Legacy of Empire (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

‘The two great evils which menace society in general and a society of nations in particular … are hatred and ignorance.’ Chaim Herzog1

The Arab-Israeli conflict continues. At the time of writing, there is no peace process and no sign of resolution. We are repeatedly reminded of this. The May 2018 celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the declaration of the state of Israel was marked by renewed Palestinian resistance, and bloodshed, in Gaza. Confusion persists, too. The British Labour Party has struggled to distinguish anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

On the shelves of booksellers there is no shortage of works on this subject. But much ignorance remains: of the origins of the modern state of Israel, and of the inter-communal antagonism that marked its birth. There is little knowledge of modern political Zionism, little awareness of the British Empire’s historic responsibility for Palestine, and little appreciation of the legacy for Israel.

The modern state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War. Many assume a direct link between the two events, and of course there was one. Jewish survivors of the horror of Nazi-occupied Europe wanted to start new lives ‘in the only place likely to welcome them’, and Palestine presented itself as just that.2 Tens of thousands of Jews made their way there. But Israel’s origins are properly sought in the period of the First World War, not the Second.

It is sometimes argued that it is impossible to consider the political affairs of the Jewish people before the Second World War, except in the shadow of our knowledge of what occurred then. But the reverse is also true. We cannot properly consider post-war developments without a secure grasp of what went before: above all, the worsening conflict between indigenous Palestinians and the increasingly militant Zionist movement. This eventually led the British – who from 1922 had administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate – to admit failure: provisionally before the war, in 1937; formally after it, in 1947.

It was the British who in 1917 committed themselves, owing to wartime exigency, to the Zionist project. In the 1920s and 1930s, despite evidence, argument and warnings, they oversaw the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants: a trickle in the 1920s, a flood in the 1930s. There arose, as a result of Britain’s policy, outright hostility between the peoples, which its administration could not reverse. The British abdicated in 1947 – but the conflict was inherited by Israel, after the United Nations awarded 55 per cent of the land of Palestine to a Jewish state in 1947 (to this extent fulfilling the Zionist dream). At heart it is this dispute that continues.

This is not a story of the inevitable. The British might not have done what they did in 1917 and the 1920s, especially under a prime minister other than David Lloyd George. A solution to the Jewish Question – how should Jews respond to anti-Semitism generally, though especially in Poland and Russia? – might have been found in a continuing welcome for Jewish refugees in Britain and the USA, for example, rather than in the colonisation of an Arab territory of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The initial British endorsement of Zionism was not inevitable; but its consequences flowed with ‘a certainty like fate’.3

Britain’s critical role began with the Balfour Declaration. In November 1917, the British government of Lloyd George pledged to ‘facilitate’ the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’, while stressing that ‘nothing shall be done’ to prejudice the rights of existing communities living there. In making these two contradictory promises, the Declaration – enshrined in a League of Nations mandate in 1922 – committed the British administration to a policy that was seen to fail before the Second World War and led to the ignominy of abdication shortly after it.

Balfour’s Declaration was not the pure expression of sympathy with the aspirations of persecuted Jews that it is still widely held to have been. Far from it. In fact, the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet, Edwin Montagu, condemned his government’s attitude to Palestine and Zionism in 1917 as anti-Semitic. The fantastic assumption that lay behind this commitment to Zionism – that ‘world Jewry’ was an agency so powerful that it could not be ignored – was itself indicative of an anti-Semitism well established in Central Europe. And this was the same Arthur Balfour who, as Prime Minister, had introduced the Aliens Act in 1905: primarily to prevent Jews who were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe from entering Britain.

In the period 1917–1922, sympathy among British decision-makers for the persecuted Jews of Central and Eastern Europe was constrained within geographical limits. They conceded that the Jews had a problem, but they insisted that the location for its solution lay … somewhere else. Zionists, who helped to formulate the Declaration in 1917, conveniently insisted that faraway Palestine should be the location for a Jewish National Home – even though its resident population was overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim (or, as the Declaration put it, ‘non-Jewish’) and known to be anti-Zionist (though not anti-Semitic). The Balfour Declaration was a landmark expression of nimbyism. Though Palestine, for most Jews, remained a far less attractive prospect than Britain or America, the Declaration became a template for other countries to adopt. As we shall see later, they too – including, crucially, the USA from 1924 – welcomed Zionism as an alternative to keeping their own doors open for any Jews fleeing persecution. They could go to Palestine instead. This approach did something to protect Britain and other states from politically unpopular Jewish immigration; it did nothing to recognise the rights of Palestinians in their homeland.

British Prime Minister from 1908–1916 Herbert Asquith had scant interest in Palestine, and none in Zionism. If Palestine was of little or no strategic value, the case for adopting Zionism was, from the British imperial point of view, thin indeed. However, Lloyd George made his commitments, not only to Palestine but also to Zionism, many years before the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. There was already a Jewish Question but there were, at that time, other answers to the worsening plight of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. And Zionists conceded that a Jewish national home in Palestine could not accommodate all the world’s Jews. For the time being, the USA, the choice of so many Jewish emigrants from Europe around the turn of the century, remained open.

Especially remarkable is the uncharacteristic ineptitude of decisionmakers in the British government in the aftermath of the First World War: in respect to Palestine (their knowledge of which was largely biblical), and in respect to Zionism, too (their knowledge of which was minimal). Policy initiatives were not thought through. In some respects, the imperial attitude to Palestine was unexceptional. Here, as for other overseas British possessions at the time, it was claimed that colonies (repackaged now as mandates) benefited from imperial governance; that strategic purposes further justified them; that they were valuable as potential markets and sources of raw materials; that they must be developed as far as was practicable (to keep down metropolitan costs); that settlers, as in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, would contribute, by making better use of land than natives could; and, lastly, that there was plenty of time available in which to bestow the blessings of Western civilisation. For the most part, previous British imperial decision-making along such lines had been shrewd and realistic: pragmatic, even at times reluctant. And not all colonialism caused trauma among the colonised.

But there was caprice in Lloyd George’s adoption of Zionism, along with a dogged refusal to grasp that it could not work. Zionists were a tiny minority among the world’s Jews before the period of the First World War. Zionism – an ideology and movement committed to the colonisation of Palestine – was only one, eccentric, answer to the Jewish Question of the late nineteenth century. In sponsoring the Zionist project for its own ends, Lloyd George’s British imperial government adopted a unique, hybrid colonialism in Palestine: they ‘administered’, while Jewish immigrants ‘settled’. They were thus responsible for creating, as prophesied, a problem in Palestine that before long grew to be beyond their capacity to solve.

By the late 1930s, ‘Israel’ was not only conceptualised but already had an embryonic existence. The events of the following decade are horribly familiar. Less widely known is the fact that the Peel Commission’s proposal in 1937 of a ‘two-state solution’ – before the Second World War and the genocide – closely foreshadowed that of the United Nations in 1947, which led to the birth of Israel the following year.

The legacy of thirty years of controversy and crisis in mandated Palestine was to be ineradicable. The new Israel was – and remains – scarred by an inter-communal conflict provoked by Zionist colonisation fostered by the British during an ill-judged administration of Palestine tied to the Balfour Declaration. The two-state solution advocated in response, first by the British and later by the UN, has so far produced neither two states nor a solution.

The Balfour Declaration and its consequences continue to be widely seen in a far rosier light than they merit. The centenary of the issuing of...