A History of the Middle East (34 page)

Outside the political sphere, the achievements of the French mandatary in Lebanon and Syria were far from negligible. It introduced a relatively modern administrative system, customs organization and land registration based on a pioneering cadastral survey. It built many roads and improved urban amenities. In Damascus and Aleppo it initiated city planning. One of its finest achievements was the creation of a department of antiquities to preserve and administer the Levant states’ unparalleled archaeological heritage. Some encouragement was given to agriculture, especially in north-eastern Syria’s Jazirah region, but the economic effects of the mandate were affected by the chronic weakness of the French franc on which the Syrian and Lebanese currencies were based. Also, considerable resentment was caused by the policy of granting monopolies to French companies whose profits were repatriated to France.

Education received a powerful stimulus, although in some respects the policy was controversial. The French language and culture were promoted. Arab children were taught a French interpretation of history and even learned to sing ‘La Marseillaise’. Foreign mission schools were protected and in Lebanon much of the educational system and almost all higher education remained in
their hands, with teaching mostly in French or English. As a consequence the educational standards of the Lebanese people as a whole were higher than anywhere in the former Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, the lack of an adequate state education system did nothing to promote national unity. In Syria, where the mission schools were much less important, a state educational system was constructed under the mandate and the University of Damascus was established, with its teaching mainly in Arabic.

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When the British government undertook the mandate for Palestine in 1919, it was unaware that it was taking on an impossible task. Its failure to solve the problems was to infect Britain’s relations with the Arabs for decades.

Article 6 of the Balfour Declaration, which was incorporated within the terms of the mandate, stated:

Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine, from 1920 to 1925, was Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jew who had been the first to propose the idea of a Jewish Palestine to the British cabinet in 1914. But he had never been an active member of the Zionist movement, and as high commissioner he made strenuous efforts to be fair to the ‘other sections of the population’, ultimately incurring the disappointment and even odium of the Zionists. He set up an administration including Muslims, Christians and Jews and for a time worked with an advisory council of similar composition which he hoped would lead ultimately to a partly elected legislative council for a joint community. But the Arabs, who fundamentally
rejected both the mandate and the Balfour Declaration, boycotted the elections and demanded a national government. Severe rioting ensued. On Samuel’s insistence, the British government issued a White Paper declaring Britain’s intention to hold the balance between the Arab and Jewish communities. However, the Arabs were convinced by this that the true intention was to wait to grant self-government until the Jews in Palestine had grown sufficiently in numbers and power to become dominant, and they continued to demand an immediate national government, citing the promises made to the Arabs during the war. They rejected Samuel’s proposal for the formation of an Arab Agency to match the Jewish Agency.

One of Samuel’s actions with good intentions towards the Arabs had fateful consequences. To maintain the balance between the two leading families in Jerusalem, he overturned the elections for mufti of Jerusalem in favour of a young nationalist, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. From this position, Hajj Amin, an uncompromising nationalist who singularly lacked political wisdom, was able to gain the leadership of the Arabs of Palestine.

However, the years 1923 to 1929 were relatively quiet, mainly because Arab fears were reduced by the drop in Jewish immigration. In 1927 there was nil Jewish immigration into Palestine and in 1928 the net immigration was only ten persons. The Zionists continued to consolidate their settlements and their political presence, but their hopes of dominance receded. The British mandatary authorities became complacent and drastically reduced the garrison, despite the warnings of the Permanent Mandates Commission.

In 1929 the situation sharply deteriorated. In August, Britain consented to the creation of an enlarged Jewish Agency in which half the members were recruited from Zionist sympathizers outside Palestine. The Zionists acquired a new sense of confidence. In the same month a dispute concerning religious practices at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem led to widespread communal clashes, with severe casualties. Troops were rushed in and order was restored. Arabs massacred Jewish colonists in Hebron. Arab casualties were mainly caused by British soldiers.

Britain was fully confronted with the contradictions in the mandate. The new high commissioner, Sir John Chancellor (1928–31), proposed that the mandate should be reshaped to remove the special privileges of the Jews, restrict their land purchases (which were proceeding apace with the help of Zionist funds and sales by absentee Arab landlords) and give the Arabs a measure of self-government. A British technical report established that there was no margin of land available for new immigrants without substantial development funds which, at a time of world depression, the British government was quite unready to provide. In 1930 the colonial secretary in Britain’s Labour government issued a White Paper which gave some priority to Britain’s obligations to the Arabs by restricting Jewish immigration and ending Jewish land purchases. In the ensuing uproar the Zionists, who naturally saw their hopes of a Jewish Palestine vanishing, were able to use their sympathizers among all parties in the British parliament to cause Ramsay MacDonald’s weak and nervous cabinet to rescind the White Paper. The Palestinian Arabs became convinced that recommendations in their favour would always be annulled at the centre of power. They began to attempt to organize their own international support. In December 1931 a Muslim Congress was called in Jerusalem, attended by representatives of twenty-two Muslim countries, to warn against the danger of Zionism. But although fellow-Arabs in neighbouring countries were beginning to be aroused by the plight of the Palestinian Arabs, there was little practical support they could provide. A boycott of Zionist and British goods called in 1933 was largely ineffective.

In the first half of the 1930s there was a sharp rise in Jewish immigration, from 4,000 in 1930 to 30,000 in 1933 and 62,000 in 1935. This was due partly to fears of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany but much more to growing confidence in Palestine’s future which, in spite of world depression, was enjoying something of a boom based on its citrus industry. In 1935 the Arab parties, although far from united, collectively demanded the cessation of Jewish immigration, the prohibition of land transfer and the establishment of
democratic institutions. The British offered a legislative council of twenty-eight members on which the Arabs would have fourteen seats and the Jews eight, with the remaining six reserved for British officials. Most, although not all, Arabs rejected the proposal because they would not be represented in proportion to their numbers. The Jews bitterly denounced it because they believed it would provide the Arabs with a permanent stranglehold on the development of the Jewish national home. For this reason some Palestinians later came to regret their rejection.

The Arab rebellion of 1936–8 against the mandate, which at first smouldered and then burst into flame, was provoked by continuing fears that Jewish immigration would lead to Zionist dominance and the certainty that Britain would not effectively prevent it. The spark was provided by the knowledge that the Zionists were smuggling in arms for self-defence. In April 1936 the Arab political parties formed an Arab Higher Committee, under Hajj Amin, which called a general strike. This was maintained for six months. At the same time Arab rebels, joined by volunteers from neighbouring Arab countries, took to the hills and a full-scale national uprising began.

For not the first nor the last time, Britain sent out a commission of inquiry. Lord Peel’s commission of 1937 concluded that Britain’s obligations to Arabs and Jews were irreconcilable and the mandate unworkable. It therefore for the first time recommended the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem and Haifa remaining under British mandate and with a 12,000 annual limit to Jewish immigration for the next five years. The tiny Arab state would be joined to Transjordan under Abdullah. The Zionists’ response was ambivalent. Britain had for the first time spoken of a Jewish state and had proposed the forcible transfer of some of the Arab population. But they disliked the limitation on the size of the Jewish state, which would exclude Jerusalem, and the limit on Jewish immigration. They still hoped to become dominant in an undivided Palestine. The Arabs, on the other hand, were unanimously outraged (except for Emir Abdullah of Transjordan, who urged acceptance) and their rebellion intensified, in spite of the heavy use of British force and
the outlawing of the Arab Higher Committee. Most of the Committee’s members were deported to the Seychelles, but Hajj Amin escaped to Baghdad, from where he continued to exert some influence in favour of the maximum Arab demands.

The League of Nations then authorized the preparation of a detailed partition plan. However, the technical commission which reported in November 1938 declared the Peel commission’s proposal to be unworkable. The British government agreed and called for a round-table conference, which was held in London during February and March 1939. This was a failure, as were the two bilateral conferences with Jews and Arabs which followed. (The conference with the Arabs included representatives of the Arab states, as an acknowledgement that Palestine was of interest to all the Arabs.)

The Arab rebellion gradually died down in the early months of 1939. Following the Munich crisis in 1938 and the postponed threat of immediate war, Britain had been able to pour in extra troops. The long and unsuccessful struggle left the Palestinian Arabs exhausted and demoralized.

The British government, however, was primarily concerned with the approaching world war, which now seemed inevitable. The priority was to secure at least the passive support of the Arabs who formed the vast majority of the population in the strategically vital Middle East region (including Palestine, where they were still some 70 per cent). It was assumed that the Jews would inevitably be on Britain’s side in any war against Hitler. A new British government White Paper in May 1939 provided for the limitation of Zionist immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, with further immigration subject to Arab ‘acquiescence’. The White Paper said that the object was the establishment ‘within ten years of an independent Palestine State in such treaty relations with the UK as will provide satisfaction for all commercial and strategic interests of both countries’. It was clear that the Arabs would still then be in substantial majority.

Although this new policy was more favourable to the Arabs, the mufti’s party rejected it – mainly on the grounds that experience
showed that the British government could not be trusted to carry it out against Jewish opposition. More moderate Arabs shared these doubts. The Zionists, on the other hand, were appalled and angered because they considered it a death blow to their aspirations and a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration. They became even more determined to establish their own state in Palestine. Already the Jewish community in Palestine was largely self-governing through an elected assembly which levied its own taxes. Purely Jewish trade unions were united in a confederation, the Histadrut, which performed numerous other functions as banker, entrepreneur and landowner. Between 1922 and 1939 Jewish colonies had increased from forty-seven to two hundred and Jewish land-holdings had more than doubled. The Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, opened in 1925, was playing the leading role in the training of the country’s intellectual and academic leadership. The most significant development for the future was the creation of the Haganah, the secret but officially tolerated Jewish army. This gained experience in defending Jewish settlements against Arab attacks, and some of its members assisted British forces in suppressing the Arab rebellion.

The Jews in Palestine were a formidable force and they were determined to oppose Britain’s new policy. But the odds seemed heavily weighted against them.

East of the River Jordan in the newly created emirate of Transjordan under the rule of Emir Abdullah, the problems were infinitely less complicated. Having secured the League of Nations’ approval for Transjordan’s exclusion from the policy of the Jewish national home, on 25 May 1923 Britain recognized Transjordan as an independent state, subject to British obligations under the Palestine mandate. Under French pressure, Syrian leaders who had taken refuge in Transjordan were ordered to leave.

All troops were placed under the command of a British officer, and with British help the fledgeling Jordanian forces were able to deal with some internal tribal dissension and the incursions of Wahhabi warriors from Nejd in the early 1920s.

The country was poor, undeveloped and thinly populated, but it acquired a social and political cohesion which Palestine lacked. Britain virtually dictated the terms of the 1928 treaty under which, through a British resident appointed by the high commissioner for Palestine, Emir Abdullah was to be guided by British advice in such matters as foreign relations, finance and jurisdiction over foreigners. There were a score of British advisers and a modest British subsidy (£101,000 out of a total state budget of £257,000 in 1925–6) and, in spite of the poverty, some slow and steady progress was made. Roads and schools were built, although it was fifteen years before the country had more than one secondary school.