Before the war, Neville Chamberlain had said "if we must offend the Jews or the Arabs, let it be the Jews." During the war Jewish volunteers from Palestine worked as spies (some of them could obviously pass for Germans) and fought as soldiers wherever and however they could; meanwhile, the Arabs were rooting for Hitler; the mufti of Jerusalem spent the war years in Berlin, helping to raise a Muslim brigade for the Nazis.

Segev is not so much an historian as a man with a mission: to overturn all received ideas, even if it means doing violence to the truth.

But afterwards, it was all as before; the British returned, as if nothing had happened, and proceeded to block the entry of all Jewish survivors of Hitler's Europe, most fresh from the camps, into Palestine. They turned away refugee-laden ships after the war as they had turned them away before the war ended, even firing on them in international waters and killing a number of those who had managed to survive Hitler. In London, the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin berated the "Jews": they should stop protesting his plan to re-settle many of the deathcamp surivors in Germany itself, and if they did not stop their demands in Palestine, he warned, they would bring on themselves a new wave of antisemitism. Much later the British Laborite R. H. Crossman, who had served in the British government at the time, and knew intimately its secrets, publicly accused both Attlee, the Prime Minister, and Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, of "having tried to destroy the Jews of Palestine."

In Palestine itself there were many British officials who agreed with them. As the Arabs refused the U.N. Partition Plan for Western Palestine (having quietly pocketed Eastern Palestine in 1922), and prepared to make war, the British attitude may be gauged from a handful of remarks, very few of them to be found in Segev's exculpatory fantasy. There was the Chief Secretary for Palestine, Sir Henry Gurney, who blandly told Golda (Meir) Meyerson, "You know, Mrs. Meyerson, if Hitler persecuted Jews, there must be some reason for it." He was puzzled that she took offense. And he described one Jewish at-tack thus: "(Bergen) Belsen 'pales' besides the bestialities of (the Jewish attack at) Deir Yassin." He also threatened Ben-Gurion: "If the fighting in Jaffa did not cease, the RAF would bomb Tel Aviv." There was the British commander, Evelyn Barker, who wrote in Dec. 1947 to his Arab mistress Katy Antonius, offering his services to the Arabs: "As a military man he had no doubt: the Jews would not be able to withstand the force of the entire Arab world, and in the end they would all be eradicated. They (the Arabs) had to unite, to be more cunning, to work according to a plan. He would willingly fight at their side in order to exterminate Zionism, he reiterated."

The British had armed, trained, and led the Arab Legion of Transjordan; they had armed and trained (but not always led) the forces of Egypt and Iraq. Meanwhile, they behaved quite differently toward the Jews of Palestine. In 1946-1948, in Operation Agatha, ordered by none other than General Evelyn Barker, British soldiers repeatedly raided Jewish arms caches, and confiscated nearly 40% of the "sticks" (rifles), the only arms that the Jewish forces possessed at the time. When Israel declared its independence, a total arms embargo on the Jewish forces was firmly in place; it was enforced, from the sea, by a tight British blockade along the Mediterranean coast.

Meanwhile, the British continued to pour supplies into the Arab states. When the Arabs went to war, it was the regular armies of five Arab states, including those receiving British military aid and training, not the local Arabs (it would be twenty years before the latter re-named themselves, for politically astute reasons, the "Palestinians"), who were the great threat. There was even direct military action taken against the Jewish forces; in order to stop the advance of the Palmach, under Yigal Allon, in the Negev, British pilots in Spitfires strafed and bombed the Jewish troops. When the Israeli Air Force's rickety Messerschmitts went into action against them, shooting down five, an enraged Bevin threatened war. Most of the British were like Bevin in London and Barker in Jerusalem: they did not expect the Jews to win, and were prepared to see them lose, with results that could easily be imagined.

Few were glad, and many lamented in Whitehall when those troublesome Jews prevailed. Sir John Troutbeck, Head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, spoke for many when he said of the Arab defeat, "We are partners in adversity." The British government refused for nine months to recognize the Jewish state, long after all other major countries in the world did, and despite the pleadings of Winston Churchill, Great Britain continued to oppose Israel's admission to the United Nations. None of this receives mention in the book; instead, Segev finishes his tale with one final little kick at what he takes to be another "myth" of Zionism. During the War for Independence, the widow of Orde Wingate went up in a small plane and threw his Hebrew Bible out to the Jewish troops below. Segev says "there are those who say" the story is not true. He does not deny the story outright (there are many who say it did happen, and some are still alive). Instead, he writes: "But among the dreams and illusions, the fictions and myths, this story, too, has its place." In

[(Continued on p.11)]

Outpost               - 10 -               May 2001