After the conclusion of the peace settlements following
the First World War, Britain attempted,
for a time successfully, to secure the benefits of
empire in the Middle East while minimising the
costs of control. Its time-honoured way of achieving
this was to maintain old social structures and
unreconstructed traditional rulers. Modernisation
and democratisation was at best half-hearted,
since mass nationalism would have threatened
British dominance.
The Ottoman khedive of Egypt became a king
under British supervision. The Hashemite amirs
of Arabia were transformed into sovereign rulers.
The Arab states were also provided with constitutions;
assemblies were ‘elected’ and ministers
were appointed who were supposedly responsible
to the assemblies. British ‘advisers’ made sure that
law and order were maintained and Britain’s
interests preserved. These arrangements proved
unstable and, after the Second World War, progressively
collapsed in Egypt, Iraq and the Sudan.
Although not an Arab state, Iran (Persia) was subjected
to a similar pattern of indirect rule after the
war. This merely continued, in this region, the
policy followed before the 1914 war. Britain was
inventive in devising constitutional and international
arrangements that gave it what was necessary
to protect its imperial interests without
saddling it with responsibility for the welfare of
the indigenous peoples of the countries it controlled.
An exception was Aden, which was
annexed in the nineteenth century and became a
colony ruled outright by Britain; its population,
however, was small. A more ingenious solution
was found for the Sudan, reconquered in 1898,
which became half a colony, a so-called condominium,
shared between Egypt and Britain in
1899; in reality, both Egypt and the Sudan were
administered by Britain. Britain did not attempt
to rule over the Arabs living in the sheikhdoms
of the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf, or in the
interior of Arabia. Instead, special treaties were
signed and protectorates proclaimed excluding
any foreign influence other than British. Iraq,
Iran, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt were
ostensibly independent countries bound only to
Britain by treaties of alliance ‘freely concluded’
against this general background of its imperial
policy in the Middle East; the position of
Palestine, a large, predominantly Arab land for
which Britain assumed direct responsibility under
the League Mandate, was different. From the
first, Palestine proved a troublesome possession.
Far from providing Britain with a friendly and
secure base in the Middle East, increasing
numbers of troops from Britain’s small army had
to be assigned to Palestine just to try to keep the
peace. In other parts of the Middle East British
policy also ran into constant problems. It was
already too late and too expensive to extend
imperial control by the mixture of force, efficient
administration and paternalism that Britain had so
successfully adopted in the heyday of imperialism.
Taking on the heritage of the Ottoman rulers
after the First World War turned out to be far
more difficult than the British had expected. Not
all the different ethnic and religious groups
accepted the Arab rulers imposed on them. The
largely desert regions of the former Ottoman
lands that Britain had now acquired, with their
stretches of irrigated territory along the coastlines
and river banks, were divided into Palestine,
Transjordan and Iraq. The ‘royal’ protégés whom
Britain appointed to rule the Arab states were two
sons of the Hashemite Sharif Husain of Mecca,
Abdullah and Faisal. What territories they would
actually rule remained uncertain, a detail not sufficiently
worked out in 1919, especially as the
French had their own ideas about how to govern
Syria and Lebanon, the Arab territories that had
been assigned to them. Abdullah had hoped to
become king of Iraq with Faisal as king of Syria.
Faisal actually established himself in Syria for a
short time until he was driven out by the French.
The British then decided to install Faisal as king
of Iraq, which left his brother disappointed.
Abdullah, at the head of a contingent of tribal
forces, in turn threatened to avenge Faisal’s
unceremonious expulsion from French Syria, at
the same time putting forward claims to rule over
an Arab Palestine, claims that were totally unacceptable
to the British. Instead, the territories
across the Jordan, the Transjordan, were separated
from Palestine and constituted into a separate
state in 1921 with Amir Abdullah as ruler.
This was intended as no more than a temporary
arrangement until the French agreed to allow
Abdullah to become king of Syria. But this the
French never did. Syria thus nurses a historical
grievance. The ruler of small, barren Transjordan
hankered after Jerusalem but was totally dependent
on Britain.
The creation of these states was not based on
any logical or natural divisions. Nor were they
based on the Wilsonian principle of what the
people wished, even supposing this could have
been accurately discovered. Instead they derived
from machinations of a few leaders and from the
power play of Britain and France. Ottoman dominion
was more easily destroyed than replaced.
The one country with clear national frontiers
was Egypt. Britain’s dominance was difficult to
justify after the First World War. Egypt had
received continuous Western tutelage since the
British occupation began, and an efficient administration
had been built up with outstanding and
powerful British proconsuls, modestly named
‘consul-generals’ (because Turkish suzerainty was
acknowledged until 1914). The Sudan too was
under effective British control, as we have seen,
though in theory it was shared with Egypt.
During the war of 1914–18 Egypt was declared
a British protectorate; a strong military base was
established and all protest was suppressed. The
war nevertheless brought about change. It created
wealth among a minority of Egyptian merchants,
and a small Egyptian elite evolved, whose
members became determined to remove British
control and govern the country in their own
interests rather than Britain’s. But they were split
between the supporters of the monarchy and supporters
of a nationalist party, the Wafd, led by
Sa’ad Zaghlul, who in 1918 made himself
spokesman of the nationalist cause. How could
Egypt be denied independence when it was
promised to the backward Bedouin Arabs? After
riots and demonstrations Egypt was offered
limited independence. Zaghlul objected. He also
demanded that Egypt should have a say in the
Sudan, for control of the headwaters of the Nile
was regarded as vital by the Egyptians, who were
dependent upon its water. No one in Cairo would
conclude a treaty on British terms, so Britain in
1922 unilaterally proclaimed a limited Egyptian
independence but reserved all those rights considered
essential to British interests including military
control of the Suez Canal.
So-called constitutional politics now revolved
around the rivalry for power among the group
of Wafdist politicians supported by wealthy landowners
and the corrupt supporters of the king.
Between Britain and an elected Egyptian Wafd
government a modus vivendi was at long last
achieved by the signature of an Anglo-Egyptian
alliance in August 1936. British troops were withdrawn
from Egypt’s main towns but British air
and land bases were maintained to guard the Suez
Canal, and the Royal Navy had free use of the harbour
of Alexandria. In the event of war or the
imminent threat of it, the Egyptian government
promised Britain its full support and unrestricted
use of all Egyptian facilities and territory. Under
the terms of the treaty the Egyptian army would
also pass under British command in wartime. For
a while all seemed peace and harmony and the
foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was even featured
on Egyptian postage stamps. But within
two years there was renewed bitterness about the
continued presence of British troops.
During the 1939–45 war King Farouk and the
Egyptian government proved uncertain allies.
Egypt did not declare war on Germany and Italy,
but was nonetheless ‘defended’ by the British
Eighth Army against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
Meantime, Farouk and his government were
making secret overtures to Hitler in 1941, professing
to welcome a German occupation. Hatred
of Britain played a part, but there may also have
been an element of reinsurance in case Rommel,
as seemed likely, entered Cairo victorious. The
British victory at El Alamein in 1942 settled
Egypt’s immediate future, since Britain’s wartime
needs overrode all notions of genuine Egyptian
independence. To the Egyptians at the end of the
war what stood out starkly was not that they had
been defended against a German invasion but
that, despite Britain’s recognition of their independence
in 1936, the British remained virtually
an occupying power ten years later. By then an
economically exhausted but still militarily dominant
Britain faced a chorus of strident nationalist
demands to revise the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of
1936 and to hand complete independence over
to Egypt’s rival political leadership. As elsewhere
in the Arab world, after 1945 Britain was faced
in Egypt with the immensely difficult task of
appeasing an Arab nationalism that was now
stronger than ever.
Treaties and a special relationship also protected
British interests in Iraq which became a British
mandate after the First World War. In many ways
Britain carried on where the Ottoman rulers had
left off. Except in non-Arab Persia, where Shia
Muslims are the majority, the Arab governing
elite in country after country was chosen from the
same group, the Sunni Muslims, whether they
were in a majority as in the Arabian peninsula or
in a minority as in Iraq. Other minorities, communities
of Kurds, Christians and Jews, were left
to the mercy of the Sunnis, as were some majority
groups, such as the Shia Muslims of Iraq. The
Iraqi Shiites were not reconciled to alien or Sunni
rule and rose in revolt in 1920. The British helped
to suppress the rising, the Royal Air Force brutally
bombing the rebels into submission. The
British then proceeded to install the Amir Faisal
as king, but Iraq remained an unstable kingdom,
with an ineffective and corrupt parliament. A few
years later, in 1933, the Iraqi army carried out a
horrifying massacre of Christian Assyrians. The
British did not intervene; good relations with Iraq
took priority.
The monarchy set up by the British did not
prove a strong stabilising influence. After Faisal’s
death in 1933, his playboy son succeeded, only
to be killed six years later in one of his many
sports cars. As in all the newly independent but
politically underdeveloped states, the indigenous
army played an increasingly important role. By
the 1930s Iraqi independence was internationally
recognised; Britain appeared to have fulfilled its
task and preserved its interests in the form of a
treaty signed in 1930 with a nominally independent
Iraq. But internally Iraq remained as
unstable as before, and in 1936 a successful coup
saw the start of a series of military interventions
in government.
At the start of the Second World War the
German National Socialists seemed to many Iraqis
to be natural allies; not only were they at war with
the hated British, but they were enforcing a programme
of anti-Jewish racial policies and were
apparently ready to allow the Arabs their own way
in Palestine. Germany’s victories in 1940 and
1941 proved even more persuasive in turning Iraq
away from the Allies. It now looked likely that
Britain’s dominance of the Middle East would be
broken. Although, Iraq was bound to Britain by
special treaty, the country became a centre for
anti-British Arab activity, and in the spring of
1941 a pro-German coup drove out the Regent
and his government. For Britain the situation was
very dangerous. With vital British interests,
including the continued flow of oil from the
Kirkuk wells, at stake, Churchill ordered the
occupation of Iraq by British and Indian troops
in May 1941. For the remainder of the war, and
indeed for some years after, Britain was able to
reassert its dominance, until it all collapsed in
another bloody Iraqi coup in 1958.
Persia, during the First World War, was a partitioned
country divided between Russia and
Britain until the Russians departed after the
Bolshevik Revolution. The end of the war in
1918 left the British in a dominant position with
sole rights to the exploitation of Persian oil. As in
Iraq, Britain in 1921 moved away from direct
control to indirect influence. Among the leaders
who seized power in Persia was the self-appointed
commander of the Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan.
He soon extended his military power over the
whole country, crushing tribal revolts and political
opposition, and dignifying his authoritarian
rule with a constitutional façade. The Persian parliament,
the Majlis, was dependent upon the
rulers, not the other way round.
In 1925 Reza Khan had himself chosen as the
new Shah and declared the foundation of the
Pahlavi dynasty, whose survival he sought to
ensure by despotic rule and the murder of opponents.
Britain did not intervene and regarded it as
in its best interests to deal with a strong ruler,
allowing agreements to be made that would not
be jeopardised by changes of leadership. What
mattered was to maintain the Anglo-Persian oil
concessions and the bulk of the profits. As oil production
increased, the royalties paid to the Shah
also grew; these he used to strengthen his army.
Following the example of Kemal Atatürk, he
forced Westernisation through. The emancipation
of women and the spread of Western influences,
especially education, began to change Iran,
though more in the towns than in the countryside.
Communications were improved and there was
some industrial development. Centralised government,
a growing bureaucracy and a new army represented
the modern face of Persia, renamed Iran
in 1935; but, for the masses of the poor, little was
done. The Shah favoured the rich, the merchants
and the landlords, over the majority, the poor
peasants, from whom taxes and military service
were exacted. To the poor’s resentment against
the rich was added a religious dimension: the peasants
remained faithful to traditional Muslim teaching,
while the middle and upper classes tended to
Western secularism. The Shah’s efforts to stimulate
modernisation widened rather than narrowed
the differences between the poor 90 per cent and
the privileged few at the top of the social pyramid.
The seeds of reaction were sown.
The Shah wished to throw off British influence
and was attracted, when the Second World War
began, to National Socialist Germany, as were
other Middle Eastern leaders. In the midst of a
devastating war Britain could not afford to jeopardise
its oil supplies. The German invasion of the
Soviet Union in June 1941 gave Iran an added
importance as a vital Allied supply route to the
Russians. With Britain and the Soviet Union now
allies, joint action was agreed. In August 1941
British and Russian troops invaded Iran and
deposed the Shah. The 21-year-old Mohammed
Reza succeeded his father as Shah. Under Allied
supervision mass politics were encouraged, with
the Russians, the Americans and the British
seeking to broaden their support among the
people. Thus the Russians promoted a pro-Soviet
Tudeh Party with its base in the Soviet-occupied
north. The British supported tribal leaders in the
south. The disruption the war brought to Iran
compounded the problems from which the
country was already suffering, but the national
crises were postponed until the war’s conclusion.
France’s power and role in the Middle East was
once second only to Britain’s. Despite France’s
success in penetrating the eastern Mediterranean
culturally and commercially – French became the
language of the educated elite – French power
was eroded by two world wars. The British succeeded
in limiting France’s share of Ottoman
spoils to the Lebanon and to a Syria much
reduced in size. France showed little interest in
guiding its mandate to independence.
In 1920 the French made short shrift of
Faisal’s Syrian kingdom. They then proceeded to
divide their mandate into five separate administrative
nations and, when this proved unworkable,
into two states (in 1925), the Lebanon and Syria.
The mandatory governments were firmly controlled
by the French military on the model of
Morocco. Nationalist demonstrations and, all the
more so, rebellions were harshly suppressed.
Complete military control was the prior condition
of France’s civilising mission. In the aftermath of
a serious Muslim revolt in Syria in 1925–6, the
French decided it was expedient to grant more
autonomy and proclaimed a Syrian republic in
1930 with a parliamentary constitution. Whereas
Britain fostered Arab ‘monarchies’, the French
promoted ‘republics’. In 1936 a French–Syrian
treaty, following the British example in Iraq,
sought to lay the basis of a partnership between
Syria and France in place of outright French
domination. Arab nationalism in Syria was not
satisfied. The French military and bureaucracy
maintained close supervisory control, their presence
making it evident who the real rulers were.
In the Lebanon, the French faced less opposition,
and the constitution which they imposed
sought carefully to distribute the offices and representation
among the principal groups of inhabitants.
But nationalist opposition to the French
occupation developed among both the Christian
Maronites and the Muslims. France’s domination
of the Levant became a vital symbol of its continued
role as a great power.
France took its cultural mission seriously and
made sacrifices for it. Money and teachers were
poured in to provide French education; hospitals
were built and French judicial codes introduced.
Communications improved, Beirut turned into
one of the Middle East’s best harbours, modern
cities with fine public buildings and adequate utilities
transformed the Ottoman towns and, most
important of all, a genuine effort was made to
improve the lot of the peasant, with impressive
increases in agricultural productivity. France thus
made a real and genuine contribution to the wellbeing
of the peoples of Syria and the Lebanon.
In Syria and the Lebanon in 1940, as well as
North Africa, however, the French administration
and army remained loyal to the government of
Vichy France, and obeyed its orders. Although
the generals on the spot wanted to fight on, suspicion
of Britain’s intentions also remained
strong. As long as Syria and the Lebanon did not
become an enemy base, Britain, beset by enough
difficulties already, was prepared to leave Vichy
undisturbed in the Levant. But the Syrians,
impressed by the German victories, became
increasingly pro-Nazi. Syria was the key. The
Germans arranged to send military supplies to
Iraq by way of neighbouring Vichy Syria. Vichy
agreed to cooperate in return for substantial
German concessions in France. The Vichy government
also agreed to defend Syria against a
British attack. So German planes landed on Syrian
airfields with supplies for Iraq; but the effort was
in vain. Churchill acted ruthlessly. If necessary the
British would fight their former allies. Iraq as has
been seen was occupied before German supplies
could get through and then, in June 1941,
Britain, together with the Free French forces,
invaded Syria and the Lebanon.
The Syrian and Lebanese campaigns signified
a deep humiliation for France. The bulk of the
French forces had refused to join the Free French
troops and, though they capitulated, had been
allowed to return to Vichy France. Despite the
ceremonial return of Syria and the Lebanon to
Free France, it was the British who were the clear
masters of the situation. Capitalising on this,
Britain demanded that the Free French proclaim,
in order to appeal to Arab opinion throughout
the Middle East, that the Lebanon and Syria
would be free. De Gaulle had no choice but to
comply. Deeply resentful, he accused Britain of
driving France out of the Levant.
De Gaulle in 1945 was more concerned to reestablish
French authority. In May he ordered
military action and a number of Syrian towns
were shelled and bombed. But this was not 1920.
Britain was in a position both of overwhelming
military might and of decisive political influence
in Europe and the Middle East. Supported by the
US, Britain forced the French out. It was a humiliating
end to French rule, and de Gaulle neither
forgot nor forgave.
The French were able to take comfort two years
later when British rule in Palestine came to an end.
Although Britain’s Balfour Declaration had powerfully
contributed to the creation of the State of
Israel, there were in 1945 many Jews who no
longer saw in Britain a benevolent friend. British
policies had not won Arab friendship either.
Biblical Palestine was a familiar concept in the
West, but at the close of the First World War few
people in Britain or elsewhere had more than the
vaguest notion of its geographical extent; King
David’s and Solomon’s empire had included much
of today’s Syria and Jordan, Egypt’s Sinai as well
as contemporary Israel. There was no simple guide
to what the modern territorial frontiers should be
since Palestine as a country had ceased to exist
under the Ottoman Turks. It was the British who
re-created Palestine within its post-1919 frontiers.
To the north were Syria and Lebanon: how far
should these countries extend? Agreement on the
frontier was reached with the French government;
then, in 1922, the British decided to divide their
sphere along the River Jordan, which thus formed
the eastern frontier of Palestine. Beyond the river
to the east a new country was created: the British
Mandate of Transjordan.
The importance of these artificial frontiers was
never accepted as final by the peoples who lived
within them. Syria could dream of being reunited
with the Lebanon and of establishing a greater
Syria by incorporating land belonging to presentday
Israel. Jordan claimed Palestinian lands west
of the river, including Jerusalem. Israel claimed
the West Bank – in biblical times Judaea and
Samaria – which before 1947 was part of the
Palestine Mandate. Possession has been decided
by war and conquest and the Arab Palestinians
have no country of their own. Within the mandated
territory of Palestine as geographically
defined in 1922 the Jews were to be permitted to
build their National Home among the 650,000
Palestinian Arabs already living there.
As only 68,000 Jews inhabited Palestine in
1919 there could be no question of forming a
Jewish state immediately. A National Home was
a vaguer phrase; but there was no doubt about
the end in view. Zionists, and also such powerful
statesmen as Churchill, Smuts and Lloyd George,
believed that a progressive Jewish state would, in
future years, be re-created; the Balfour Declaration
of 1917 was seen as providing a promise of
assistance towards the goal of a pro-British Jewish
state. Until events proved otherwise, the Palestinian
Arab population was regarded by the
British as too sunk in poverty and backwardness
to merit consideration. In some official papers
they were contemptuously referred to as mixed
‘Levantines’. The racial arrogance of an outmoded
imperialist frame of mind was thus superimposed
on the complicated Palestine issue.
There was a significant silence about the political
rights of the majority of the inhabitants of
Palestine in the Balfour Declaration; they were
given no more than an assurance that the ‘civil
and religious rights’ of the ‘non-Jewish population’
would not be prejudiced, although they
were the overwhelming majority. Leading Zionists
recognised that a Jewish state was a distant
prospect and would require large-scale immigration
of Jews; but that Jews in their masses would
actually come was a matter of faith.
In 1919 the majority of Palestine’s 68,000
Jews were settled in Jerusalem, most of them
orthodox Jews who had lived there under
Ottoman rule for four centuries in their own religious
communities. These religious Jews were
generally opposed to the aims of the ‘new’ late
nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from
Europe inspired by Zionist ideals of nationalism
and statehood. It was persecution of Jews in the
Russian Empire especially, and widespread anti-
Semitism, which had led to the birth of Zionism
before the First World War. Some 16,000 Zionist
pioneers had settled in what had been part of the
Ottoman Empire, mainly in agricultural colonies
but also in towns. Working on the inhospitable
land they had been inspired by the belief that they
were laying the basis of a state for the Jewish
people. Zionists asserted, with Theodor Herzl,
that the Jews were a people, dispersed in history,
but one people wherever they now lived. One day
they would return to Palestine, their historical
country. The early Zionists saw themselves as
colonisers reclaiming Jewish land, precursors of
the Jewish nation. But the world was ruled by the
great powers, so the Zionists would need the
sympathy and protection of one of these if they
were to set about building their own nation.
Theodor Herzl had tried to enlist the help of the
German kaiser. The Zionist leader Dr Chaim
Weizmann turned to Britain.
The Jews bought land in Palestine and on this
land built their kibbutz, their own agricultural
communities. The majority of the Arab population
was seen by the Zionists and their Western supporters
as benefiting rather than suffering from this
economic development of the barren Palestine soil,
which Jewish zeal and skill would turn into productive
plantations. It was a vision wounding to
the pride of the Arab elites, conscious of their own
culture and resenting the label of backwardness.
From this followed the Arab identification of
Zionism with ‘Western imperialism’. There were
also educated, moderate Arabs who got on well
with their Jewish neighbours, but the Jewish and
Arab societies in Palestine were different from the
beginning and the differences widened rather than
narrowed. With the growing influx of Jewish
immigrants, Jewish society became overwhelmingly
European, democratic and socialist. Arab
society, on the other hand, was traditional and
patriarchal, and the few wealthy Arab landowners
dominated the poor tenants scratching a living
from the soil. Paradoxically, Arab landowners profited
greatly from Zionism: because the Jews were
eager to buy land, property values soared, and Arab
wealth was hugely augmented. The growth of
Jewish industry and commerce also introduced a
new factor and built, adjoining an Arab town like
Jaffa, the modern Tel Aviv. Development increased
the gulf between the more prosperous urban and
agricultural Jews and the mass of poor Arabs. The
fundamental problem was whether Arab or Jew
would ultimately control Palestine.
The rate of Jewish immigration and the related
question of Jewish land purchases were, in the
early years, at the heart of that problem. The Arabs
did not, after all, turn out to be a negligible political
factor. There was indeed a widespread Arab
reaction against the Balfour Declaration. Arab
nationalism and expectations had been aroused by
Faisal’s establishment of an Arab kingdom in
Damascus in 1918.
In October 1919 Curzon, who did not share
his predecessor’s Zionist sympathies, replaced
Balfour as foreign secretary. British official views
were hardening against the wider Zionist aspirations
and moving towards a policy of evenhandedness
as between Arabs and Jews, which
meant taking the Arab point of view into account.
What the Arabs feared was that, as soon as a large
Jewish population was built up in Palestine, the
Zionists would impose their own Jewish state on
all the Palestinian people. Accordingly, they
wished Jewish immigration to be restricted. By
early 1920, tension between the Zionists and
the Arabs had risen dangerously. The British
responded by limiting Jewish immigration and
imposing a quota of 16,500 for one year. This
was, even so, more than the Arab political leadership
could accept and they organised their followers
to react with violence. In May 1921 Arabs
attacked Jews and Jews retaliated. By the time the
British could bring the violence under control,
forty-eight Arabs and forty-seven Jews had been
killed. It was the beginning of the tragic sequence
of bloody Arab–Zionist conflicts.
The British now tried to allay Arab fears and
to make further concessions to their views. First
immigration was suspended, then it was announced
that Jewish immigration would be
strictly controlled, restricted to the economic
absorptive capacity of the country. The Jews were
not to take over the whole of Palestine: their
National Home would be established in only a
part of the country. But this reassurance had a
boomerang effect, for Churchill, as colonial
secretary, also explained that the Palestinian Arab
majority could not expect to be set on the path
to independence like the other Arab mandates,
owing to the pledge of a National Home given
to the Jews. The denial of independence to the
Jews because of the Arabs, and to the Arabs
because of the Jews, had all the makings of a
bankrupt policy. Finally, the British undertook to
take some account of local political attitudes; a
legislative council, with more Arab members than
Jewish, as well as British nominees, would be set
up. The British hope was that the Jews and Arabs
would work together in this forum, but the Arabs
rejected the proposal out of hand. They also
refused to form any representative Arab organisation
in parallel with the existing Zionist organisation,
later known as the Jewish Agency. The
refusal of the Arabs to cooperate politically with
the British, and to provide an elective Council of
Palestinian Arabs, weakened their position. The
Jewish Agency, meanwhile, became the nucleus of
an effective government for the Jews.
The problem of the Jewish state and the pressure
of would-be Jewish settlers appeared to be
easing in the 1920s. After an initial influx of Jews,
immigration slackened. In 1927 more Jews actually
left Palestine than entered, and in 1928 the
net increase was only ten. However, Zionists and
Arabs still wanted assurance about the future. The
British Labour government elected in 1929, buffeted
by Zionist demands for a coherently defined
policy, did not follow a steady course: in 1930
promises were made to halt Jewish immigration
altogether; then, in 1931, it was allowed to continue.
This tendency to veer first one way and
then the other only encouraged more violence in
Palestine and increased the pressure on London
from both sides in the struggle to influence
British policy.
It was Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in
Germany, and the rest of the world’s rejection of
large-scale Jewish immigration, however, that
more than anything transformed the Palestine
question in the 1930s and after the Second World
War. All of a sudden there were hundreds of
thousands of Jews who wished to escape the
Reich in addition to those leaving Poland and
central Europe. The fate of the Jews of continental
Europe appeared to prove the Zionist case
that the Jews would always be maltreated and so
had to possess a country of their own. Before
1933 only a minority of German Jews had supported
Zionism though prominent men were
among them. The great migratory wave of Jews
from the late nineteenth century onwards moved
out of Russia and Romania west to Germany,
France, Britain and, above all, the US. Hitler’s
violent persecution converted more Jews in the
1930s than Herzl had done. But from 1936
onwards conversion to Zionism was less important
a factor in the pressure to enter Palestine than
the closing of the doors of the European countries
and the US to large-scale immigration of the
increasingly desperate German and, later,
Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews who had fallen
under Nazi German rule, in addition to the continued
emigration from central Europe. Their
fellow Jews in Palestine were willing to provide
refuge and to share their possessions; Jews in
other countries were willing to provide financial
aid to enable their persecuted co-religionists to
emigrate; the Germans wanted to force them out
of the expanding Reich, yet the British mandatory
authority in Palestine, fearing Arab reactions,
barred the way to any but controlled immigration.
Nevertheless, between 1932 and 1936 the
quotas were sufficiently large for the Jews who
wished to leave Germany and to settle in Palestine
to be able to do so, encouraged by the National
Socialists, who for a time agreed to the transfer
of a proportion of Jewish property. Emigration
from Germany soared, reaching a peak of 62,000
in 1935 alone.
The surge of Jews lay at the root of Arab fears.
If the Jews gained a majority in Palestine they
would not be satisfied with a Jewish Home in
Palestine, but would demand a sovereign Jewish
state, to which the Arabs, still in a majority,
would be subjected. In just two decades from
1919 to 1939, the Jewish population of Palestine
had increased sevenfold, while the Arab population
had not quite doubled. The trend was all too
clear. With financial help from abroad, the Jews
purchased land from absentee Arab landlords and
found work for their co-religionists. The displaced
Arab tenants and workers were aroused to
religious fanaticism and hatred of the Jews by
Arab politicians led by the Mufti of Jerusalem,
Haj Amin. Haj Amin, a nationalist, was corrupt
and totally unscrupulous in dealing with Arab opposition
to his leadership; murder of Arab opponents
and terror became an unstated part of his
political programme. Yet he also enjoyed genuine
large-scale backing from Palestinian Arabs
fearful of the spectre of a Zionist-dominated
Palestine.
The Arab nationalist movement was implacably
hostile to any Jewish development or to Jewish–
Arab collaboration. The Mufti mobilised the
Arabs not only against the Jews but also against
the British. In the spring of 1936 an Arab strike
was called and violence broke out. Jews were
once again the target and for a time the Arab
political leadership presented an unaccustomed
united front. But the British hit back, refusing
to reduce Jewish immigration and imprisoning
Arab terrorists. Palestine was on the verge of civil
war. Determined to restore order and to find a
solution, the British responded with troop reinforcements.
A Royal Commission was sent to
investigate and its conclusions were embodied
in the Peel Report, published in July 1937. The
commissioners concluded that the Arab and
Jewish communities were irreconcilable and recommended
that Palestine should be partitioned
between Arab and Jew. Partition of a small country
was a bitter pill for both Zionists and Arabs to
swallow. The Zionists, after careful deliberation,
finally accepted partition as a solution that would
give them a small state in northern Palestine. It
was a starting point. But the Arabs rejected independence
if it meant partitioning Palestine; no less
unacceptable to the Palestinian Arabs was the loss
of Jerusalem which, under the partition plan,
would have remained a British mandate.
The British government accepted the report as
the basis of policy in Palestine. But it was one
thing to adopt a policy, quite a different matter
to enforce it against strong opposition. The
Palestinian Arabs were reacting with increasing
violence, and in 1938 their revolt was renewed;
there was fighting throughout Palestine, with
Jewish settlements and British troops and police
being attacked by militant Palestinian Arabs. The
British reacted fiercely, executing convicted Arab
terrorists and arming the Jews to defend their
outlying settlements which, in turn, strengthened
the Haganah, the Jewish secret army. The Arab
revolt continued into 1939. Despite Britain’s firm
response in Palestine, in London the government
retreated from forcible partition against Arab
wishes. Just when the need for Jews to leave
Europe became most urgent, Britain further
restricted immigration into Palestine. For five
years Jewish immigration would be limited to
75,000 and thereafter would be permitted to continue
only with Arab consent. The Zionists
reacted with predictable anger: the new quota
meant not only that the threatened Jews of
central Europe could not be rescued, but that the
Arabs would remain a large majority in an unpartitioned
Palestine. British calculations were
simple: the Arabs far outnumbered the Jews in
the Middle East; in a war with Nazi Germany,
Arab friendship was important and uncertain,
while Jewish support could, it was thought, be
counted on.
In Palestine, British troops finally crushed the
Arab revolt but the Palestinian Arab political
leadership continued to protest that British policy
was too favourable to the Jews and was denying
Palestinians their independence. The Second
World War and the mass murder of 6 million
European Jews by Hitler’s executioners transformed
the Palestine question. From this searing
experience the State of Israel emerged, peopled
by Jews ready to defend with their lives a country
of their own. In their eyes the injustice to the
Palestinian Arabs paled in significance when compared
with the fate that had befallen European
Jews under Nazi rule in a world that had even
placed obstacles in the way of saving them and
their brethren. Such murderous indifference
created a new hardness and bitterness among
Jews. The Arab cause, in the meantime, was not
helped by the attitude of the Arab political leadership
to the global contest. The Second World
War found the Arab world on the sidelines, more
hostile to its British ‘protectors’ than to the Nazi
aggressors. In 1941 the Mufti became Hitler’s
ally and tool, the chosen Führer of the Arabs: a
German victory, it is clear, would have meant the
destruction of the Jews of Palestine as well. But
even while Jews all over the world wanted the
Allies to win and fought in Allied armies, Zionists
were preparing for the post-war period. Among
them were extreme nationalists ready to fight not
only the Arabs but also the British rulers if necessary
to create a Jewish nation.
World History
