THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XII, Issue # 142, August 2, 2010
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
SHIMON PERES VERSUS THE BRITS
By Dr. Efraim KARSH
BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST SINCE THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRITISH MIDDLE
EAST POLICY FROM BRITAIN'S RECEIVING THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS MANDATE FOR PALESTINE ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1923, TO
PRESENT DATE -- HAS THE POLICY BEEN PRO-ARAB, ANTI-ZIONIST, ANTI-ISRAEL, & ANTI-JEWISH? ARE
ANTI-SEMITIC ATTITUDES CHARACTERISTIC OF THE BRITISH FOREIGN POLICYMAKING ESTABLISHMENT? WHY
HAVE THE ARABS ALWAYS BEEN FAR MORE MEANINGFUL TO BRITISH INTERESTS THAN HAVE THE JEWS?
FULL STORY:
Shimon Peres, Israel's 87-year-old President doesn't usually arouse antagonism among Europeans.
A tireless peace advocate for decades, and architect of the Oslo Process, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, he
has long presented Israel's moderate face to the outside world.
Yet, last week he provoked anger among British politicians and Anglo-Jewish leaders when he told a Jewish website that
the British establishment had always been "deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israel," and that this was partly due to endemic
anti-Semitic dispositions. "I can understand Mr. Peres' concerns, but I don't recognize what he is saying about England,"
said James Clappison, Vice-Chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel. "Things are certainly no worse, as far as Israel is
concerned, in this country than other European countries. He got it wrong."
But did he? While few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of observers, than the claim
that Britain has been the midwife of the Jewish state, the truth is that, no sooner had Britain been appointed as the
mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the
country, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.
As early as March, 1921, the British government severed the vast and sparsely populated territory east of the Jordan
River ("Transjordan") from the prospective Jewish national home and made Abdullah, the Emir of Mecca, its effective
ruler. In 1922 and 1930, two British White Papers limited Jewish immigration to Palestine – the elixir of life of the
prospective Jewish state – and imposed harsh restrictions on land sales to Jews.
Britain's betrayal of its international obligations to the Jewish national cause reached its peak on May 17, 1939, when a
new White Paper imposed draconian restrictions on land sales to Jews and limited immigration to 75,000 over the next
five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state in which the Jews would comprise no more than
one-third of the total population.
Such were the anti-Zionist sentiments within the British establishment at the time that even a life-long admirer of Zionism
like Prime Minister Winston Churchill rarely used his wartime dominance of British politics to help the Zionists (or
indeed European Jewry). However appalled by the White Paper, he failed to abolish this "low grade gasp of a defeatist
hour" (to use his own words), refrained from confronting his generals and bureaucrats over the creation of a Jewish
fighting force in Palestine, which he wholeheartedly supported, and gave British officialdom a free rein in the running of
Middle Eastern affairs, which they readily exploited to promote the Arab case. In 1943, for instance, Freya Stark, the
acclaimed author, orientalist and Arabian adventurer, was sent to the U.S.A. on a seven-month propaganda campaign
aimed at undercutting the Zionist cause and defending Britain's White Paper policy.
That this could happen at the height of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, of which Whitehall was keenly aware,
offered a stark demonstration of the mindset of British officialdom, which was less interested in stopping genocide than
in preventing its potential survivors from reaching Palestine after the war.
So much so, that senior Foreign Office members portrayed Britain, not Europe's Jews, as the main victim of the Nazi
atrocities.
This anti-Zionism was sustained into the postwar years, as the Labor Party, which, in July, 1945, swept to power in a
landslide electoral victory, swiftly abandoned its pre-election pro-Zionist platform to become a bitter enemy of the
Jewish national cause. The White Paper restrictions were kept in place, and the Jews were advised by Foreign Secretary
Ernest Bevin not "to get too much at the head of the queue" in seeking recourse to their problems.
Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who chose to ignore the warning and to run the British naval blockade were
herded into congested camps in Cyprus, where they were incarcerated for years.
"Should we accept the view that all the Jews or the bulk of them must leave Germany?" Bevin rhetorically asked the
British Ambassador to Washington.
"I do not accept that view. They have gone through,
it is true, the most terrible massacre and persecution,
but, on the other hand, they have got through it and
a number have survived."
Prime Minister Clement Attlee went a step further by comparing Holocaust survivors wishing to leave Europe and to
return to their ancestral homeland to Nazi troops invading the continent.
While these utterances resonated with the pervasive anti-Semitism within British officialdom (the last High
Commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, for instance, said of Zionism, "The forces of nationalism are
accompanied by the psychology of the Jew, which it is important to recognize as something quite abnormal and
unresponsive to rational treatment"), Britain's Middle Eastern policy also reflected the basic fact that, as occupiers of
vast territories endowed with natural resources (first and foremost, oil) and sitting astride strategic waterways (e.g., the
Suez Canal), the Arabs had always been far more meaningful for British interests than the Jews.
As the Chief of the Air Staff told the British Cabinet in 1947, "If one of the two communities had to be antagonized, it
was preferable, from the purely military angle, that a solution should be found which did not involve the continuing
hostility of the Arabs."
One needs look no further than David Cameron's statements on the Middle East to see this anti-Israel mindset is alive
and kicking. In the Summer of 2006, when thousands of Hizbullah missiles were battering Israel's cities and villages, he
took the trouble of issuing a statement from the tropical island on which he was vacationing at the time -- a statement
condemning Israel's "disproportionate use of force."
Four years later, while on an official visit to Turkey, he went out of his way to placate his Islamist host, Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by criticizing Israel's efforts to prevent the arming of the Hamas Islamist group, which, like its
Lebanese counterpart, had been lobbing thousands of missiles on Israel's civilian population for years.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. ["The more it changes, the more it's the same." - or - "The more things
change, the more they stay the same." (Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guepes, January, 1849.)] [In other
words: nothing ever really changes, history repeats itself. A.L.W., Jr., Editor of The Progressive Conservative,
U.S.A.]
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Britain -- The United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland:
Mother Country & Close Ally of the United States of America
Jews & Anti-Semitism
Europe, Europeans, & Anti-Semitism
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Efraim Karsh, Editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author most recently of the book, Palestine
Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2000), is Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College,
University of London, U.K. A graduate in Arabic and Modern Middle East History from Hebrew University in
Jerusalem and holding the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in International Relations from Tel Aviv University, Dr. Karsh has
held academic posts at Harvard University, Columbia University, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics,
Helsinki University, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Kennan Institute for Advanced
Russian Studies in Washington, D.C., and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Founder and Editor of the scholarly journal Israel Affairs, Dr. Karsh has written extensively on Middle East
politics, Soviet foreign policy, and European affairs. A regular media commentator, he has appeared on U.K. and U.S.
television and radio and contributed articles to leading newspapers in Britain and the U.S.A., among them the Wall
Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Telegraph, and The
Times (of London).
The foregoing article by Dr. Efraim Karsh was originally published in the Jerusalem Post, August 2, 2010, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(URL: http://www.meforum.org/2697/shimon-peres-vs-british)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
August 2, 2010
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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