It’s about Oil
With the defeat of Germany and Japan, some perspicacious American observers reckoned that the Soviets would focus their attention on the Middle East, where the British position seemed enfeebled. In addition to promoting Communist activity in Greece, the Soviets sought concessions from Iran and Turkey, using increasingly strongarm methods to achieve them. But were the Americans justified in seeing this as a pathological pattern, or was Stalin acting much more opportunistically as each new chance arose? Was he acting within the historic tradition of tsarist Russian policy, or was a more ideological ambition involved? Moreover, British imperial power throughout the region was being contested by nationalist movements that had almost nothing to do with Communism, towards which cultural Islam often proved a major obstacle.
The collapse of European authority in the Middle East after the Second World War was much less precipitate than what happened to the colonial powers in Asia. Although the British had a long-standing presence in Egypt and close relations with the Trucial Emirates of the Persian Gulf, their involvement in the area had only deepened in the final year of the First World War, when British Imperial forces drove the Germans’ Ottoman allies from their historic Arab dominions. Hegemony over this enormous area came to be seen as crucial to the survival of the British Empire, not only to ensure communications between Britain and India but also because of the strategic importance of oil deposits in Mesopotamia and Persia. Mesopotamia was the ancient Greek toponym for ‘land of the two rivers’, the cradle of ancient civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates where modern Iraq now sits; Persia was the vast ancient empire ultimately beneath modern Iran.1
After the First World War the British and French became the administrators of hugely increased imperial territories in the Middle East, usually as mandates from the League of Nations for a specified time. The trick was to turn them into the equivalent of perpetual tenancies through puppet rulers. Amir Abdullah’s Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan became the most dependable after the British had expelled his independent advisers in 1924. But it was Iraq that was supposed to exemplify the ‘civilized tutelage’ the British elites envisioned for these mandates, although in reality it was a defence in depth of the Anglo–Persian Oil Company, whose majority shareholder was the British government. In 1918 Anglo–Persian increased its controlling share of the Turkish Petroleum Company (renamed the Iraqi Petroleum Company) to 75 per cent after expropriating the 25 per cent formerly held by Deutsche Bank. Hashemite Amir Faisal, first proclaimed king of Syria, was transferred to the Iraqi throne in 1921 after a referendum from which the British subtracted rival contenders, shipping one of them to Ceylon. That Faisal was a Sunni and that the majority of Iraqis were Shiite simply perpetuated the divide-and-rule strategy employed by the Ottomans. At his pre-dawn coronation ceremony, the band played the British anthem, ‘God Save the King’.
The Anglo–Iraqi Treaty of 1922 cemented British influence over a nominally independent Iraq for twenty years, during which resistance was ruthlessly suppressed. Iraqi crude was not even refined locally and was of little benefit to the local population, 90 per cent of whom were still illiterate in 1950. When the British mandate expired in 1932, a new treaty pared down the British presence to a military minimum, retaining two air bases at Habbaniyah and Shaiba and the right of their armed forces to transit the country. Two years later Iraq became the first Arab state to be admitted to the League of Nations. Its independence remained a sham in the eyes of Iraqi nationalists, and it was also a hotbed of ethnic and sectarian animosities between Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shias, and political tensions between the army, the elites and left-wing reformers.
Resentments grew towards a monarch who was nothing more than a British client, and the resentful seized their moment when fate resulted in that shaky moment for all monarchies, a period of regency and minority rule. After Faisal had died in Switzerland in 1933, his son Ghazi, a Harrow-educated playboy with a love of fast cars, took over until he drove one at high speed into a lamppost in April 1939. The throne passed to three-year-old Faisal II under the regency of Ghazi’s twenty-six-year-old cousin Abdullah, with a pro-British prime minister called Nuri as-Said. Once the Second World War had broken out, opponents of the regime were naturally drawn towards Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In April 1941 the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gayani deposed Abdullah and Nuri and appointed the Mufti of Jerusalem to his new cabinet, prompting the British to intervene in strength in what Iraqis call the ‘Thirty Days War’. Baghdad’s Jewish community fell victim to a terrible pogrom in the period before the British established control. As the chief inciter of these riots, the Mufti had blamed an alleged Zionist fifth column for the fall of the Rashid Ali regime. Unlike Iraqi Christians, the Jews had indeed been indiscreet in their warm welcome for the British. Rashid Ali and the Mufti fled, the latter to the Japanese embassy in Tehran, which proved an uncertain sanctuary.
Meanwhile Faisal II was sent to Harrow to become more thoroughly anglicized than his Bedouin father. Commercial sharp practice ensured that the Iraqi Petroleum Company kept the lion’s share of Iraq’s oil profits, with very little of the remainder invested in anything that might have benefited ordinary Iraqis rather than their profligate rulers. The arrangement continued until 1958, when King Faisal, his Crown Prince and Nuri As-Said were brutally murdered in a popular uprising and Iraq embarked on its future as a republic.2
Oil also figured very prominently in British calculations regarding Iran – or Persia, as foreigners insisted on calling it. In October 1941 what had been an almost frantically neutral government issued a resigned armistice plea: ‘We have done whatever possible to prevent this nefarious war from breaking out on our land. But against all international rules and moral principles, our two neighbours invaded our country. There can be no other reason for this dastardly act but their wish to destroy our system and our progress, which we have achieved with so much labour and human struggle.’3 The victim was not Poland, but Iran. The aggressors were Great Britain and the Soviet Union, whose forces occupied the country to secure Allied Lend-Lease supplies going to the Red Army defending the Caucasus, as well as to protect the oil refinery at Abadan, on which the Royal Navy depended.
The deep background to this unhappy story reached back to the turn of the twentieth century, when Persia had been a de facto colony of Great Britain in the south and of tsarist Russia in the north, leaving the ruling Qajar dynasty in precarious power in the centre. Russians staffed the Persian army’s elite Cossack forces, while the British had their own South Persian Rifles, whose main task was to protect the burgeoning interests of the Anglo–Persian Oil Company. This rapacious organization (renamed the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company in 1932, before eventually becoming British Petroleum) paid derisory royalties to the Iranian government from its colossal revenues.
Every trick in the accountants’ book was used to swindle the Iranians. This was easy as two British government officials sat on AIOC’s board and there were no Iranian representatives. Taxes to the British Exchequer were deducted before profits were distributed to Iran, which meant that in 1949 the Iranian government received £1 million in tax revenue while Whitehall received £28 million. The British Admiralty paid twenty US cents per barrel of oil when the market price was $1.50 and similar discounts were made to American oil concerns to help liquidate Britain’s massive post-war debt to the USA.
European operatives enjoyed a plush lifestyle while local workers were paid 50 cents a day and lived in shacks made from beaten oil drums amid the giant refinery complex on the island of Abadan and in what were called ‘The Fields’, where the oil was extracted. Under the 1933 agreement the AIOC was obliged to improve the infrastructure with roads, hospitals and schools, but none of this was done. Abadan was an immense complex of metal pipes, valves and tanks, all burning to the touch and shimmering like a mirage in the heat. Asphalt roads had the consistency of marshmallow, and grocers served customers while standing in a barrel of water. Two thousand British administrators and technicians worked there, although it could have functioned with fifty.4
In the early 1920s the British had backed an officer in the Cossack guard in his quest to discipline and modernize the country along the lines of Atatürk’s Turkey. A little English general stood on tiptoe to whisper in the giant Reza’s ear, ‘Colonel, you are a man of great possibilities.’ This was the tall, pockmarked, illiterate soldier who in 1921 deposed the Qajar monarch. Five years later the Iranian parliament, or Majlis, offered Reza Shah Pahlavi – as he styled himself – the Peacock Throne; he crowned himself and preferred to sleep on the floor. Reza Shah wanted to eradicate what he regarded as the backward effects of Arab conquest on Iran. He only ever ventured west as far as Turkey, for he feared the humiliating shock of visiting developed Western Europe.5
After having some of the old order poisoned or strangled, Reza Shah dragged urban Iran into the new century. In 1935 he banned the name ‘Persia’ in favour of the more ancient Iran. In 1936 he outlawed the Islamic chador and introduced peaked caps to make it hard for pious Muslims to bump their foreheads on their prayer rugs. He tore down much of medieval Tehran, often before the residents could evacuate their possessions, replacing it with expansive boulevards and swanky public buildings. People were prohibited from photographing symbolically backward camels. He insisted on providing the country with a modern infrastructure, notably the Trans-Iranian Railway, completed in 1938, even though most freight was carried on trucks. Nomads were forced to settle and the tribes were cowed. Mullahs without demonstrable theological training were banned from preaching and the raggedy mullah became a common sight.6
Washington was asked to send a team of experts to sort out the country’s bankrupt and corrupted finances. Reza Shah created a civil service as well as a national army, while instituting secular courts. He could be brutal if he needed to be. When clerics gathered in the Khorasan mosque to protest against the ban on veils, his troops stormed it and killed a hundred of those inside. When bakers hoarded wheat, causing a famine, he had one of them thrown in his own oven. Dissenting liberals were bricked up in a tower.7
One of those who opposed the Shah’s modernizing military despotism was Mohammed Mossadeq, a scion of Iran’s ramified ruling Qajar dynasty. Having studied public administration in Iran’s mandarin manner in order to work as a tax collector, the aristocratic Mossadeq went to Paris in his mid-twenties to acquire modern Western culture. His second long stint in Europe was in Switzerland, where he completed a doctoral thesis, in Latin, on testaments in Islamic law, the first Iranian to achieve such a higher degree. On his return home he was elected to parliament. There he bravely opposed Reza Shah’s 1925 coup and the latter’s increasingly tyrannical behaviour. Mossadeq was a committed parliamentarian – not quite the same beast as a democrat – who hated foreign interference in Iranian affairs. He spent virtually the entire 1930s living in rural isolation, the alternative to being murdered by the Shah.8
For if Reza Shah’s initial model was Atatürk, by the 1930s he had become entranced by Europe’s Fascists. In his quest to find a source of investment capital and expertise independent of the British and Russians, Reza Shah opened Iran to the Germans, who flooded into the country in some numbers. The British and Soviets combined to insist that Reza Shah expel them so as to protect supply routes to the desperate Soviets, and, although he complied, they occupied his country anyway and he went into exile. The Allies put his twenty-one-year-old son Mohammed Reza Shah on the throne, in events witnessed by the young Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei. Mohammed was a soft pastiche of Daddy.
A British consular official, Sir Claremont Skrine, was based throughout the war in Meshed, a city within the increasingly closed Soviet north of Iran. His main task was to expedite transhipments of war materials going to the Soviet Union. In his peripheral vision Skrine also noted another power in the land, the third party to a tripartite treaty which guaranteed Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, with a supplemental promise to evacuate the country six months after the cessation of global hostilities. Thirty thousand US troops radically increased the carrying capacity of the Trans-Iranian Railway bearing Lend-Lease materials northwards. The fiscal expert Arthur Millspaugh returned to run Iran’s public finances. Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the founder of the New Jersey State Police, was imported to reorganize the Iranian paramilitary Gendarmerie. He was to return in 1953 as part of a joint CIA–SIS operation to overthrow Mossadeq and reinstate the Shah.
Although his relations with the Soviets began amicably enough, Skrine noticed that, following a few changes of key personnel, the atmosphere deteriorated. In 1941 the Soviets helped camouflage the Iranian Communists as a more populist Tudeh or ‘Masses’ Party, to attract a wider range of those who sought reform and an end to foreign rule. Although it numbered only a few thousand core members, it had hundreds of thousands of sympathizers, particularly in the unions. The Soviets also backed separatist movements among the Azerbaijanis under Mir Bagirov and Kurds under Jafar Pishevari, even though this threat to Iran’s integrity was anathema to the Tudeh Party.
The British responded by supporting such conservative forces as the Shia clergy and the monarchy, while encouraging an anti-Communist Party called National Will. In the event, power in the Majlis passed to liberal nationalists such as Ahmed Qavam and Mossadeq. Stalin gradually dropped the Tudeh party in favour of using the northern Azeri and Kurdish nationalists to lever oil concessions out of the Iranian government. Of course the northern nationalists were expendable pawns too, as Molotov admitted when he said that Pishevari ‘could die or become ill’ should he prove awkward.9 The Iranian government sought to interest a wider range of Western oil companies in Iran, partly to counter the hegemony of the British. This annoyed the Soviets, who in October 1944 demanded a northern oil concession of their own. The Soviet Ambassador, Sergei Kavtaradze, tried to bully the Iranians by encouraging the Tudeh Party to demonstrate outside the parliament building, calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation, and then deployed Red Army troops to protect the demonstrators from the Iranian government. No wonder the US was worried about how the Soviets conducted themselves towards a ‘friendly’ power.10
While Mossadeq took to railing in parliament against both the British and Russians, the new Prime Minister Qazam encouraged deeper US involvement in Iran’s oil industry, while simultaneously double-crossing the Soviets over their northern concession. Qazam promised Stalin oil concessions and took three Tudeh Party members into his government. Stalin duly dropped the northern separatists and withdrew his forces in May 1946. He explained to his despondent separatist clients that their analysis of events was faulty, and that at this stage of the infant Iranian revolution it was necessary to support a progressive bourgeois like Qazam to isolate the Iranian Anglophiles.
It was Stalin’s analysis of the situation that proved flawed. The Shah’s forces crushed the Azeri and Kurdish separatists with extreme violence, the three Communists were ejected from the Tehran government and the oil-concessions treaty was never ratified by the Majlis, where opposition to Qazam was led by Mossadeq. Resembling a cartoon vulture, Mossadeq was much given to fainting, weeping and long bouts of hysterical laughter, which played well among emotional Shias but which lent themselves to self-serving foreign insinuations about his sanity. He was emerging as the one figure who had suffered twenty years of exile and house arrest for his loyal opposition to the old Shah, and who could unite all shades of nationalist opinion, including the Shia clergy. The door closed on Stalin was one which opened for the US, reluctantly drawn into ever closer support for the young Shah of Iran, whose pretensions to restoring the empire of Darius the Great otherwise struck the Americans as absurd.11
Stalin’s parallel demands on Turkey, for military bases on the Straits and the return of Kars and Ardahan to the Armenian Soviet Republic, and his alleged backing for Communists in Greece led many US policy-makers to see ominous patterns in his behaviour.12 One who did so was Loy Henderson, who in the spring of 1946 became head of the State Department’s Near Eastern and African Affairs division, having served in Moscow in the 1930s. In a major policy paper, written two months before Kennan’s Long Telegram, Henderson argued that with Germany and Japan out of the way, the Soviets would turn their attentions to an enfeebled British position in the greater Middle East. He played a major role in following Soviet troop movements in northern Iran – the Vice Consul in Tabriz spent many nights counting tanks by moonlight – and in persuading Secretary of State Byrnes to let the Russians know that the US were fully aware of what they were doing.13
In fact Stalin pursued a policy that might be called an immoderate sauter pour mieux reculer to make a more moderate gain, always testing his ideological enemies’ resolve. Thus Soviet demands for a military presence on the Dardanelles in August 1946 led the Americans to elaborate war plans (codename Pincher) for the region. There was talk of the knock-on effects, not just in Greece, but in the Middle East, India and even China, the prototype of the domino theory that came to dominate US policy-making. A US carrier group, led by the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, was moved into the eastern Mediterranean, while by October plans had been worked out for air strikes on Soviet oil installations, and for nuclear war. Fully informed of US plans by his many agents in the US government, Stalin backed down and made more emollient noises to Ankara.14
Egyptian Resurgence
If the Soviet threat drew the US into the affairs of Iran and Turkey, to the west and south its British ally was the main problem. Egypt had never formally been a British colony, unusual in that since the time of the ancient pharaohs foreigners, from the Hellenic Ptolemys to the Ottoman Turks, had always ruled Egypt. But because the French-designed and Egyptian-built Suez Canal was the jugular vein for the wider British Empire, the British used financial power and military might to install themselves on and around this major artery. Interwar monarchical Egypt was a paradise of liberality compared with anywhere in the Middle East. There were regular elections to a bicameral legislature, which dated back to 1866, full adult male suffrage and a free press. Only the last was true of contemporary Britain. Alexandria and Cairo were lively cosmopolitan cities. Of course, one should not idealize modern Egypt for in the late 1940s as little as 5 per cent of Egypt’s population controlled 65 per cent of the country’s commercial and industrial assets, while 3 per cent owned 80 per cent of its land.15
As the first entrant into the field, the liberal nationalist Al-Wafd (Delegation) Party dominated the politics of the period. Its main concerns were to wring further constitutional concessions from King Fuad, and from 1936 his child heir Faruq, and to limit British dominance of what, since 1922 when the British relinquished financial controls, was a nominally independent country. Although the 1936 Treaty of Preferential Alliance, negotiated by Anthony Eden, conceded that ‘Egypt was an independent and sovereign state’ – it joined the League of Nations a year later – two major points of tension were unresolved. First, Britain refused to acknowledge exclusive Egyptian suzerainty over the much vaster Sudan, which since 1899 had been ruled as a condominium; and second, the British retained an enormous military presence in the Suez Canal Zone as well as in Cairo and Alexandria. Suez was the juncture where the British Empire could be split in half. The Suez complex included some ten airfields and forty other major encampments capable of sustaining half a million troops or more in the event of war, in which the Canal was a vital strategic route for the defence of India. Ironically, one minor detail in the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty was that the Military Academy was opened to all of Egypt’s social classes. Among the beneficiaries was Gamal Abdul Nasser.
Nasser was one of eleven children, who moved frequently in the tow of their postmaster father until he settled in the capital. Despite the inevitably cramped conditions in a four-room Cairo apartment, Nasser managed to supplement the rote learning common at the time with extensive if somewhat indiscriminate reading about Julius Caesar, Nelson and Gandhi, even tackling the novels of Dickens and Hugo. Schoolboys and students were sufficiently uncommon in a society where peasants earned £15 a year for them to assume vanguardist functions. While still young, Nasser was smashed in the face with a truncheon during a demonstration. By late adolescence he had to face the fact that his family were too poor for him to study law. Instead he joined the army, which had something of the Kemalist cum Prusso-Japanese air of being a school for the nation. Various desultory provincial postings ensued, including three years in the Sudan, but already he had become firm friends with a group of like-minded nationalist officers, including Anwar Sadat, who chafed at the continuance of British informal rule behind the puppets on the Egyptian throne.
Sadat was tantalized by the discipline and mobilizing powers of totalitarian dictatorships, but above all this group looked at neighbouring Palestine and saw a majority Arab population held down in order for the British to import European Zionist refugees, bent on creating a settler society resembling what the French had established in Algeria. Among these Egyptian officers the Palestinian Arab revolt of the late 1930s elicited the same passionate response as the Spanish civil war among European and US intellectuals. On the outbreak of war in Europe, Sadat was most assiduous in seeking an Axis victory, establishing contacts with Italian and German agents, as well as with the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Hassan al-Banna, with a view to overthrowing Faruq’s regime along the lines of Rashid Ali al-Gayani’s coup in Iraq. The British had little difficulty keeping tabs on German agents so incompetent that they established their base next to a houseboat inhabited by the city’s best belly dancers. Sadat was duly rounded up and imprisoned.16
The British engineered the dismissal of Prime Minister Aly Mahir in June 1940 and of the Egyptian Chief of Staff in August. In early 1942, they persuaded the Egyptian government to break off relations with Vichy France, although they did not consult young Faruq about this development. The entire government collapsed when Faruq demanded that his Foreign Minister resign. The British Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, was a bullying giant at six feet five and seventeen stone, who had the unfortunate habit of referring to Faruq as ‘the boy’. Lampson insisted that Faruq form a new pro-British government and sent him an ultimatum warning that ‘unless I hear by 6pm that Mustafa Nahas Pasha has been asked to form a cabinet, his Majesty King Farouk must expect consequences’. When Faruq ventured rhetorical defiance while otherwise complying with this demand, Lampson had tanks surround Abdin Palace. Lampson stormed in, accompanied by two South African officer cadets brandishing guns, and told the King he should appoint Nahas or abdicate immediately. He had a letter of abdication already prepared for the browbeaten King lest he baulk at dismissing his own Prime Minister.17
This incident, which has hardly registered in British consciousness, was of the utmost importance in the evolution of Egyptian nationalism. It discredited both Faruq and those who benefited from the brutal intervention. To Nasser and his friends it was an appalling affront to their sense of national dignity and honour. Of course it also discredited the British, although other factors had contributed more to that process. Throughout the war all colonial peoples observed white men killing other white men in vast numbers, while the influx of thousands of lower-class soldiers undermined the carefully cultivated image of the white men as a superior race. This was particularly the case in Egypt.18 A capital where the Circassian-Egyptian elite had interacted happily with their British equivalents was suddenly invaded by a horde of British and Dominion troops, the Australians in particular distinguished by their drunken boorishness. Amid the bars and brothels of the Fish Market, there was much knocking off of red tarboosh hats and raucous chants of ‘Faruq the Dirty Old Crook’. Although the King was still in his twenties, the refrain was otherwise accurate about his lifelong pursuit of teenage girls.
By the end of the war Nasser was a captain in his late twenties, happily married to a woman with a considerable private income of £800 a year. He and Sadat quietly organized cells of so-called Free Officers within the army of the late 1940s, a clandestine group numbering in the low hundreds with a larger group of civilian sympathizers. Meanwhile, successive Egyptian governments sought to renegotiate the 1936 Treaty with Britain, seeking to force it to relinquish control of the Sudan and to withdraw its troops from the Suez Canal Zone. The British were able to resist these efforts, but were not strong enough to reassert their control over Egypt as a whole.
In 1948 Egypt was one of seven Arab nations to send troops to Palestine, ostensibly to crush the new nation of Israel in support of the Palestinian Arabs, but in reality to prevent King Abdullah’s Jordan absorbing the areas the UN had ceded to the Arabs under the partition arrangements. Nasser was one of the officers involved in a shambolic campaign where he had to buy food for his men, who were equipped with Spanish grenades that blew up in their hands. He suffered a superficial wound and, although his troops may have acquitted themselves with honour, the political and military deficiencies of the Arabs were laid bare. Returning to his duties as a Staff College instructor, Nasser blamed the West’s royal Arab puppets for military humiliation at the hands of the Israelis, who at that time enjoyed the support of both the USA and the Soviet Union. Defeat also brought the Free Officers an important recruit in the form of the influential General Mohammed Naguib. In 1951 Faruq’s government unilaterally abrogated both the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty and the 1899 convention on the Sudan but then, unwisely, authorized a guerrilla campaign against British forces in the Canal Zone, which was run by the Free Officers. Heavy-handed British reprisals triggered mass protests in Cairo and Alexandria that Naguib and the Free Officers exploited to topple the monarchy.
Asking for Trouble in Algeria
In Arabic the Maghreb signifies the western tip of an Arab world whose heart is in the Gulf. France had two protectorates in the Maghreb – Morocco and Tunisia – while the three departments of Algeria were legally and constitutionally as much a part of metropolitan France as Normandy. Algeria was France’s oldest and most integrated colonial possession. Hard, sun-baked colons faced hard, dour native Muslims, for, as the nationalist leader Ahmed Ben Bella himself acknowledged, the peoples of Algeria are not known for their winning charm.19
Algeria was a classic settler colony, with some 800,000 Europeans – many of them Corsicans, Italians, Maltese and Spanish rather than français de souche (of the stump), as native French are known. Collectively these settlers were known as pieds noirs, after the shiny black shoes they wore amid the bare feet and sandals. The European settlers were French citizens – the indigenous Muslim population were unenfranchised subjects, to whom the repressive 1881 Native Code applied. One of Algeria’s nationalist leaders acknowledged that there was no Algerian nation: ‘such a fatherland does not exist. I questioned the living and the dead. I searched through the cemeteries: nobody could speak to me of it. You cannot build on air.’20
The introduction of private property law based on written contract gave Europeans key advantages over an indigenous population based on oral lore and tribal ownership. Muslim prohibitions on usury also gave Europeans an advantage in buying land on credit. By 1936, a century after the initial French conquest, European colons owned 40 per cent of the land once owned by Arabs and Berbers, the indigenous people who predated the Arab conquests.21 Agricultural mechanization diminished the importance of physical labour.22 The Muslims migrated into shantytowns or the pullulating courts of the cities’ various kasbahs, the Arab word for tight warrens of streets, steps and alleyways. As long as they were docile, these migrants would not be regarded as a threat by the Europeans who lived in the tonier quarters of towns.
The French divided Algeria into three departments – Oran, Algiers and Constantine – whose colon voters sent deputies and senators to the national legislature in Paris. The franchise was extended only to a very select group of Muslims who were deemed capable of being educated up towards full citizenship, as suggested by the paternalist Darwinian term évolués for such men. Since only 10,000 of three and a half million Muslims attended primary schools in 1890, evolution was a glacial process. Sharia law, governing marriage, the family and inheritance, was a convenient obstacle to granting Muslims full civic rights, a role played by polygamy in black Africa.
Although many nationalist leaders were secular French-speakers married to French women – and spoke Arabic haltingly – they regarded Islam (in its typically Algerian animist Sufi form) as a non-negotiable part of their cultural identity. Fanatical Islam was something they associated with medieval Almoravid conquerors. Football was as important as religion in forging a sense of national identity. In the 1920s Muslim Algerians formed separate football teams such as the Mouloudia Club in Algiers, whose red and green strip celebrated Mahloud, the festival of the Prophet’s birthday. Nervous of allowing Muslims to occupy any public space unsupervised, the authorities insisted that each Muslim team must include three colon players, regardless of their lack of skill.
There were three outstanding figures in the first wave of Algerian nationalists. Their precise ideological identities should be taken with a pinch of salt since in their part of the world these were often fluid. They were the Islamist cleric Sheikh Abd al-Hamid ben Badis, a student politician called Ferhat Abbas, who stemmed from the Francophone Muslim bourgeoisie, and finally the First World War veteran and factory worker Messali Hadj, who spent long periods in French prisons in between nondescript jobs in Paris’s Red Belt. The guru of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, influenced ben Badis, whose Association of the Algerian Ulema rejected French influences and sought to align Algeria within the wider Muslim umma, the global community of believers. Ferhat Abbas was a chemistry graduate married into an Alsatian settler family. He reluctantly moved from advocacy of citizenship through total integration to demanding an Algerian state based on parity of rights ‘within the fold of the French community’ and based on the principles of 1789. Messali Hadj was a shoemaker’s son who married the daughter of a French anarchist miner. He became the leading light of the Etoile Nord-Africaine (North African Star), an organization which flourished chiefly among the half-million Algerian workers living in metropolitan France. Politically, he moved from adherence to the French Communist Party to something more nationalist and Islamic, but the link with Communism would always play against him.23
The Second World War crystallized Algerian nationalist demands, not for integration but for complete independence. The army had always been an exit route from the grim economic conditions Muslim Algerians experienced, although a few managed to become soccer stars in France. The future nationalist leader Ahmed Ben Bella joined the army in 1936, while playing midfield too for Olympique de Marseilles.24 Ben Bella was a natural soldier, who loved the army mainly because he experienced no discrimination in it. He won the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire fighting as a warrant officer at such epic battles as Monte Cassino. His elder brother had died of wounds sustained during the First World War. Other soldiers included such former non-commissioned officers as Omar Ouamrane and Belkacem Krim. ‘I never had a chance to know adolescence,’ said Krim. ‘My brother returned from Europe with medals and frost-bitten feet. There, everyone was equal. Why not here?’ It was a very good question, which could just as easily have been asked by any non-white soldier returning to a racially stratified colony, or by Afro-American GIs who returned to the segregated South, where they could not even enter a bar.25
After 1940 the monolithic face of French authority was compromised, with Vichy being especially popular among the colons. Then a much more powerful ‘Anglo-Saxon’ actor arrived on the North African stage in the wake of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion in late 1942. Abbas was politely received by Roosevelt’s personal envoy Robert Murphy – mainly, it should be said, to solicit Muslim support for the war. In 1943 most of the Algerian nationalist factions combined into an Association des Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty), which became the first mass political movement in Algerian history.
In March 1944 de Gaulle in principle opened all government posts to Muslims and Frenchmen alike, and included 65,000 deserving Muslims on the French electoral roll. All Muslim males over twenty-one were declared eligible to vote for local assemblies, which had to include 40 per cent Muslims in their membership. This was too little, too late in an atmosphere rendered febrile by the end of a war that had pushed so many Muslims to the wall. By mid-1945 parts of Algeria seethed with discontent, with nationalists organizing boycotts of collaborating businesses and the intimidation of Muslims who drank alcohol or worked for the French. The eastern department of Constantine, next to Tunisia, became a flashpoint, with some of its nondescript towns harbouring concentrations of nationalists. One of these was Sétif, where Ferhat Abbas had worked as a pharmacist. On 8 May a noisy Muslim procession, led by the Muslim Boy Scouts, wound its way through Sétif to celebrate Victory in Europe Day and calling for the release of Messali Hadj from house arrest. Hadj was instead transferred to detention in the desert before being flown to Brazzaville in the French Congo – where, ironically enough, de Gaulle had made a declaration during the war embracing broad colonial reform, albeit without independence, to placate the Americans.
In Sétif twenty gendarmes faced around 8,000 demonstrators, boldly intervening to confiscate the green and white banners emblazoned with calls for a ‘free and independent Algeria’. In the increasingly ill-tempered encounters between demonstrators and policemen, shots were fired, which led to wholesale Muslim attacks on any passing Europeans. A priest had his heart ripped out and hung round his neck, while the hands of the Secretary of the Communist Party were chopped off. Word passed quickly to the surrounding countryside that ‘jihad’ had been declared, to cries of ‘Holy War in the name of Allah!’ Although control was restored by nightfall in Sétif itself, out in the countryside armed groups of Muslims bushwhacked isolated settlers, killing 103 of them with clubs, guns and knives. There were instances of women being raped.
One hundred and ten miles east of Sétif lay the small town of Guelma, with around 4,500 Italian, Maltese and Jewish European inhabitants amid 16,500 Muslims. The Association of the Friends of the Manifesto was well represented among them. Again there was an initially peaceful VE Day demonstration which turned ugly, after the local police commissioner, André Achiary, fired warning shots in the air, shortly followed by his men opening fire on the foremost demonstrators. After imposing a curfew, Achiary restored a semblance of order in the town, before launching a series of arrests of nationalist leaders, some of whom were summarily killed by the police and their colon vigilante helpers, who in an echo of Vichy’s paramilitary police dubbed themselves the milice. By the time the bloodshed stopped, around 1,500 Muslims were dead.26
The French government’s response was swift and hard. On arriving in Algiers to congratulate the French Governor-General on victory in Europe, the liberal Ferhat Abbas was arrested despite having denounced the uprising in Sétif. French troops, including Foreign Legionnaires and Senegalese, neither trained in counter-insurgency warfare, saturated Muslim villages, aggressively ‘raking them over’ to identify Muslim militants. Remote villages were attacked with US-supplied Douglas dive-bombers, armed with anti-personnel bombs supplied by the RAF. A cruiser shelled a coastal road used by Muslim militants. Muslims suspected of political activism were arrested and shot, their bodies disposed of in kilns, wells and ravines.27
Quite how many Muslims were killed remains contentious. After gaining independence the Algerian nationalist government claimed that 50,000 or 80,000 people had been killed (the number rose over time), but a more realistic estimate seems to be between 6,000 and 8,000. What is not in doubt is that the French authorities were determined to overawe the Muslims. After a hotelier and his daughter had been killed by Muslims in Falaise, the army commander in Constantine ordered 15,000 Muslims to assemble on a beach at Melbou, marshalled behind their headmen or caids. French navy ships manoeuvred offshore; aircraft swooped past at alarmingly low levels; artillery salvoes boomed. A mufti praised the steps taken by the French and invoked Allah before leading a collective prayer. The terrified crowd were given slices of ‘peace cakes’, which they received with applause and ululations.28
By way of concession to Muslim opinion, and in the teeth of settler opposition, the French National Assembly agreed to a revised electoral statute for Algeria. A new Algerian Assembly would have 120 seats, half chosen by a European electoral college of 460,000 French citizens plus 58,000 assimilated Muslims, and the other half elected by 1,400,000 unassimilated Muslims. Even these slanted arrangements had to be comprehensively rigged on polling day in April 1948, to secure European dominance. Right-wing parties won fifty-four of the sixty European seats, but only nineteen of the sixty Muslim seats went to socialists and nationalists. Forty-one went to government stooges, known as béni-oui-ouis (Uncle Toms) to the locals.29 All of this was the handiwork of a ‘Third Force’, socialist-dominated French government, whose Governor-General in Algiers, Marcel Naegelen, was an Alsatian anti-Communist leftist fanatically opposed to ‘separatism’. Thus the range of non-violent options open to Algerian nationalists was diminished while the incentives for armed resistance increased.
Not So Holy Land
A year before the Second World War erupted, the newly appointed British Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, calculated that, although he was responsible for fifty colonies around the world, the Palestine Mandate alone occupied half of his time. Churchill would describe the war between Arab and Jew in Palestine as the ‘war of mice’, for it continued – as it still does more than sixty years later – even as the world’s bull elephants clashed. In essence, the conflict between the mice was about the semantic ambiguity of the phrase ‘national home’ as promised to the Jews in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, avoiding the commitment embodied by the word ‘state’.
There has never been an historic Palestine, except as a Roman province, though there certainly were two ancient Jewish kingdoms long before that. Palestine had no separate identity during the centuries of Ottoman rule either, in the latter part of which, from the 1880s onwards, the 25,000 Orthodox Jews who lived in Jerusalem were augmented by two major waves of East European immigrants who farmed on the plains. The Balfour Declaration had served two circumstantial purposes. One was to defuse Bolshevism, whose internationalism was widely attributed to the influence of the perennially homeless Jews. The other was as a wartime expedient to win the support of US Jews, much as the Russians were promised Constantinople, and probably no more sincerely meant.
Following a three-year Arab revolt, which the British crushed ruthlessly, in 1939 MacDonald published a White Paper that drastically restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, limiting it to some 75,000 persons over five years, even though he recognized that it was largely the employment opportunities created by these industrious immigrants that had led to an increase in the local Arab population. In Zionist eyes the White Paper was a cold-blooded betrayal of a desperate people, for it coincided with the intensified persecution of European Jews in Nazi Germany and in Poland. The rest of the world (with the notable exception of dictator Leonidas Trujillo’s Dominican Republic) had responded by agreeing at the 1938 Evian Conference that there was no more room in their respective inns. The British issued the White Paper to ensure that the wider Arab world, from which Britain derived 60 per cent of its oil, did not switch to the Axis side during the imminent war. As MacDonald explained, ‘We could not let emotion rule our policy. We must accept the facts of the extremely dangerous prospect with absolute, unsentimental and, some people would say, even cynical realism. The Jews would be on our side in any case in the struggle against Hitler. Would the independent Arab nations adopt the same attitude?’30
While this local example of appeasement did not lead to a recrudescence of the Anglo-Arab alliance of the First World War, it did mean that no major trouble jeopardized trans-Jordanian oil pipelines or threatened British bases in Egypt, even when the British heavy-handedly deposed the Egyptian Prime Minister. Nor, given the Nazis’ pathological hatred of the Jews, did the British have cause to worry where the latter’s sympathies might lie. The Zionist-Fascists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky were a tiny if noisy minority, although one of Jabotinsky’s most devoted disciples was Menachem Begin, later leader of the Irgun terrorist organization. The majority Zionist response to a war that was existential for the Jewish people was encapsulated by David Ben Gurion’s formula that ‘we shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war’.
When the Zionists offered to raise a Jewish army to fight the Axis, the British prevaricated, eventually conceding a joint Arab and Jewish battalion attached to the East Kent Buffs in which the Jewish contingent fought and the Arabs deserted. Ten thousand or so Palestinian Jews (and 7,000 Palestinian Arabs) served as individuals in the British armed forces. In late 1944 the British at last sanctioned a Jewish Brigade, which fought with distinction. British equivocation, however justifiable in terms of keeping the Arabs on side, was to give the Zionists a potent propaganda weapon to use against them once the mass murder of European Jews was revealed to an uncomprehending world. As evidence built up of Nazi murder of Europe’s Jews, so Zionist insistence on a secure Jewish state of Israel intensified. If all else failed, the world’s Jews could repair there. This meant that the Jews were never going to accept the preferred British fix of Arab and Jewish enclaves with a bi-national Palestine.
A murky human traffic had developed between Palestinian Jewish agents and the Nazi paramilitary SS to expatriate Jews down the Danube to Romanian ports and hence out of Europe. These ships were vermin-infested freighters, rusting cattle boats and leaking tankers, into which men, women and children were crammed. When these overloaded hulks appeared off Palestine the British ordered them to turn back, and in one instance opened fire, killing two refugees. Thus began a war of boat propaganda, a tactic Israel’s Turkish and NGO enemies have since turned against it. In November 1940 the British transferred 1,700 refugees from two ships which had arrived at Haifa on to a larger vessel called La Patria, which was destined for Mauritius. Early one morning the ship’s alarm was sounded and the refugees leaped into the sea. Shortly afterwards La Patria blew up and sank. Two hundred and forty refugees drowned or died in the explosion, along with a dozen policemen. The Jewish Agency, founded in 1929 to promote settlement of Palestine, promptly claimed that the refugees had opted to kill themselves rather than go to the hell of Mauritius – in fact one of the most agreeable islands in the world. The true cause of the tragedy was a bungled attempt by the Irgun to cripple the ship’s propulsion. Further incidents included a ship denied entry to Turkish harbours that sank with the loss of 231 lives during a storm, and the Struma, a well-publicized floating hell moored off Istanbul, which sank after another mysterious explosion. Although the fanatical Begin regarded the British as Nazis with better manners, the Irgun respected the call of the mainstream Jewish Agency and its militia army the Haganah to refrain from attacking the British. But the Zionist movement itself was also highly fissiparous, and included extremists as well as moderates. No such restraint inhibited the Lehi, known as the Stern Gang from its charismatic leader Avraham Stern, revered as ‘Yair’ (the Illuminator) by his followers. Stern was killed ‘trying to escape’ from British custody in 1942, but the gang continued to carry out terrorist attacks during the war, murdering at least fifteen men and attacking police stations, official buildings and oil pipelines.31
Initially, British life in the Mandate had differed little from that of colonists elsewhere, reflecting the way most of the British administrators and soldiers thought about a situation whose complexities generally eluded them – for Palestine was not a colony. There were official receptions at Government House, flower shows and tea parties. The more active could hunt jackals with the Ramle Vale Hunt, or tee off on the Sodom and Gomorrah Golf Course, about which there was much ribald wit. But this was not India or the Sudan; it was more a dead end than a chance to shine as part of an elite, among people too ‘clever’ to be patronized, and one with no real strategic significance until the British had to consider alternatives to a restive Egypt. In a word, Palestine was a boring backwater posting, except perhaps to those of a religious bent.
Zionist terrorism began in retaliation for Arab atrocities during the 1936–9 Arab Revolt, providing perplexing evidence for the British of peoples’ inability to ‘get along’, as if they were neighbours quarrelling over a suburban hedge or party wall.32 The military response was in line with a simple-minded speech Brigadier Bernard Montgomery had delivered in Haifa in 1937: ‘I do not care whether you are Jews or Gentiles. I care nothing for your political opinions. I am a soldier. My duty is to maintain law and order. I intend to do so.’33 The countenance of the Mandate changed, with official buildings heavily sandbagged behind barriers of barbed wire, and police stations turned into imposing forts constructed from reinforced concrete. In November 1944 the Stern Gang excelled themselves when two of their operatives murdered Resident Minister of State Lord Moyne, Churchill’s friend and his wife Clementine’s exotic travel companion, in Cairo. The reaction among the British governing class was so negative that the Jewish Agency, Haganah and Irgun declared a ‘hunting season’ against Sternist sympathizers. The two young assassins were quickly caught, tried and hanged.
Although the British in Palestine could rejoice at victory in the war, that mood proved evanescent in the troubled Mandate, where concrete police forts were dubbed ‘Bevingrads’ after Ernest Bevin, the new Labour Foreign Secretary. As the British pulled back their forces in Egypt to the Canal Zone, so Palestine assumed greater importance should they have to beat a strategic retreat from there, with the port of Haifa substituting for the naval facilities at Alexandria. That was why the British concentrated so many troops, at an annual cost of £40 million, in a place where two irreconcilable national identities had long clashed. The 100,000-strong force stationed in Palestine became the object of a campaign in which Jewish children were encouraged to spit on its members while crying ‘English bastards’ or ‘Gestapo’. British airborne troops, in their maroon berets, were dubbed ‘red poppies with black hearts’ when they marched past sullen Jewish onlookers. The emotional atmosphere was further ratcheted up over the well-publicized plight of Jewish Displaced Persons languishing in former Nazi camps.
As British statesmen were only too aware, Palestine threatened to poison their relations with the US, largely because of the electoral clout of a Jewish lobby that had been bitterly divided before and during the war, but which was now speaking with the enormous moral authority derived from the Holocaust. Disinclined, like his illustrious predecessor, to open America’s doors to them, in August 1945 President Truman requested the admission of 100,000 refugees to Palestine to assuage agitation among Jewish Democrat supporters in New York. Many ordinary Americans, especially the more fundamentalist Christians, supported the Zionists but were ambivalent about America’s own Jews and hated their strong presence in the New York financial district. Truman’s demand thwarted British efforts to decouple the problems of refugees and Palestine, while Washington’s standard combination of opportunism and self-righteousness was bitterly resented in London.
US policy in the Middle East was almost as subject as the British to competing pressures. In an echo of the Balfour Declaration, Roosevelt had both endorsed the idea of a Jewish state and solemnly promised Saudi Arabia’s King Abd Al-Aziz Ibn Saud that he would not aid the Jews or do anything detrimental to Arab interests. Perspicacious diplomats also noted that there was no point in bolstering the imaginary arch represented by the Northern Tier of Greece, Iran and Turkey if ‘we are going to kick out the pillars’ to the south on which the arch rested. While Arabs had a few advocates like Loy Henderson within the US State Department, they could not match the Zionist organizers, who knew how to mobilize public emotion and had many sympathizers extending to the very top of the administration.
Truman himself put the main problem succinctly: ‘I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.’ Specifically, only once since 1876 had a candidate won the presidency without winning the forty-seven electoral votes of New York, and – though he did in fact lose New York in 1948 – Truman was not going to take that risk. He may have been occasionally exasperated by Zionist lobbyists, but they had the ear of some in his inner circle nonetheless, notably his right-hand man and campaign manager Clark Clifford, who was also to be a highly influential member of the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Many of Truman’s advisers were dismissively racist towards the Arabs, while other influential figures were simply naive about the complexity of such conflicts. Loy Henderson, who had been a consul in the Irish Free State as well as chief of mission to Baghdad, was aghast when Eleanor Roosevelt optimistically opined in 1947: ‘Come, come . . . a few years ago Ireland was considered to be a problem that could not be solved. Then the Irish Republic was established and the problem vanished. I’m confident that when a Jewish state is set up, the Arabs will see the light; they will quiet down; and Palestine will no longer be a problem.’34 Not for the last time, Ireland’s idiosyncratic history was wrongly taken to be exemplary. Rather than encouraging Americans to overcome their own aversion to Jewish immigration, US policy-makers expected the Arabs to do so.35
While some of the British governing class were as reflexively anti-Semitic as their US peers, others simply refused to accept that the remnants of the Jewish people had no further destiny in Europe.36 They could not grasp that they were asking the Jews to assimilate into a charnel house. The pro-Zionist Labour politician Richard Crossman accurately described the irresponsible aspects of US moral grandstanding: ‘By shouting for a Jewish state, Americans satisfy many motives. They are attacking the Empire and British imperialism, they are espousing a moral cause, the fulfilment for which they will take no responsibility, and, most important of all, they are diverting attention from the fact that their own immigration laws are one of the causes of the problem.’37
If Americans felt common cause with rebellious colonial frontiersmen, the British were unused to colonized peoples who were modern, democratic, self-assertive and prone to moralizing about general European guilt for what was not yet called the Holocaust. British anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (which should not be casually conflated) received powerful impulse from what was too crudely described then, and now, as ‘Jewish terrorism’, a term akin to calling the IRA ‘Catholic terrorists’.
While the Haganah focused on destroying British coastal radar installations, bridges and railway lines, Irgun and the Stern Gang stepped up their terrorist campaigns. In April 1946 they gunned down seven British soldiers in a car park and stole their weapons. In June Operation Agatha saw the large-scale deployment of British troops to detain leading Zionists, including many ostensibly moderate Jewish Agency figures, and to unearth arms dumps. The primary object of this operation was to prove connections between the Jewish Agency and the Haganah underground, and in that respect it was successful, despite seemingly hysterical women on rural kibbutzim who tore off their sleeves to reveal German concentration-camp tattoos to distract the searchers from weapons dumps.
Irgun documents seized in such raids found their way to British Criminal Investigation Department offices situated, alongside other Mandate bureaucracies, on various floors of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.38 Even by British standards it was an act of astonishing casualness to have conflated business and pleasure in one major complex, for the King David Hotel was both an administrative centre and a functioning luxury hotel. On 22 July 1946 fourteen or fifteen Zionist terrorists, dressed as Arabs, drew up in a truck and unloaded milk churns packed with explosives into the basement nightclub called the Régence. These exploded at 12.36 p.m., when the hotel was at its most crowded, and demolished most of its southern wing, killing ninety-one people including British soldiers and Arab and Jewish administrators. A few days after the attack the British launched Operation Shark to round up further Zionist extremists, 800 of whom were detained in Rafah camp. Onerous controls were placed on the general Jewish population through random searches, curfews and roadblocks.39
The terrorists responded by extending their campaign to British interests in Europe (the British embassy in Rome was bombed in October 1946), as well as to the imperial metropolis itself. In March 1947 the Stern Gang bombed the British Colonial Club off Trafalgar Square, injuring black servicemen and African students. In June the gang despatched the first ever letter bombs, with Churchill, Bevin, Clement Attlee and Eden among the addressees. The Security Service, MI5, kept Zionist sympathizers under close surveillance and successfully frustrated terrorist attacks.40 Unsurprisingly, the British authorities in Palestine responded to Zionist attacks with strongarm methods that many of their policemen had learned fighting Irish republicans in the 1920s, the model of choice too for many Zionist terrorists in the 1940s. The ranks of the undercover police also included such war heroes as SAS Major Roy Farran, whose robust approach to counter-terrorism (which has been normative in Israel itself for the last half-century) was denounced by those indulgent of the malignancy of Zionist terrorism. By the end of 1946 the terrorists had murdered 373 people, the majority civilians.41
High-level British policy was conflicted between those who believed in the primacy of a political solution and military men who regarded any negotiated settlement as appeasement. The chief advocate of a hard line was the star general, Field Marshal Montgomery, who easily overruled the more political approach of Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, who had been jailed for pacifism in the First World War. British troops were forbidden to visit such public places as cafés and cinemas, while non-essential family members were repatriated. The British retreated behind more fortifications, in the process ‘transforming the Mandate into a prison, and locking themselves in as well’.42 They also relied upon collective reprisals for terrorist atrocities, something modern Israel practises too. As one British officer noted: ‘when the security forces have to deal with a thoroughly non-cooperative, unscrupulous, dishonest and utterly immoral civilian population such as the Jewish Community in Palestine, who systematically and continually hide and refuse to give up to justice the perpetrators of murderous outrages, reprisals are the only effective weapon to employ, saving time, money and unnecessary bloodshed’.43
Events in Britain and India compelled a decision in the winter of 1946–7. While the bankrupt British froze in their own homes, in India communal violence forced them to put a date on withdrawal. In the House of Commons on 25 February 1947 Richard Crossman fatuously maintained that a bit of creative conflict might bring resolution, just as a strike might settle a domestic labour dispute after failed negotiation and arbitration.44 Such facile analogies made it easy enough to let Palestine go, a decision arrived at that month when the cabinet acknowledged that there was no obvious political solution. It also declared martial law, although that proved no more help than the abortive quest for a political solution.
Meanwhile the Zionists continued to utilize what has been called ‘boat propaganda’, which MI6 sought to frustrate with Operation Embarrass, in which they damaged or sank five refugee ships in Italian harbours.45 They did not manage to get at the Exodus 1947, which after being repulsed from Palestine was in turn refused entry to Marseilles, ending up in Hamburg, where British troops and German policemen manhandled the refugees ashore. The captain subsequently recalled that Zionist intelligence agents ‘gave us orders that this ship was to be used as a big demonstration with banners to show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were’.46
The Exodus story was played up in an inflammatory way in the US by the Zionist screenwriter Ben Hecht. Any emotional capital the Exodus saga accrued in Britain was immediately dissipated when the Irgun hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their bodies in response to the execution of three convicted terrorist killers in Acre jail – and Hecht gloated about it. The outrage caused British troops in Palestine to riot and contributed to anti-Semitic incidents in Britain itself.47
These incidents took place under the noses of the delegates to the UN Special Committee on Palestine, who arrived in Palestine in mid-June 1947. Three of its members personally witnessed British mismanagement of the Exodus saga in Haifa harbour. UNSCOP eventually recommended partition, by eight votes to three, although under these arrangements the Arab and Jewish areas were to be entwined like two fighting snakes. The British rejected the proposal on the grounds that the US refused to underwrite it with aid or troops. Unable to impose a solution on either Arabs or Jews, in late 1947 the British informed the UN of their intention to withdraw unilaterally, fixing the date at 14 May 1948. The precedent of India lay to hand, except that there they had patched up a settlement of a sort. Although the British claimed to represent law and order, this was notional in a country given over to a civil war between Jews and Arabs. To British surprise, both the US and the Soviet Union backed partition, tacitly uniting under the banner of anti-imperialism.48
The Soviet attitude was interesting. Stalin always sought to disrupt and divide what was coalescing as a single Western opponent. In this respect Palestine seemed ideally designed to cause trouble between the US and Britain. There was much for the Soviets to like in the incipient Zionist state. Young Zionists like Amos Perlmutter had eagerly charted the onward march of the Red Army into Germany with maps and pins on their bedroom walls, and Stalin was certainly aware of how rife pro-German sympathies had been in the Arab world, as well as among Muslims in the wartime Soviet Union. Trade unionism had a much stronger purchase among Palestine’s Jews than it did in any surrounding Arab country. Interwar Palestine had the largest Communist Party in the Middle East, dominated by its Jewish members. Unlike Egypt, where most land was in feudal ownership, the Zionist kibbutzim bore a generic resemblance to Soviet collective farms. Stalin could imagine that, should the Arabs emulate these modern features of Zionism, they might then enter into a more revolutionary phase of their own development. No wonder the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel.49
The Zionists had achieved international recognition for a Jewish state, rather than a ‘national home’, within Palestine, even though with 600,000 Jews to 1.2 million Arabs the Jews were only a large minority in a country where most of the land was owned by absentee urban Arab landlords. There were some obvious weaknesses on the Arab side. They lacked the military experience and European training of Haganah, nor did they have the sophisticated war-surplus German weapons that Haganah was sourcing from Czechoslovakia. Illiterate Arab villagers had a much less visceral sense of nationhood than educated European immigrants who had survived attempts to exterminate them all.50 The internal Palestinian Arab leadership was bitterly divided between rival clans, while the notorious Mufti Hajj Amin was hated by other Arab leaders and damned as a Nazi collaborator in the wider world.
The only Arab ruler to support partition, King Abdullah of Jordan, did so with a view to absorbing a small Arab Palestine into Transjordan itself. His wider regional ambitions frightened the Syrians, whom he wished to subsume into a greater Hashemite kingdom, the Egyptians, who thought they were leaders of the Arab world, and finally the Saud dynasty, who were the Hashemites’ main regional rivals. But since Arab emotions had been whipped up by the prospect of a Jewish state in their midst, Arab rulers had to be seen to act, for their own febrile street mobs might easily be turned on them. In view of their rivalries, it suited Arabs rulers to send a free-floating Arab Liberation Army into battle with the Jews, whom the Arabs regarded as an alien European excrescence in their part of the world. They could not understand why the Europeans or Americans could not find the Jews a homeland elsewhere.
The Jews responded with a similar argument vis-à-vis the leaderless Palestinian Arabs, who began fleeing the fight they had spasmodically begun. Why couldn’t they be relocated to the huge desert spaces of the Arab kingdoms? A Palestinian Arab and Jewish war began, fought under weary British eyes and with mounting ferocity on both sides. Believing that they were going to be massacred by the Jews, up to 300,000 Arabs fled their homes, convinced that they would return with neighbouring Arab armies to exact their own vengeance. One day after the British had sailed away, five Arab armies attacked the newly declared state of Israel – and comprehensively lost. Israel would survive further wars as the sole modern democratic state in a Middle East dominated by dictators and autocratic monarchs. But it would carry forward both a wider sense of Jewish victimhood and militarism in its DNA. That so many military men have also figured in its political class testifies to what it means to live in a neighbourhood of fanatics and maniacs.