serve with the SNS, but saw action with Sadeh and FOSH -recalled
that Wingate ‘regarded himself, in practice, as a member of the Haganah ,
and that was howwe all saw him - as the comrade and, as we called him,
"the Friend" [Hayedid ]’ and that Wingate andthe Haganah
viewed the SNS as another means of securing training from the British
army.Wingate was a truculent Zionist, who not only disagreed with the British
government policy of negotiated partition but often said so in public, albeit
in Hebrew, perhaps so his British colleaguescould not understand him. Moreover,
the Haganah’s strategic agenda was different from the British:to them,
the SNS role was to secure territory around Jewish settlements in Galilee ,
a disputed area,thereby ‘establishing facts’ with military force. To them, the
SNS was a means of obtaining militarytraining and continuing the inter-communal
struggle under the aegis of the British Army and, indeed,they saw the SNS as a
Haganah unit, Plugot Ha’esh , the Company of Fire. Now, the final,
and most controversial stage of the SNS campaign involved reprisal attacks.
Thelargest and most controversial such action followed a particularly nasty
Arab atrocity at the town of Tiberias ,
on the Dead Sea . In October, a large Arab gang, most of
them apparently high on hashish,entered the town and murdered 19 Jewish
children in a nursery, who had their throats slit before beingset alight.
Hearing about this, Wingate redeployed two squads from another operation and
hit the gangon its way out of Tiberias, killing forty of them. The next day, he
tracked down the rest of the gang toits lair on Mount Tabor, launching an
assault, supported by RAF bombing, in which another 14 werekilled. A few days
later, the village of Hitin Lebanon
and then to Iraq ,
from where hewas quite openly doing the bidding of the German Foreign Ministry.
A conference was called inLondon in early 1939 but such was the acrimony
between the Arab and Jewish leadership by this stage that each side said
they would boycott the conference if the other attended. The British then tried
toforce the situation with the White Paper that was presented to the Commons by
the Colonial Secretary,Malcolm Mac Donald, in mid 1939: the MacDonald White
Paper announced that the Mandate wouldend by 1949, after which Palestine would
become fully independent; Jewish immigration would berestricted to 15,000 per
year up to 1944, after which it would only continue with Arab consent; the
saleof Arab land to Jews was largely banned. The nature of the Nazi regime was
all too apparent by now,and Europe’s Jews needed a sanctuary, yet the
immigration policies of most of the western powersconfined them to going to
Palestine; it now seemed that door was closing rapidly as well, thanks toArab
pressure on the British. Yet, the Arabs also rejected the White Paper on the
grounds that it didnot stop Jewish immigration altogether and immediately.Yet,
when World War Two did break out, in September 1939, the bulk of both the
Jewish and Arabcommunities agreed to support the British in the war against
Germany. 250,000 British troops werestationed in Palestine
throughout the war, and 27,000 Jews and 25,000 Arabs joined the British
Army;the Jewish industrial and business sector flourished, due to the absolute
torrent of contracts to do work for the British garrison. The exceptions to
this were the extremists: the Mufti chose the wrong side to back, eventually
travelling to Germany
where he had several meetings with both Hitler and Himmler,and played his part
in recruiting Muslim Albanian and Central Asian volunteers into the
Waffen-SS;after the war, he had to settle in Egypt .
On the other side, the Irgun also opened secret contacts withthe Nazis – their
ideology was, effectively a form of Jewish fascism, and their aim was to offer
the Nazis with an opportunity to get all of the Jews out the Reich in return
for the Irgun waging guerrillawar against the British. This they did, at one
point carrying out the assassination of a British minister in Cairo.Another
impact of the war was the growth of American interest in the Middle
East . Like Britain, theUSA badly needed Gulf oil to support its
war effort and President Roosevelt adopted a strongly pro-Arab policy, being
particularly keen in winning the lasting friendship of Ibn Saud and pouring
moneyinto Saudi Arabia to keep it stable; in 1947, Harry Truman became the
first serving US President tovisit the Middle East, meeting with Ibn Saud on a
US battleship in the Gulf. This ran contrary to public opinion in the US ,
which has traditionally tended to be pro-Jewish. Because of this, BenGurion
visited the USA
in 1944, after which Congress, Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey, the
Republicancandidate in the 1944 Presidential election, all endorsed the
Biltmore Programme, which offered theUSA’s broad support to the creation of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine . This
was strengthenedconsiderably by the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the revelation
of the full horror of the Holocaust.President Roosevelt, then President Truman,
began to pressure Britain to lift restrictions on Jewishimmigration to
Palestine.The immediate post war period also saw some major changes in the Arab
world. In 1945, Egyptorganised the Arab League, which included Egypt, Syria,
Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanonand Yemen. The League’s main purpose
was to promote cultural, social and economic links betweenthe Arab peoples, and
it stayed away from politics, particularly Pan-Arab nationalist politics, due
to theweakness of its members: only Egypt and Yemen were independent, and Yemen
was one of the poorest countries on the planet, Saudi Arabia and Transjordan
were completely reliant upon Americanand British funds respectively, and
Lebanon, Syria and Iraq had been occupied by the British duringthe war.
However, the League did establish a Higher Committee to lobby western
governmentsagainst Zionism. It was a combination of the widespread global
sympathy for the Jews, following the revelation of theHolocaust, and the
wartime crippling of the British economy, which led to the British withdrawal
fromPalestine and the creation of Israel .
From 1948 to 1947, British forces in Palestine were subjected to amajor
terrorist campaign by the Irgun and the even more extremist Stern Gang, the
worst incident of which was the blowing up of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem, organised by Begin and carried out by Irgun operators dressed as
Arabs, in which 91 people, mainly British civilians, were killed. At thesame
time, up to 40,000 people were entering Palestine illegally per month, and the
British weredetaining those they caught in camps in Cyprus; images of Jewish
refugees from post-Nazi Europe being confined in British ‘concentration camps’
were a gift for Zionist propaganda, and Ben Gurionmade sure that images of this
were shown in cinemas all over the USA. Britain’s Labour governmentwas not only
opposed to colonialism on ideological grounds, but also wanted to get rid of a
major strategic, economic and political burden, while maintaining enough troops
and bases in the region to protect the Suez Canal.After trying to come to a
joint solution with the USA, they eventually surrendered the problem to
thenewly formed UN. The UN formed UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee
on Palestine ,which eventually
reincarnated the Peel Report, recommending that Palestine
should be divided intoseparate Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem
under the control of a UN Mandate. The Jewish statewould be called ‘Israel ’.
UNSCOP’s proposal was passed by the UN General Assembly at the end of 1947,
with Britain
and all the Muslim countries voting against. Nevertheless, Britain
announced itwould end the Mandate on 14 May 1948.UNSCOM was the blueprint for
the first Arab-Israeli War, but we will talk about that next time, including
Lloyd George and Balfour. Weizmann, it must be said, was a brilliant
‘operator’: he wasdistinguished, highly charismatic and charming, and had a
gift for knowing what made the peoplehe was talking to tick. For instance, he
did nothing to dispel the myth of the influence of ‘International Jewry', and
used it tactically as late as 1929, after which the apparently unstoppablerise
of the Jews' arch enemy, Adolf Hitler, made it implausible. It was largely
through Weizmann’slobbying of the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary that the
Declaration was made.The Declaration included the proviso that the ‘civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewishcommunities' - the Arabs who made up 90%
of Palestine's population in 1917 - would not be prejudiced by any Jewish
presence. It did not say that Palestine
would be turned into a Jewish state , just a homeland, nor did it, at any
point lay out what the borders of this homeland would be – after all, they had
yet to secure Palestine from the
Turks. Nor, most importantly, did it say exactlyhow the inevitable tensions
between the Jews and the Arabs would be resolved – that would bedecided after
the First World War was over. All it committed itself to was supporting the
principleof a Jewish homeland. Now, this principle soon had to be adapted to
conditions on the ground. In November 1918,Palestine
was occupied jointly by a British Expeditionary Force, under General Sir
EdmundAllenby, and a large force of Bedouin under Faisal, the son of Hussein of
Mecca. The British setup a military provisional government, and, in 1922, the
newly formed League of Nations gaveBritain an official Mandate to administer
Palestine, which specifically charged them withimplementing the Balfour
Declaration – so, the British were obliged under international law toencourage
Jews to immigrate to Palestine and settle there en route to setting up a Jewish
nationalhomeland there; they were also required to set up a Jewish Agency in
Palestine to allow the Jews toadminister part of this process themselves, and
this Jewish Agency was to become the unofficial‘government’ of Palestine’s Jews
up to 1947. Now, at the same time, the League seems largely tohave gone along
with Sykes-Picot: France
was given League Mandates to administer Syria
andLebanon, and Britain
another Mandate for Iraq .
There was a difference between these Mandatesand Sykes Picot and with the
Mandate given the British in Palestine, in that the League specificallylaid out
that it was the job of Britain and France to prepare these countries for
independence, whichwas to be declared within three years, and, indeed, in 1921
the British set up Iraq as an independentHashemite kingdom with Faisal as its
king. The Palestine Mandate did not mention any kind of state entity, nor did
it have any deadlines. The stance of the Americans over this was
ambiguous;President Wilson was a naive idealist whose aim of ending all wars
once and for all by giving allthe peoples of the world ‘national self
determination’ rapidly came unstuck when faced with thecomplication and
messiness of real life – attempts to apply this in Europe were to be a
contributingfactor in the path to World War Two; as of 1917, he supported both
the idea of a Jewish homelandin Palestine and the creation of Arab states;
between 1918 and 1922, some moderate Arab leadershoped that the USA would be
given the Palestine Mandate, but this was dashed when the USSenate rejected
American membership of the League of Nations.Some British politicians were
aware of the implications of the post war settlement. One of thesewas the
Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, who happened to be a Zionist, who
disliked Arabs,and a friend of Weizmann’s. Nevertheless, he was a hard-nosed
realist, and in 1922, he issued aWhite Paper denying Weizmann’s objective ‘of
making Palestine as Jewish as England is English’,and which committed Britain
to restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine’s ‘absorptive capacity’,
which was not too serious, given that Jewish immigration was
minuscule at the time, and, indeed,the British managed to attract 50,000 Arab
immigrants to Palestine in the
1950s. Another thingwhich apparently violated the terms of the Mandate was the
creation of Transjordan . Transjordan,which consisted of
the two-thirds of Palestine to the east of the River Jordan and,
technically,incorporated into the Mandate, was formed into a separate Hashemite
Arab Emirate, not subject tothe Balfour Declaration and ruled by Hussein’s son and
Faisal’s brother, Abdullah, and Abdullahsoon set up a separate government with
its capital city in Amman, with a mainly British bureaucracy and a
British-commanded army, the Arab Legion. Consequently, even the Zionistscame to
recognise that Transjordan could not form part of any
Jewish homeland, despite previously being part of Palestine.Subsequently, Palestine ,
Transjordan and Iraq
took on vital strategic importance for the Empire, asa buffer zone protecting Egypt
and the Suez Canal , and as an aerial artery between Britain
andIndia. Although aware of this, the first British High Commissioner of
Palestine, Sir HerbertSamuel, a prominent British Jew, a member of the Cabinet
producing the Balfour Declaration, anda keen but moderate Zionist,
inadvertently set the policy agenda leading to the uprisings of 1936-39. In
1920, he passed an Immigration Ordinance removing all restriction upon
Jewishimmigration to Palestine , and
created the tripartite system by which Palestine
was to be governed,with the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency) and the
Supreme Muslim Councilrepresenting their communities to the High Commissioner.
Samuel's Ordinance resulted in Arabrioting, and to pacify Arab opinion, Samuel
temporarily suspended it and allowed the riots' principal agitator, the Muslim
cleric, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to be elected Grand Mufti of Jerusalemin 1921 and
President of the Supreme Muslim Council a year later, making him both spiritual
andsecular leader of Palestine's. Haj Amin was just 28 years old when he was
elected as Mufti. Hewas born in 1893 to a middle-class Jerusalem Arab family
and was educated mainly in Cairo ,
andhe served as an officer in the Ottoman Empire in
World War One. As such, he seems to have cometo Arab nationalism relatively
late, although he proclaimed that he had always supported the aim of a
Palestinian Arab state. As Mufti, he was the main judge and administrator of
Sharia amongPalestine’s Muslim community, and also appointed Imams, and
he used these powers to heavily politicise the Islamic clergy in Palestine .
The Mufti consequently developed the strategy of usingthreats of disorder to
pressure the British into curtailing the Jewish ‘incursion' into Palestine,
whilealways remaining careful to cover any direct links with troublemakers and
to assure the British of his goodwill.At the same time, Samuel encouraged the
Jewish community to form their own permanentinstitutions. With European
organisation and European education, they did this with greatefficiency. The
Jewish Agency was set up as a semi-official governing body, representing the
Jewsto the High Commissioner. They set up the Histadrut, a kind of economic
planning body, based onsocialist principles, which set up factories, food
processing plants and a construction company,Solel Boneh, which did regular
construction work for the British Army throughout the Mandate period. It is
often stated that the British built railways and modern roads in Palestine ,
along withwater pipelines, sewage plants and an electricity grid; much of the
work was done by Jewishcontractors who used a combination of Arab and Jewish
workers. Probably the most important andcontroversial body was the Jewish
underground militia, the Haganah. The Haganah was a part-timeforce which had
been formed in 1920, and in which all Jewish men of military age were
expectedto serve; its existence was highly illegal and its units trained in
secret, although its existence was
tolerated, conditionally by Samuel and all the British High
Commissioners who followed him and,indeed, a number of senior British officers
wanted it legalised and placed under British commandand training, particularly
as the Arab community apparently became more restive in the 1930s. By1938, it
had fully 50,000 men under arms, commanded by Jewish men who had served in
theRussian, German, Austrian and Ottoman armies, financed by the International
Zionist Organisationand with a complete military staff with offices dealing
with strategy, training and intelligence: thehead of the intelligence branch,
Reuven Shiloah, was later to found Mossad. It was also very wellarmed: most of
its weapons were smuggled in, and there was some attempt at creating
undergroundweapons factories where such smuggled in weapons could be
reverse-engineered. By 1939, it had6,000 rifles, 600 machine guns and 24,000
grenades. So, by the end of the inter-war period, theJews in Palestine
had set up most of the institutions of an embryonic state – a government,
aneconomic infrastructure, an army, even something of an intelligence agency.
Now, compare this with the Arabs. The Arabs were divided throughout this period
by tribaldifferences, by religious differences and perhaps above all, by the
highly divisive figure of theMufti, who was, to use a cliché, loved and hated
in equal measure. His authority was severelyweakened by a long-standing feud
between his clan, the al-Husseinis, and the powerful an- Nashashibi family,
who, although anti-Zionist, were more openly pro-British. Indeed,
thePalestinians, throughout their history, I think, have been desperately
unfortunate in their politicalleaders, something we will be looking at in some
detail in some of the following sessions. TheArabs did not develop governing
institutions in Palestine , nor did
they ever have a unitednationalist organisation. Instead, they were divided
sharply, almost on black and white lines, between those who pursued a
completely obstructionist and oppositional policy towards both theJews and the
British, which cost them a lot of support abroad, and those who believed in
peacefulco-existence with the British and in some kind of peaceful settlement
with the Jews, such as the an- Nashashibis. Indeed, the Mufti probably threw
away his best chance at major peaceful politicalinfluence early: in 1923 the
British offered to set up a Palestine Legislative Council with 22 seats,ten
Arab, ten British and two Jewish. The Arabs, or, more specifically, the Mufti,
turned down thisoffer on the basis that the Jews and the British were
over-represented in terms of their numbers inPalestine: this was perfectly
true, but agreeing to the Legislative Committee might, at least, havegiven the
Arabs an official voice, a working compromise, if you like. Along with this,
there waslittle chance of any effective support from the rest of the Arab
world. Remember, this is at leasttwenty years before serious amounts of oil
began to flow out of the region: the Gulf Arab stateswere, at the time, among
the poorest and most backward in the world; Egypt was firmly under theiron hand
of a pro-British king, and Abdullah of Transjordan was not only a sworn enemy
of theMufti, who had encouraged his flock to assassinate him in a number of
sermons, but, as Avi Shlaimhas shown in his research, was, from the 1920s
onwards, engaged in secret negotiations with theJewish Agency over the borders
of a future Jewish state. Now, it has to be said that all this was rather
academic, as of the early to mid 1920s. The Jewish population of Palestine
remained at around 10% of the total and, indeed, over one two-year period,1926
to 1928, it actually shrank. So, there was relative peace until 1929, mainly
because the Jewsremained such a minority in Palestine ,
and a Jewish national homeland, let alone a Jewish state,seemed an unlikely
prospect at any time. However, the mid 1920s saw Europe
begin its greatestspasm of anti-Semitism, beginning in Poland
in 1925 and moving to an unprecedented level withthe rise of the Nazis. The USA
had restricted immigration in 1924, so Palestine
now took on the
role Theodor Herzl had envisaged for it, a Jewish national
sanctuary: Jewish immigration toPalestine, encouraged initially by the Nazis as
the best means of getting the Jews out of Europe,rose from 4,000 arrivals per
year in 1931 to over 61,000 in 1935, plus perhaps 5-6000 illegalimmigrants
smuggled in per year, and the Jewish population of Jerusalem and Haifa doubled
withinfive years.The perceived existential threat to the Palestinian Arabs
posed by the sudden rapid upsurge inJewish immigration produced a violent Arab
nationalist response sharpened by militant Islam. Thefirst clash came in 1929,
with the so-called Wailing Wall Incident. The Wailing Wall, or what theJews
call the Western Wall, is all that remains of the Second Jewish Temple, which
was destroyed by the Romans after the second Jewish uprising of 135 AD. To
religious Jews, it is of enormoussignificance, as it symbolises the hope that
one day the Temple Zion Palestine Hebron Palestine
‘a religious exhortation to the Mohammedan to encourage him
to fight and die for the cause of God'and going on to state ‘The warrior
fighting for God and his country must be merciful, just andlenient with
the people' an exhortation Arab rebels almost universally ignored. Islam
was more of afactor in shaping British attitudes: the notion that
Palestine may become a source of tension between the Islamic world and the
British Empire, with implications for British interests in theMiddle East and
India which the Axis could exploit, shaped the policy of the Colonial Office
andthe High Commission in dealing with Palestine in the 1930s, they
advocating compromise andconciliation in opposition to the British Army's
repeated calls for vigorous repression against Arabinsurgents.There were two
other aggravating factors which became a lot stronger in the 1930s,
land and theBritish predicament in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 1930s. When
it comes to land, Arablandlords were often keen to sell to Jews, who paid generously,
but Arab tenants were notconsulted, and were often evicted forcibly from
land their families had occupied for generations.This was aggravated by the
Zionist politico-military strategy of ‘establishing facts'. What thismeant
was that, being aware that any eventual political settlement in Palestine
would depend upondemographics, the Zionists attempted to establish a Jewish
presence in every part of Palestine
by purchasing land in majority Arab areas, preferably near Palestine 's
borders, in the disputed area of Galilee in particular. Once
land was purchased, there followed a set of drills devised by theHaganah. Haganah
volunteers moved in immediately and erected pre-fabricated quasi-militaryoutposts
aimed at preventing Arab farmers from returning; 55 such settlements were
established in1936-39. Although these were invariably cloaked as ordinary
kibbutzim, the British were fullyaware of what was happening: in April 1938,
the High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael,reported to London that
‘establishing facts' stemmed from:The desire to press on with the establishment
of a National Home all over Palestine and to show theworld, in particular the
Arab world, that violence and danger would not be a deterrent....(and)
Thedesire to extend settlements in...Galilee in general
so that the Jewish "claim" to this district will bemore easily
established.
ﾐ
The Zionists were greatly encouraged by the Peel Report
of July 1937 (see below) whichrecommended that Eretz Israel should include
as many of the Jewish Settlements and as muchJewish owned land as possible. After
this, the strategy was escalated, supported by the‘Redemption of Galilee'
charity which raised funds in Britain and the USA to support thesettlements ‘Establishing
facts' was soon seen as a major nuisance by the British Colonial Office,which was
desperate to pacify Arab opinion; in November 1938, the District
Commissioner for Galilee reported to MacMichael that ‘Dr Weizmann's fait
accompli policy' had resulted in threenew settlements being established in
this highly disturbed area, ‘one disguised as a labour camp',and that his
queries met with a ‘conspiracy of silence'; MacMichael - generally sympathetictowards
the Jews - was so disturbed by the level of army and police resources
redirected todefending the new settlements that, at his request, an Order in
(the Privy) Council was passed inearly 1938 granting him the authority to ban
new settlements unless specifically permitted byhimself. This led to
further moral and legal complications, as Lieutenant General Sir
RobertHaining, the British General Officer Commanding (GOC) - later a “’bete noir“’
for Wingate -confided to Major General Bernard Montgomery, commanding 8th
Division, in northern Palestine,
in April 1939: æ°[The] Point really is, it is [the] Jews'
land, and in law and under the Mandate, theyare “’entitled“’ to occupy [it].
Therefore any attempt to dispossess them if they bounce us, isfraught with
difficulty, and far reaching effects.’ To Palestinian Arabs, the settlements
were provocative for more mundane reasons; not only were they resentful over
their landlords sellingtheir land to outsiders, but also of Jewish success in
cultivating that land, which had often beenunproductive for generations.What do
we know about Jewish attitudes to all this?Despite Weizmann's aim, stated in
1919, ‘To make Palestine as Jewish as England is English', theZionist
leadership aimed at reaching this goal in organic manner, via immigration and
settlementunder British protection. This affected the initial Jewish reaction
to anti-Zionist violence.Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency
and accepted head of Palestine'sJewish community, at first advocated Havlagah,
or restraint, agreeing that maintenance of the moralhigh ground would guarantee
the support of the world community. Yet, by 1939, having hadseveral peace
overtures rejected, Ben-Gurion was expressing in public the view he had long
held in private, that Islam was a ‘violent doctrine', that Arabs were
instinctively intolerant and any peacefulsettlement was impossible; ‘We both
want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict’ Thiswas already the
stance of the most uncompromising Zionist leader of all - Vladimir
Jabotinsky,President of the New Zionist Organisation and originator of the
philosophy of the ‘Iron Wall'. Thiswas first enunciated in an article published
in Russia in
1923 in which Jabotinsky argued that, likeall peoples, the Arabs had a strong
sense of national identity, and the natural tendency of people toresist
incursion by another nation meant that Jews and Arabs, two nations competing
for the sameterritory, could never co-exist peacefully. Arab resistance was
entirely natural, as ‘Everyindigenous people will resist alien settlers as long
as they see any hope of ridding themselves of thedanger of foreign settlement.'
Moreover, the Arab desire for a pan-Arab federation, includingPalestine, meant
peaceful agreement with the wider Arab world would remain ‘a delusion.' TheArab
world therefore had to be coerced to recognise an Israel
in its biblical borders:Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must
either be terminated or carried out indefiance of the will of the native
population. This colonization can, therefore, continue anddevelop only under
the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron
wallwhich the native population cannot break through. ﾐ
If Zionism was ‘moral and just', justice had to prevail, leaving Zionists and
their supporterswith no choice but to use overwhelming military force to induce
more moderate voices in the Arabworld to prevail and a peaceful settlement to
be reached. Jabotinsky knew that this was already becoming Zionist policy,
factions being divided only on who would build the wall: One prefers aniron
wall of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an iron wall of British bayonets,
the third proposesan agreement with Baghdad, and appears to be satisfied with
Baghdad's bayonets...but we allapplaud, day and night, the iron wall.'Jabotinsky
was an Anglophile, had served in the British army in the First World War, and
hisaim apparently was to create the ‘Iron Wall' as an Anglo-Jewish project, a
theme taken up in amemorandum sent to the Colonial Office in early 1937,
wherein he argued for the Haganah to belegalised and placed under British
command and training, and for the British to raise a Jewish
Legion consisting of three infantry battalions from
Palestine and volunteers from the Diaspora.Ben-Gurion recalled Jabotinsky
arguing consistently that Jewish units in Palestine should be under British
command, in contradiction of the policy of Ben-Gurion's own Labour
(“’Mapai“’)movement. Yet, Jabotinsky remained uncompromising towards the Arabs,
a Jewish state ‘on both banks of the Jordan (ie. incorporating Transjordan)'
being a stated aim of his Revisionist Party and New Zionist Organisation, and
he regarded any attempt at partition as ‘treason'. Moreover, from1936, the
Revisionists maintained their own militia, Irgun Bet, a splinter group from the
Haganahwhich slowly drifted out of even Jabotinsky's control and became the
most violent Jewish group of all under its new name, Irgun Zvai Leumi and
through the influence of one of its most prominentoperators, Menachem Begin.
Now, as I have said, the Mufti often let the situation slip out of his control,
and was then forced totake action to get it back. In 1936, the Arabs finally
began to organise themselves similarly to theJews, although they had a lot of
catching up to do. In 1936, he was elected chairman of the ArabHigher
Committee, which was a new body intended to represent all of Palestine ’s
Arabs, Christianas well as Muslim, to the British. Now, as I have mentioned, in
1935, Qassam’s followers beganattacks on Jewish settlements in Galilee .
In April 1936, the Supreme Muslim Council and the ArabHigher Committee called a
general strike of Arab workers, which lasted six months and wasaccompanied by rioting,
targeting Jewish businesses and residential areas in the big towns, themurder
of British officials and Jewish civilians, and, in the summer, the forming of
large guerrillaunits in the countryside. Now, this was the beginning of the
Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, which was, put simply, the firstArab-Jewish War. I
say this for a couple of reasons: to begin with, the British noticed that
theseguerrilla units, which called themselves Mujahideen, consisted largely of
volunteers from Iraq andSyria, many of them apparently with regular army
training, and reinforced by local PalestinianArabs, who seemed to be a lot less
aggressive. Indeed, one phenomenon of the Revolt was thatmost of the rural Arab
population, the ones with actually the most to lose from the creation of
aJewish state, remained indifferent to the guerrillas and had to be coerced or
even terrorised intosupporting them; indeed, many of them cooperated actively
with the British, up to and including,later on, forming counter-guerrilla units
which cooperated with the British Army. Moreover, themilitary direction of the
guerrillas was in the hands of a former Colonel in the Iraqi Army, Fawzi
alQuwuqji, who had been enlisted by the Arab Higher Committee, i.e. the Mufti,
to give theguerrillas some direction and command; this he did, producing a
manual for guerrilla warfare acopy of which you can see in the Public Records
Office at Kew. Iraq
itself spoke internationally on behalf of the Arab Higher Committee and
attempted coercive pressure on the British with vaguethreats of escalating the
crisis in the whole region. So, what we see is not so much an insurgency asan
invasion, using guerrilla methods, in support of an elite of urban agitators
led by the Mufti. Now, the British had just a single weak brigade in Palestine ,
about 6,000 men, not all of themfighting troops, so they could not take the
offensive to deal with the guerrillas. The major Britishresponse was to
announce, in August 1936 that they were going to send a Royal Commission,under
Lord Peel, to Palestine, to investigate whether the Mandate was actually
working to thesatisfaction of all the communities. However, before it could do
so, law and order had to berestored in Palestine ,
and so they sent two infantry divisions, some 80,000 men, supported by four
squadrons of RAF bombers to Palestine ,
under Lieutenant General John Dill, with orders to crush
the guerrillas. This they did, with some considerable
ruthlessness, backed up by some severemeasures from the civilian
administration: the death penalty was introduced for saboteurs and thosehiding
firearms, and the British, at one point, were hanging between thirty and fifty
Arabs a month;corporal punishment, the birch or Rotan, was introduced for
juveniles supporting the rebellion andcollective punishment of Arab communities
supporting the guerrillas was also authorised,consisting of collective fines,
demolition of suspects’ houses, and the enforcement of curfews.The Arab Higher
Committee called off the strike in October, thanks to a combination of the
BritishArmy’s crushing of the guerrilla bands in the countryside and fear that
the citrus crop, whichneeded to be tended from October to March and on which
most of the rural Arab economydepended, would suffer if the fighting continued.
So, on 10 October, the Mufti issued a jointstatement with King Abdullah of Transjordan,
Faisal of Iraq and Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia callingoff the revolt, citing the
Peel Commission as reason.However, the Mufti again proceeded to shoot himself
in the foot by ordering the Arab Higher Committee to boycott the Peel
Commission until just before it left in January 1937, which meantthat the
Zionists almost completely dominated proceedings. When the Peel Commission
publishedits report, later on in 1937, it recommended partition, the first of
several such official reports to doso. Basically, the Jews would get north and
central Palestine in which to form
their own state; thiswould not have been as much as they wanted, but it would
be a working start, and would allowthem to rescue many more European Jews from
the Nazis. The rest of Palestine would toAbdullah; now, to the Arab Higher
Committee, not only would this mean they would actually losePalestine, but the
Mufti had publicly called for Abdullah to be killed and so would be in a
verysticky situation indeed were he to suddenly become one of his subjects.In
September 1937, the rebellion was resumed. Now, a major pertinent issue from
the followingtwo years was the growth in military cooperation between the
British Army and the Haganah. Now, I touch on this because a lot of myths have
grown up about this in both Britain
and Israel .
Manyauthors have argued that British soldiers such as TE Lawrence, Harry St
John Philby and John BagottGlubb established a tradition of romantic
pro-Arabism in the British Army or, more accurately‘pro-Bedouinism’, based upon
a sentimentalisation of the nomadic Bedu
, who had fought withLawrence. The Bedu
were seen as a ‘martial race’, brave, honourable and courteous, uncorrupted
byurban living, correctly deferential to white
sahibs , and possessing qualities to which those sahibs aspired. 148 This is supported by the
contemporary testimony of a number of British soldiers: Arabstended to treat
British soldiers with courtesy, hospitality and at least an impression of
helpfulness. 149 Conversely, British soldiers serving in Palestine often found
orthodox Jews alien beyondcomprehension and the
Ashkenazim , the European Jews making up the majority of the
newimmigrants, superior and aloof. 150
Yet, reviewing contemporary military documents reveals a more complex.
Not only did General Sir John Dill and his successors as General Officer
Commanding Palestine take the Army Council's initialinstruction to ‘crush’ the
rebellion very seriously, and argue consistently for a tougher line againstArab
nationalism, but were prepared to enlist Jewish support. Their principal
opponents in this werethe High Commission and the Colonial Office in London ,
who wished to enlist the support of the Arabkings to win over the Arab Higher
Committee, and therefore opposed the courting of overt Jewish
support, and use of Jewish military units as unnecessarily
provocative. Measures adoptedsubsequently, such as military control and the use
of unrestricted armed force to smash the Arabgangs, indicate that the British
authorities were now following the Army’s line of argument rather thanthat of
the FO and Colonial Office.However, another issue now emerged - arming the
Jews. As of 1936, Jews formed part of thePalestine Police and all of the irregular
Supernumerary Police ( Notrim in
Hebrew), which enlisted3,000 volunteers between April and October 1936. 163 It
is unsurprising that the Haganah pressed
itsmembers to join the JSP in order to receive weapons training, courtesy of
the British, and the JSPallowed the
Haganah to make use of weapons stored for its use in Jewish settlements:
when Yitzhak Sadeh formed his elite
Haganah strike force, FOSH, most of its members had been trained in the
JSP. Nor did the British Army seem to mind: the
Notrim ’s role was confined initially to protecting Jewishsettlements
and a section of railway running through majority Jewish areas but it is
evident that Dillnot only wanted to expand their numbers, but use them
offensively against the gangs.From March 1937, Notrim were authorised to carry out ‘hot
pursuits’ of fleeing gangs, and insummer that year they were embodied formally
as the uniformed Jewish Settlement Police (JSP) under British Army command and
training. Ben-Gurion recalled that by then, both the Yishuv and theBritish Army
accepted the Notrim /JSP as ‘legal Haganah ’ and the best available source of
militarytraining for young Jewish men - ‘Jewish bayonets’, courtesy of the
British army.By March 1938, the British Army had, effectively, destroyed all the
large guerrilla gangs inPalestine once and for all, and this prompted a change
in insurgent strategy. The insurgents switchedaway from waging guerrilla
warfare against the British Army and the Palestine Police and towardscarrying
out terror attacks directed at civilian targets: this involved murdering or
kidnapping Britishofficials and Jewish and Arab civilians, sabotage of British
facilities and night-time attacks on Jewishsettlements in the countryside. This
was financed by drug smuggling and gun-running, and by a protection racket
extorting money and concealment from Arab businesses and villages. Because of
thediffuse and unpredictable nature of these activities, by the autumn of 1938
British forces were badlyoverstretched, single platoons were often defending
villages against attacks from far larger insurgentforces(35), and the GOC,
General Sir Robert Haining, was communicating to London that he hadcancelled
all offensive operations, and that the authorities had, effectively, lost
control of large parts of the country. The Arab population was starting to fall
in behind the insurgents, and, most ominously of all, this included much of the
Palestine Police, there being numerous reported cases of Arab policeassisting
the theft of weapons from police stations.It was at this point that perhaps the
best know, and certainly the most controversial Christian Zionist of them all
began to make his mark. This, of course, was Captain Orde Charles Wingate of
the RoyalArtillery. Now, Wingate is usually only mentioned in passing in most
histories of the Arab-Israeliconflict, but I think this is unfair, because if
you look at what he actually did, his influence on thesubsequent development of
the Arab-Israeli conflicts has been immense. In particular, he providedthem with
a military doctrine by which the ‘Iron Wall’ philosophy could be put into
practice, whichcentred upon aggressively carrying the war into enemy territory
in order to maximise the pain andterror for them, and he also gave them the
confidence in their own military ability to make them putthis philosophy into
practice.
Now, it was because of the deteriorating
situation that Haining supported the proposal made to his predecessor, General
Sir Archibald Wavell, by Wingate, who was then a captain working in
theintelligence cell of his HQ, to form special counter-insurgent units to hunt
down gangs operating bynight in rural areas. What Wingate was proposing was
‘counter-gang’ operations, referring explicitlyto ‘government gangs’ hunting
terrorist gangs on their own territory and using their own methodsagainst them.
In his view, the best way to deal with infiltrating insurgent gangs was to
deploy what hecalled ‘moving ambushes’, specially trained patrol units,
sweeping known infiltration routes or, preferably, directed towards incoming
gangs, and drilled to deliver an immediate and effective attack if one was
encountered. Wingate had used this method against shifta bandits while serving with theSudan
Defence Force ten years earlier. and the deployment of such forces has been
common practicein British Army counter-insurgent operations for the last 100
years, we have seen it practiced by theSAS in such operations all over the
world over the past fifty years. Wingate was firm that Notrim /JSP should participate: units could
either be British, with Notrim andother
Jewish supernumeraries acting as guides and interpreters, or
British-trained Notrim , ‘ideal for this
task, as possessing expert local language both of area, and character and
language of Arabs. Thereis ample evidence of their courage and they are
intensely keen and eager to learn’; the one group thatshould be excluded were
Arab police, ‘Arab police are useless, being both sympathetic towards, and
inawe of, the gangs....Trust will become appropriate after, and not before, the
Government has scotchedthe terror.’ 193 As noted previously, the loyalty of
Arab policemen had been patchy since 1936, andtheir collapse was a key factor
in the crisis that befell the British in autumn 1938, so Wingate’s viewwas
probably shared by many. Notrim tactics
in defending settlements from night attacks were, for the period 1936-38, as
desultoryas those of the British, consisting mainly of directing rifle fire
from behind the settlement’s staticdefences at where the shooting from outside
was coming from, while taking steps to summon Britishtroops to the area. It was
as much as they were allowed to do under British policy. While the digest
praised the determination of the Notrim
, it was also felt that their poor level of training made themsomething of a
liability, their indiscriminate shooting making them a threat to British troops
in thearea, and their lack of formal organisation made cooperation with them
difficult.With Haining’s backing, Wingate formed his first squads in order to
patrol a prime target for terroristattacks, the oil pipeline running across
northern Galilee from Iraq to Haifa which, by spring 1938, was being blown up
several times a night. In early June, the SNS carried out their first
operations,ambushing three Arab gangs on the pipeline, after which attacks
ceased for several months. However,the insurgents then switched to carrying out
large numbers of simultaneous sabotage attacks by small parties – what the Jews
called ‘pellets’. Wingate’s response was twofold: firstly, he acquired
somemachine guns from his senior commander and switched to using large numbers
of small, staticambushes, which killed enough insurgents for attacks on the
line to cease altogether: secondly, heinstigated nightly patrols of Arab
villages in the area in order to impress on the local Arab populationthat the
British were in the area and they were watching them. By late June, again with
the backing of his superiors, Wingate escalated from this to carrying out
pre-emptive raids on Arab villages known to be harbouring terrorists. The first
of these, on the village of Jurdieh, involved Wingate leading three patrols
across the Lebanon border to hit the village from behind, killing fifteen known
insurgents; the
headman of Jurdieh asked Hanita for a truce, which was upheld.
In July, Wingate carried out a larger and more ambitious operation, involving a
force of nearly 100 men attacking the village of Dabburiya,killing twelve known
insurgents and for which Wingate was awarded his first DSO.Jewish police
participated initially as guides, scouts and interpreters: however, as
operationscontinued, they took a more prominent role and eventually Jewish
police sergeants were to command patrols. Yigal Allon - who did not serve with
the SNS, but saw action with Sadeh and FOSH -recalled that Wingate ‘regarded
himself, in practice, as a member of the
Haganah , and that was howwe all saw him - as the comrade and, as we
called him, "the Friend" [Hayedid
]’ and that Wingate andthe
Haganah viewed the SNS as another means of securing training from the
British army.Wingate was a truculent Zionist, who not only disagreed with the
British government policy of negotiated partition but often said so in public,
albeit in Hebrew, perhaps so his British colleaguescould not understand him.
Moreover, the Haganah’s strategic agenda
was different from the British:to them, the SNS role was to secure territory
around Jewish settlements in Galilee , a disputed
area,thereby ‘establishing facts’ with military force. To them, the SNS was a
means of obtaining militarytraining and continuing the inter-communal struggle
under the aegis of the British Army and, indeed,they saw the SNS as a Haganah unit,
Plugot Ha’esh , the Company of Fire. Now, the final, and most
controversial stage of the SNS campaign involved reprisal attacks. Thelargest
and most controversial such action followed a particularly nasty Arab atrocity
at the town of Tiberias , on the Dead
Sea . In October, a large Arab gang, most of them apparently high
on hashish,entered the town and murdered 19 Jewish children in a nursery, who
had their throats slit before beingset alight. Hearing about this, Wingate
redeployed two squads from another operation and hit the gangon its way out of
Tiberias, killing forty of them. The next day, he tracked down the rest of the
gang toits lair on Mount Tabor, launching an assault, supported by RAF bombing,
in which another 14 werekilled. A few days later, the village
of Hitin Lebanon
and then to Iraq ,
from where hewas quite openly doing the bidding of the German Foreign Ministry.
A conference was called inLondon in early 1939 but such was the acrimony
between the Arab and Jewish leadership by this stage
that each side said they would boycott the conference if the
other attended. The British then tried toforce the situation with the White
Paper that was presented to the Commons by the Colonial Secretary,Malcolm Mac
Donald, in mid 1939: the MacDonald White Paper announced that the Mandate
wouldend by 1949, after which Palestine would become fully independent; Jewish
immigration would berestricted to 15,000 per year up to 1944, after which it
would only continue with Arab consent; the saleof Arab land to Jews was largely
banned. The nature of the Nazi regime was all too apparent by now,and Europe’s
Jews needed a sanctuary, yet the immigration policies of most of the western
powersconfined them to going to Palestine; it now seemed that door was closing
rapidly as well, thanks toArab pressure on the British. Yet, the Arabs also
rejected the White Paper on the grounds that it didnot stop Jewish immigration
altogether and immediately.Yet, when World War Two did break out, in September
1939, the bulk of both the Jewish and Arabcommunities agreed to support the
British in the war against Germany. 250,000 British troops werestationed in Palestine
throughout the war, and 27,000 Jews and 25,000 Arabs joined the British Army;the
Jewish industrial and business sector flourished, due to the absolute torrent
of contracts to do work for the British garrison. The exceptions to this were
the extremists: the Mufti chose the wrong side to back, eventually travelling
to Germany
where he had several meetings with both Hitler and Himmler,and played his part
in recruiting Muslim Albanian and Central Asian volunteers into the
Waffen-SS;after the war, he had to settle in Egypt .
On the other side, the Irgun also opened secret contacts withthe Nazis – their
ideology was, effectively a form of Jewish fascism, and their aim was to offer
the Nazis with an opportunity to get all of the Jews out the Reich in return
for the Irgun waging guerrillawar against the British. This they did, at one
point carrying out the assassination of a British minister in Cairo.Another
impact of the war was the growth of American interest in the Middle
East . Like Britain, theUSA badly needed Gulf oil to support its
war effort and President Roosevelt adopted a strongly pro-Arab policy, being
particularly keen in winning the lasting friendship of Ibn Saud and pouring
moneyinto Saudi Arabia to keep it stable; in 1947, Harry Truman became the
first serving US President tovisit the Middle East, meeting with Ibn Saud on a
US battleship in the Gulf. This ran contrary to public opinion in the US ,
which has traditionally tended to be pro-Jewish. Because of this, BenGurion
visited the USA
in 1944, after which Congress, Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey, the
Republicancandidate in the 1944 Presidential election, all endorsed the
Biltmore Programme, which offered theUSA’s broad support to the creation of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine . This
was strengthenedconsiderably by the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the revelation
of the full horror of the Holocaust.President Roosevelt, then President Truman,
began to pressure Britain to lift restrictions on Jewishimmigration to
Palestine.The immediate post war period also saw some major changes in the Arab
world. In 1945, Egyptorganised the Arab League, which included Egypt, Syria,
Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanonand Yemen. The League’s main purpose
was to promote cultural, social and economic links betweenthe Arab peoples, and
it stayed away from politics, particularly Pan-Arab nationalist politics, due
to theweakness of its members: only Egypt and Yemen were independent, and Yemen
was one of the poorest countries on the planet, Saudi Arabia and Transjordan
were completely reliant upon Americanand British funds respectively, and
Lebanon, Syria and Iraq had been occupied by the British duringthe war.
However, the League did establish a Higher Committee to lobby western
governmentsagainst Zionism.
It was a combination of the widespread global sympathy for
the Jews, following the revelation of theHolocaust, and the wartime crippling
of the British economy, which led to the British withdrawal fromPalestine and
the creation of Israel .
From 1948 to 1947, British forces in Palestine were subjected to amajor
terrorist campaign by the Irgun and the even more extremist Stern Gang, the
worst incident of which was the blowing up of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem, organised by Begin and carried out by Irgun operators dressed as
Arabs, in which 91 people, mainly British civilians, were killed. At thesame
time, up to 40,000 people were entering Palestine illegally per month, and the
British weredetaining those they caught in camps in Cyprus; images of Jewish
refugees from post-Nazi Europe being confined in British ‘concentration camps’
were a gift for Zionist propaganda, and Ben Gurionmade sure that images of this
were shown in cinemas all over the USA. Britain’s Labour governmentwas not only
opposed to colonialism on ideological grounds, but also wanted to get rid of a
major strategic, economic and political burden, while maintaining enough troops
and bases in the region to protect the Suez Canal.After trying to come to a
joint solution with the USA, they eventually surrendered the problem to
thenewly formed UN. The UN formed UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee
on Palestine ,which eventually
reincarnated the Peel Report, recommending that Palestine
should be divided intoseparate Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem
under the control of a UN Mandate. The Jewish statewould be called ‘Israel ’.
UNSCOP’s proposal was passed by the UN General Assembly at the end of 1947,
with Britain and
all the Muslim countries voting against. Nevertheless, Britain
announced itwould end the Mandate on 14 May 1948.UNSCOM was the blueprint for
the first Arab-Israeli War, but we will talk about that next time
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