Suez 1956, page 9
Then again, overseas commitments were strengthened by cultural and social ties. Colonial peoples were a mixed bunch with expatriates or their first-, second- or third-generation descendants living alongside the native populations in varying degrees of edginess. They were not to be lightly abandoned.
Finally, there was the economic imperative. The case was particularly strong for Britain, which relied on the empire for well over half of its two-way trade and income from foreign investment. This was to change, but slowly – too slowly for the good of the British economy. For the first five years after the war, Britain had no trouble in selling abroad whatever she produced, but too often this was to soft, protected markets on a take-it-or-leave-it basis that soon had customers looking elsewhere for higher quality at competitive prices. Even then British industry was more inclined to look back to the good old days than to plan for a dynamic future. Despite appearances, France was rather better at managing its long-term future. Derided for its political instability – twenty governments between 1945 and 1954, high inflation, tax avoidance on a massive scale and wildcat strikes – France provoked assumptions that the civil administration was equally chaotic. In reality, as President Auriol commented, ‘though France might frequently change the horses, the carriage continues to move forward’.
While the politicians argued, a planning team led by Jean Monnet, accountable only to the prime minister, got on with the job of ‘transforming France into a modern country’. Its achievements included the construction of the Rhône dams, the electrification of the railway system, the re-equipment of the iron and steel industry and the development of natural gas reserves. As a result, France’s economic miracle paralleled that of Germany, and both were well ahead of Britain.
Economics aside, the problem for the latter-day imperialists was that chauvinism was a two-way track. However loudly they called for Britain or France to assert their worldwide authority, there was an even louder response from the colonies demanding independence. The British solution was to aim to turn the colonies into self-governing nations within the Commonwealth, a more or less free association of former dependencies, led by Britain, which had the potential for becoming a powerful world lobby. This posed many questions of detail. At precisely what point a colony was ready for independence was a matter of prolonged, often bitter, contention. India’s claim, a priority for the new Labour government, was deferred to 1947 by the need to settle terms between Hindus and Muslims. In Kenya, where up to 100,000 Africans but few whites had taken part in the war, the whites were prepared to fight rather than accept universal suffrage, while in the Gold Coast (Ghana) progress towards self-government was set back when the funeral of the Ashanti paramount chief, Nana Sir Ofori Atta, climaxed with a human sacrifice.
Seen from Paris, the imperial future was envisioned in terms of a French Union with an elected assembly in each colonial capital taking care of local affairs while representatives in the National Assembly in Paris devoted themselves to defence and foreign and economic relations. In this way, it was predicted, all French citizens, irrespective of race or place of origin, would enjoy full equality.
Neither of these romantic strategies had application to the mandatory territories of the Middle East or to Egypt, a sovereign power still under occupation. With France jostled out of Syria and Lebanon, Britain was left to patch up agreements that satisfied nationalist aspirations while protecting the right to maintain sufficient forces in the region to deter Soviet incursions. America, experiencing a brief period of post-war isolationism, was happy to keep a distance, the more so because it was useful to have Britain take the flak over Palestine.
In Egypt, grievances against the British multiplied from day to day. While, at first, there were encouraging signals from London that a total evacuation of British troops was in prospect, it soon became clear that the Labour government was as keen to hold on to the Suez base as its Conservative predecessor. Or, maybe, not quite. As the latest incumbent of 10 Downing Street, Clement Attlee was a diminutive but tough prime minister who tried to inject a note of realism into government defence policy, warning of the growing gap between Britain’s overseas commitments and the resources available to carry them out. He was backed by his deputy, Herbert Morrison, and by his chancellor, Hugh Dalton, who confessed to being ‘worn down’ by the imbalance of Britain’s external overheads and the exhaustion of American loans.
But the cost-cutters in the cabinet were outflanked by foreign minister Ernest Bevin, in alliance with the military chiefs, who made the most of their post-war prestige to boost defence expenditure. Bevin (Ernie to his friends) was a politician of humble origins who had been schooled in trade union hard bargaining and had served in Churchill’s wartime coalition as minister of labour. In his latest role, the blunt, no-nonsense sixty-four-year-old came on like John Bull incarnate, intensely patriotic and passionately anti-communist. Embracing the traditional foreign office interpretation of Britain’s world role, he was adopted by the conservative establishment as one of their own. It was significant that Lord Alanbrooke, Churchill’s wartime chief of staff and later a dominant voice in the defence committee, should have noted in his diary, ‘The more I see of Bevin, the more impressed I am by him and his great qualities.’3 One of those ‘qualities’ was agreeing with Alanbrooke that British influence abroad had to be sustained at all costs.
Bevin presided over a collection of worldwide responsibilities greater than at any time in British history. In addition to manning occupation zones in West Germany and Austria, there were troops in Italy, Libya, Malta and Cyprus, not to mention bases in a patchwork of colonial outposts where a military presence was thought to be a necessary mainstay to flying the flag. In the Middle East, Transjordan (formally declared independent in 1946 but still relying on a British subsidy and troops commanded by British officers), Iraq, Iran and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms were still in Britain’s thrall. Some 100,000 servicemen were in Palestine trying, in vain, to break the cycle of terror and counter-terror. In Egypt, the Suez Canal Zone complex of barbed wire and corrugated iron, 120 miles long by 30 wide, was the largest military base in the world. One ammunition depot alone covered 8 square miles.
Urged on by the military, Bevin became obsessed with the Middle East as the centrepiece of British foreign policy. Though not strictly part of the British Empire, it offered more than all the other imperial territories put together. Bevin needed no persuading that British and European economic recovery depended on the free flow of oil. By 1946 shipments of crude oil through the Suez Canal were more than half the volume of northbound cargo. From 1948, oil dominated the shipping, cargo and revenue of the canal.4 The chief suppliers were Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Thirty per cent of Britain’s overseas investments, mostly in oil, were in the Middle East. How to hold on to those assets exercised Bevin’s imagination beyond all other issues.
One strand of his thinking was linked to ideas for developing the Commonwealth. The Labour government had grand plans for economic and technical support for the colonies, which would lead to ‘a common basis of partnerships’. As a start, the 1945 Colonial Development Act led to a five-year programme of loans and grants totalling £40 million for building roads, schools and hospitals. The fallacy at the heart of this policy was that Britain could afford to do all that it most desired. Critics pointed out the nonsense of handing out money to the colonies for worthy projects while some £250 million earned from exports by those same colonies was held by the Bank of England to bolster sterling reserves.
Ambitious schemes dreamed up by the economic planners were no help. The mass production of groundnuts in East Africa was supposed to promote the regional economy while saving on dollar imports by providing oils and fat for the British market. In practice, the site was ill chosen and the entire project came to a miserable and costly end, just one example of well-intentioned imperialism going badly wrong.
As for the Middle East, there was no desire for a closer relationship with Britain, economic or otherwise. Nationalist criticism focused on the niggardly returns on oil (the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, while advertising its claim to be a model employer, purloined 75 per cent of oil revenues) and on restrictions on the use of sterling balances. Egypt alone was owed £400 million for its services as a war base but had no chance of laying her hands on more than a small share while the currency remained frozen.
In his clearer moments, Bevin realised that Britain’s best chance of holding her economic grip in the Middle East was to loosen up on the military side. In this he was encouraged by Attlee, who continued to urge a military rethink that would ‘make the most of our limited resources’, even to the extent of abandoning the Middle East and Mediterranean altogether. ‘It may be we shall have to consider the British Isles as an easterly extension of a strategic area the centre of which is the American continent rather than as a power looking eastwards through the Mediterranean to India and the East.’
Bevin and the military establishment begged to differ. As ‘the last bastion of social democracy’ in Europe, argued Bevin, Britain had a responsibility to countries vulnerable to Soviet expansion.
The Mediterranean is the area through which we bring influence to bear on Southern Europe, the soft underbelly of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. Without our physical presence in the Mediterranean, we should cut little ice with these states which would fall, like Eastern Europe, under the totalitarian yoke . . . If we move out of the Mediterranean, Russia will move in, and the Mediterranean countries, from the point of view of commerce and trade, economy and democracy, will be finished.5
The chiefs of staff of the three armed services went even farther. In 1946 they had come up with a Commonwealth defence plan which fixed a main base in the Canal Zone as the direct link with India, Australia and the Far East. That India was soon to gain independence in no way influenced their thinking. As part of the Commonwealth, India was entitled to British protection and was thus still central to defence strategy.
Bevin played with the idea of making East Africa, probably Kenya, an alternative to Egypt as a centre for British overseas military operations, but while the chiefs of staff were ready to consider a withdrawal from Cairo and the Nile Delta, the payback was a strengthening of the Canal Zone. Moreover, Palestine as the only territory in the Middle East directly under British rule was ‘of growing and vital importance in the defence of the Middle East’. What now must be seen as a policy bordering on lunacy was justified at the time on the assumption that if sufficient manpower were devoted to the task (the chiefs of staff had a weak grasp of economic reality) the Jews and Arabs would be forced to an accommodation.
In fact, holding the balance between Jews and Arabs had already become an impossible task. By the end of the Second World War, Britain was spending more on law and order in Palestine than on domestic health and education combined. And it was a losing battle. The opening of the Nazi concentration camps had resulted in huge pressure, not least from America, to lift restrictions on Jewish immigration, a pressure that Bevin resisted, knowing what a free-for-all would do for a hard-pressed peacekeeping force. For the militant Zionists, this put Bevin on the side of the Devil and made all things British a legitimate target for terrorist attacks.
At midday on 22 July 1946, there was a delivery of milk to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The churns, carrying not milk but a mixture of gelignite and TNT, were taken through to the kitchens. At 12.37 they exploded.
Since the King David was the headquarters of the British army in Palestine and of the secretariat of the British Mandatory Administration, as well as the first call for journalists in need of a story, the attack struck at the very core of British authority. The shock was made yet more brutal by the murder of two British sergeants, their booby-trapped bodies left hanging in a eucalyptus grove near Nathanya. The outrage, committed by an organization called Irgun Zvei Leumi, led by Menahem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel, released passionate denunciations that fell on the peaceful majority of Jews, who were simply bewildered by events and nervous of their future.
It was perhaps understandable that the commanding officer in Palestine, General Sir Evelyn Barker, should declare ‘all Jewish places of entertainment, cafés, restaurants, shops and private dwellings’ out of bounds to British troops, but less clear why he felt compelled to sign off his orders, circulated to all officers, with the assurance that they would be ‘punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any – by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt for them’.
Committed to a Jewish national home for more than a quarter of a century, Labour ministers had trouble holding their nerve. With outbreaks of violent anti-Semitism in Liverpool, Manchester and in the East End of London, Bevin gave way to pressure to hand over the Palestinian crisis to the United Nations. Not for one moment did he believe that the strategy would work. Rather, he anticipated the UN making a mess of the job, after which Britain would be called back as the essential mediator. The big difference, as he hoped, would be the closer involvement of the Americans, who up to now had been content to criticise from the sidelines. Bevin was right in one sense. The UN blueprint for the future of Palestine was unworkable. The recommendation was for partition with a Jewish state and an Arab state in economic union and Jerusalem as a neutral international city. It left the map of the region looking like a patchwork quilt with three Zionist sectors and three Arab sectors. There was no way it could work.
But Bevin was wrong in thinking that Britain would be given a second chance to implement its own settlement. The alternative, the only one on offer, was for Britain to take on responsibility for enforcing the UN peace plan, a proposal that was bound to bring conflict with the Arab states that had already voiced implacable opposition. Instead, Britain backed away from the Palestinian imbroglio, adopting a ‘strictly neutral’ stance while the UN moved inexorably towards recognition of an autonomous Jewish state, knowing full well that it would have to fight for its survival.
The Middle East was about to change as dramatically as at any time in its long history. And not necessarily for the better.
7
On 14 May, 1948 the last British high commissioner left Palestine and the mandate formally ended. The Zionists immediately proclaimed an independent Israel. The following day the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq launched an attack across the Palestinian frontier, occupying areas that were still essentially Arab but stopping short of a direct assault on Jewish settlements. Though recognised by the USA and the Soviet Union, the infant state stood alone. Vastly outnumbered, it was expected to put up a spirited but hopeless fight. The armchair strategists, however, overlooked weaknesses on the Arab side that proved to be fatal.
Their most effective leader was King Abdulla of Transjordan, where the Arab Legion was led by General Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha, a capable British commander devoted to the Arab cause. But Abdulla’s authority outside his own closed circle was undermined by a thinly disguised ambition to absorb into his own country the Arab part of Palestine. His readiness to do business with the Zionist leaders to achieve his objective put the lie to Arab unity.
Other political rivalries were compounded by military incompetence. While King Farouk was inspired by the cheers of the crowd to believe that the Egyptian army was heading for a great victory, most of his senior officers were inexperienced in all but ceremonial duties. By contrast, the Israeli force, though small in number, had been hardened by fighting Germans or the British or both. Moreover, they knew very well that they had just one chance of survival. They pursued it with ruthless intensity. Well-intentioned UN peacemakers were lost in a maze of intrigue and double dealing. No sooner was a ceasefire signed than it was broken.
When the fighting ended in January 1949, most of what had been Palestine disappeared from the map. A large part of it went to Israel, the rest to Transjordan (now to be called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), except for Gaza, a coastal strip administered by Egypt, home to thousands of Palestinian refugees who had fled across the border or been forced to leave by trigger-happy Jewish settlers. Peace of a sort was established, but while their humiliated armies returned to barracks, the Arab nations insisted that the war was not over, only in abeyance. Thus Israel, by her own not unfair estimation, remained a little country menaced by hostile neighbours dedicated to its destruction. A blood-soaked sequel was in the making.
If the Arab contenders were humbled by the Israeli experience, how much more so was Britain, the once dominant power in the region, now seen to be totally ineffectual when it came to meeting one of the great challenges. In the apportionment of blame, Britain came top of the list for Arabs looking for a scapegoat. Britain, in turn, pointed the finger at America. The role of the USA in the creation of Israel was that of the back-seat driver, long on advice but short on practicalities. As soon as the Labour government took office it was reminded by President Truman of the ‘great interest’ of Americans in the Palestinian problem and their ‘passionate protest’ at restrictions on Jewish immigration. A demand for the immediate entry of 100,000 Jews into Palestine was dispatched from the White House with monotonous regularity, a cause of enormous irritation to Ernest Bevin, who believed that Truman had more concern for the Jewish vote than genuine sympathy for the Zionist cause.
This was unfair. Having emerged from early post-war isolationism, America had accepted its role as the only power capable of resisting Soviet expansion. To this end, not only the defence of Europe but also its economic recovery was largely financed by American dollars. But if Britain was to retain credibility as a world power it had to do something for itself. The Middle East, which Britain claimed as its prime area of influence, seemed as good a place as any for Britain to live up to its macho image. If this were to prove beyond its capacity, and there were those in the British government, starting with the prime minister, who were ready to admit that it was, then America would have to fill the vacuum. This was a step too far for Bevin and his military advisers, who wanted American support only if it came without strings.
