A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The prospect offered by the 1939 White Paper – that Palestine would become an independent binational Arab/Jewish state with the Arabs dominating the government – had been destroyed by Hitler. He had been defeated, but there was now overwhelming pressure that the survivors of the Holocaust should be allowed to take refuge in Palestine. Neither the Western countries, such as the United States, nor the Zionist leadership wanted them to go elsewhere.

  The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, still believed that a solution might be found by negotiation. He unwisely told the House of Commons that he would ‘stake my political future’ on solving the Palestine problem. But he wanted to make the United States share responsibility. As soon as the war ended, President Truman cabled the British government to demand the immediate entry of 100,000 Jews into Palestine. The US Congress wanted unrestricted immigration. In November 1945 Bevin announced the formation of an Anglo-American commission of inquiry. In April 1946 this recommended the continuation of the mandate and a unitary state, repeal of restrictions on land sales and the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews – in effect a return to the 1922 policy. The commission criticized the existence of the Jewish underground forces, which it estimated at 65,000, and it recommended that they should be disarmed.

  The British government found these proposals impracticable as they stood but approved some discussions on Jewish and Arab autonomy. As Britain continued trying to prevent illegal Jewish immigration, the Zionist underground stepped up its activities, which reached a peak with the blowing up in July 1946 of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, containing British civilian and military offices.

  Meanwhile, the seven independent Arab states were attempting to act to prevent an Arab disaster in Palestine. Their heads-of-state meeting in Egypt in May 1946 reaffirmed the Arab character of Palestine, and another meeting in June in Syria passed secret resolutions threatening British and US interests in the Middle East if Arab rights in Palestine were disregarded.

  The British government faced an impossible dilemma. Public opinion in Britain was divided between Zionist sympathizers and those outraged by Zionist atrocities. In the Middle East, all British interests in the Arab world would be threatened if the Zionists were allowed to seize Palestine, but Britain was under relentless pressure from the US to allow massive Jewish immigration and, in the aftermath of the war, Britain was financially dependent on Washington. (In support of the so-called Truman Doctrine of overseas US involvement, set out in an address to Congress on 12 March 1947, President Truman asked Congress for aid, which Britain could no longer afford, to enable Greece and Turkey to maintain their independence against the Soviet threat.) After one more futile attempt to obtain Arab and Jewish agreement on a joint plan, Britain handed the problem over to the United Nations in February 1947.

  In August 1947 a majority report of a UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, which would still be economically unified, with Jerusalem and its environs to be international. By a vote of 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions, these recommendations were substantially adopted by the UN General Assembly in its Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947. This resolution was passed because both the USA and the Soviet Union, which then dominated the UN, voted in favour and were prepared to use pressure. The Soviet Union at that time regarded the Zionist struggle in Palestine as one of liberation against imperialism. Only the Islamic Asian countries voted against the resolution. An Arab proposal to question the International Court of Justice on the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country against the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants (there were 1,269,000 Arabs and 678,000 Jews in Palestine in 1946) was narrowly defeated.

  The Zionists welcomed the partition because it recognized a Jewish state which, although including a large area of desert in the south, the Negev, covered 55 per cent of a country in which Zionist land-holdings still amounted to less than 8 per cent of the total. The Arabs, as always, bitterly opposed partition but they were especially outraged because the proposed Jewish state would include almost as many Arabs as Jews.

  Britain had already, in September 1947, announced its intention to give up the Palestine mandate on 15 April 1948. The United Nations had made no proposals as to how the partition of Palestine should be carried out or financed, and Britain refused to implement a policy which was not acceptable to both sides or to participate in the UN Palestine Commission which was supposed to supervise the transitional period. Britain merely handed over power to whichever community was locally in the ascendant and, since Arab cadres, in contrast to Jewish cadres, were generally lacking, order was better maintained in the Jewish areas. Communal fighting broke out immediately and soon developed into full-scale civil war as the British administration was dismantled.

  Faced with this disaster, the US retreated and declared its opposition to forcible partition. On 30 March 1948 it called for a truce and the further consideration of the problem by the UN General Assembly. But the Zionists, anxious about the American shift in policy, redoubled their efforts to establish their state. The extreme Zionist Irgun and the Stern Gang were now collaborating with the Haganah, and the master-plan, known as Plan Dalet, for the seizure of most of Palestine was put into effect. Operations were launched against strategically situated Arab villages. An Arab Liberation Army of some 3,000 volunteers from outside Palestine had some initial successes but could do little against greatly superior Zionist forces. Arab civilian morale crumbled in the face of the onslaught and a psychological offensive which exploited reports of the massacre on 10 May by Irgunists of 250 inhabitants of the village of Deir Yasin. Tiberias, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and much of Arab Jerusalem fell, and some three to four hundred thousand refugees streamed in terror towards the neighbouring Arab countries.

  On 14 May the last British high commissioner left Palestine and the mandate formally ended. The Zionists immediately proclaimed the state of Israel and within hours they had received the de facto recognition of the Soviet Union and the United States.

  Early on 15 May, units of the regular armies of Syria, Transjordan, Iraq and Egypt crossed the frontiers of Palestine in the hope of restoring the situation for the Arabs.

  This apparently determined action by the independent Arab states masked their fatal disunity. It was a unanimous decision of the Arab League to intervene in Palestine, but the unity was no more than a façade. There was no effective liaison between the Arab armies and they did not act in concert. Their military capacity did not reflect the overwhelming Arab superiority in numbers, with 40 million Arabs confronting some 600,000 Zionist Jews. In fact to take the field Egypt had some 10,000 regular troops, Transjordan’s Arab Legion 4,500, Syria 3,000, Lebanon 1,000 and Iraq 3,000. Their arms were British or French and, in the case of Transjordan, the commander-in-chief General Glubb and senior officers were British. One surviving Arab statesman recalls that the Arab armies were useful only to perform ceremonial parades. They were confronting some 60,000 Jewish troops who, although never officially recognized by the mandate, were armed and trained and many of whom already had battle experience.

  Some of the Arab leaders, especially in Syria and Iraq, were so ignorant of the situation that they expected a walk-over. King Abdullah had the most realistic appreciation of Zionist strength. For some time he had been in secret negotiation with the Zionist leaders and he had formed with them what amounted to a strategic alliance which would enable him to take over the Arab part of Palestine and exclude the Palestine nationalist leaders, such as the Husseinis, who were hostile to the Hashemites. The Egyptian prime minister Nokrashy Pasha, who lacked the flamboyant confidence of the more ambitious Nahas, also had doubts about an Arab victory and had no illusions about the adequacy of the Egyptian armed forces. But Egyptian public opinion had been roused. The Muslim Brotherhood wanted to fight for Palestine, and Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who was now in Egypt, exerted a powerful influence. Of greater importance was King Farouk’s determination that the Egyptian arm
y should enter the war.

  If Zionist resistance had collapsed there is little doubt that even King Abdullah would have been obliged to continue until the state of Israel had been strangled at birth. But the declared objective of the Arab governments was only to restore order and to protect the 45 per cent of Palestine which had been allotted to the Arabs under the UN partition plan.

  At first all went well for the Arabs as they occupied areas which were not yet controlled by the Jews. The Egyptians entered Gaza and Beersheba and linked up with the Arab Legion near Bethlehem. The Legion, with its Iraqi allies, held the central section of Palestine and attempted to blockade Jewish west Jerusalem, although, disastrously for the Arabs, they were unable to cut the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

  The UN mediator, Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte, secured a four-week ceasefire from 11 June and put forward proposals for a settlement which were rejected by both sides. When the fighting resumed, the Jews broke the siege of west Jerusalem and made lightning gains in nearly all sectors, capturing Nazareth and western Galilee, which had been allotted to the Arabs. A second ceasefire called on 18 July was ineffective, and when the fighting finally ended in January 1949 the Jews had occupied all the Negev up to the former Egypt–Palestine border except for the Gaza Strip on the coast. The Iraqis and Jordanians held a slice of territory to the north and south of Jerusalem. Only 21 per cent of Palestine remained in Arab hands. The number of Arabs within the area held by Israel had decreased by between 700,000 and 750,000.

  Between February and July 1949 the new UN mediator, the American Ralph Bunche, succeeded in securing separate armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt and the Arab states (except Iraq, which nevertheless withdrew its troops). It was broadly agreed to fix a temporary frontier where the lines had been at the start of the negotiations, while certain border areas were demilitarized. Jerusalem was divided between the Arab east and Jewish west. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian administration.

  No peace treaty was signed. In December 1948 the UN General Assembly appointed a three-member conciliation commission to promote a final settlement and to arrange an international regime for Jerusalem, but all its efforts were frustrated. The Arab states refused to consider a peace treaty unless the Israeli government agreed to accept all Arab refugees wishing to return to Israel. Resolutions demanding that the refugees should be given the option of return or compensation for their property were constantly reaffirmed by the UN General Assembly, and it was on this basis that Israel was admitted to the UN on 11 May 1949. But Israel maintained that the future of the refugees could be discussed only as part of a general peace settlement. The impasse was complete. Half of the Palestinian Arabs had become refugees. Neither the new state of Israel nor its Arab neighbours could expect even a minimum of security and stability.

  11. The Entry of the Superpowers and the Nasser Era, 1950–1970

  The repercussions of the Palestine disaster (al-Naqba in Arabic) were felt throughout the Arab East. Blame was divided between Britain, the United States and the Arab leaders whose incompetence and divisive rivalries had contributed to the miserable Arab performance. Arab opinion in general was radicalized. In Syria, a military coup d’état took place even before the truce was signed. Although it was soon overturned and a form of constitutional parliamentary government restored, the Syrian armed forces had acquired a taste for political power which was never to diminish. Syria became a byword for political instability.

  The Transjordanian monarchy, although at the eye of the storm, survived with the support of a loyal army. King Abdullah was able to carry out his ambition of uniting what was left of Palestine in his newly proclaimed Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. The majority of the inhabitants of the enclave, defenceless and in imminent danger of being swallowed up by the Zionists, saw no alternative and in December 1948 a conference of some 2,000 Arab notables at Jericho invited King Abdullah to unite Palestine and Jordan. The move was bitterly opposed by the other Arab states, who attempted unsuccessfully to block it. They tried to revive the UN resolution for the internationalization of Jerusalem but, since this was unacceptable to Israel, they failed. King Abdullah remained in control of the Arab Old City.

  Jordan had acquired a Palestinian population twice as numerous as the Transjordanians, and half a million of them were destitute refugees. The Palestinians accepted King Abdullah’s annexation as the consequence of force majeure, but most of them had reservations about being ruled by Transjordanians, whom they regarded as less advanced than themselves. A minority actively detested the Hashemites.

  King Abdullah handled this delicate situation with practised ambiguity. He and his government tried to carry out the political integration of the new population and Jordan was the only Arab state to offer the refugees full citizenship, but, like the others, it continued to maintain that the refugees were primarily an international political and economic responsibility and would never abandon their right of return. Thus Jordan aimed both to combat Palestinian separatism and to maintain its right to speak for the Palestinians while proclaiming that one day an Arab Palestine would be restored. This ‘Jordanian paradise’ was to last for nearly thirty years. It created acute political difficulties but the Jordanian monarchy survived, through a combination of good fortune, external aid, divisions among its enemies and the flexibility and determination of its rulers. Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian youth as he entered the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 20 July 1951. His son, Tallal, proved to be mentally unstable and abdicated a year later. Tallal’s sixteen-year-old son Hussein (1952–99), then at school in England, succeeded and, against all the odds, became the longest-surviving Arab head of state.

  Egypt was the Arab country in which the Palestine disaster had the most momentous long-term effects. The younger officers who served in the war became convinced of the criminal incompetence of the men ruling Egypt. Food and medical supplies were inadequate, while arms were obsolete and in some cases worthless. Senior officers gave contradictory and meaningless orders, while some showed downright incompetence. (An outstanding exception was Major-General Muhammad Neguib, who was severely wounded in the fighting.) Gamal Abdul Nasser, recently promoted to major, was wounded and distinguished himself in a defensive engagement, but his most vivid memory was the words of one of his most admired superiors shortly before he was killed: ‘Remember, the real battle is in Egypt.’

  For several years there had been a clandestine movement among the younger nationalist officers. Nasser – grave, thoughtful and reticent in manner, but with considerable charismatic charm – had emerged as its natural leader and organizer. Many of his closest colleagues served with him in Palestine, and on their return they stepped up their activities, more than ever convinced of the urgent need for a radical change in the regime. The military coup in Damascus in March 1949 started a chain reaction which affected all the Arab states. In Egypt the Free Officers, as they now called themselves, formed an executive committee of which Nasser, now a colonel, was formally elected president. They established a chain of cells throughout the armed forces and began to distribute mimeographed tracts denouncing the regime.

  Egypt’s parliamentary democracy was already crumbling as the extra-parliamentary forces gathered strength. Of these the Muslim Brotherhood was the most visible and had gained new prestige from its members’ brave actions as volunteers in Palestine. In November 1948 Nokrashy Pasha made use of martial law to declare the Brotherhood dissolved and its branches closed. A month later Nokrashy was assassinated, and two months after this Hassan al-Banna, founder and Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, was himself shot down – almost certainly by a wing of the state counter-terrorist police.

  King Farouk was steadily losing what remained of his youthful popularity. A combination of glandular disorder and self-indulgence had transformed the handsome boy-king into a cartoon-satire of middle-aged debauchery. His divorce of his popular Egyptian wife Farida at the height of the Palestine war had not helped his reputation, and the fri
volous luxury of his life in Mediterranean resorts during Egypt’s troubles seemed a callous insult to his impoverished subjects.

  Although Farouk’s humiliation by Britain had made him increasingly cynical, he had not abandoned his inherited taste for political intrigue or the desire to hold on to power. In January 1950 he recalled his old enemy Nahas and allowed a general election in which the Wafd was still able to gain its customary sweeping victory. Both parties in this improbable palace–Wafd alliance hoped in this way to preserve their share in Egypt’s ramshackle system of government.

  Britain also hoped for an improvement in Anglo-Egyptian relations, pending the still elusive final agreement, and made some conciliatory gestures. The British government had been working to set up a combined Middle Eastern command with the US, Turkey and France, which it hoped Egypt would join. This was essentially a Cold War move, aiming to keep the Soviet Union out of the eastern Mediterranean, but already it was doomed to failure. Neutralist feeling was nascent in the Middle East, where most of the population regarded the old imperial powers as a more serious threat than Soviet communism. When Britain presented the plan to Egypt in October 1951, it was flatly rejected. In fact the Wafdist government had already decided to abrogate the 1939 Anglo-Egyptian treaty and unilaterally to declare Farouk King of Egypt and the Sudan.

  Faced with mounting criticism and exposure of its corruption, the Wafd was anxious to restore its credentials for uncompromising nationalism. But although its move was wildly popular in the country, it was dangerous because in its struggle with Britain the Egyptian government had to enlist the support of all the forces in the country which were aiming for the overthrow of the constitutional regime. Nahas not only declared a state of emergency and took steps to cut off supplies of food and Egyptian labour to the British troops in the Canal zone but also went further and encouraged the formation of volunteer ‘Liberation’ squads to carry out sabotage and guerrilla attacks. For these the obvious recruits were Muslim Brothers, communists and any other groups with valuable terrorist experience. Some Free Officers helped to train these groups behind the scenes.