The Palestinians and British Perfidy: The Tragic Aftermath of the Balfour Declaration of 1917

324 Pages·2018·5.51 MB·English

by  C. W. R. Long

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ii LEFTTT
DEDICATION
To Jan, who has been unstinting in her
support for this labour of love.
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Copyright © C. W. R. Long 2018.
The right of C. W. R. Long to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 9781845198961 (Cloth)
ISBN 9781782845133 (PDF)
First published in 2018 in Great Britain by
SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
PO Box 139
Eastbourne BN24 9BP
Distributed in North America by
SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
ISBS Publisher Services
920 NE 58th Ave #300, Portland, OR 97213, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of
criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Long, Richard (Charles William Richard), author.
Title: The Palestinians and British perfidy : the tragic aftermath of the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 / Richard Long.
Description: Brighton ; Portland ; Toronto : Sussex Academic Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017035708 | ISBN 9781845198961 (hbk : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Balfour Declaration. | Palestine—History—20th century. |
Zionism—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Palestinian Arabs—
Attitudes. | Great Britain—Foreign relations—Middle East. | Middle East—
Foreign relations—Great Britain.
Classification: LCC DS125.5 .L66 2018 | DDC 956.94/04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035708
Typeset & designed by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Eastbourne.
Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall.
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Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Illustrations ix
Abbreviations xii
Introduction 1
Part One MACHINATION
1 Zionism Emerges 9
2 The UK Promotes a Jewish Palestine 18
Part Two JUSTIFICATION
3 Palestine’s Doom is Documented 25
Part Three OCCUPATION
4 The UK Conquers Palestine and the Sharif is Hoodwinked 57
5 Faysal Fails to Fight for Palestine 69
Part Four CAPITULATION
6 ‘Mr. Lloyd George’s Madness’ Crowns the Zionist 83
March into Palestine
7 Herbert Samuel Lays the Groundwork of the Jewish State 102
8 Balfour Savours his Handiwork 132
Part Five VACILLATION
9 A White Paper and a Black Letter 147
10 Zionism Resurgent 166
11 The Sorceror Prepares to be Overthrown by the Apprentice 186
Part Six HUMILIATION
12 Israel is ‘Born in Sin’ 203
Notes, Bibliography, Index 227–307
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Preface
‘There can be no doubt about what was in the minds of the chief architects
of the Balfour Declaration. The evidence is incontrovertible. All envis-
aged, in the fulness of time, the emergence of a Jewish state.’
(Norman Rose)1
This book is roughly a companion to my British Pro-Consuls in Egypt,
1914–1929. The Challenge of Nationalism and The Immense Failure.
British Rulers of Iraq, 1914–33 in that it discusses British involvement
in another segment of the post-World War I Middle East, in this case
Palestine. But in contrast to its predecessors, which were purely
academic in character, this one has a secondary purpose. In another of
my titles,2I complained that ‘Cambridge and McGill somehow managed
to expose me to the language, literature and history of the Arabs, and to
Islam, without letting slip . . . the grievous wronging of the Palestinians
in particular, and the Arabs in general, by my own country’. The present
volume is thus in part an attempt to make better known the forcible
transformation of the ownership of Palestine via the absolute and ruth-
less determination of the United Kingdom (until things got difficult) and
the even more unshakeable insistence of the Zionists, to whom it is hard
to believe that God would have promised Palestine if He had known how
they were going to behave there.
I wish to make five points in explanation of my text. Firstly, I have
throughout called the Jewish population of Palestine ‘Jews’, ‘Zionists’,
‘the Yishuv’ or ‘Israelis’ as seemed contextually appropriate and – in
order to avoid endlessly using the terms ‘Arab Palestinians’ or
‘Palestinian Arabs’ – the Arab inhabitants of the territory ‘Palestinians’.
Secondly, my transliteration from the Arabic script to our own is irreg-
ular. There are no capital letters in Arabic, but I have equipped Arabic
names here with initial ones. There are no hyphens in Arabic, but I have
followed the common practice of making use of them in order to avoid
such monstrosities as ‘ashshimal’ or ‘asSury’ by the less daunting ‘ash-
shimal’ and ‘as-Sury’. I believe that this arrangement would allow
readers (and even newsreaders at the BBC, which studiously ignores the
distinction between sun and moon letters) to make the nearest possible
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Preface vii
approach to pronouncing Arabic words and names correctly. Thirdly,
in an attempt to limit the number of my references, I have as often as
possible made the assumption that readers will not need my guidance in
locating the obvious sources in the bibliography. Fourthly, I have not
scarred my text, as I have done before, by highlighting the many occa-
sions when the terms England and English have, in quoted passages,
been wrongly used for UK/Britain and British. And last, it might be
helpful to know that £1 sterling to-day is the equivalent of £106 in 1914
and £41 in 1948.
RICHARDLONG
Bromsberrow Heath, August 2017
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Acknowledgements
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the King’s Own Royal
(Lancaster) Regiment, in which, before it lost its identity through amal-
gamation, I did my National Service. The path of my life was set when
I flew with it to Libya and encountered the Arabic script for the first
time. In consequence, going up to Cambridge six months later, I
switched from the subject for which St. Catharine’s College had accepted
me to Arabic and Persian.
After graduation, a diplomat in the British Embassy in Baghdad, I
came up against the question of Palestine. It is not an exaggeration to
claim that, if I have not devoted my life to it, the theme of my country’s
callous First World War intervention in its affairs has never been absent
from my thoughts. Despite multiple attempts to write about it, however,
I have not had the opportunity to do so until now. Unlike other
publishers I have approached, who deemed the very idea of crticising
Israel unthinkable, Anthony Grahame at Sussex Academic Press has an
openminded and unprejudiced view of the question which is unfortu-
nately extremely uncommon. It is thanks to him that I am at last now
able to broach the subject in print.
In researching this book, I have been privileged to enjoy the facilities
of the British Library, the Public Record Office at Kew, Rhodes House
and St Antony’s College, Oxford, the Sudan Archive, Durham
University and the University Library of my alma mater, Cambridge. I
am also indebted to Mr. R.D. Chancellor for allowing me to quote from
the papers of his grandfather.
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Illustrations
Cover illustrations
David Lloyd George, ca. 1919. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library
of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004672079/. (Accessed July
24, 2017).
Arthur James Balfour, copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Balfour stamp. “Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration” stamp, 1967.
Designed by Oswald Adler. Reproduced courtesy of the Israel
Philatelic Service, Israel Postal Company.
Picture section (overleaf)
Sir Henry McMahon by John Collier. Reproduced with permission from
Art Collection 2 / Alamy Stock Photo.
Sharif Husayn. Reproduced with permission from World History
Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
Chaim Weizmann. Reproduced with permission from World History
Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
Amir Faysal. Reproduced with permission from Mrs. Jan Long, MBE.
Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayny, Mufti of Jerusalem. Reproduced with permis-
sion from World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
Musa Kadhim al-Husayny. Reproduced with permission from PASSIA.
www.passia.org
David Ben-Gurion. © Robert Capa © International Center of
Photography/Magnum Photos. Reproduced with permission.