Blair, Labour, and Palestine

Conflicting Views on Middle East Peace After 9/11

Toby Greene

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781628923995
• eBook ISBN: 9781441161475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many of Tony Blair's policy decisions in the Israeli-Palestinian arena were controversial and politically costly. Blair, Labour and Palestine argues that gaps between him and much of his party were rooted in different world views. A positive attitude towards Israel came to be seen as a defining mark of New Labour loyalists. However, contrasting views among left-leaning strands in the party reflected a broader set of ideological rifts. Such differences became increasingly significant in the wake of 9/11 as British policymakers sought to understand and respond to Islamic anger against the West. Based on interviews conducted by the author and on previously unseen documents, this unique case study shows how the distinctive world view of a political leader defined foreign policy, by shaping Britain's response to Islamist violence and its interconnected approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Author Toby Greene also examines the extent to which ministers and officials considered shifting foreign policy in response to fears of Islamist radicalisation in the UK, and Blair's role in stopping this trend, especially after the 7/7 bombings.

1

Roots of British Policy in the Israeli-Palestinian Arena

The Mandate period

Whether they like it or not, British policy makers do not travel lightly in the Middle East. They carry baggage. As well as the various, often conflicting interests they have to balance in their hands, they take on their backs the legacy of Britain’s historic role in the region; what Elizabeth Monroe called ‘Britain’s Moment in the Middle East’.¹ It was Britain, along with France, that drew the map of the post-Ottoman Arab world, and when dissatisfaction arose, they were always liable to having the finger pointed at them by Arab leaders.

Divergent trends in Britain’s policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian arena predate General Allenby’s conquest of the territory from the Ottoman Turks in 1917. During World War I, support for Zionism – the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine – grew within the British government, though the reasons for this have been contested over the decades. Some emphasize the sentimental sympathies of British leaders for the Zionist cause rooted in a Christian attachment to the Bible. An alternative interpretation focuses on the largely false belief of Lloyd George and others that Jews had global power, including influence in Russia and the United States, that could be harnessed in the context of the war, through support for Zionism. Another version has it that Britain acted on the basis of its strategic considerations and a belief that a Jewish presence under British protection on the eastern Mediterranean would strengthen Britain’s position in the region against the French and the Russians, giving protection to the Suez Canal and access to India. Others emphasize the significance of the skill and influence of the Zionist leadership, in particular, Chaim Weizmann.²

Whatever the dominant cause of the British cabinet’s pro-Zionism, there was always a strong countervailing sympathy for the Arabs in the British establishment during and after World War I. This pro-Arab sympathy also stemmed from varied sources. These included a belief that the far more numerous Arabs were of greater importance as a strategic ally for Britain, a romantic attraction to Arab culture and society, and the belief that Britain’s adoption of the Zionist movement’s aims in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was an injustice to the Arabs.³ These views were often shot-through with anti-Semitic beliefs about the Jews as either grasping capitalists or dangerous Bolsheviks.⁴

Prior to World War I, Britain had acquired a number of protectorate Arab territories in the Persian Gulf, military and economic domination in Egypt, a colony in Aden, and a strategically vital oil concession in Persia. After World War I, Britain was mandated by the League of Nations to administer Iraq and Palestine. Britain promised Hussain ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in a 1915 letter from British High Commissioner in Cairo Sir Henry McMahon, that it would support Arab national aspirations in return for Hussain’s support for the British war effort against Turkey. Arabs subsequently claimed that this agreement included Palestine, something later denied by the British.⁵ Whether or not it contradicted its promises to the Arabs, in 1917 Britain issued the ‘Balfour Declaration’, expressing support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine . . . it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil or religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’⁶

In January 1919, Faisal Ibn Husain, the leader of the Arab delegation to the post-war Paris peace conference, and Chaim Weizman, leader of the Zionist movement, signed an agreement in London to support each other’s national aspirations in the Middle East. Faisal wrote in a letter to another Zionist representative, Felix Franfurter, two months later, ‘We Arabs, especially the educated amongst us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement . . . We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.’⁷

However, this spirit of cooperation was not felt widely, and the Arab world soon became implacably opposed to a Jewish homeland in the region. As a result, for most of the twentieth century, British policy makers have worked in a context whereby to support Arab aspirations in Palestine was to undermine the interests of the Jews, and vice versa. Both Arabs and Jews have sources of resentment against the British dating back to the Mandate period. In 1922, Britain restricted the area designated for a Jewish national home to the smaller part of Mandate Palestine west of the River Jordan, establishing to the east the Emirate of Transjordan, ruled over by Abdullah, one of the four sons of the Sharif of Mecca and a brother of Faisal. Nonetheless, the Arabs and their sympathizers regarded a national home for the Jews even in the area West of the Jordan unjustified, given that the Jews were at the time a small minority in the territory, and believing that the policy inevitably diminished the rights of the Arab majority. For Arabs, Britain carries considerable blame for helping establish Israel with the Balfour Declaration and its support for Jewish immigration into Palestine prior to World War II. As both Jewish and Arab societies developed in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, and as the Jewish population rapidly expanded, tensions and violence between the communities, and between the Arab population and the British authorities, increased. This peaked with a major Arab uprising against the British and the Jews between 1936 and 1939. In 1937, the Peel Commission established by the British government to investigate the Palestine problem concluded that there was no way to reconcile conflicting Arab and Jewish demands. The Commission proposed the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The principle of partition was accepted by the Zionist movement, though they objected to the proposed borders. Any idea of partition which would create a Jewish state was rejected by the Arabs.⁸

In 1939, in an attempt to appease the Arabs and gain their support on the eve of World War II, the British issued the MacDonald White Paper, which heavily restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine, thus denying European Jews a refuge from the Nazis.⁹ Just as Arabs recall with rancour the Balfour Declaration, Jews recall the 1939 White Paper with great lament. Regardless of the White Paper, the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini made an alliance with Hitler, spending the war years in Berlin and recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the Nazi SS. During World War II, approximately six million Jews, the majority of Europe’s Jewish population, were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices in the Holocaust. At the end of the war, up to 300,000 survivors passed through Jewish refugee camps in Europe. Robbed of all property and rights, many wished to move to Palestine and there was a surge of international sympathy for the Zionist demand for an independent state. The Jewish Agency, the representatives of the Jewish community in Palestine, called on Britain to allow 100,000 Jews to enter. The proposal was backed by the United States, and by the report of a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry published in 1946, but the British resisted.

The Labour government, led in its policy by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, had to contend with a number of issues in the Middle East. The United Kingdom had a large military installation in the Suez Canal zone in Egypt and the Abadan oil refinery in Iran, as well as, at its peak, 100,000 troops stationed in Palestine. Britain was heavily in debt, both to the United States and to its colonial territories and protectorates including Egypt. Britain could not afford to maintain its military control over large parts of the Middle East. However, the United Kingdom wished to maintain as much influence as possible and protect its strategic position.¹⁰ This was for the sake of important trade routes, the reliability of oil supply from the Gulf and the value of military bases in the region for any future war against the Soviets. Britain, along with the United States, also feared the spread of Communism and Soviet influence into the region.¹¹ These interests created a need to maintain good relations with the Arabs and contain the rising tide of anti-Western, pan-Arab nationalism.¹²

According to a famous critique by Elie Kedourie, Britain’s intellectual and official classes were also influenced by a particular view of the region Kedourie termed the ‘Chatham House Version’.¹³ Kedourie attributed the ‘Chatham House Version’ to the influence of Arnold Toynbee, the historian who was appointed the first head of the Research Analysts department in the Foreign Office in 1943, and was for 30 years the Director of the British foreign policy research centre Chatham House. Toynbee acknowledged himself to be a ‘Western spokesman for the Arab cause’.¹⁴ He saw the Arabs as a naturally unified entity that had been artificially suppressed by the Ottomans and then divided up by oppressive Western powers. He felt the Middle East’s malaise to be a consequence of this Western interference in the region, including support for Zionism. Toynbee believed that Zionism itself was little better than Nazism, and in supporting it, Britain had cheated the Arabs of Palestine out of their promised independence and burdened the region with the Arab–Israel conflict.

The refusal of the British Government to allow Jews to enter Palestine after World War II intensified both illegal Jewish immigration and the confrontation between the British authorities and the Jews of Palestine. In November 1945, the Haganah, the Jewish armed force established to defend Jewish communities, joined forces with the radical Jewish Lechi and Irgun armed groups in an alliance to conduct armed actions against the British. With Jewish violence against the British intensifying, the Mandate forces heavily suppressed Jewish militancy, arresting 3000 people in an operation at the end of June 1946. The violence peaked when the Irgun bombed the British headquarters at the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946, killing more than 90 people. This event, and the hanging and booby trapping of the bodies of two British servicemen by the Irgun, led to considerable anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, including anti-Jewish riots.

The mounting violence within Palestine, and international pressure to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis in Europe, forced the British to turn the problem over to the UN and hastened their desire to withdraw from the territory. Fearing that the Haganah was not ready for war with the Arabs, the Jewish leader in Palestine, David Ben Gurion, tried to delay Britain’s departure and persuade Bevin that Britain should stay longer. He reasserted the case, made by Herzl and Weizmann before him, that the Jews in Palestine represented a foothold of European values in the Middle East. His efforts were to no avail.¹⁵ Bevin was preoccupied with maintaining British influence in the wider Middle East and was personally unsympathetic to the Jews and the Zionist movement. The UN’s commission, UNSCOP, recommended portioning the territory into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the proposal, with Britain abstaining in the vote.

The Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan, but Palestinian and other Arab representatives rejected it. War broke out between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, with the fighting leading many Arabs to flee their homes to neighbouring countries or other parts of Palestine. In May 1948, the British pulled out the last of its troops and David Ben Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. Simultaneously, the armies of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon, with additional forces from Saudi Arabia, invaded the nascent Jewish state. By 1949, Israel had repelled the Arab armies, had negotiated armistice agreements with their governments and was admitted to the UN. Its borders exceeded those that had been allotted to it by the UN, but the bulk of the territory intended for the Arab state by the partition plan was in the hands of Jordan, which annexed the West Bank, and Egypt, which occupied the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem was divided between Israeli and Jordanian control, with the Old City and its holy sites in Jordanian hands. The war resulted in a situation where between 500,000 and 940,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees in neighbouring Arab countries.¹⁶ In the first years of its existence, Israel’s population was swelled by hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe, and by Jews fleeing persecution in Middle Eastern countries.

After Israel’s establishment

After Israel’s establishment, British strategic priorities shifted. While maintaining good relations with the Arab states remained the first priority, the United States and the United Kingdom were also keen to ensure that the new Jewish state turned to them for support rather than to the Soviet Union. Britain recognized Israel in 1949. In 1950, Britain, France and the United States made the ‘Tripartite Agreement’, committing to defend the integrity of the Israeli-Arab armistice and to coordinate arms supplies to Israel and the Arabs for their defence and to repel Soviet influence.¹⁷ In the decades that followed, the readiness to supply heavy weaponry was often the key benchmark by which Israel measured its relations with the great powers, including Britain.¹⁸

However, the fear that Israel might fall under Soviet influence soon subsided.¹⁹ In the early 1950s, Britain’s policy in the region was determined largely by its desire to retain influence and prestige with Arab states.²⁰ Britain, ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Roots of British Policy in the Israeli-Palestinian Arena
• 2 New Labour and the Israeli-Palestinian Issue
• 3 ‘Patient and Quiet Diplomacy’ in Labour’s First Term
• 4 Radical Islam, 9/11 and the Israeli-Palestinian Issue
• 5 The Israeli-Palestinian Issue and the Response to 9/11
• 6 The Israeli-Palestinian Issue and the Iraq War
• 7 The Israeli-Palestinian Arena Becomes ‘The Issue’
• 8 The Israeli-Palestinian Issue and Domestic Counter-Radicalization
• 9 Blair Confronts ‘Radical Islam’
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright