Mapping the End of Empire

American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World

Aiyaz Husain

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780674728882
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674419445
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

By the end of World War II, strategists in Washington and London looked ahead to a new era in which the United States shouldered global responsibilities and Britain concentrated its regional interests more narrowly. The two powers also viewed the Muslim world through very different lenses. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo–American perceptions of geography shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.

Aiyaz Husain shows that American and British postwar strategy drew on popular notions of geography as well as academic and military knowledge. Once codified in maps and memoranda, these perspectives became foundations of foreign policy. In South Asia, American officials envisioned an independent Pakistan blocking Soviet influence, an objective that outweighed other considerations in the contested Kashmir region. Shoring up Pakistan meshed perfectly with British hopes for a quiescent Indian subcontinent once partition became inevitable. But serious differences with Britain arose over America's support for the new state of Israel. Viewing the Mediterranean as a European lake of sorts, U.S. officials—even in parts of the State Department—linked Palestine with Europe, deeming it a perfectly logical destination for Jewish refugees. But British strategists feared that the installation of a Jewish state in Palestine could incite Muslim ire from one corner of the Islamic world to the other.

As Husain makes clear, these perspectives also influenced the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and blueprints for the UN Security Council and shaped French and Dutch colonial fortunes in the Levant and the East Indies.

ONE

All of Palestine

The first Arab-Israeli War was the climax of a decades-long struggle between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. For Britain, the war was a catastrophe. Arab unrest fueled by continued Jewish immigration into Palestine, accelerated by both Nazi persecution and Soviet pogroms, coupled with the postwar costs of overseas military deployments and manpower shortages throughout the British Empire, had pushed to the limit British forces in the mandated territory and in the region as a whole. Meanwhile U.S. support for the continued immigration of Jewish settlers into Palestine and the eventual recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 raised the temperature and demographic pressure in Palestine to new highs. The combustible situation meant that it was only a matter of time before the pragmatic Labour government in London seeking to implement Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin’s policy of nonintervention and economic development in the Middle East would beat a hasty retreat from Palestine.¹

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION AND MANDATORY PALESTINE

The modern roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict date back to the aftermath of the First World War and the resulting peace settlement that accorded the British Empire rights to League of Nations mandates to Iraq and Palestine.² Great Britain had long coveted the Eastern Mediterranean for its intrinsic strategic value, given its proximity to the Suez Canal and the Levant’s principal trade routes. As early as 1917 British officials, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George, an ardent Zionist, and his advisors, had subscribed to the notion that a partnership between Great Britain and Jewish émigrés seeking a national homeland in Palestine could help fashion a peace after the war consonant with British interests in the Near East, as Britain began to feel the pinch of creeping imperial costs and to countenance new strategic risks imposed by the burden of imperial administration. By the end of the war a number of these officials—including assistant secretaries of the War Cabinet like Mark Sykes and Leo Amery and an influential member of Parliament, William Ormsby-Gore—came to the conclusion that the coexistence of an Arab Palestine and a national homeland for Zionist Jews within the same borders was both desirable for Great Britain and a feasible diplomatic objective.³

As is now well known, that objective proved infamously difficult to reconcile with wartime promises to the leaders of Arab tribes to which the Foreign Office had assented for the sole purpose of inducing a revolt that might decisively turn the tide against Britain’s enemies, the Ottoman Empire and the Central Powers. During the years 1915–1916 the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, conveyed to Sharif Hussein of Mecca (the leader of the Arab Hashemite clan) Britain’s intent to support Arab independence throughout the Levant in exchange for leading a revolt against Ottoman forces. Specifically McMahon delineated territories promised to Britain’s Arab allies in a document known as the Damascus Protocol, which assured the Arab leader of “the recognition by Great Britain of the independence of the Arab countries lying within the following frontiers: North: The Line Mersin-Adana to parallel 37N. and thence along the line Birejek-Urga-Mardin-Kidiat-Jazirat (Ibn ‘Unear)-Amadia to the Persian frontier; East: The Persian frontier down to the Persian Gulf; South: The Indian Ocean (with the exclusion of Aden, whose status was to be maintained). West: The Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea back to Mersin.” ⁴ As mountains of historical research have argued, McMahon’s vague message seemed to directly contradict parallel assurances that London would soon thereafter provide to Zionist leaders eager to settle in Palestine. Perhaps motivated by the hope that Russian Jews would reinforce Tsar Nicholas II’s support for the war effort and that American Zionists would persuade President Woodrow Wilson to enter the war in support of the Entente powers, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917 in the aftermath of an energetic campaign of lobbying by international Zionist groups, the start of a global advocacy effort that would continue throughout the first half of the century and culminate in the creation of the state of Israel. The Declaration all but committed the British government to the establishment of a national Jewish homeland in Palestine, paving the way for the emigration of Jews there at an increasing rate over the next two decades. In issuing the Declaration the Foreign Office probably also considered its effect on President Wilson, who, it surmised, might have been subjected to pressure from American Zionists to enter the war on the side of the Entente powers. Whatever its motivations, the Declaration encouraged a wave of emigration to Palestine over subsequent decades. It was largely the population shifts and displacements spurred by this emigration en masse that sowed the seeds of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict.⁵

After the First World War the great powers, convened at the San Remo Conference of 1920, agreed that Britain would be responsible for postwar administration of the territory of Palestine.⁶ But just what constituted “Palestine” first had to be defined before the mandated territory could be topologically demarcated—which raised the corresponding issue of the precise obligations connoted by the Balfour Declaration. In a May 1922 conversation with the Colonial Office, the first high commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, pleaded with British officials to assuage Arab concerns by outlining three conditions. First, Samuel proposed limiting the Jewish national home to areas west of the Jordan River; second, he suggested abandonment of the principle of a state with a Jewish majority; third, he suggested that future Jewish immigration under the mandate be limited to “the economic capacity of the country.” When His Majesty’s government published Samuel’s draft document on 1 July 1922, the resulting Churchill-Samuel White Paper came to represent the official British definition of the extent of mandatory Palestine. That week the House of Commons accepted the mandate, paving the way for its approval by the League of Nations on 29 September.⁷ A year later the League of Nations approved Britain’s rights to a formal League “mandate” for the territory of Palestine. While the settlement did not grant the Zionist movement a free and independent Palestine to settle at will, the League Council echoed the Balfour Declaration and acknowledged “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” It also made reference to the legitimacy of the Zionist movement in “reconstituting their National Home in that country.” Moreover the British would “use their best endeavors to facilitate” continuing Jewish immigration and settlement. Notably, though, the mandatory language refrained from any direct mention of the Arabs in Palestine, describing the territory’s other inhabitants only as “non-Jews.”⁸ The language was significant in its omission of a reference to the Muslim Arabs inhabiting Palestine, who constituted a sizable majority.

In a sense the omission of an overt reference to the Palestinian Arabs cast further immigration into Palestine in the rhetoric of frontier settlement, as opposed to the narrative of neocolonial usurpation and territorial appropriation, to which the Arabs of Palestine subscribed. These opposed narratives with disparate geographical implications—one of overseas settlement of fertile soils, the other of illegitimate invasion—would soon collide in violent confrontation leading to open war.

Over the subsequent decade a cascade of violence over continuing Jewish immigration began to threaten the tenability of Britain’s presence in Palestine. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s Arab-Jewish clashes such as during the May Day riots of 1921, the Wailing Wall incident in 1929, and other encounters led officials in London to rethink their policy vis-à-vis the Palestine mandate.⁹ The continued immigration of Jewish settlers into Palestine had worsened drastically the security situation in Palestine, a series of British government White Papers concluded. But the leaders of the Zionist movement maintained that the notion of Palestine’s “absorptive capacity,” as a static limit, was an illusory one. “How are we to interpret the principle of absorptive capacity?” David Ben-Gurion wrote in 1933. “In the eleven years since the [1922 Churchill-Samuel] White Paper appeared, the rate of admission has fluctuated considerably—in some years, over 10,000 Jews arrived, in others, only a few thousands; one year more than 30,000 immigrants; another year more emigrants than immigrants.”¹⁰ The notion of absorptive capacity was ambiguous, Ben-Gurion and his Zionists maintained, and a construct of the British “Official Mind” to stem further Jewish immigration.

The British government’s response to the deterioration of the situation in Palestine entailed convening a series of commissions of inquiry, elaborate undertakings by appointed senior officials that produced massive periodic reports on the situation and laid out recommendations for resolving Palestine’s ultimate status. But the spiral of events in Palestine and beyond began to sweep away any hope of Arab accommodation of incremental Jewish settlement. After the National Socialist Party’s accession to power in Germany triggered additional waves of emigrating European Jews, Arab opposition to the Jewish influx hardened reflexively, further defining itself in the process. Led by the ardent Nazi sympathizer and grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Arabs turned en masse against the perpetuation of British rule. Organizing under the banner of the new Istiqlal Party, Palestinian Arabs now demanded institutions that would secure what they perceived as their increasingly embattled majority in mandatory Palestine. By the mid-1930s what was brewing among Arabs was a more virulent, reactive, anti-Zionist nationalism that now, like many of the Zionists it targeted, lay claim to all of Palestine in the name of Arabs.¹¹

These sentiments boiled over into violent riots in 1936 in which the Arabs in Palestine revolted against British rule in a conflict that would last for three years, sparking a guerrilla war between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers. The event was significant not only for its scale but also for the Arabs’ appropriation of the rhetoric of political independence as a specific demand.¹² The following year the influential 1937 Palestine Royal Commission (the “Peel Commission”) issued a report based on an inquiry it conducted recommending the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish areas to allow the internecine conflict to subside before it reached the level of a full-blown civil war. The report concluded, “While neither race can justly rule all Palestine, we see no reason why, if it were practicable, each race should not rule part of it.”¹³ But the idea of partitioning off elongated slivers of Palestine failed to fully satisfy either Arab or Zionist demands and left unaddressed the issue of the demographic pressures elevated by the continued immigration of European Jews there.

Some British officials believed at the outset that Palestine could not be partitioned, leading the Foreign Office to retreat from the Peel Commission’s findings almost upon their release. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Great Britain issued another White Paper on Palestine, a document that would profoundly affect the fate of displaced European Jews in the war and arouse the most vitriolic Zionist opposition Whitehall had yet faced. Its recommendations were threefold. First, it called for the creation of an independent state in Palestine after a transitory ten-year period; second, it tightly circumscribed the continued purchase of land throughout Palestine by Jews seeking to settle there; third, it called for the restriction of Jewish immigration into Palestine subject to Arab acquiescence within five years, over the course of which no more than 75,000 Jews were to be admitted.¹⁴

In stipulating that “political and psychological factors must be taken into consideration” in determining future immigration quotas, Zionists lashed out that the 1939 White Paper represented a complete British capitulation to Arab demands. The prominent Zionist and British chemist Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Organization, had first glimpsed some of the provisions of the eventual White Paper at the 1938 Tripartite Conference convening British, Arab, and Jewish delegations to discuss immigration. There an invitation to a lunch hosted by the British government intended only for the Arab delegations was inadvertently sent to the Jewish participants. After reading the letter, Weizmann’s reaction characterized that of many Zionists: that “Arab terrorism had won its first major victory.”¹⁵

But was agreement on an acceptable rate of immigration to accommodate the outflow of Jews from Europe the principal objective of the Zionist movement? Or were its goals more fundamentally irredentist in nature, in terms of the reclamation of an ancestral homeland? It so happened that the 1930s saw the transformation of not only the Arab political consciousness in Palestine but also that of Palestinian Jewry. The continuing (and accelerating) Jewish immigration into Palestine and the punitive British policies hastily fashioned to limit it had unearthed and sharpened new political aims of the fluid, international Zionist movement.¹⁶

ZIONISM AND ITS POLITICAL AIMS

The idea of a collective return to Zion reentered public discourse among Jewish intellectuals as early as the late nineteenth century. Critically it had a defined territorial component.¹⁷ The modern Zionist movement, founded by the Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, undertook to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine in the wake of upsurges of anti-Semitism in Europe as manifest in the form of mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus Affair. In 1896 Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), laying out his vision. The following year the first World Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland. As early as that first gathering, it became clear that two distinct mind-sets separated the international Zionist movement. While both saw the settlement of a territory where Jews would become a national majority as their ultimate objective, one group focused squarely on the acquisition of international legal sovereignty as its principal goal—even before the achievement of a demographic majority. The other focused on the act of settlement as the primary task at hand. The Basel Program adopted at the Congress sought to reconcile these views by framing the Zionist mission as “the establishment of a home (Heimstaette) for the Jewish people secured under public law in Palestine.”¹⁸

When the 1903 Kishinev pogrom against Jews in Bessarabia stirred Russian anti-Semitism and open acts of violence, some 40,000 Jews answered Herzl’s calls and migrated to Palestine. So began the modern Zionist settler movement, which continued through the interwar period until it vexed and inextricably bound American and British policymakers within a half century. As settlers purchased land from Arab landholders, the influx of Jews into Palestine began to disrupt the livelihoods of Arab tenant farmers, who in some instances were forced to abandon the land they tilled and accept compensation for the tracts they inhabited when landlords sold off their holdings. By the end of the First World War the fledgling Jewish settler population in Palestine, “the Yishuv,” numbered about 55,000. But from 1919 onward the Third Aliyah (or “homecoming”) immediate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. All of Palestine
• 2. Remapping Zion
• 3. The Contested Valley
• 4. Keystone of the Strategic Arch
• 5. Imperial Residues
• 6. Two Visions of the Postwar World
• 7. Maps, Ideas, and Geopolitics
• 8. Joining the Community of Nations
• 9. From Imagined to Real Borders
• Conclusion
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Archives Consulted
• Acknowledgments
• Index