Perfidious Albion How the British played the Arabs and Jews against each other in the founding of Israel. by Robert Spencer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/perfidious-albion/
As the Ottoman Empire was in its death throes, the British government began to look ahead. On November 2, 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour issued a momentous statement in a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish community:
His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
This was a significant boost for the Zionist project, as it was the first time that a major power had expressed support for it, and Jewish immigration into Palestine increased.
The British, however, were playing both sides. At the same time that they committed themselves to the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, they were also encouraging the most vociferous opponents of the Zionist project, the Arabs. Indeed, no less an authority than Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the celebrated “Lawrence of Arabia,” admitted that the very concept of Arab nationalism was a British invention.
To be sure, the Arab Muslims of Palestine had always hated the Jews, but the Arabs in general had hated one another as well. According to Lawrence, however, “the phrase Arab Movement was invented in Cairo as a common denominator for all the vague discontents against Turkey which before 1916 existed in the Arab provinces. In a non-constitutional country, these naturally took on a revolutionary character and it was convenient to pretend to find a common ground for all of them.”
The British colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, who served as head of Britain’s military intelligence in Cairo and later as His Majesty’s chief political officer for Palestine and Syria, was blunter: “Arab national feeling is based on our gold and nothing else.”
Even worse, Colonel Lawrence, in the course of building the “Lawrence of Arabia” myth about himself, propagated, primarily in his massive 1926 book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the idea that the Arabs, with a bit of help from Lawrence himself, had played a decisive role in the defeat of the Turks in World War I, driving them out of Arabia and ultimately even capturing Damascus, setting the stage for the fall of the empire itself.
Hollywood chimed in on this myth-making with the 1962 blockbuster film Lawrence of Arabia. This myth proved to be extraordinarily destructive, for after the Balfour Declaration, it became a staple of Arab Muslim propaganda that the Arabs had heroically and nobly come to the aid of the British against the Turks in World War I, and instead of being rewarded, were cruelly betrayed by the perfidious Albionites, who gave the land that had been promised to them to the Zionists instead.
Reality was far from this. Even Lawrence, after building his myth, admitted in a rare moment of candor that the help the Arabs offered to bring down the Ottoman Empire was not at all decisive, but “a sideshow of a sideshow.” Richard Aldington, whose 1955 book Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry does much to dispel the myths that Lawrence had woven, discounts the claim that the Arabs contributed much of anything at all to the British war effort, saying of its wartime activities: “To claim that these spasmodic and comparatively trifling efforts had any serious bearing on the war with Turkey, let alone on the greater war beyond is…absurd.”
Indeed, says Aldington, “much of the effort of the Arab forces…was diverted to hanging around on the outskirts of Medina and to attacks on that part of the Damascus-Medina railway which was of the least importance strategically.” Even worse, according to Aldington, was the Arab role in the British victory over the Turks in the Battle of Megiddo, which broke Ottoman power toward the end of the war. Aldington says that General Edmund “Allenby’s great breakthrough in September 1918 provided [the Arabs] with sitting targets which nobody could miss, and the chance to race hysterically into towns which they claimed to have captured after the British had done the real fighting.”
The British encouraged the Arabs in this. The Muslim historian Muhammad Kurd Ali recounts that “whenever the British Army captured a town or reduced a fortress which was to be given to the Arabs it would halt until the Arabs would enter, and the capture would be credited to them.”
This was calculated to win Arab hearts and minds, but it did more than that. It gave impetus to the Arab claims after the war that the British owed them something, while owing the Jews nothing, and that they had been betrayed and were therefore justified in attacking Jews and resisting their settlement in Palestine.
The British did nothing to counter this impression; quite the contrary. They continued to play both ends against the middle.
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