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Hi there and welcome again to the Explaining History podcast.
This week has been a bit different and understandably so.There's been a lot more analysis on the podcast this week and less kind of history.
I'm going to sort of flip that round today and look at Britain's withdrawal from Palestine and the period before that during the Second World War as Britain's policy in Palestine evolves.
I'm reading today from the People's Peace by Kenneth O Morgan, which is, if you wanted to have a book which is the standard reader on post-war British history and kind of
British managed decline in the post-war era and of course the end of empire and that kind of thing.It's a fantastic single volume, it really really is.It only takes up to 45 to 90 and so there's a whole history obviously beyond that.
And tomorrow I'll be looking at approaches to history again.We'll be delving back into the way in which we look at, you know, historians or kind of proto historians imagined the past in the Middle Ages.And so tune in, tune in for that.
And every Saturday, bit by bit, we're going to move through different kind of theoretical and critical approaches to understanding history.So let's talk about Palestine.
The great exception to the generally untroubled start to the withdrawal from empire in the post-war period is Palestine.
Here the Atli government inherited a hopeless legacy, a jumble of rival commitments to both the resident Arabs and the immigrant Jewish community that went back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration of a Jewish national home.
In 1945 the government faced a problem in Palestine of extraordinary complexity.
The two decades of conflict between Arab and Jewish residents in Palestine was now intensified by the massive Jewish exodus from Europe following the Nazi Holocaust and resultant pressure markedly to increase Jewish immigration into Palestine.
the Labour Party conference in 1944 had passed a strongly pro-Zionist resolution so to increase Jewish migration as to make Jews the majority in Palestine.So the last kind of
almost getting on for almost 10 years now in the Labour Party, has been kind of marked by this kind of resurgence in Labour Zionism.
In part, part of the process of removing Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the Labour Party, from the leadership between 2015 and 2019,
literally everything was thrown at him and then the charge of anti-semitism is the thing that's used and weaponised.And one of the reasons why this is successful is because Labour does have these long-standing Zionist roots, this idea.
And it was kind of a mixture of left Zionism initially, I don't think it's particularly left-wing any longer, And also aspects of Christian Zionism, the idea that the Holy Land will be settled.
And there's a kind of unspoken colonialism there that I've talked about before, the idea that Palestine is somehow a wilderness. that the Jewish people would turn and cultivate it and turn it into something civilised.
Of course there is a civilisation there and it's one that the British colonised.The Holocaust of course dramatically changes everything.
The British had done in Palestine, kind of what they had done in India, they create rival ethnic groups and this has been a tried and tested means of Britain maintaining power.The favoured group in this case was obviously the Jewish settlers.
One of the things that happened from the 1920s onwards was that the British system of governance in Palestine, much like the French system of governance in Syria under the mandate system, introduces kind of British approaches to everything from education and policing through to, most crucially, land ownership.
The way in which land ownership had landed changed hands.This is a very, very crude analysis.
Prior to this, between different different Arab buyers and sellers of land would be, well, you know, I will sell you this land and the village there and the fields and the olive groves and that kind of thing.And you can extract rents from it.
But the people who inhabit the land stay on the land. This is kind of how you maintain a relatively stable society.
And it's you find examples of this kind of patrician ship, you know, this, you know, the landowner looking after the tenants, even when the land changes hands throughout the Middle East and indeed in all sorts of other parts of the world as well.
It's not a rare thing. When land was sold to Jewish settlers, the Jewish settlers looked at it entirely differently.They said, well, we've bought this land.This is land for colonising.This is for Jewish people to settle.The tenants have to go away.
We don't want them.We want the land and we pay fair and square for it. And they looked to the British colonial administrators and their soldiers as the people who should enforce this transition in land ownership.
And they said, well, basically, the people on this land now are squatters.You kick them off.That's what you're for.This is your responsibility. And this happens from maybe about 1922 onwards.And here's how we start to see the settlement of Palestine.
There is this kind of myth version of that story that, well, the sort of slightly feckless Arabs didn't want the land anyway, and they didn't know quite what to do with it, and they sold it to Jewish purchasers.
A lot of the purchasing of land for Jewish settlers is well-organized and well-financed from overseas, from Britain and America.
money is raised for it and it's seen as a kind of a righteous and good cause but we we are looking at this in an era where the colonization of places like South Africa
is seen as a righteous and good cause, where the removal of Aboriginal people in Australia from the land is seen as a rightful and good cause, where colonialism has such a special civilising mission.
And so it's hardly surprising that you have not just Jewish people in Britain, America and Europe, but non-Jewish people as well thinking this is really positive, this is a good thing, the land there is being settled and obviously it is
the centre of all three Abrahamic religions.So there are many Christian people who with all sorts of probably Islamophobic prejudices that saw the removal of the power of Palestinian Arabs as entirely positive.In addition,
there were diplomatic and strategic imperatives.
Palestine was a potential source of tension between Britain and the United States, with the large Jewish population of New York and other cities putting pressure on President Truman's democratic administration.Truman himself, after the war,
had an interest in Jewish immigration into Palestine because he knew that there were sufficient numbers of anti-Semites in America who would react very badly to mass Jewish immigration into America from Europe.
And he thought, well, you know, send them somewhere else.This will be good.
There's a really interesting history of all of this that I really want to kind of get into at some point from Norman Finkelstein in his book Beyond Chutzpah, where he he he talks about how at the end of the Second World War,
The main Jewish organisations in America were relatively sceptical about Israel or nervous around Israel.They'd seen a holocaust in Europe happen and would be forgiven for thinking that a further holocaust in America might be possible.
And so not rocking the boat, not speaking out about Israel, was initially the strategy.Why?Because before 1948, 1949, it was unclear that if a Jewish state is established in Palestine, which way it will go in the Cold War.
The nightmare scenario for American Jews is that they are championing this new state, saying, yes, it must happen.And then it it does happen.It's established the Arab armies are defeated with Soviet weapons.
And then hey, presto, the Soviet Union develops a satellite state in the Middle East.And many, many Jews that had come to the mandate of Palestine had come from parts of the Soviet Union or the former Russian Empire.
So there were all these kind of anxieties in the mix at that particular moment.
And the main kind of civic Jewish organisations in America at the time feared that the worst situation would be in the midst of the Cold War tensions when people are being denounced, people with names like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example.
And there was a vein of antisemitism that ran through the McCarthyite era, for sure. that Jews would be accused of backing a new Soviet-friendly state.
Of course that doesn't happen and you don't get a new Soviet-friendly state, in fact you get an American satellite state in the Middle East that has served American interests ever since.
Again, the sensitive strategic position of Palestine close to the Suez Canal, the base for 100,000 British troops, and relatively near the major imperial bases elsewhere in the Middle East, was a further complication in reaching a settlement.
The Labour government in 1945, with its strong support in the British Zionist community, appeared to inherit a clear commitment to develop a much-expanded and protected Jewish state in Palestine.
To make the situation even more difficult, Palestine came inevitably into the domain of Nisbeth, and this is the British Foreign Secretary, an otherwise skillful and innovative Foreign Secretary.
In the case of Palestine in Brollio, he was shown consistent insensitivity and crassness that verged on anti-Semitism.
British policy in Palestine was guarded and hesitant throughout, without the decisive impulse of principle that guided policy in India.
The Anglo-American Palestine Committee, appointed by both governments, reported in May 1946 in favour of issuing Jewish certificates of immigration to up to 100,000
the acute embarrassment of Bevin himself, President Truman kept up American pressure along the same lines.
Yet, despite these weighty factors, it has been apparent since the very first days of the Labour government that its imperialism was far more powerful than its Zionism.
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Cabinet ministers like Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison famous for their close links with Jewish leaders and their sympathy for the Jewish socialists such as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meirson bluntly announced as early as the 8th of September that they supported the traditional pro-Arab views of the Foreign Office.
They signed a paper for the cabinet's Palestine committee, which declared that massive Jewish immigration into Palestine was unacceptable because of the strategic position and importance as an oil bearing region in the Middle East.
This made good relations with friendly Arab states, such as Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, imperative.You have these states that are Not so much newly independent, but they've been kind of around for at least 20 or 30 years.
There was a very delicate game throughout the Second World War, which you can read all about in James Barr's brilliant book Lords of the Desert.
managing and control and managing relationships with Arab states and the fear throughout the Cold War era was it only took a couple of oil producing Arab states to drift into the Russian camp and you've got big big trouble.
Iraq, with its British air bases at Habbaniya and Sha'iba, and the pro-British inclinations of the head of state, Nouri al-Said, was a particularly sensitive country.
After all, it was the British who had restored the Hashemite kingdom there following the Rashid Ali revolt in Iraq in 1941, and they regarded their client, Nouri, as an elder statesman of much wisdom and vision.
The broad drift of British policy in Palestine, therefore, was not in doubt.In 1946, guerrilla war broke out between the occupying British forces and a series of extreme Jewish terrorist gangs, notably the Irgun and Shtirn gang.
Atrocities such as the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946 with the loss of 91 British, Jewish and Arab lives,
led to a British campaign of retaliation and arms suppression, as it had previously and happily attempted in Ireland during the Troubles of 1919 to 1921.Again, citing James Barr, if you read his book A Line in the Sand,
The last kind of quarter of the book is quite extraordinary.The lengths that Jewish terrorist gangs went to, including a bombing campaign across London, and much of it aided and abetted by the French.
Britain, of course, had caused all sorts of mischief in the French mandate of Syria. and armed rebels there, but the levels of public animosity in Britain by about 1947 to the Jews of the Mandate
of course combined with actual real kind of anti-semitism and a sense of kind of frustration and resentment and why are we there kind of mentality and after all we've done for these people sort of mentality as well.
It causes a real desire, a real public desire to withdraw as quickly as possible from the mandate and leave people to basically fight it out.
which is when you look at kind of French public attitudes to decolonisation in Vietnam by the mid-1950s it's kind of similar of, you know, I don't know why we're bothering with all of this, we have our domestic problems, leave them to it.
The British government offered no obvious or compelling solution.It proposed variations on the theme of partition.Sir Arthur Creech Jones, the Colonial Secretary from October 1946 and an old Zionist sympathiser, tried to press this policy on Bevin.
But the reality was that Arabs wanted no Jewish migration at all, while Jews sought unlimited immigration and a unitary Jewish state of Israel. The United Nations failed to produce more than declamations.
Bevin's insensitive policy led to the publicly disastrous episodes such as the turning back of the ship Exodus with 4,500 would-be Jewish immigrants on board.Some of the ships that were turned back were sailed back to Europe.
From there, Jews, mainly of whom who had left Germany, had to be put somewhere. and you won't guess where the British put them.
Straight back into camps, concentration and concentration camps have to become death camps because they were the facilities that were there and you have this appalling situation
of Jews that had either avoided being captured by the Nazis or had survived the camps being dumped back into them.And when there were riots, the British soldiers tear gassing them.
A kind of unimaginably awful policy in its kind of crassness and cruelty and insensitivity and ignorance. But the British, it was their attempt to prevent the tinderbox that they had kind of created in Palestine from finally exploding.
By the summer of 1947, the Atlee cabinet was placing its main emphasis on the financial drain imposed by maintaining British troops in Palestine, especially in the light of the foreign exchange crisis over convertibility in the July-August period.
This factor had already led to the withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent and the early decision to remove the British military presence in Greece and Turkey.The only solution appeared to be a similar policy in Palestine.
The great difference in this case was that no future political settlement was outlined at all.Britain's dismal record of trusteeship, lasting since the mandate was granted in 1920, ended in communal chaos.
In India, new Indian and Pakistani governments could take over from the Raj.This is to kind of slightly ignore the issue of the partition?
India, I mean, the critique I have here, and hopefully Kenneth O'Morgan will address it, but the critique I have here is that the withdrawal from India was many times, many times bloodier.
I'm not suggesting the withdrawal from Palestine isn't bloody and violent, because it is.But the withdrawal from India is one of the great, it involves some of the great monstrous ethnic cleansing crimes of the 20th century. on both sides.
In Greece and Turkey, the Truman Declaration ensured the United States would replace the departing British.In Palestine, there was only anarchy and carnage.The last British troops were withdrawn by early May 1948.
Thenceforward, the Arabs and Jews fought out their future.To Bevin's surprise and possible disappointment, the Jews won and the State of Israel came into being, recognised by Britain on a de facto basis in January 1949.
It was impossible to see the withdrawal from Palestine as anything other than humiliation for Britain.British lives had been lost and much money spent, with no guarantee outcome to show for them.
The issue produced a lengthy crisis of conscience for the Labour Party, with its historic ties to the Jewish community. A local journal, like the Morecambe Visitor, protested that Britain was in the grip of the Jews.
This shows you again popular anti-Semitic attitudes hadn't gone away after the Second World War. The Second World War didn't miraculously, even when the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, it doesn't miraculously change public attitudes.
There are all these kind of horrible, bigoted, ignorant attitudes still there.If you want to read a really, really good account of this, I've said this before, but get Thinking the 20th Century by Tony Judd.
And in it, he talks about what a Jewish post-war childhood is like.And it's very, very interesting account of what a British-Jewish post-war life is like.
There was some residual antisemitism in Britain, already evident in the membership of rules of such bodies as the Home County's golf clubs.
It was fanned by some cases of black market corruption, such as the Sydney Stanley Affair of 1948-49, in which Jewish business figures were implicated.But all this did not amount to much.
On balance, the main British response to Palestine was sheer relief that an impossible and irreconcilable political legacy had been disposed of, without sacrificing the British position in the Middle East.
A new command structure was created in the area.By 1949, indeed, Britain was consolidating its Middle East role after the Palestine withdrawal, with defence agreements with Egypt and Jordan.
The Palestine debacle was not allowed to cloud the feeling that, overall, Britain, since the end of the war, had been in control of its colonial destiny and maintained direction over the course of events.
So when you look at everything that happened since in 1948, in 1956, in 1967, in 1973, in 1982, in 1994, and the last 20 or so years, the horrors that
colonialism and empire kind of bequeathers are still they are still alive I mean if you look at the for a kind of like a colonial explanation of Ukraine
This is a, we have an empire that is trying to reassert itself over a kind of a wayward former colony and those kind of tensions of centuries of kind of imperial dominance are still there along these kind of historical fault lines.
So the British Empire there has this huge role to play in generating the tensions and there were obviously, before 1917, there were Jewish communities in Palestine that had lived alongside Arab and Christian communities.
Palestine is a hugely kind of cosmopolitan place. as we saw a few weeks ago with Mohammed Tabush's biography, My Palestine, which hopefully we'll hear some more from soon.
And the policies of the British, which I think actually in that account there, get a slightly more positive hearing than I think they're actually due.The key thing there is that at the end, by 1948, the British walk away in safe few.
Well, the debacle hasn't ended and won't end, just as the debacle, for want of a better word, in Kashmir at the end of the British Empire in India is still ongoing with immense bloodshed and violence and oppression.
But as far as the British were concerned, it was.And it was their continued economic and strategic and military and diplomatic dominance in the region that's the key thing that they don't wish to have threatened.
The human beings on both sides, you know, on both sides in the middle of this horror are set up and left with and sort of an almost irreconcilable issue of conflicting demands and desires on ones. OK, so let's let's finish that.
And I just want to let you guys know that I said this a few times now on the 20th, I'm going to be doing a live stream teach on YouTube.There's a link in these in the show notes down below.
I'll put a link to the book so you can grab yourself a copy of that if you want to.If you're a student of British history, it is a really, really good book to have.
And I'll catch you on the Explaining History podcast tomorrow where we'll talk about some more approaches to history.Anyway, thanks so much.Take good care.All the best.Bye bye.
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