A Durable Peace (14 page)

Yet for all this, the British anti-Zionist policy was an abysmal failure. The British lost their influence with the Arabs—not,
of course, because of the Jews, but because of the overall decline of British power in the world. This was coupled with the
antipathy of the Arabs toward
any
Western and Christian power—a resentment that had been suppressed only by the overwhelming force of British troops and the
overwhelming enticement of British subsidies. The Arabs’ unrelenting antipathy to the West was such that neither their liberation
from the oppressive Ottomans, nor the consistent British hostility to Zionism, nor the return of boatloads of Jews to the
European inferno succeeded in winning their affections. As Meinertzhagen had predicted, when the first big test of
Arab loyalty to Britain came during the darkest days of the British battle for survival during World War II, the Arabs repaid
the British as they saw fit: In Iraq, in Egypt, and in Syria they openly allied themselves with the Nazis, flocking to Berlin
to enlist in the war effort and lobby Hitler for favors. They even formed an Arab Legion in Berlin that eventually became
part of the SS.
⁶⁹

A popular song at the time caught the spirit of the Arab masses as they enthusiastically waited to rid themselves of the detested
British and French who were working so hard to win their affection:

No more Monsieur, no more Mister

In heaven Allah, on earth Hitler.
⁷⁰

Later, when he was asked about this Arab abandonment of the Allies to whom they owed their independence, the Palestinian Arab
leader Jamal al-Husseini replied, “I have read somewhere that it was a Jewish war anyway”
⁷¹

The Jews of Palestine, on the other hand, formed a Jewish Brigade that fought with distinction under the British command,
again confirming Meinertzhagen’s prognosis. After the war, at a point when the fate of a hundred thousand Jews in the displaced
persons camps hung in the balance, David Niles, one of President Harry Truman’s closest advisers, used the fact of Palestinian
Jewish support for the Allies as an argument to advocate Jewish immigration to Palestine:

I am also inclined to think that 100,000 [more] Jews would be of great assistance to us in that area, as the Jews of Palestine
were during the second World War, which is generally admitted by everybody who is familiar with the situation. The Allies
got no help from the Arabs at all, but considerable help from the Jews in Palestine.
⁷²

Bartley Crum, a member of the committee investigating the situation of the refugees, echoed this sentiment:

[I] t should never be forgotten how the entire Jewish community of Palestine set aside its differences with Britain and gave
its complete support to the defeat of the Nazis…. They wrote a glorious chapter which is yet to be told in full. In contrast
the Arab community was largely indifferent to the war.
⁷³

But British Arabist policy drew no such lessons and never wavered from its course. Within a few years, every inch of the British
Middle Eastern empire was lost, as the lands they had so carefully contrived to control had spun out of their grasp forever.
Britain’s policy of catering to Arab “sensibilities” had led to the loss of every toehold, every garrison, and every privilege
it had had among the Arabs. All that remains of its presence today is a nostalgic attachment to British habits in Jordan and
Oman.

Britain’s policy of appeasing the Arabs at the expense of the Jews, which it pursued for three decades, gained it nothing
and cost the Jews a great deal. But it had yet another pernicious result whose effects are very much alive today: the transmission
of British policy preferences to almost every foreign ministry and foreign policy establishment in the world. Britain, after
all, was the dominant international power between the two world wars, its diplomats venerated, its policies everywhere emulated.

Thus, the Arabist thinking of Richard Waters-Taylor and John Shuckburgh spread from the British Colonial and Foreign offices
to the American State Department—especially after American companies developed huge petroleum reserves in Arabia in the 1930s.
Reserves of oil in the Persian Gulf were being systematically uncovered during the first four decades of this century: in
Iran (1908), Iraq (1923), Bahrain (1932), Saudi Arabia (1937), Kuwait (1938), and Qatar (1940). Although the cost of finding
and developing this oil was substantial, the enormous size of the reserves and the high yield for each well drilled more than
made up for the investment. The oil industry underwent a tremendous expansion during World War II and in its aftermath, as
rapid industrialization
in the West and elsewhere increased the worldwide demand for oil. By the early 1960s, Arab oil amounted to 60 percent of the
world’s proven oil reserves.

When the Arab oil-producing states imposed an oil embargo on the West in 1973, some people thought that the Arabs could control
the world’s energy supply forever, raising prices higher and higher. But it soon became clear that this was not the case when
other, previously uncompetitive producers such as Norway and Britain came onto the market with the development of North Sea
oil, as did suppliers of alternative energy such as natural gas. Further, the Western economies retooled their industries
to become more energy efficient and produced vehicles that consumed considerably less fuel. As a result, by 1981, the real
price of oil had fallen dramatically. To the surprise of many, it turned out that the oil market was just that—a market—and
that not even the Arabs could corner it.

But back in the 1930s, none of this was known. (Even a half-century later, when it did become known, the psychological hold
of Arab oil producers on the Western political psyche remained significant.) It is thus hardly surprising that the excitement
of the first petroleum discoveries in Arabia led many American officials to be particularly considerate of Arab demands, including
the demand to curtail Zionism. Indeed, the State Department quietly but consistently supported the Chamberlain White Paper
and then the closing of Palestine to immigration during World War II,
⁷⁴
and it continued to oppose the immigration of Jews to Palestine throughout the postwar period and up to the creation of the
State of Israel. When President Harry Truman, against the opposition of virtually his entire administration, decided to support
the Partition Plan creating a Jewish state, George Kennan, the head of the State Department planning staff, wrote that “U.S.
prestige in the Muslim world has suffered a severe blow, and U.S. strategic interests in the Mediterranean and the Near East
have been seriously prejudiced.”
⁷⁵
Truman later wrote that during the
entire period, “the State Department continued to be more concerned about the Arab reaction than about the suffering of the
Jews.”
⁷⁶

This concern was promoted most forcefully by a coterie of Arabists who had entrenched themselves in the 1930s in the Near
East and Asian Affairs Bureau of the State Department. Thus, while public opinion in the United States has traditionally supported
the Jews and later Israel and is often unsympathetic or downright antagonistic to the Arabs (even after years of negative
portrayal of Israel in the media), the American foreign policy elite often exhibited exactly the opposite attitude. In the
corridors of the State Department, where plans are daily laid for the new world order that is heir to Britain’s, the Arabist
belief that wresting concessions from the Jews or forcing them to relinquish valuable assets will somehow win the favor and
loyalty of the Arabs endures among many to this very day. And it is as shortsighted today as it was in the 1930s.

Nor has the influence of British Arabism in the United States and elsewhere been limited to the professional diplomats. In
every capital there is a foreign policy establishment consisting of academics, politicians, and journalists who specialize
in foreign affairs. Long before the gush of Arab oil wealth in the 1970s and the rapid expansion of Arab influence in the
West that followed, most of these foreign policy establishments were already following their present pro-Arab courses. Half
a century after the Jewish state was created, the notion still endures among Arabists that somehow Israel was conceived in
geopolitical sin—that sin being, in Arabist eyes, that its very existence deprived the West of cherished Arab support.

It is hard to understand how tenaciously a very small but influential circle of diplomats still clings to this notion. They
seldom voice it in public, and some may not even admit it to themselves, but a great many of them believe it nonetheless.
This was brought home to me one afternoon in New York, on my last day as Israel’s
ambassador to the United Nations, when I was saying good-bye to several Western diplomats. One of them, an American with whom
I had a cordial relationship, invited me for a drink. After several vodkas, he turned to me and said, “It’s all a mistake.”
Knowing he was critical of many of Israel’s policies, I asked which policy he was referring to. “No,” he said, “not a policy.
I’m saying the whole damned country is a mistake. We should have prevented it in the first place and saved everyone the trouble.”

But after the Holocaust, not even the powerful Arabist establishments were able to prevent the reemergence of the popular
sentiment that justice must be done with the Jews—that they must finally, after their incomparable suffering, be enabled to
have a state of their own. By then, Arab pressure and Western complicity had reduced the territory originally promised to
the Jews to a pittance, but to a brutalized people barely hanging on to life, even a pittance was better than nothing.

The Jews could wait no longer. At the end of World War II, the Jewish underground movements redoubled their campaign to break
open the gates of Palestine to the survivors of the Holocaust and to oust the British administration. The campaign lasted
several years, gathering momentum through concerted military actions of escalating boldness against the British Army in Palestine.
These actions—led most prominently by Menachem Begin’s Irgun (National Military Organization) and the Lehi (Fighters for the
Freedom of Israel, of which Yitzhak Shamir was operations officer), and joined for a time by the Hagana (Defense Organization)
under David Ben-Gurion—eroded and eventually broke the will of the British government to retain its hold on the country. The
majority of these attacks were launched against the installations used by the British authorities to control the country.
The targets included bridges (in one night in 1946, a Hagana-led operation blew up twelve critical bridges), railway lines,
police stations, army bases, officers’ clubs, military headquarters, and prisons in which jailed underground members were
being held—including the Irgun-led breakout in 1947 of 251 inmates from the Acre prison
fortress, previously thought to have been impregnable.
^*
A few months later, when the British intended to hang a number of captured Irgun members, the Irgun warned that this would
lead to the hanging of two captured British sergeants. Tragically, both acts took place. The unfolding of these events shocked
public opinion in Britain and strengthened the hand of Churchill, who was by then in opposition, in demanding that Britain
depart from Palestine.

The effect of the Jewish campaign on British rule in Palestine was decisive. The British Empire, tottering and drained of
energy at the end of World War II, could not afford to keep an army of a hundred thousand men there. British public opinion
demanded that the troops be brought home. In 1947, Britain finally declared its intention to evacuate, and it unceremoniously
handed the decision as to what to do with the country to the United Nations.

Thus was born UN Partition Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947. Although it granted the Jews a mere 10 percent of Mandatory
Palestine, with the rest going to the Arabs (see
Map 5
), this resolution at least reinstated the principle that the Jews must
have an independent state. Not that it would amount to much, many of the professional Arabists believed. The consensus in
the governing
circles of the West, friendly and unfriendly alike, was that the pinhead-size state would instantly be overrun by the Arabs,
and Western military strategists concurred. The international community could clear its conscience by according the Jews a
gerrymandered state that was smaller in area than the Bahamas, and the combined might of the Arab armies would do the rest.

Nevertheless, the Jews of Palestine accepted the Partition Resolution. The Arab world unanimously and unequivocally rejected
it and called for war. Arab irregulars began pouring into Palestine immediately after the UN vote, seeking to prevent the
Jewish state from coming into existence, and they were followed within months by the regular armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan,
Iraq, and Lebanon. By the time the Jewish state was officially declared on May 14, 1948, upon the departure of the British,
the War of Independence against the invading Arabs was already under way. The common belief was that it was only a matter
of time before the Jewish state, hardly in its infancy, would be terminated.

Israel was coming into its War of Independence with severe handicaps imposed on it by the British. The British had reduced
almost to nothing the territory accorded to the Jews and the number of Jews who were allowed to immigrate into it, then proceeded
mercilessly to prevent the Jews from arming themselves while allowing progressively more substantial armament of the Arabs
in Palestine (reinforced by troops crossing the border from neighboring Arab lands, whom the British seemed not to notice).
The result was that Israel’s ragtag forces were overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned, possessing virtually no tanks, no
artillery, and no planes. As the Arab armies invaded, Israel’s life hung in the balance. In those twenty horrible months of
fighting, the carnage consumed six thousand Israelis, quite a few of them recent survivors of the Nazi death camps. (This
is out of a population of 600,000 and is the proportional equivalent of 2.5 million Americans dying today.) By June, the Jews
had come close to a state of complete exhaustion. Yet even on the brink of disaster, they somehow held on. Not fully realizing
how weak Israel was,
the Arabs agreed to a cease-fire. Israel used it to rearm and mustered its forces to roll back the Arab onslaught (see Map
6). The Jewish state was now a fact. It had come into the world after an agonizing labor. It would have no happy childhood,
either, with frequent cross-border attacks by Arab marauders and daily promises from Egypt’s President Nasser and other similarly
disposed neighbors that Israel would shortly be “exterminated.”