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BRITAIN'S ROLE REVEALED
Roger Owen
Al-Arabiya, United Arab Emirates
Monday, 07 July 2008
In the vast -- and largely ideological -- literature produced by the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Britain's responsibility for the events
of 1948 is not often directly discussed, neither polemically nor from
a more academic point of view. It was thus something of a novelty
to attend a whole conference devoted to the subject of "Palestine,
Britain and Empire" at King's College, London, in mid-May. It was
also a great pleasure to observe how much dispassionate, archive-
based research is being conducted by young scholars whose commitment
to old passions and the rehearsal of stale arguments is much less
pressing than that of many of their older colleagues.
Three new lines of argument seemed to me of particular interest. One
was the role played by the international mandate for Palestine
itself, a subject often dismissed as being of trivial significance
compared with the more obvious importance of Palestine as a quasi
colony. However, as a paper on "The powers and uses of the mandate
system" amply demonstrated, the fact that the Balfour Declaration was
written into the mandate document itself enormously reduced Britain's
power of manoeuvre, particularly in the mid- 1930s when it was becoming
clear that Palestine contained two irreconcilable communities unable
to agree on almost anything.
Here is a clear example of imperial hubris at work, with Britain
starting off in the 1920s imaging that it could manipulate both the
Palestine mandate and the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League
of Nations to its own advantage, only to find them becoming something
of a millstone round its neck, the more so when key members of the
commission became strongly identified with the Zionist position in
the next decade.
Britain's complicity in the division of Palestine was also made
obvious in a second paper on "The Peel Commission's inquiry and
partition proposal, 1936- 1938" when the members of this high level
body sent out to investigate the causes of the 1936 Palestinian revolt
found how little had been done to try to create a sense of a common
Palestinian-ness among Palestinians and Jews, leaving partition --
they believed -- as the only realistic option. It did not help that,
in the language of that time, the Palestinians were always referred
to as "Arabs", and assumed a loyalty not to the state of Palestine
but the larger Arab community beyond its borders and so, in the
commission's proposal, not to be given their own mini-state but one
shared with that of Trans-Jordan.
Third, three papers on the Palestine police and the methods used
to put down the 1936-39 revolt showed not only the importance of
the often brutal counter- insurgency methods imported from imperial
experience in Ireland in 1922 and elsewhere, but also the extent to
which armed Jewish auxiliaries were employed on the British side,
some 18,000 in all, a process which contributed substantially to the
development of the not-so-secret underground army, the Hagannah.
A key figure in all this was the commander of the northern of two
British divisions that were brought in to put down the revolt, General
Bernard Montgomery, who used the occasion to elaborate some of the
methods he had first seen at work in Southern Ireland, including the
encouragement of so-called "night squads", often containing both
British soldiers and Jewish auxiliaries, whose role was to set up
ambushes, to engage in hot pursuit of Palestinian irregulars, to take
hostages and, on occasions, to launch pre-emptive attacks on villages
deemed dangerous and disloyal.
No doubt academic research of this kind has been much stimulated by a
more general interest in imperial policing stemming from the present
war in Iraq. Moreover, in Palestine, as in Iraq, every effort was
made to prevent knowledge of the more unpleasant aspects of what was
going on filtering back to the public at home. Not only did Montgomery
effectively ban the media from entering the field of his military
operations, but also journalists were specifically forbidden from
taking photographs of the houses of Palestinian militants, or alleged
militants, blown up as a warning to others.
Only by returning to the subject 60 or so years later, and by combining
use of British archives with the records of the soldiers and police
involved, it is possible to understand such tactics in their proper
imperial context. Only in this way, too, can one explode the still
powerful myth surrounding the supposed originator of the night squads,
Major Orde Wingate, which in Zionist discourse at least makes him
the one British officer who was on the Jewish as opposed to the
Palestinian side.
The conference papers, if and when published, will add greatly
to general understanding of the British role in the Palestine
Mandate. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of work still to do to
provide a full explanation of what a recent historian of empire in
the Middle East, David Fieldhouse, has described as Britain's "most
ignominious [Imperial] failure". One highly relevant question which
I raised myself was what efforts were made between the UN partition
resolution of November 1947 and the final scuttle of British troops in
May 1948 to hand over the various assets of the Palestine government
to representatives of one or other of the two warring sides. While
it is clear that Israel inherited the vast bulk of these assets, most
notably government ministries and all their records, the processes by
which this took place remain more or less unknown, and its consequences
rarely spelled out.
Could the outcome have been different, particularly after the rise of
the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933? Not insofar as I could judge
the opinions of the majority of those present at the conference,
which were that either the simple proclamation of the Balfour
Declaration in 1917 or its incorporation in the League of Nations
Mandate in 1922 made a division of the new Palestine more or less
inevitable. As for the origins of the Balfour Declaration itself,
one interesting paper suggested that it be put in the context not
just of straight imperial interest, but also of the emerging consensus
among soon-to-be victorious great powers at the end of 1914-18 war on
a world containing groups of unified peoples with unitary goals -- the
Poles, the Armenians, the Irish and the Jews -- whose aspirations could
only be satisfied by a process of national self-determination. Given
this larger international obsession, the Palestinians, known to the
British and other great powers only as Arabs, were not going to have
a much of a chance.
Roger Owen
Al-Arabiya, United Arab Emirates
Monday, 07 July 2008
In the vast -- and largely ideological -- literature produced by the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Britain's responsibility for the events
of 1948 is not often directly discussed, neither polemically nor from
a more academic point of view. It was thus something of a novelty
to attend a whole conference devoted to the subject of "Palestine,
Britain and Empire" at King's College, London, in mid-May. It was
also a great pleasure to observe how much dispassionate, archive-
based research is being conducted by young scholars whose commitment
to old passions and the rehearsal of stale arguments is much less
pressing than that of many of their older colleagues.
Three new lines of argument seemed to me of particular interest. One
was the role played by the international mandate for Palestine
itself, a subject often dismissed as being of trivial significance
compared with the more obvious importance of Palestine as a quasi
colony. However, as a paper on "The powers and uses of the mandate
system" amply demonstrated, the fact that the Balfour Declaration was
written into the mandate document itself enormously reduced Britain's
power of manoeuvre, particularly in the mid- 1930s when it was becoming
clear that Palestine contained two irreconcilable communities unable
to agree on almost anything.
Here is a clear example of imperial hubris at work, with Britain
starting off in the 1920s imaging that it could manipulate both the
Palestine mandate and the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League
of Nations to its own advantage, only to find them becoming something
of a millstone round its neck, the more so when key members of the
commission became strongly identified with the Zionist position in
the next decade.
Britain's complicity in the division of Palestine was also made
obvious in a second paper on "The Peel Commission's inquiry and
partition proposal, 1936- 1938" when the members of this high level
body sent out to investigate the causes of the 1936 Palestinian revolt
found how little had been done to try to create a sense of a common
Palestinian-ness among Palestinians and Jews, leaving partition --
they believed -- as the only realistic option. It did not help that,
in the language of that time, the Palestinians were always referred
to as "Arabs", and assumed a loyalty not to the state of Palestine
but the larger Arab community beyond its borders and so, in the
commission's proposal, not to be given their own mini-state but one
shared with that of Trans-Jordan.
Third, three papers on the Palestine police and the methods used
to put down the 1936-39 revolt showed not only the importance of
the often brutal counter- insurgency methods imported from imperial
experience in Ireland in 1922 and elsewhere, but also the extent to
which armed Jewish auxiliaries were employed on the British side,
some 18,000 in all, a process which contributed substantially to the
development of the not-so-secret underground army, the Hagannah.
A key figure in all this was the commander of the northern of two
British divisions that were brought in to put down the revolt, General
Bernard Montgomery, who used the occasion to elaborate some of the
methods he had first seen at work in Southern Ireland, including the
encouragement of so-called "night squads", often containing both
British soldiers and Jewish auxiliaries, whose role was to set up
ambushes, to engage in hot pursuit of Palestinian irregulars, to take
hostages and, on occasions, to launch pre-emptive attacks on villages
deemed dangerous and disloyal.
No doubt academic research of this kind has been much stimulated by a
more general interest in imperial policing stemming from the present
war in Iraq. Moreover, in Palestine, as in Iraq, every effort was
made to prevent knowledge of the more unpleasant aspects of what was
going on filtering back to the public at home. Not only did Montgomery
effectively ban the media from entering the field of his military
operations, but also journalists were specifically forbidden from
taking photographs of the houses of Palestinian militants, or alleged
militants, blown up as a warning to others.
Only by returning to the subject 60 or so years later, and by combining
use of British archives with the records of the soldiers and police
involved, it is possible to understand such tactics in their proper
imperial context. Only in this way, too, can one explode the still
powerful myth surrounding the supposed originator of the night squads,
Major Orde Wingate, which in Zionist discourse at least makes him
the one British officer who was on the Jewish as opposed to the
Palestinian side.
The conference papers, if and when published, will add greatly
to general understanding of the British role in the Palestine
Mandate. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of work still to do to
provide a full explanation of what a recent historian of empire in
the Middle East, David Fieldhouse, has described as Britain's "most
ignominious [Imperial] failure". One highly relevant question which
I raised myself was what efforts were made between the UN partition
resolution of November 1947 and the final scuttle of British troops in
May 1948 to hand over the various assets of the Palestine government
to representatives of one or other of the two warring sides. While
it is clear that Israel inherited the vast bulk of these assets, most
notably government ministries and all their records, the processes by
which this took place remain more or less unknown, and its consequences
rarely spelled out.
Could the outcome have been different, particularly after the rise of
the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933? Not insofar as I could judge
the opinions of the majority of those present at the conference,
which were that either the simple proclamation of the Balfour
Declaration in 1917 or its incorporation in the League of Nations
Mandate in 1922 made a division of the new Palestine more or less
inevitable. As for the origins of the Balfour Declaration itself,
one interesting paper suggested that it be put in the context not
just of straight imperial interest, but also of the emerging consensus
among soon-to-be victorious great powers at the end of 1914-18 war on
a world containing groups of unified peoples with unitary goals -- the
Poles, the Armenians, the Irish and the Jews -- whose aspirations could
only be satisfied by a process of national self-determination. Given
this larger international obsession, the Palestinians, known to the
British and other great powers only as Arabs, were not going to have
a much of a chance.