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Sat, Nov 13, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The Origin Of The Dispute

This article is the third chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the second chapter: Arab Refugees. In the next few days, we will publish the rest of the chapters from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click Here.

About the book: “A fully documented, dramatic history of the events which shaped the Middle East. Every key problem in the Arab-Israel conflict, every decision is carefully analyzed, from the questionable policies of Britain in 1948 to how the Palestinian refugee problem began. The territory won in the war of 1967, and the terrorist war of attrition is discussed.” (From the intro at ShmuelKatz website). To view the entire book online, go to Shmuelkatz.com. To buy the book, go to Afsi.org.

On November 29, 1947 – the day the United Nations Assembly decided to recommend the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state – there were no Arab refugees. The area allotted to the Jewish state was much smaller even than that established by the Armistice lines of 1949 (which lasted until June 5, 1967), to which Israel is now urged to withdraw. At that time, Israel had no “occupied territories from which to withdraw.

It was against that embryo state that the Arabs declared and waged their war. Its total area, amounting to little more than half of western Palestine, was roughly 15,000 square kilometers (about 6,000 square miles), Including the semi-arid Negev. The Arabs were thus assured of seven-eighths of the totality of Palestine on both sides of the Jordan as it was reward at the end of the First World War by all the nations of the world as the territory for the Jewish National Home.

The seven Arab states In existence in 1947 Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Transjordan– whose leaders decided to prevent the birth of Israel, contained an area 230 times larger than the projected Jewish state and a population 60 times that of its Jewish inhabitants who numbered only a little more than half a million.

The Arab appetite would be satisfied with nothing less than the remainder. It was, moreover, characteristic that the Secretary of this confederation of invader states, Azzam Pasha, in forecasting the success of the invasion, invoked the memory of the massacres by the Mongols and the Crusaders.

Such was the attitude of the Arabs in 1947, when they had in their hands all, and more than, the territory they are now demanding from Israel. At that time, they violently refused to share Palestine with the Jews in a territorial ratio of seven to one. They refused to recognize the Jewish claim to the country or to the smallest part of it; to acquiesce in the international recognition of that claim; or to abate this one jot of their designs on the whole of the area that had once been the Moslem Empire in Asia.

Less than thirty years later, the “historic rights” of the Arabs to Palestine, allegedly existing for a thousand years, had not yet been discovered. In February 1919, the Emir Faisal, the one recognized Arab leader at the time, then still striving for the creation of Arab political independence in Syria (of which he was briefly king) and Iraq (over which he and his house subsequently ruled for forty years) signed a formal agreement with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing the Zionist Organization. This provided for cooperation between the projected Arab state and the projected reconstituted Jewish state of Palestine.

Borders were still to be negotiated, but Faisal had already described the Zionist proposals as “moderate and proper.” The borders proposed by the Zionists included what subsequently became Mandatory Palestine on both banks of the Jordan as well as northwestern up to the Litany River — later included in southern Lebanon part of the Golan Heights later included in Syria — and part of Sinai left under British administration in Egypt.

When and how were the Jewish rights, historic and recognized, “transferred” to the Arabs?

The key to this question is reflected in the behavior of the British in 1947, when, in that year, the Arabs rejected the partition of Palestine and refused to set up the projected Arab state, the British administration, then still governing Palestine under the Mandate, refused to carry out the recommendations of the United Nations to implement the partition plan.

The British government made it plain that it would do all in its power to prevent the birth of the Jewish state. Britain announced that she would not —and indeed, she did not— carry out the orderly transfer of any functions to the Jewish authorities in the Interim before the end of the Mandate on May 15, 1948. Everything was left in a state of disorder. This was Britain’s first contribution to the burden of the nascent state.

When, immediately after the United Nations Assembly decision, the Palestine Arabs launched their preliminary onslaught on the Jewish community, the British Army gave them considerable cover and aid. It obstructed Jewish defense on the ground; it blocked the movement of Jewish reinforcements and supplies to outlying settlements; it opened the land frontiers for the entry of Arab soldiers from the neighboring Arab states; it maintained a blockade in the Mediterranean and sealed the coast and ports through which alone the outnumbered Jews could expect reinforcements; it handed over arms dumps to the Arabs. When Jaffa was on the point of falling to a Jewish counterattack, it sent in forces from Malta to bomb and shell the Jewish force. Meanwhile, it continued to supply the Arab states preparing to invade across the borders with all the they asked for and made no secret of it.

The British government was privy to the Arab plans for invasion; and on every diplomatic front, and especially in the United Nations and in the United States, it pursued a vigorous campaign of pressure and obstruction to hinder and prevent help to the embattled Zionists and to achieve the abandonment of the plan to set up a Jewish state. When the state was declared nevertheless, the British government exerted every effort to bring about its defeat by the invading armies. It was not by choice that one of the last operations in the war between Israel and the Arab states in January 1949 was the shooting down on the Sinai front of five British RAF planes that had flown across the battlelines into Israeli-held territory.

This was the culmination of a policy developed and pursued by the British throughout their administration of the Mandate — surely not the least of the great betrayals of the weak by the strong in the twentieth century.

The policy of Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who was severely criticized, was not more than the logical, if extreme, evolution of the policies of Anthony Eden, who inspired the creation of the Arab League in 1945; of Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary who presided over the declaration of death to Zionist in the White Paper of 1939, and of their predecessors who shaped the “Arab Revolt” of 1936, who made possible the “disturbances” of 1929, and who were responsible for the pogrom in Jerusalem in 1920.

It is impossible and, indeed, pointless and misleading to explain, analyze, or trace the development of Arab hostility to Zionism and the origins of Arab claims in Palestine without examining the policy of the British rulers of the country between 1919 and 1948.

One of the great objects of British diplomacy as the conflict in Palestine deepened during the Mandate period was to create the image of Britain as an honest arbiter striving only for the best for all concerned and for justice.

In fact, Britain was an active participant in the confrontation. She was indeed more than a party.

The Arab “case” in Palestine was a British conception. It took shape and was given direction by the British military administration after the First World War. The release in recent years of even a part of the confidential official documents of the time has strengthened the long-held suspicion that the Arab attack on Zionism would never have began had it not been for British inspiration, tutelage and guidance.

In the end, it is true, British sympathy, assistance, and cooperation came to be auxiliary to Arab attitudes and actions. Those attitudes, however, had their beginnings and their original motive power as a function of British imperial ambitions and policy.

The two intertwined progressively throughout thirty years, until their open cooperation after 1939. At the last, in 1947-1949, they consummated an imperfectly concealed alliance for the forcible prevention of the establishment of the Jewish state.

British policy in the Middle East was not confined to Palestine. Its purpose, though now a defeated anachronism, informs British attitudes even today. It had its genesis in a historic misrepresentation: the inflation, out of all relation to the reality, of the so-called Arab Revolt during the First World War. This hoax was part of the intricate maneuvers of the great powers at the end of the war. It was at first directed against France.

Early in the First World War, after the defeat at Gallipoli, a group of senior British officers serving in the countries on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire in Egypt and the Sudan conceived the idea of bringing the vast Arab-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire under British control after the war.

In the words of the then Governor General of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, they envisaged

“a federation of semi-independent Arab states under the guidance and supervision… Owing spiritual allegiance to a single Arab primate, as its patron and protector.”

The early disaster to British arms in the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 provided the impulse. The British government called on its agents with contacts in the Arab-speaking countries to make an effort to detach the Arabs from the Turks. The men on the spot in Cairo and Khartoum decided that Hussein ibn-Ali, Sherif of Mecca, Guardian of the Moslem Holy Places, a semi-autonomous chieftain in Hejaz (Arabia proper), was the suitable candidate for levering all the Arabs out of the Turkish war machine.

While London was interested in immediate relief, the Arabists in Cairo and Khartoum contrived to steer and manipulate the relations with Hussein toward their own more grandiose schemes. Hussein asked a high price for his participation in liberating his people from Turkish rule, even at one stage threatening to fight on the side of the Turks.

He demanded all the territory in Asia that had ever been in the Moslem Empire. He was of course employing the accepted oriental gambit in a bout of bargaining: he asked for much more than he expected to get. Moreover, the negotiators were warned from London that the British government had made other commitments in the area, concerning Palestine, Lebanon, and the Mosul area in Mesopotamia (Iraq). In return for the promise of liberation in his own territory and the gift of part of the other Arabian lands, together with vast sums of money (in gold) and considerable quantities of arms, Hussein launched his revolt, led in the field by his son Faisal.

Toward the end of the First World War, and increasingly after the war, it became common knowledge and part of the popular literature of the age that in the defeat of the Turks a specific and notable part was played by the Arab revolt and that its leaders had enjoyed the indispensable cooperation and advice of a brilliant young British officer named Thomas Edward Lawrence.

This revolt, according to the account, began in Arabia, displacing the Turks, spread over into Syria and reached a climax in the capture of Damascus. In the end, so the story ran, the promises to the Arabs were broken. The Arabs based their later vociferous propaganda and their claim to vast additions of territory, including Palestine in this account.

The major part of the story of the revolt was a fabrication, largely created in Lawrence’s imagination. It grew and grew and was not exposed for many years. It well suited the makers of British policy at the time.

The aid given to the Allied campaign against the Turks by the Arab Revolt was minor and negligible; Lawrence himself in one of his outbursts of near penitence, once described it as “a sideshow of a sideshow.” ‘Though the Sherif Hussein did send out his call for an Arab rising throughout the Ottoman Empire, in fact no such rising took place. Nor was there a mutiny by Arabs anywhere in the Turkish Army; on the contrary, the Arabs fought enthusiastically in the cause of their Turkish overlords.

The operations of the “Arab Army” can be summed up in Aldington’s words:

“To claim that these spasmodic and comparatively tiny efforts had any serious bearing on the war with Turkey, let alone on the greater war beyond is … absurd” (p. 209).

Aldington further explains that the revolt was limited to the distant Hejaz, an area that was relatively unimportant to the Turks, and to

“desert areas close to the British army, from which small raids could be made with comparative immunity. Beyond those areas, where there was real danger to be found and real damage to be done, the Arabs did nothing but talk and conspire” (p. 210).

The operations in the, Hejaz itself were not conclusive.

A few weakly held Turkish positions were taken, but the Turks were not driven out; they held out in Medina for two years. In consequence,

“much of the effort of the Arab forces… say, 20,000 to 25,000 tribesmen plus the little regular army of 600 … was diverted and ran around on the outside of Medina and to attacks on that part of the Damascus-Medina railway which was of least importance strategically” (p. 177).

These demolition raids on the Hejaz Railway became the most famous operation of the Arab Revolt. Their avowed object was to cut the Turkish supply route to Medina, but in fact they did nothing of the sort. Any damage they caused was quickly repaired; its extent was no greater than the damage inflicted on the same railway by the same Bedouin tribesmen in peacetime as part of their customary marauding activities. When General Allenby decided finally to put the railway out of commission, he sent British General Dawnay, with a British force, for the purpose; Dawnay demolished it beyond repair.

During the final phase of the war, the British conquered southern Palestine. The prospect of victory over the Turks appeared over the horizon. Soon there would be an accounting of what had and what had not been achieved, and by whom. Now, therefore, came the last fantastic phase of the “Revolt.”

Allenby’s great breakthrough in September 1918 provided [the Arabs] with sitting targets which nobody could miss, and the chance to race hysterically into towns which they claimed to have captured after the British had done the real fighting. There was calculated purpose in this behavior. It was part of an agreement between the makers of British policy and their Arab collaborators. The Arab Revolt had obviously failed as a major or even a significant enterprise. Outside of Hussein!s own area of Arabia, it had not attracted any significant assistance from Arabs. In spite of efforts at persuasion by Faisal and Lawrence, the Arabs of Syria had refused to join the war effort.

No Arab had risen–even in the rear of the advancing British troops in southern Palestine. The Hejaz regular force was numerically insignificant, and the Bedouin tribesmen, traditionally well versed in the primitive techniques of looting forays, could contribute nothing to Allenby’s offensive through Palestine and Syria. The discussion on the future of the area thus threatened to remain a dialogue between Britain and France, who had reached agreement earlier on the division of the spoils.

Herein lay the British dilemma. French control of part of the area, to which London had previously agreed, ruled out the later plan by Cairo and Khartoum for British control of the whole area. Thus the objective of British policy now became to find a way to “biff the French out of all hope of Syria!” (in Lawrence’s words) or, in the blunter terms used–disapprovingly–in the British Cabinet by Lord Milner, “to diddle the French out of Syria.” This could only be done, if at all, by establishing a plausible Arab claim.

In June 1918, an ingenious solution was accepted by the British government. Osmond Walrond, an intelligence officer attached to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, read out in that city a statement in which the British government officially pledged itself to recreate in the areas not yet conquered the “complete and sovereign independence of any Arab area emancipated from Turkish control by the option of the Arabs themselves.”

On this principle Lawrence and the Sherifians now hastened to operate in order to establish the “facts” they required. As an Arab historian has summed it up:

“Wherever the British Army captured a town or reached a fortress which was to be given to the Arabs it would halt until the Arabs could enter, and the capture would be credited to them.”

Hence the wild chase that followed to raise the Arab flag in towns from which the Turks had already been driven by the British… At Damascus, there was a serious difficulty, and the maneuver did not succeed.

The capture of Damascus, the ancient seventh-century capital of the Arab Umayyad dynasty, was to have been the climax of the revolt, installing Faisal as the indigenous King of Syria before the French could object. General Allenby, the British Commanderin-Chief, ordered the officers in command of the combined British, Australian, and French forces advancing on Damascus not to enter the city.

It was assumed that the retreat of the Turks could be completely cut off north of the city. Only the Sherifian troops were to be allowed to pass into the city, to announce its capture… All this was worked out in advance between the British War Office, Allenby, and Lawrence. Because Faisal’s 600 soldiers were not adequate for the required pomp, one of his supporters was sent to recruit Druze and Haurardans to march in with what was now called the Northern Arab Army (it was, in fact, the southern contingent gone north).

Two unforeseen circumstances upset the plan. The Australian Commander, Brigadier Wilson, finding that he could not cut off the Turks’ retreat without entering the city, therefore went in, and so it was to the Australians that Damascus was in fact surrendered. Later, a British force went in to quell a revolt against the British and against the planned installation of Faisal. It was put down only by the application of considerable force.

Nevertheless, a Sherifian administration was installed, and the fiction was then promoted that the Arabs had captured Damascus.

From this scramble to claim territory by “right of conquest,” Palestine was excluded. No such effort was made by the Sherifian forces on either side of the Jordan. Coming as it did a year after the publication of the Balfour Declaration on the Jewish National Home in Palestine, this reaction underlines the fact that the Arab leaders felt no urge to oppose or obstruct the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

In Syria, the clash between French claims, accepted by the British in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915, and Arab claims, conceived and fostered by the British after 1916, was not finally resolved until 1945. In Palestine, the French effectively gave up their claims as early as 1918.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, providing for an international administration in Palestine, was the original reason for the exclusion of Palestine from the promises made to Hussein. But in 1917, the British government published the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

To achieve this promise of support in the restoration of their ancient homeland, issued after much negotiation and deep consideration, the Jews made a significant contribution to the British war effort. Whatever fantastic interpretations were later put on it, the British intention was clear and was understood clearly at the time. A Jewish state was to be established – not at once, but as soon as the Jewish People by immigration and development become a majority in the still largely derelict and nearly empty country with its then half-million Arabs and 90,000 Jews.

This plan would require the tutelage of a major power. The Mandate system of the then infant League of Nations seemed to apply perfectly to the situation. British overall control could be achieved by granting a Mandate to Britain. With a group of Arab states in Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia — “semi-independent,” with British mentors and advisors in Jedda, Damascus, and Baghdad (not to mention the British-controlled administration in Cairo and Khartoum) — and with, now, a British Mandatory Administration in Palestine, Britain would have unhampered control of the whole Middle East, from the Mediterranean clear to the borders of India.

Zionist diplomacy was now exploited by the British to achieve the consent of France to, in effect, her own elimination from any direct influence in Palestine. This was not an easy matter, especially in view of obvious British efforts to “biff” her out of Syria as well. The French, however, were also sensitive during the war to American opinion and had already acquiesced in the Balfour Declaration. In order to ensure the establishment of the Jewish National Home, the French agreed, in the end (and not without some mining and sapping), to waive their claims in Palestine by acceding to the grant of the Mandate over Palestine to Britain.

Considerable pressure had to be exerted on France over the question of the borders; in the north she did hold out successfully for the inclusion in “her” zone of the area enclosing the main water sources of Palestine (which remained largely unexploited). Northwestern Galilee was included m Lebanon, and Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights in Syria.

The claim to eastern Palestine — Transjordan on the other hand was, after a struggle, relinquished by France. Characteristic of the argument brought to bear by the British to persuade her was a leading article in the London Times, in those days an authentic spokesman for the British government. The paper called for the inclusion of Palestine as essential to the Jewish state and urged a “good military frontier” for Palestine to the east of the Jordan River “as near as may be to the edge of the desert.”

The Jordan, noted the Times on September 19, 1919, “will not do as Palestine’s eastern boundary. Our duty as Mandatory Is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State but one that is capable of a vigorous and independent national life.” France consented; eastern Palestine remained part of the area designed for the Jewish National Home and thus passed into British control.

A dovetailed Middle East, with Arab client states and a Jewish client state coexisting and cooperating under a completely British umbrella, provided the motive power of official British policy in the period 1917-1920.

On December 2, 1917, Lord Robert Cecil had said at a large public meeting in London:

“The keynote of our meeting this afternoon is liberation. Our wish is that the Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians and Judea for the Jews.”

The Zionists, moreover, helped the Arabs and the British in the great diplomatic campaign that went on around the Paris Peace Conference and used their influence in Washington to urge the Arab claims. The Emir Faisal was not overstating when he wrote on March 3, 1919, to Felix Frankfurter:

“Dr. Weizmann has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their
kindness.”

France, pressing her claim to Syria and Lebanon, was granted control over them by the Peace Conference. In defiance of this decision, a so-called General Syrian Congress offered the throne of Syria to Faisal; he was subsequently installed in Damascus, where he set up an administration. The Supreme Allied Council in Paris retorted by formally granting the Mandate over Syria. and Lebanon to France. This duality could not last. In July 1920, the French ordered Faisal out of the country.

Faisal, bereft of the Syrian crown for which Lawrence and the Arab Bureau had labored so hard, was instead offered the throne of Iraq by the. British, though it had previously been earmarked for Faisal’s younger brother Abdullah ibn-Hussein, who was thus left without a throne.

At the end of October 1920, Abdullah therefore collected some 1,500 Turkish exsoldiers and Hejaz tribesmen, seized a train on the Hejaz Railway, and entered eastern Palestine. Here he announced that he was on his way to drive the French out of Syria and called on the Syrians to join him. There was no response, nor was Abdullah given any encouragement by the handful of inhabitants of Transjordan itself.

His continued encampment in eastern Palestine created a dilemma for the British. They had not yet set up any administrative machinery in what was largely empty territory— its 90,000 square kilometers were estimated to hold at most 300,000 inhabitants, most of them nomads.

The British feared, or were induced to fear, that the French, angered by Abdullah’s threats, would invade eastern Palestine. They therefore casually suggested to Abdullah that he forget about Syria and instead become a representative of Britain in administering eastern Palestine on behalf of the Mandatory authority. Whereupon Abdullah generously assigned himself to the French presence in Syria and took up office in Transjordan, and in time accepted it as a substitute.

The British government then recalled that eastern Palestine was part of the area pledged to the Jewish people. They thereupon inserted an alteration in the draft text of the Mandate (then not yet ratified by the League of Nations), which gave Britain the right to “postpone or withhold” the provisions of the Mandate relating to the Jewish National Home “in the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined.”

The Zionist leaders were stunned by this threatened lopping off of three quarters of the area of the projected Jewish National Home; its establishment had, after all, been Britain’s warrant for being granted the Mandate. But the British government countered with the proposal that, if the Zionists did not accept the situation, Britain would decline the Mandate altogether and thus withdraw her protection from the Jewish restoration.

The Zionist leaders – struggling with the material problem of building a country out of a desert and restoring a people, largely impoverished, from the four corners of the world – were moreover inadequately equipped with political experience to judge the emptiness of the British threat. They did not feel strong enough to resist this blow to the integrity and security of the state-in-building and to their faith in the sanctity of compacts.

Thus, as a purely British manufacture, filched from the Jewish National Home, torn out of Palestine of which it had always been an integral part, there was brought into being from the empty waste what subsequently became a spearhead in the “Arab” onslaught on the Jewish state, the Emirate of Transjordan, later expanded across the river and renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The elimination of eastern Palestine in 1921-1923 was only the first act —though stark, dramatic, and momentous — in a developing effort by the British to frustrate and emasculate the Jewish restoration that began in Palestine immediately after the British occupation.

At first, British policy was confined to the military administration in Palestine itself In colonial politics, nothing seems to succeed like repeated error and miscalculation and failure. The Cairo-Khartoum school of British officials in 1916 had grossly overestimated the influence of the Sherif Hussein of Hejaz on the Arabs outside his own area. His “revolt” proved a damp squib and had to be retrieved and embellished by a large fraud.

But these officials did not give up their dream of a large Arab state or federation of states, extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and from the border of Turkey to the southern seaboard of Arabia and supervised by Britain.

It was the men of this school who continued from Cairo to direct overall British policy for the occupied territory and who came into Palestine with Allenby or, in the wake of his victory in 19187 to form the military administration in Palestine. They were stricken to the ban by their government’s deviation from what they had conceived as the correct policy to be followed in the Fertile Crescent.

But the Balfour Declaration, the promise of Jewish restoration, even if shorn of its historical sweep, was seen by London as a clear quid pro quo to the Jews for their contribution to Allied victory and as a great moral reason for France’s renunciation of her claim. The policy it embodied became the indispensable (or unavoidable) condition for the Mandate being granted to Britain.

To the ruling group in Jerusalem almost wholly composed of leaders or disciples of the Cairo school— the Balfour Declaration guaranteeing Jewish restoration represented an intolerable interference in their plans.

Just as they continued trying to “biff the French bit of Syria,” they applied themselves to biffing the Zionists out of Palestine. While their government was still canvassing international support to grant Britain the Mandate in order to implement the Zionist policy, and while the Zionists were urging Britain’s claims, the first British administration in Palestine was busily engaged in open defiance of its government’s declared policy.

It was this group, all-powerful on the spot, that inspired and mobilized and established organized Arab resistance to the Jewish restoration. It used its power and authority as a military regime to establish facts, to create events, and to control them. It was this group whose views progressively pervaded the subsequent Mandate regime.

That is the background of the sudden appearance In 1919 of a militant Arab “movement.” In the circumstances of the time, the British military administration should have invited and ensured the cooperation of the local population, Moslem and Christian, in implementing London’s policy. What was required was dissemination of clear and concise information on the vast areas of Arabia and Mesopotamia that had been liberated by the British and their Allies and were to become Arab or predominantly Arab states; on the contribution made by the Jews to the liberation of Palestine, their ancient and unrelinquished homeland; and on the undertaking made to them in the Balfour Declaration and the safeguards in that declaration for the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

It might have been made clear that the Sherif Hussein had called on the Moslems to welcome the Jews to Palestine; information should have been spread about the cordial meetings between Faisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann and the agreement they had signed; and last but not least, the determination of the British government to carry out Its Zionist policy should have been confirmed.

Such a declaration would without a doubt have created the right climate for launching that policy.

“No Military Administration ruled the country which waited on its very nod,” wrote a contemporary observer. “It would consequently have required the maximum of moral courage, enmity or external support, deliberately to go in the teeth of the policy of the Administration above and in the Levant where the whole population is so singularly sensitive to every nuance of tyranny and of intrigue.”

The popularization of the Jewish National Home Policy was, however, farthest from the minds of the military administration. For more than two years, it neither published nor allowed the publication of the Balfour Declaration In Palestine. This act of omission was backed by a specific prohibition from headquarters in Cairo. The Declaration, wrote the Chief Political Officer to the Chief Administrator in Jerusalem on October 9, 1919, “is to be treated as extremely confidential and Is on no account for any publication.”

The group in power In Jerusalem made no secret of its hostility to Zionism. The whole of Its administration, even down to its social occasions, was permeated with an anti-Jewish atmosphere that reminded some Jewish observers of the Tsarist regime in Russia. Indeed, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then serving as a lieutenant in the Jewish Legion, which he had founded, and himself a native of Russia wrote:

“Not In Russia nor in Poland had there been seen such an intense and widespread atmosphere of hatred as prevailed in the British Army in Palestine in 1919 and 1920.”

Nor did the administration wait on events. They worked hard, simultaneously on two fronts, the second being in Syria, against the French. In July 1919, “Syrian National Congress” demanded the unity of Syria (that is, to include Palestine) and the installation of Faisal as king. The French expressed a fear that this sudden materialization from nowhere of a Syrian national movement, and the reversal of the popular feeling against the Sherifians was the result of a British intrigue. The British replied with denials and reassuring statements. In fact, Allenby in Cairo and his subordinates in Palestine, O.O.C. General Bois and his Chief of Staff, Col. Waters-Taylor, were secretly pressing their home government to “accept the situation”: to jettison their government’s pact with the French, to abandon the Zionists, and to give Syria and Palestine to Faisal.

The plan, however, could not be pursued as a bald British purpose. In the face of London’s official Zionist policy, it had to be covered by an Arab cloak, and quickly. The military administration itself began creating an Arab organization that could then be presented as the authentic voice and representative of “the Arabs” in rejecting and combating the Zionists and the Zionist policy of the British government.

Here began the history of the first Arab political organization, the Moslem Christian Association (MCA). Its first branch, in Jaffa, was organized at the inspiration of the District Military Governor, Lt. Col. J. E. Hubbard – who had formally proposed to his superiors in the administration the setting up of an Arab organization – and under the personal direction of the district head of British Intelligence, Captain Brunton. Not insignificantly, the most active and disproportionately numerous early recruits were Christian Arabs. Years later, a leading member of the military administration, Sir Wyndham Deedes, admitted that from its inception the Moslem Christian Association had enjoyed “the support and financial aid of the British administration.”

The purposes of the administration were now pursued by a stream of memoranda of protest and demands by the several branches of the MCA, dutifully forwarded to London with accompanying evaluations of their originality, spontaneity, sincerity, and the representative character of their signatories.

Memoranda, however, were not enough to generate quick action; a “situation” had to be created. Col. Waters-Taylor maintained contact with Faisal in Damascus, urging upon him action to assume power in Syria from the French. He assured him that the Arabs of Palestine were behind him and would welcome him as king of a “united Syria,” that is, including Palestine. He urged him, moreover, “to stand up against the British Government for his principles.” Early in 1920, this general effort at persuasion gave way to more specific inducement; money and arms were provided for the planned coup.

In Jerusalem, Waters-Taylor and Col. Ronald Storrs, one of the original members of the Cairo school and now Governor of the city, established and maintained regular contact with the handful of militant Sherifians, notably Haj Amin el Husseini, the young brother of the Mufti of Jerusalem, and Aref el Aref. In early 1920, Waters-Taylor suggested to his and Storrs’ Arab contacts the desirability of organizing “anti-Jewish riots to impress on the Administration the unpopularity of the Zionist policy.” A detailed critical report of all these activities was submitted to General Allenby by the political officer of the Palestine administration, Col. Richard Meinertzhagen. Allenby told him he would take no action.

The spring of 1920 was chosen for action. In March, the coup was carried out in Damascus and Faisal was installed as king. In order to achieve a sizable riot in Palestine, the country (in the words of the subsequent military Court of Enquiry) was “infested with Sherifian officers,” who carried on a lurid agitation against the Jews. As the court noted euphemistically, the administration took no action against them.

On the Wednesday before Easter, Col. Waters-Taylor had a meeting in Jerusalem with Haj Amin el Husseini and told him

“that he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine; that Zionism was unpopular not only with the Palestine Administration but in Whitehall; and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, both General Bols and General Allenby would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish Home.”

That year, Easter coincided with the Moslem festival of Nebi Musa. Its celebration included a procession starting in Jerusalem, where the crowd was addressed by the Sherifians and told to fall on the Jews “in the name of King Faisal.” For doubters, there was an even more convincing argument: A’dowlah ma’ana – the government is with us. This was a demonstrable fact; all but a remnant of the Jewish regiments that had helped liberate Palestine had been disbanded over the preceding months; the few remaining soldiers were confined to camp at Sarafand. On the day of the outbreak, all British troops and Jewish police had been removed from the Old City; only Arab policemen were left.

The mob in the Old City, armed with clubs and knives, first looted shops. Then it caught and beat up or killed Jews and raped Jewish women. The Court of Enquiry-itself a creation of the administration summed up:

“The Jews were the victim of a peculiarly brutal and cowardly attack, the majority of the casualties being old men, women and children.”

Zeev Jabotinsky and Pinchas Rutenberg had in the, preceding days hastily organized a Jewish self-defense unit. Their way into the Old City was barred at the gates by British troops.

In the the first flush of enthusiasm, a British military compounded the offense in traditional fashion: The defenders were punished. Jabotinsky was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment and twenty of his followers were given lesser terms.

But Haj Amin and el Aref had operated too openly for any government publicly to ignore their guilt.

Though they escaped across the Jordan, they were sentenced in absentia to ten years’ imprisonment each. The British government, however much whitewash it was willing to splash over the events in Jerusalem, had to react to the outcry that went up in Europe and the United States at the phenomenon of a pogrom in Jerusalem. Nor could it ignore the factual inside information it received.

Meinertzhagen, as a representative of the Foreign Office, sent a new, detailed report derived from an independent intelligence unit he had established. This time, he bypassed Allenby and wrote directly to the Foreign Office.

As a result, the sentence on Jabotinsky was quashed; the most obvious conspirators, including Bols and Waters-Taylor, were removed; the military regime was replaced by a civil administration. Storrs, more subtle than his colleagues, remained, and he was not alone.

The Arabist purpose of the Cairo school did not change but was carried over into the civil administration of Palestine and pervaded and finally dominated the Mandatory regime.

It did not succeed in creating an Arab “nation” in Palestine. In 1918, at the height of his campaign to register Arab achievements, Colonel Lawrence himself had cautiously confessed in one of his confidential reports:

“The phrase Arab Movement was invented in Cairo as a common denominator for all the vague discontents against Turkey which before 1916 existed in the Arab provinces. In a non-constitutional country, these naturally took on a revolutionary character and it was convenient to pretend to find a common ground in all of them. They were most of them very local, very jealous, but had to be considered in the hope that one or the other of them might bear fruit.”

In 1919 and 1920, despite the historic transformation that had taken place around them, the Arabs had not changed. When in July 1920 the French in Syria decided on a firm stand and ordered Faisal to leave the country, he meekly complied. The popular forces which his British sponsors attributed to him did not show themselves.

In Jerusalem that Easter, even the Arab mob in the marketplace, before they attacked Jews, had to be fired by religious incitement, by the Invocation of a living king, by the visible evidence that their victims were defenseless, and by the assurance that their violence would be welcomed by the British rulers.

The political officer to the administration went even further: “Arab national feeling,” be wrote, “is based on our gold and nothing else”.

In the early years of the civil administration, there was still a running policy conflict between the British statesmen who had been responsible for, or associated with, the negotiations with the Zionists and the undertakings made to them and the purveyors of Laurentian pan-Arabism. The Laurentians, however, contrived to fill key posts in the Palestinian administration, and some of them were inevitably recruited to fill the posts in the Middle Eastern Department of the Colonial Office, which in 1921 took over responsibility for Palestine.

Haj Amin el-Husseini received the lowest number of votes and thus could not be included in the recommended list of three. Richmond launched an energetic campaign to get Samuel to appoint him nevertheless. He urged upon him the “expert” view that the poll was unimportant, that Haj Amin was the man the “Moslem populations insisted on. A virulent agitation was let loose within the Moslem community against the successful candidate, Sheikh Jurallah, who was described, among other things, as a Zionist who intended to sell Moslem holy property to the Jews.

Samuel gave way. He did not in fact send Haj Amin the letter of appointment and it was never gazetted. Haj Amin simply “became” the Mufti of Jerusalem. Thus, this man, imposed on the Moslem community, became and remained, for most of the crucial years of the Mandate, the director and spearhead of the war on Zionism.

The Moslem dignitaries, whom even the backward Turks had not accustomed to such outrageous interference or dictation, nevertheless took the hint. They knew now beyond any doubt what the British power expected of them.

When he started on his career, however, Haj Amin’s followers were few, and he had no sources of finance for the political task projected for him. This, too, had been thought of. The administration then set up a body called the Moslem Council. Haj Amin, now clothed with the authority of Mufti and authentic favorite of the British, was elected its president without difficulty. His position was entrenched. The appointment was for life, so that no opposition could ever unseat him democratically. He and his pliant subordinates became the arbiters of all Moslem religious endowments and expenditure.

Many Moslems became dependent on him for their livelihood. He controlled an annual income of more than £100,000 (Palestinian pounds), for which he was not accountable. (By today’s values, this would be equivalent in purchasing power to about $2 million.) Such was the origin of the organized “national movement” of the “Arabs of Palestine.” The means of organizing propaganda and violence against Zionism and the pattern of its organization were thus assured. A short localized attack took place in 1921 and simultaneous onslaught in several areas in 1929. This latter attack was again distinguished by the choice of helpless, defenseless people as its target – in Hebron the bulk of the community of rabbis and yeshiva students and their wives and children were slaughtered by the blatantly benevolent neutrality forces of law and order, one of whose first acts was to disarm the Jewish villages. In 1936 come the last and most protracted offensive, officially organized by an informal political body called the Arab Higher Committee, it was led by Haj Amin el Husseini, still Mufti and still President of the Moslem Supreme Council.

In the intervening years, the men of the Cairo school as they progressively increased their dominance in Palestine as well as over the central policies in the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office – were able to deepen and diversify their campaign against Zionism. During those years, their propaganda identified Zionism with Bolshevism – an image carrying instant demonic conviction with devout Christians as well as devout Moslems.

During those years, the Lawrence myth was built into the popular history of the age, and with it the story of the “Arab Revolt” gained credence. Now the Arabs, and even the Arabs of Palestine, gradually came to play a major role in the liberation of the country from the Turks. Now, too, the claim promoted by Lawrence and embellished by oriental imagination about how the Arabs had been “let down” by the British was broadcast as historic truth. The very real and significant Jewish share in Allenby’s campaign in Palestine on both sides of the Jordan was not mentioned. The Balfour Declaration was somehow twisted at one and the same time into a discreditable transaction and a meaningless document that promised the Jews nothing. During those years, in order to match the unique relationship of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the “rights of the Palestine Arabs” were manufactured and endowed with the fictitious historical continuity which serves as the substance of present-day Arab propaganda.

In Palestine, the measures to confine and restrict Jewish reconstruction slowly tightened. The British government was not free to make drastic changes since Britain had no sovereignty in Palestine. She was there constitutionally to fulfill the Mandate and was answerable to the League of Nations for her actions.

As long as the League had prestige in the world, it served as a restraining influence on the deepening tendency in London to turn the purpose of the Mandate from the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home, to the creation of an Arab-dominated dependency of Great Britain. Informed public opinion could not be disregarded, nor that part of the British establishment that fought back, though ever less effectively, against the Arabist erosion of its obligation to the Jewish people.

But while the Colonial Office and the administration In Palestine reduced the essentials of the Mandate, the League of Nations grew progressively less effective; its influence waned gradually in the 1920s, speedily after Its show of impotence over the Japanese seizure of Manchuria In 1931. In sum, Zionism was fought on every possible front: economically, in the social services, in the police and public service. The administration was so filled with officials hostile to the purpose of the Mandate that the exceptions became famous. The progress of Jewish restoration was retarded as much as possible.

The central and most effective weapon in the British armory was the control of immigration, and this was used with ever increasing severity. In justification, economics were Invoked; a principle called “economic absorptive capacity” was the guiding criterion. With the help of “experts” who asserted that there simply was little or no cultivable land left for development, the government’s control of Jewish immigrationadministered by a system of quotas became ever more restrictive. (At that time, there were less than a million people in western Palestine; today there are four million, with still undefined possibilities of growth.)

Through the country’s back door, in quiet defiance of its Mandate, it also allowed an Incessant inflow of Arabs. These came mainly from Syria and Transjordan, attracted by the progress and prosperity the Jews were bringing to Palestine. In a constant atmosphere of Jewish crisis and tragedy, In the twenty-six years of the Mandate period, the British allowed the entry of approximately 400,000 Jews into their national home and hounded and punished and, in the end drove back or deported Jews who were trying to steal in. In that same period, crossing the Jordan with ease, probably 200,000 Arabs came in to swell the “existing non-Jewish population.”

Yet, though the effort was sustained for a whole generation, from the early 1920s to 1948, neither the British rulers nor Haj Amin el Husseini with the machine he had built for propaganda and indoctrination, ever succeeded in converting the Arab population of Palestine into a national conscious entity, moved and animated by a hunger for “liberation,” proclaiming and asserting itself as a people with a positive aim. The fundamental reason is that it was – and is still – no such thing. A nation cannot be “created” In a generation or even in two, certainly not when essential ingredients are lacking. It was difficult to distinguish an Arab people altogether, not only in Palestine.

A sense of fraternal solidarity did exist In the Arab family, in its economics, in its sense of honor. It existed in the clan that might grow out of the individual family. It might exist in the village. Beyond these loyalties, there was only a religious sense, a sense of community in Islam. Even that, with the considerable sectarian fragmentation, never proved itself. In modern times as an effective force. There was little sense of belonging to “Arabdom.” To the degree that such a feeling ultimately did take root, it was expressed by an affinity to the large Arab people as a whole. Such an affinity could at least refer back to the ancient glory of a vast Arab Empire. This very frame of reference emphasized the absence of a “Palestinian” consciousness, which had in fact never existed and which could not be conjured up. Whenever, therefore, a reaction was to be provoked in the more militant, or more unruly, section of the Arab population, it was the vaguer generality of Islam or of pan-Arabism that was invoked.

Thus, the disturbances in 1929 were organized on a religious pretext – the alleged designs of the Zionists on the Moslem Holy Places and an Arab assertion of Moslem ownership of the Western Wall (of the Jewish Temple), which abuts the Temple Mount where the Moslems built their mosques. These disturbances, marked by the resolute permissiveness of the British authority, were characterized by outbursts of sheer slaughter. The massacre of the scholarly Jewish community of Hebron remained unrepeated elsewhere because of the defense provided by the newly effective Jewish Haganah organization.

The “Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939, developed by British and Arab cooperation into an expression of pan-Arab policy, was far more ambitious. It was intended – and indeed came to be – the herald of Britain’s final abrogation of her pact with the Jewish people. For between 1929 and 1936, a drastic and dire change had occurred in the world.

The Nazis had come to power in Germany. The campaign of the German state against the Jewish people in Germany and throughout the world, the wave of anti-Semitism engulfing the Jews of Eastern Europe and poisoning the wells of the West, had created an unprecedented pressure on the gates of their national home. During the three years after 1933, when the official anti-Jewish terror in Germany began, some 150,000 Jews had entered Palestine by taking advantage of remaining loopholes in the immigration regulations. The plight of the Jews remaining in Germany and of the persecuted, increasingly desperate, five million Jews in eastern Europe was arousing considerable international attention. Opening the gates of Palestine, though the obvious solution, would have meant the defeat of the Arabists’ purpose. A few more years of large-scale Jewish immigration would have placed the Jews in a majority. If the Jews could proclaim a state, the Arab population for the most part probably prepared to resign itself to a Jewish regime if it did not interfere with its way of life – might well make peace with it, and the British presence would come to an end. The pressure of Jewish need and world sympathy could be countered only by a more powerful, irresistible force which would prove that it was impossible to achieve the Mandate’s original purpose, that Arab resistance was too strong, too determined. The Arab “Revolt” was the result.

It was not a revolt at all but a campaign of violence directed against the Jews. Haj Amin’s resources, after fifteen years of organization, were adequate to give it a country-wide though still primitive and improvisational-character. In 1920, the pogroms had been inspired and connived at by the military administration in an effort to nip its home government’s Zionist policy in the bud. In 1936, the Arab campaign of violence was a move calculated to further the British home government’s intention of finally burying Zionism. The policy laid down in 1939 in the White Paper was the preordained purpose for which the 1936 outbreak was needed.

The permissive attitude of the Palestine government to the campaign of violence was evident from the outset. The outbreak was signaled months in advance. Inciting speeches by Arab political and religious notables and inflammatory articles in the Arab newspapers were the order of the day. It was common talk among both Jews and Arabs that the Arab villages (as in 1920) were “infested with agitators” who were inciting the population to violence against the Jews and that once again the people were being assured that a’dowlah ma’ana. This process was not disturbed by a single overt act, no by any public statement, nor any warning of preventive or punitive action by the government.

When, in the face of this astonishing forbearance, warnings were addressed to the High Commissioner and to the colonial Office in London of the signs of the imminence of Arab violence, the reply was that the situation was under control. Similar reassuring statements were made after the first day’s toll of seventeen Jews killed by Arab mobs in the public streets of Jaffa under the nose of the British authority (Katz, pp. 4-5).

Had the campaign been in fact a spontaneous Arab outbreak, and had the government been determined to maintain law and order, the outbreak would have lasted no more than a few days and would have made little impact. A completely typical illustration of the administration’s solution to the problem of pretending to be putting down the “rebellion” is provided by the description by a British soldier on the spot, given in the London journal New Statesman and Nation, September 20, 1936:

At night, when we are guarding the line against the Arabs who come to blow it up, we often see them at work but are forbidden to fire at them. We may only fire into the air, and they, upon hearing the report, make their escape. But do you think we can give chase. Why, we must go on our hands and knees and find every spent cartridge-case which must be handed in or woe betide us.

In a similar spirit, the general strike proclaimed by the Arab Higher Committee (the selfappointed leadership of the Arab community, headed by Haj Amin el Husseini) and imposed on the Arab masses as the central weapon and symbol of the campaign was not resisted by the administration. It refuses to declare the strike illegal, in flagrant contrast to its swift crushing of an earlier strike in nonviolent protest by the Jews against Jabotinsky’s arrest after the pogrom of 1920.

When, subsequently, the “rebels,” mistaking British permissiveness for Arab strength, went beyond attacks on Jewish villages and on Jewish life and property and attacked British personnel, effective measures were taken, and the “rebels” were firmly suppressed.

The revolt, widely publicized, served its purpose. The British government proclaimed in its famous White Paper of 1939 its abandonment of the Zionist policy. After the introduction of 75,000 more Jews into Palestine during the ensuing five years, the gates would be closed. The way would thus be open for that ultimate semi-dependent Arab state that would complete the British pan-Arab dream in the Middle East.

This document was rejected as inconsistent with the Mandate by the supervising body of the League of Nations, the Permanent Mandates Commission. But the League of Nations was dying, and Britain treated it with appropriate contempt. Four months later, the Second World War broke out, and the British government executed the White Paper policy as if Palestine had been a British possession and the White Paper an act of Parliament. Unnumbered Jews thus were trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe when, but for the rigid and unrelenting application of the provisions of the White Paper, they could have escaped to Palestine even during the war.

It may be that this grim consequence of British policy is the reason why the British government later willfully destroyed so many of the documents that could have provided direct evidence of the Palestine government’s behavior. After thirty years, the British state archives were, in accordance with custom, opened to the research of writers and historians. The entire correspondence between the Palestine administration and its chiefs at the Colonial Office in London relating to the records of the meetings of the Executive Council (in effect the Cabinet) of the Palestine government had been “destroyed under statute.” Another obviously important file so destroyed was that relating to the Haganah organization, which, if it had not been hamstrung by the government, was itself capable of putting a swift end to the Arab attacks. Yet another file destroyed was on “Propaganda Among the Arabs” the incitement against the Jews – which the Palestine government had often been charged with inspiring, sponsoring, or at least facilitating.

The sanctity of the minutes of the British Cabinet in London has, however, saved one item of direct documentary evidence on the British government’s relationship to the “revolt” and to the “rebels.” The disturbances were not even mentioned when the Cabinet met soon after they broke out. Nor was the outbreak discussed at the next meeting or the one after that. Indeed, five meetings went by before the Cabinet discussed any aspect of the situation in Palestine. At the meeting of May 11. 1936 three weeks and a day after the outbreak the Secretary of State for the Colonies presented the Cabinet with a memorandum, not indeed proposing or even announcing measures for putting an end to the violence, but reporting that the High Commissioner recommended that the most helpful means now open to His Majesty’s Government of preventing the present disorders from spreading and increasing in violence would be for an immediate announcement of a Royal Commission, with wide terms of reference, with power to make recommendations for lessening animosities and for establishing a feeling of lasting security in Palestine. [Cab. 23/841]

The Secretary of State “did not,” the minutes continue, “ask for a decision on the Terms of Reference to, or composition of the proposed Royal Commission which would require careful consideration, but merely for permission to tell the High Commissioner that His Majesty’s Government was favorable to the proposal so that he could sound the Arabs and report further” (italics added).

Nevertheless, in spite of this conclusion, the development of the “revolt” was made possible and given shape and thrust only by the introduction of help by Arabs from outside Palestine. One of the outstanding features of the “revolt” was the failure of the Arabs of Palestine themselves to act appropriately.

The Palestinian Arabs were comfortably aware of the existence around them, in addition to their original homeland in Arabia, of six more Arabic speaking countries, five of them predominantly Moslem, all part of the same sprawling territory which many centuries ago had been won and lost by the invaders from Arabia. Those Arabs who had dealings with the Jews got on well with them, and even if they did not like the idea of Jews, rather than Turks or British, ruling the country, they could not conjure up enough hostility to fight them. In 1929, the Mufti had incited them by distributing postcards which showed the El Aksa Mosque flying the Zionist flag an effective essay in photomontage. In 1936, the bulk of Palestinian Arabs still remained cold to the urgings of Haj Amin. A minority carried out the street knifings, the sniping at Jewish transport, the throwing of bombs in cinemas and marketplaces. The general strike was maintained only by the constant threat of force by the Mufti’s organization; and the threat was made more persuasive by the refusal of the administration to declare the strike illegal.

The effort of the Palestine Arabs was not enough to Impress the world. After the first phase of sniping, of attacks by street mobs, of individual bomb throwing, of shooting at transport on the main roads, there came a relaxation even of this effort. “Rebels” were consequently imported. A Syrian, Fawzi Kaukji, led a mixed band of Syrian and Iraqi mercenaries in the extended campaign directed mainly against the Jewish villages. The Palestine Arab population on the whole refused to cooperate with these liberators, often even denying them shelter. The outcome was a campaign of murder against the Palestinian Arabs. When Arab villages appealed to the British administration for arms to defend themselves against Kaukji’s invading bands, they were refused. In the end, more Arabs than Jews were killed by the “rebels.”

The intervention by Arabs from the neighboring countries was a reflection of the Cairo school’s dream. To its members, Palestine was only part of the larger scheme; it was needed only to complete the homogeneity of a large Arab “world” under British tutelage.

That dream was not abandoned. Indeed, the British government worked energetically to create a form of unity, or at least a, framework of cooperation, among the Arab states. In an Arab world riven with disagreements and jealousies, the Palestine issue was the ideal instrument to bring about such cooperation. To appear, without much effort, as the champions of their brothers in Palestine and at the same time to nourish the hope that the Fertile Crescent might become homogeneously Arab this was a prospect that appealed to the Arab states.

As early as 1936 the real or nominal heads of the Arab states or states in embryo were called in by the administration and generously agreed to “secure” from the Mufti and his Arab Higher Committee a temporary cessation of the revolt so as to enable an investigation of grievances. When the Mufti in turn graciously consented, the government permitted the main body of Fawzi Kaukji’s terrorists to go back across the Jordan, where they could rest and reorganize. Thereafter, it became a self understood facet of British policy that the Arab states had acquired a right to intervene in the affairs of Palestine. As though they were parties to the “dispute,” with a claim and interests in the country and in flagrant flaunting of the origin, the concept, the letter and the spirit of Britain’s own defined Mandate, the Arab rulers were invited in 1939 to a so called Round Table Conference. The predetermined failure of this conference (where the Arab representatives refused to meet the Jews face to face) was enshrined in the white Paper that followed immediately. Looking ahead, through the storms of the war that followed to the final consummation of the White Paper, the British government took active steps to create a formal instrument of pan Arabism. Thus, the Arab League was born. After Anthony Eden first mentioned it publicly in 1941, the then British Foreign Secretary presided over the necessary diplomatic exchanges and negotiations that brought about the formal establishment of the League in 1945.

The pan Arab dream, had meanwhile also assumed that large economic importance which had been part of its inspiration. The oilfields of Iraq proved to be but a small portion of a vast potential in Iraq itself and, even more, in Saudi Arabia and the British dependent sheikhdoms on the Persian Gulf. British commercial interests played a large part in their exploitation.

Thus, after thirty years, an Arab entity coexisting of seven countries Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Transjordan formally independent, semi-dependent, or on the way to forced independence and providing substantial dividends, to an impoverished British economy, promised to realize the dream, conceived in 1915, of an Arab confederation that would “look to Britain as, its patron and protector. Western Palestine was, still lacking to complete the picture, but its inclusion seemed imminent. It remained only to give the finishing stroke to Zionisin. That should not be difficult after the battering the Jewish people had suffered from the Nazis.

Zionism however, refused to die. On the contrary, with a drive and a passion that may have been unexpected by the British, a Jewish resistance sprang up, determined now, after six million Jews had been exterminated, to take what seemed the last chance to restore the Jewish independence that Britain had been pledged to establish and had now betrayed. In varying degrees of intensity before the end of the Second World War, and at increased and increasing pitch after the war, the Jews were locked in struggle with the Mandatory regime. Large military forces were poured into, the country by Britain.

Now, at last, the time had come for the assertion of a “Palestinian” Arab entity. The Arabs could theoretically have joined the Jews in a classic war of liberation from a foreign ruler and established a claim to partnership in the ensuing independence. Or, more credibly, the British having already promised them in fact independence which the Jewish resistance was endangering, they might have rushed in to help the British in, crushing the Zionists. In fact, faced with the two alternatives, they chose a third. They did nothing.

The Arab population of Palestine sat by while the Jewish resistance movement brought about the end of British rule.

The claim has in fact been made that the Arabs restraint was calculated. “Let” the Jews get rid of the British, then “settle” with the Jews. The facts prove otherwise. When the United Nations General Assembly decided on, November 29, 1947, to recommend the partition of Palestine and the establishment of two states, the Arabs did launch a countrywide attack on the Jews. But this, too, was carried out only with considerable aid from the British who maintained their presence in the country for another six months. Clearly, also, the attacking Arabs were a minority of the people, while the majority remained passive or evacuated in order to leave the field to the invading Arab states, who promised to drive the Jews into the sea. The Palestine Arabs were truly a people of noncombatants, they contributed very little manpower to the ensuing full scale war that was supposed to be a life-and-death struggle for them. The British statistics gave the Arabs a population of 1,200,000 in western Palestine. Even if, as is likely, this figure is an exaggeration, there must still, at a highly conservative estimate, have been 100,000 men of military age. The report of the Iraqi Government Commission, which subsequently inquired into the cause of the defeat established that the total number of Palestinian Arabs who took part in the war was 4,000. The Jews, altogether some 650,000, lost one-and-a-half times that number.

This confrontation of figures is symbolic of the affinity to Eretz Israel of the Jewish people and of the real Arab relationship to the country. The Arabs of Palestine were under no physical compulsion when their vast majority deliberately left their homes unguarded and exposed and moved off across the Jordan or into Syria or Lebanon or to those parts of western Palestine that fell under the control of the Arab invaders. The Jews, most of them the first and second generation of the organized return to their ancestral country, stood and fought and died for every inch of the land. This stark confrontation of affinities has its deep roots in the history of the land and the people.

We would like to thank ShmuelKatz.com for providing us with the material for this article. This article is republished with the permission of David Isaac, e-Editor of ShmuelKatz.com. For republishing rights please contact David Isaac directly at David_Isaac@ShmuelKatz.com.

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About the author,

Shmuel “Mooki” Katz, born Samuel Katz (9 December 1914 – 9 May 2008) was an Israeli writer, member of the first Knesset, publisher, historian and journalist. He was a member of the first Knesset and is also known for his research on Jewish leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Katz was born in 1914 in South Africa, and in 1930 he joined the Betar movement. In 1936 he immigrated to Mandate Palestine and joined the Irgun. In 1939 he was sent to London by Ze’ev Jabotinsky to speak on issues concerning Palestine. While there he founded the revisionist publication “The Jewish Standard” and was its editor, 1939–1941, and in 1945. In 1946 Katz returned to Mandate Palestine and joined the HQ of the Irgun where he was active in the aspect of foreign relations. He was one of the seven members of the high command of the Irgun, as well as a spokesman of the organization.

In 1948 Katz assisted in the bringing of the ship, Altalena to the shores of Israel. Shmuel Katz was one of the founders of the Herut political party and served as one of its members in the First Knesset. In 1951 he left politics and managed the Karni book publishing firm. He was co-founder of The Land of Israel Movement in 1967, and in 1971 he helped to create Americans for a Safe Israel.

In 1977 Katz became “Adviser to the Prime Minister of Information Abroad” to Menachem Begin. He accompanied Begin on two trips to Washington and was asked to explain some points to President Jimmy Carter. He quit this task on January 5, 1978 because of differences with the Cabinet over peace proposals with Egypt. He refused the high prestige post of UN ambassador. Katz was then active with the Tehiya party for some years and later with Herut – The National Movement after it split away from the ruling Likud. He also has written for the Daily Express and The Jerusalem Post. (source: wikipedia and shmuelkatz.com)

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