The Compromised Land

Raymond Carr

ONE PALESTINE COMPLETE by Tom Segev Little, Brown, £25, pp. 612 Tom Segev is a practising Israeli journalist who holds a PhD in history from Boston University. He is a prominent representative of what is now called in Israel 'the new history'. This, mercifully, has nothing to do with modernism or postmodernism. It represents an endeavour to describe things as they were, to pursue the truth as it is embodied in the contemporary sources at the cost of conventional wisdom and comforting myths.

His long, complex book describes British rule in Palestine from 1917 to 1948. Segev sets out to describe how, and on what terms, Britain became involved in Palestine. In 1917, Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire which fought on the side of Germany. The advance of General Allenby to Damascus destroyed Ottoman power, leaving a trail of devastation and a political vacuum. How was this to be filled? In November 1917, the British government published the Balfour Declaration which committed it to favour 'the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people'. Balfour was the foreign secretary of Lloyd George's coalition government and he had been converted — the word is exact — to Zionism by a Russian Jew, Chaim Weizmann, a chemistry lecturer at Manchester University.

Zionism arose in the later 19th century with the aim of creating a territory where the Jewish victims of Tsarist pogroms could find a refuge. By 1917 for the Zionist organisation that refuge could only be in Palestine. Its president, Weizmann, exercised his 'feline charm' on the great and good. After a two-hour conversation with him, Balfour confessed, 'I am a Zionist.' Weizmann succeeded in a bluff. He presented the Zionists as the sole and legitimate representatives of the aspirations of Jewish people. This was untrue. Moreover, as Segev insists, Weizmann could benefit from the commonly held notion, shared by Lloyd George, that the Jews somehow turned the wheels of history and it was prudent to have them on one's side in a war.

Balfour's enthusiasm alarmed Curzon, who was the only member of the Cabinet with first-hand knowledge of Palestine, and knew that Palestine, in which the Declaration was to plant a Jewish Home, was inhabited by Mussalmans' (i.e. Arabs). What would happen to them as a conse quence of the Declaration? They had been there, he argued, for 1,500 years and would

not consent to be expropriated by Jewish

immigrants to the National Home or to act 'as hewers of wood and drawers of water' for the Zionists. To quieten such objections, the Declaration included the state ment that 'nothing would be done which might prejudice the rights of existing nonJewish communities [i.e. the Arabs and Christiansl in Palestine'.

There were rational reasons for a British presence in Palestine — to keep out the French and, as a military base, to protect the sea route to India. Balfour's commitment to Zionism was emotional. He saw the promise of a National Home as an act of historic justice, a gesture of which he remained proud. 'Zionism', he told Curzon, 'be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who inhabit that ancient land.'

The Balfour promise of a Jewish National Home, a concept unknown to international law, not only put the historic claims of the Jews above the democratic claims of the Arab majority, it made, as Segev insists, incompatible promises to two national demands. The Arabs saw an Arab state as the reward for their aid against the Ottoman Turks and the recognition of their democratic rights. The Zionists saw the promise of a National Home as the point de depart for the creation of a Jewish state, though this intention was kept under wraps until 1942. The democratic deficit and the demographic imbalance would be corrected under British rule by Jewish immigration to and Jewish settlement in Palestine until the Jews became a majority. Both these demands were rejected by the Arabs. Already in 1905, an Arab nationalist argued that the attempt to create 'an Israelite kingdom' on Arab soil could only end in war.

In 1922, after two and a half years of military government, Britain ruled Palestine under the Mandate granted by the League of Nations. The Mandate's terms included the Balfour Declaration, a triumph for Weizmann. Palestine was ruled as a Crown Colony, the British High Commissioner was a colonial governor under a different name. Segev describes the characteristic transformation of British domestic mores in a colonial setting. There were dinners where protocol was, as in India, strictly observed; picnics, tennis parties, amateur theatricals, performances of Gilbert and Sullivan, golf clubs, polo matches, even a hunt. Was it a distant memory of the Rutile Hunt that led an elderly member of the Knesset to admonish me that foxhunting was not a Jewish sport?

Conventional wisdom has it that these colonial administrators were pro-Arab. Segev rejects this. No doubt as busy colonial civil servants, engaged in modernising Palestine, they found demands that car licence plates and telegrams should be written in Hebrew script (to Zionists a symbolic demand since Hebrew was to be the language of a future Jewish state) a tiresome nuisance. Jews were 'aggressive', treating their rulers as equals. The Arabs were a noble, traditional people such as they had ruled in other colonies: the Jews were cosmopolitans from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. Anti-Semites there were, especially among the officers stationed in Palestine. General Barker, in his insipid schoolboy love letters to his Arab mistress, wrote, 'Just to think of all this life and money being spent on the bloody Jews. Yes, I loathe the lot.' But the outbursts of a frustrated adulterer do not invalidate Segev's conclusion: 'the frocks', the civilian administrators, were not anti-Jewish. On the contrary, they accepted what was to become the Jewish Agency as a sort of shadow government.

Some of them came to regard the Balfour Declaration as a blunder: but its terms represented British policy and it was their uncomfortable duty to implement it on the ground. Jewish immigration was allowed: Jewish settlements were protected by British police. Between 1922 and 1939 the Jewish population had grown from 83,790 to nearly half a million. Tel Aviv had risen from the sand to become a European city of 150,000 Jews. David Ben Gurion, the labour leader and now the effective leader of Zionism in Palestine, saw the Jews as bringing Western civilisation to an Oriental backwater. Ben Gurion's belief in the superiority of Western civilisation descends into a crude contempt in the four-page daily letters which the 18-year-old Chaim Halevi wrote to his parents on his immigration to Palestine. The Arab villagers 'live like real pigs'; Jewish labourers deserved higher wages because the Arabs did not wash and do not need the money for newspapers and toothpaste. The problem for Zionists in the 1920s was that most Jews of the Diaspora showed no enthusiasm for settling in Palestine. Moreover, not all those who came measured up to Zionists' vision of a race of 'pioneers' who, enthused by a 'religion of labour', would create a new society in Palestine. Halevi, for all his nationalist fervour, had no intention of breaking stones in a kibbutz. He pestered his relations for an office job.

It must be emphasised that Halevi's crude contempt for Arabs was not shared by that minority of Jews who sought to build bridges to the Arabs by the creation of a bi-national state. Ben Gurion always professed in public the desirability of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs. Zionism was always divided. There were hawks and doves.

The first High Commissioner under the Mandate was a Jew, Herbert Samuel. A moderate Zionist — in some distant future, the National Home might become a Jewish state — Samuel nevertheless believed it was his present duty to seek to reconcile Jews and Arabs. The Arabs would enjoy educational reforms; these were never carried out since it was British policy that Palestine should not be a burden on the British taxpayer. Prosperity brought by the Jews would reconcile Arabs to the existence of a National Home. 'He tended,' Segev writes, 'to view the conflict in social and economic terms, which was an illusion.' But British policy of a reconciliation in some joint 'Palestinian' identity was an illusion. Already in 1920 Arab youths had gone on the rampage in Jerusalem with the cry, 'Palestine is our land, the Jews our dogs.' In 1921 in Jaffa, and in 1929 in Hebron, Jews had been massacred. Segev's hour-by-hour description of these key episodes is a masterpiece. By 1930 the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, his nerves frayed by the impossible task of keeping order with an inadequate Arab police force, concluded that the Balfour Declaration had been 'a colossal blunder'.

By 1936 the Arabs felt, as Curzon had prophesied they would, that they had become hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Zionists of the National Home planted in their land. The Arab revolt was a savage guerrilla war, brutally repressed by the British army in co-operation with the Haganah, formed in the 1920s to protect Jewish settlement and on its way to becoming a Zionist clandestine army. The Arab revolt brought the British to the verge of abandoning Palestine. 'It would have been better for them,' Segev writes, 'had they left, but it took them nearly 20 years to act.' The establishment of a Jewish National Home was the only attempt by any nation to help the Jews. It ended in bitterness after 1945. Confronted with mass Jewish immigration from post-Holocaust Europe, the Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, was demonised as an anti-Semite, as he ordered the British army to drive the wretched immigrants from the shores of Palestine; the Haganah protected them. By this time, extreme nationalists had mounted a terrorist campaign against the British, blowing up the King David hotel, with 97 dead, and assassinating Lord Moyne. Segev challenges the accepted wisdom. The antiBritish terror and the protection of illegal immigrants by the Haganah were not a genuine 'national struggle against a foreign ruler'. They represented the competition of Zionist factions for control of a future Jewish state. 'The resistance against the British [was] to a large extent a political and psychological fiction'; 'the British were not the real enemy. The Arabs were.' Ben Gurion wanted the British to stay in Palestine because he considered that the Jews were not yet prepared to fight an Arab war.

But the British had decided to leave. The army was demoralised and the civilians were living behind barbed wire. Public opinion at home was outraged by the hanging of two captured British sergeants. When the government was prepared to grant independence to India it was absurd to keep an army of 100,000 troops to stop Arabs and Jews from killing each other in Palestine. Confronted with a universal demand to get out, the government handed back the mandate to the United Nations. The UN opted for partition, the final triumph of Zionism, since it recognised the historic claims of the Jews. It was totally rejected by the Arabs. On 14 May, 1948 the last British High Commissioner embarked for home, without, he claimed, 'finding anyone to hand over to'. This is not Segev's view. The British co-ordinated the transfer of many aspects of government with the Jewish Agency. This effort at a smooth handover 'was Britain's final contribution to the Jewish National Home'. If Arabs had possessed a shadow government, as did the Zionists, the outcome might have been different.

The scuttle of the British from Palestine was part of the post-war abandonment of empire by an exhausted nation. Government after government had striven for compromise and reconciliation but lacked the power to enforce them, confronted by irreconcilable demands. For Segev, the tragic end was in the beginning: the Balfour Declaration that brought the Jews to Palestine. 'Once the Zionist movement came to Palestine with the intention of creating an independent state with a Jewish majority, war was inevitable.' That war caught the Arabs unprepared and illorganised. On 14 May, 1948, the independent state of Israel was proclaimed. It was to remain an island of democracy, surrounded by a hostile sea of Arab authoritarian regimes.