Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (29 page)

In response Abdullah, Hussein’s second son, occupied what was to become Transjordan and threatened to attack the French in Syria. It’s not difficult to imagine that some British policymakers allowed themselves to fantasise about how marvellous it would be if Abdullah was capable of driving the French out, but there was never a prospect of him succeeding.

Eight months later, in March 1921, the British said something like the following to Abdullah: “Never mind, old chap, stay here, play your cards right—help us to administer this territory and keep Palestinian nationalism under control—and we’ll let you have this part of Palestine in due course.” The official British announcement of the time was to the effect that, under the Mandate, Britain had agreed to the creation of an Arab government in Transjordan with Abdullah as its head.

At more or less the same time the British made Faysal the King of Iraq.

The sons of the father were in the process of being well rewarded, but because of the strategic and economic importance of the territory that was to become Saudi Arabia, there was still the need for Britain to have Hussein’s goodwill. Without it Britain could be in serious trouble if he emerged with greater power than Ibn Saud.

The man most likely to secure Hussein’s co-operation if not actually his good will was Lawrence. On behalf of the British government he travelled to Jeddah in July for a meeting with Hussein. Lawrence was carrying the proposed Hedjaz-British Friendship Treaty. His mission was to persuade the king to sign it. Hussein badly needed the treaty because it promised him military support as well as money. During the Arab revolt Britain had paid him £25,000 a month.

Hussein refused to sign because the treaty required him to accept Britain’s Mandate for Palestine and thus the creation of a Jewish homeland there. According to Robert Lacey’s account in
The Kingdom
(an epic story of the creation and development of Saudi Arabia under the House of Saud), Lawrence at one point was very blunt with Hussein. “Palestine does not want you,”
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Lawrence said. The “you” was the Hashemite dynasty. Lawrence obviously believed that Hussein’s interest in Palestine was purely dynastic, and that his vision of the future was one in which the Hashemites would rule all of the Arab world east of Suez. Hussein replied, “All we are asking is that Britain keep her plighted words to the Arabs.”
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By rejecting the treaty Hussein, who by then was showing signs of mental instability (apparently a genetic inheritance), sealed his fate. Without the money from Britain—officially “the subsidy”—he began to lose his ability to keep the tribes which had been loyal to him in order. And that made it easier for Ibn Saud, in due course, to conquer the Hedjaz and establish himself as the ruler of all the land that was to take his family’s name—Saudi Arabia.

On 3 October 1924, Hussein abdicated and went into exile on Cyprus. It was a humiliating end for the Arab leader who had proclaimed the Arab Revolt to assist the British and their Allies in World War I.

For his part Abdullah was not slow to learn the lessons of his father’s fate. If you wanted to advance your own interests, you had to serve the British interest.

In Transjordan Abdullah’s first objective was to persuade the British to separate it from the rest of Mandated Palestine. He succeeded and by 1928 his Arab administration of Transjordan was virtually self-governing. It was the beginning of process which would see the emergence of Transjordan in 1946 as an independent state with Abdullah as its King and, so far as the British were concerned, their puppet, more or less.

Effectively Britain’s message to Palestinian nationalists was: “Forget about Transjordan. This part of Mandated Palestine is no longer up for grabs.” Without being consulted the Palestinians of Transjordan—still today the majority population of Jordan—were to be ruled by the Hashemites.

From the beginning the Arabs of Palestine rejected the Mandate because it could not do other than impair and prejudice their rights as the majority and original inhabitants of the territory. If they had been less than implacable in their opposition to unrestricted Jewish immigration under the Zionist banner, they would have been idiots and deserving of the fate that did overtake them. Jabotinsky had said as much when he wrote that no native people “will ever voluntarily allow a new master.”

Initial Palestinian resistance to the Mandate took the form of non-cooperation with the occupying British; but as Britain allowed more and more Jews to enter Palestine in Zionism’s name, non-cooperation turned to demonstrations, disturbances, strikes and finally rebellion.

In fact the first Palestinian riots under British rule took place quite some time before Britain had the Mandate. They were sparked by the arrival in 1919 and 1920 of more than 10,000 Jewish immigrants from Russia. Arranging for them to go to Palestine was one way of reducing the number of Jews who were committed to revolution in Russia!

As the Zionists set about acquiring more and more land in Mandated Palestine, (money buys as well as talks), sporadic Palestinian attacks on newly established Zionist settlements became a feature of life.

1929 saw the first big explosion of anti-Zionist Palestinian rage. On 23 August a mob of a thousand or more Palestinians attacked Jews in Jerusalem. Violence quickly erupted throughout Palestine and by nightfall on 26 August, 133 Jews had been killed and 339 wounded. In their efforts to protect the Jews and bring the violence to an end, British police shot and killed 110 Palestinians.

Without the British presence Zionism could not have entrenched itself in Palestine. On their own the Palestinians could have pushed the Zionists out. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, and 1936, when the Palestinians rebelled, the number of Jews in Palestine almost doubled—from just over 200,000 to 400,000. Jewish immigration on this scale only served to reinforce the Palestinian and wider Arab conviction that Britain was secretly committed to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. (It was not, however, only to Britain that Zionism looked for support in its determination to fundamentally change the demographic facts of life in Palestine. For this purpose, and as we shall see in Chapter Nine, some Zionists actually collaborated with the Nazis).

A six-month strike in 1936 was the beginning of a full-scale rebellion by the Palestinians. It had two aims. One was to force Britain to stop Jewish immigration. The other was to oblige Britain to deliver on its promise of independence for Palestine.

Britain’s first response was to appoint a Royal Commission (the Peel Commission) to consider the deteriorating situation in Palestine. It recommended the partitioning of Mandated Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.

The Palestinians rejected partition and then underlined their rejection by escalating a campaign to destroy trees and crops in newly established Zionist settlements. In the skirmishes 80 Zionist settlers were killed. It became obvious to even the British that partition was not a practical proposition.

Britain’s next response was to declare war on the Palestinians.

In its attempt to crush the rebellion Britain had virtually to re-conquer the land. More and more British troops were committed to that effort. Many of the new roads built by the British after 1936 were for the purpose of facilitating the movement of British troops.

With martial law prevailing the British application of brute force included a twin-track strategy to rob Palestinian nationalism of its leaders. Up to 300 were detained and many were deported to the Seychelles. Of those who took their places as organisers and co-ordinators of resistance, not a few were assassinated by British intelligence agents who used as their cover an internal struggle for power between rival wings of the Palestinian nationalist movement. That enabled the British to claim that Arabs were killing Arabs. (It was a standard British tactic and one the Israelis were to copy and refine.)

But British might did not break the Palestinian will to resist the
Mandate and prevent the implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

It was, however, the situation in Europe—Hitler on the rampage— that caused Britain to rethink its Palestine policy. By early 1939, pre-occupied with the task of appeasing Hitler in the hope of avoiding war with Nazi Germany, a British government led by Neville Chamberlain was ready to talk to the Arabs about what needed to be done to end the confrontation in Palestine.

The talking was done in London at the Anglo-Arab conference.

As a first priority the conference set up a committee, whose members included the Lord Chancellor, Vincent Caldecot, to examine the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence of 1915–1916. Among the other documents it studied, and which was made public for the first time at the conference, was Hogarth’s message to Hussein.

The Lord Chancellor, probably privately appalled by the British duplicity he and the committee uncovered, admitted that “the Arab point of view proved to have greater force than had appeared heretofore.”
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When the committee had completed its work, it unanimously reported on 11 March 1939 that “His Majesty’s Government were not free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine... “
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The committee’s report went on to say that all British statements made to the Arabs during and after the war had to be taken into account in any attempt “to estimate the responsibilities which— upon any interpretation of the [McMahon-Hussein] Correspondence —His Majesty’s Government have incurred towards those inhabitants as a result of the Correspondence.”
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If there was a moment when, in effect, Britain repudiated Balfour’s policy of support for Zionism right or wrong, the British government’s acceptance of the committee’s report was it.

Six weeks later, on 17 May 1939, (with the countdown to World War II unstoppable despite Chamberlain’s hopes to the contrary), Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald unveiled a White Paper setting out Britain’s new policy for Palestine; a policy the Zionists regarded as, and proclaimed to be, a betrayal of Britain’s promise to them.

The White Paper set out its stall by pointing to the ambiguity of the expression “a national home for the Jewish people”, and “the resulting uncertainty as to the objective of (Britain’s) policy.”
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This uncertainty was the “fundamental cause of unrest (a euphemism for the Arab rebellion) and hostility between Arabs and Jews.”

The White Paper went on: “His Majesty’s Government believe that the framers of the Mandate in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population of the country. That Palestine was not to be converted into a Jewish state might be held to be implied in the passage from the Command Paper of 1922, which reads as follows…” The 1939 White Paper then quoted from Churchill’s 1922 White Paper, both its assurances to the Arabs and its commitment to the founding in Palestine of a Jewish National Home.

Acknowledging that the 1922 White Paper had not removed Arab doubts about Britain’s policy, the 1939 White Paper then said:

His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state.

Then, in a most explicit way that left no scope for misunderstanding by anybody and no opportunity for misrepresentation by the Zionists, the 1939 White Paper spelled out what Britain’s Palestine policy was to be from here on.

The objective was an independent Palestinian state within 10 years, in which “Arabs and Jews could share in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each are safeguarded.” In such a Palestinian state it was envisioned that “Jews and Arabs would be as Palestinian as English and Scottish in Britain are British.”

The establishment of the indepen-dent state was to be preceded by a transitional period throughout which His Majesty’s Government would have ultimate responsibility. As soon as peace was sufficiently restored, steps would be taken to give Palestinians (Arabs and Jews) an increasing part in government with the object of placing Palestinians (Arabs and Jews) in charge of all the departments of government, with the assistance of British advisers and subject to the control of the High Commissioner. The Palestinian heads of departments (Arabs and Jews) would sit on the Executive Council which advised the High Commissioner, and Arab and Jewish representatives would be invited to serve in proportion to their respective populations.

The process would be carried on whether or not Arabs and Jews availed themselves of the opportunity.

Five years from the restoration of peace an appropriate body representing Palestine and His Majesty’s Government would be established to review the working of arrangements during the transitional period to that point and make recommendations regarding the constitution of an independent Palestine.

His Majesty’s Government would do everything to create conditions enabling the independent state to come into being in 10 years, but if the circumstances required a postponement, His Majesty’s Government would consult with the Palestinians (Arabs and Jews) and the League of Nations, as well as neighbouring Arab states, before deciding on a postponement.

(I think I should point out that Zionist and other Jewish leaders were consulted by the British government while it was rethinking its policy for Palestine. As well as the Anglo-Arab Conference there were tripartite talks in London involving the British government, the Arabs and the Jews—Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists).