Britain, Palestine and the Middle East

Abstract

The Second World War, as we noted in an earlier chapter, had profoundly affected Middle Eastern affairs. That conflict had deepened and widened local frustrations and resentments in ways which soon meshed with nationalist expectations, and speeded up the displacement of British influence in certain regions by her erstwhile American ally; this latter transition was most complete in the case of the Saudi Kingdom. Even so, there were grounds in 1945 for the belief that the British position throughout most of the Middle East was more defensible than it was, for example, in India, or than the French position was in Indo-China. None of the Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, sported a credible ‘mass’ nationalist party such as Gandhi’s and Nehru’s Congress, and the endemic anti-Communism of these Islamic societies blocked one major way in which this vacuum might be filled under post-war conditions. The British had been busy identifying workable relationships with quasi-autonomous Middle Eastern regimes since at least 1918, and with sensible diplomacy this ‘line’ could be expected to hold. The intimate and pervasive presence of western economic and political power within the crevices of Middle Eastern society, compared to its more tenuous hold in much of Asia, meant that the possible permutations of Britain’s leading role could be almost endlessly refined. Nevertheless, by 1954 this leading role had been fractured in so many places that, of all the western powers active in the Middle East, the British seemed the obvious target on which Middle Eastern nationalists might concentrate their efforts.1