The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (67 page)

There was certainly some truth in this, but there were many men-on-the-spot and in Whitehall who believed that Arab rights were in danger and needed to be defended. Jewish colonists were well-financed and had the means to buy up large areas of land for their settlements, creating a class of landless labourers who were excluded from work in Jewish areas, where the owners preferred to employ men and women of their own race. Arabs began to compare Palestine to Algeria, where the French government had handed out the most fruitful land to French and Spanish colonists, and to Libya where, under Mussolini’s colonisation policy, Italian settlers were edging out Arabs. Moreover, the Palestinian Arabs sensed that Zionists and their sympathisers had the ear of the British government.

Frustration and racial tension erupted in anti-Jewish demonstrations in 1920, 1921 and 1929, when nearly 900 Jewish settlers were killed or wounded. These outbreaks were a chilling reminder that the British government would eventually have to make a definite decision as to the final racial balance within Palestine. No one was prepared to grasp this nettle, for neither side in the dispute was open to compromise, since it was bound to involve a surrender of ideals and territory. The Arabs were resisting what they considered a usurpation of lands they had inhabited and tilled for centuries, and a future in which they might conceivably be an impoverished minority within a Jewish state. The Jewish colonists believed that they were the rightful inheritors of a land long ago bequeathed them by God, which they were using to its best advantage, and which offered a safe haven for Jews everywhere. Having, in 1922, made clear that the future of Kenya would be decided in the interests of its indigenous races, rather than the white colonists, the British government thought it would be prudent to wait on events in Palestine. For a time it seemed that the problem might resolve itself naturally; between 1927 and 1932, the rate of Jewish immigration declined and, thanks to better medical treatment (a benefit of the Mandate), the Arab birth rate increased. At the beginning of 1933, there were 800,000 Arabs in Palestine and under 200,000 Jews.

At this stage, events in Europe radically changed the nature and scale of the Palestinian problem. There were about half a million Jews in Germany when Hitler manoeuvred himself into power in January 1933. During the next five years the Nazi authorities encouraged 150,000 to leave the country, even making arrangements with the Jewish Agency in Palestine to facilitate emigration there. At the same time, the numbers of Jews under Nazi rule increased with the annexation of Austria (1938) and Czechoslovakia (1938-9). Furthermore, the example of the Nazis encouraged anti-semitism in countries where the disease was already rife, and Jews found themselves persecuted in Poland, Hungary, Rumania and the Baltic states. There were, therefore, two mass exoduses of Jews from Europe. The first involved the flight of refugees from territory under Nazi government, of whom 57,000 went to the United States, 53,000 to Palestine and 50,000 to Britain. The second was undertaken by the Jews of Eastern Europe, including 74,000 who fled from Poland to Palestine. In all, 215,000 Jews reached Palestine in these six years, raising its total Jewish population to 475,000.
26

Islam, in stark contrast to the Catholic and Orthodox churches, had traditionally shown toleration to Jews, but the prospect of a flood of Jewish immigration, and with it further transfers of land, provoked the Arab higher committee to seek restrictions on both and a timetable for Palestinian self-government. An equivocal response, together with economic distress, led to the Arab Revolt which began in April 1936. The uprising exposed the fragility of internal security within a region where, despite eighteen years of British rule, brigandage was still common and firearms were easily obtainable. As in southern Ireland in 1919, the local police force was unable to withstand a campaign of systematic ambushes, murders, sabotage of communications and a general strike. Efforts to restore the government’s authority were feeble and fumbling. Nine thousand troops were drafted to Palestine in September 1936, but when they arrived their orders were hopelessly confused. On one hand, they were warned that ‘All Arabs are your enemies’, and on the other they were told to ensure that, ‘Every effort was made to conciliate, to heal instead of wound afresh, and to restore order by pacific measures.’
27
This conundrum reflected irresolution at the top. In September the cabinet had sanctioned the bombing of villages used as bases by partisans, and early the next month sanctioned martial law.
28
General Sir Arthur Wauchope, the High Commissioner, refused to implement the first and thought the second unnecessary as it would impede progress towards a negotiated settlement, decisions for which he and the cabinet were later censured by the Mandates Commission.
29

For the next three years, the army, navy and RAF waged an anti-guerrilla war during which large areas of the country, including Jerusalem and Nablus, passed temporarily into their enemies’ control. At first it was hoped that a compromise might be achieved through a royal commission, that standard procedure by which British governments simultaneously avoided the necessity for an immediate political decision and allowed tensions to subside. The high-minded and well-meaning members of the Peel Commission collected evidence, sifted through it and, in September 1937, proposed partition and a reduced quota of Jewish immigrants. After some wavering, both sides rejected this solution.

By now the local difficulties in Palestine were becoming an international embarrassment for Britain. Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the most trenchant Arab spokesman, fled into exile and began to persuade the independent rulers of neighbouring Arab states to exert pressure on Britain. His peregrinations and the flow of anti-British propaganda which poured from Palestinian Arabs and their supporters disturbed the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, and many of his officials who feared, with good reason, that continued equivocation and repression in Palestine might undermine British influence throughout the Arab world.

Growing Arab antipathy towards Britain was a bonus for Italy and Germany, and both began fishing in the troubled waters of Palestine. During 1938 and 1939, the propaganda agencies of these powers cynically broadcast allegations of British atrocities against Arabs. These stories, some of which were true, came from Arab sources outside Palestine, but at the beginning of 1939 British intelligence there was on the trail of two Nazi agents who had been collecting material which discredited British troops and, it was suspected, dispensing cash to Arab guerrillas.
30
There was evidence that Russia was recruiting agents from among the Arabs and had sent a handful to Moscow for training.
31
Despite counter-propaganda by the BBC’s Foreign Service, British representatives in Arab states were obliged to ask the government to adopt milder measures in Palestine.
32

The war of words would have been no more than an irritant had it not been for the international situation. Relations with Italy had deteriorated after its invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, the Sino-Japanese War had broken out in July 1937, and during 1938 Britain had discovered that it could only maintain a balance of power in Europe by making concessions to Germany, which served only to increase its strength and appetite for land. Whatever the circumstances or timing of a future collision with Japan or the Axis powers, Britain could no longer allow itself to be weakened by the Palestinian ulcer. In the event of war with Japan or Germany or Italy, Arab alienation and continued turbulence in a region which bordered on the Suez Canal would have been extremely dangerous.

After years of dithering, the government took swift and decisive action to pacify Palestine. In the months after the Munich agreement, reinforcements were hurried to Palestine, and operations there were intensified. By the early summer of 1939 a semblance of public order had been restored. In May, a White Paper was published outlining the province’s political future: Britain would keep the mandate for the next five years, cut Jewish immigration to 25,000 a year, and prepare the ground for an independent state in which the Arabs would be a permanent majority. An attempt was made to divert Jewish refugees to other colonies, but with small success. The governor of Kenya thought a Jewish enclave would prove ‘an undesirable feature’, although he had no objections to the ‘right type’ of Jew (i.e. Austrian or German); the white settlers of Northern Rhodesia were very cool; and only British Guiana was encouraging.
33

Strategic necessity had ended nearly twenty years of procrastination. Whatever its rights and wrongs, and nearly all Jews saw only wrongs, the 1938–9 military-political settlement revealed that in an emergency Britain could act with determination and ruthlessness. The same qualities were apparent in the early war years when it was clear that a considerable body of Arab opinion was hoping for an Axis victory as the Middle East’s only means of escape from Britain’s domination. In Iraq, where the repercussions of events in Palestine had been strongly felt, anti-British sentiment was strongest among the officer class. Britain’s supervision of the Iraq army had not prevented those who passed through its military college from being taught to see themselves as an élite destined to be the liberators of their nation.
34
Political circumstances encouraged their daydreams; there had been no stability since Faisal’s death in 1932 and for the next eight years transitory civilian governments were more or less the instruments of a cabal of colonels.

Although Iraq was technically allied to Britain, its government was grudging in the assistance it rendered to the British war effort, and, like Egypt’s, hardly bothered to hide its sympathy for the Axis powers. In March 1940, the situation was such that the high command in Cairo prepared plans to occupy the Mosul oilfields as a precautionary measure, although no one had any idea where to find the necessary men.
35
Eight months later, deciphered German signals revealed that an overland attack on Iraq was being considered in Berlin. The German thrust through the Balkans and into Greece in the spring of 1941, and the likelihood that the Vichy authorities in Damascus would connive at German bases in Syria, forced Britain to intervene in Iraq. Two brigades of Indian troops were landed at Basra with orders to proceed to positions from where they could protect the northern oilfields.

This manoeuvre was completely within the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi treaty, but nationalists believed it was a prelude to an attack on Baghdad.
36
Rashid Ali, the prime minister who had seized power with army backing on 3 April, appealed directly for Axis help a fortnight later. The British were forewarned of his intrigues through intercepted German and Italian wireless messages, and forces in Palestine were ordered to enter Iraq.
37
An Iraqi attack on Habbaniya aerodrome was beaten off, and British motorised columns reached Baghdad by the middle of May. German and Italian aircraft, flown from Greece to Syria, arrived too late to influence the outcome of the six-week campaign in which 3,000 Iraqi troops were killed. Three thousand nationalist officers were subsequently purged from the army by a new, pro-British government under Nuri es-Said, who had fought alongside T.E. Lawrence twenty-five years earlier. Rashid Ali escaped and made his way to Berlin.

The
coup de main
against Iraq and the palace coup in Cairo nine months later were proof that, despite over twenty years of nationalist ferment, British power in the Middle East was still firm. Both were, however, exceptional measures, undertaken in the face of dire emergencies by a country fighting for its life. This was not how it looked to Egyptians and Arabs. Each display of force left a deep sense of bitterness and frustration because it had amply demonstrated the victims’ powerlessness. Britain was still the dominant power in the region and would go to any lengths to get its way there.

5

A New Force and New Power: India 1919–42

The Indian empire had always been a heterogeneous organism. Its political map was a mosaic of princely states (there were over 500 in 1919) and provinces directly governed by British officials. These states covered two-fifths of the subcontinent and contained a quarter of its population. It would have been impossible to have drawn an exact racial or religious chart of India, although, as a general rule, Muslims were concentrated in the north-western regions and Bengal. They were a minority comprising a seventh of a population which stood at 280 million in 1940.

Racial and religious tolerance was scarce in India. The Ghurka soldiers who shot down demonstrators in Amritsar in 1919 later admitted that they had enjoyed killing people of the plains.
1
In 1923 intelligence sources revealed that Hindus had been secretly pleased by recent air raids on Pathan villages on the North-West Frontier.
2
An army inquiry of 1943 as to which soldiers were best suited for policing duties revealed that, ‘The Sikh would at heart enjoy nothing more than hammering Muslims.’
3
There is no reason to disbelieve these statements, nor dismiss out of hand nationalist assertions that the British cynically exploited racial and religious antipathies in order to ‘divide and rule’.

On the other hand, those diehards who wanted the raj to continue come what may, claimed that Britain alone could keep the peace and act as a dispassionate umpire, balancing the rights of one faith against the other. This argument was strengthened during the 1920s when sectarian disorders increased alarmingly. The most trivial incident could spark off massacre and looting: a street squabble between two schoolboys, one Hindu, the other Muslim, led to ten days of rioting and pillage in Dacca in 1929.
4
The leaders of the dominant Indian National Congress were horrified by such events, and sectarian malevolence in general. It was the greatest obstacle to national unity for it prevented Indians from thinking of themselves as Indians first and Muslims or Hindus second, and acting accordingly. Jawaharlal Nehru saw religion as India’s greatest bane, believing that it fostered dogmatism and narrow-mindedness.
5
Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he had travelled far from that world in which the public slaughter of a cow or lurid tales of the forcible conversion of Hindu maidens could drive a Hindu to such a pitch of fury that he would kill his Muslim neighbours and burn down their houses.