Policy of Deceit

I am glad to be able to offer here a review of Peter Shambrook’s Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939, which was brought out in London last year by Oneworld Academic and has been republished this year.

A product of prodigious research, Policy of Deceit asks a precise historical question: did the British promise in October 1915 an independent Palestine to Arabs unhappy with their Turkish rulers of that time? World War I was on at the time, and these Turkish rulers were allies of Germany and therefore foes of Britain and France.

Shambrook’s eventual answer is that an independent Palestine was indeed promised by the British government to the Arabs, in exchange for support against Turkey. But that promise was couched in deliberately vague words which could be given another meaning when needed.

Britain’s rulers would soon, and with greater sincerity, promise the same land for housing a Jewish nation.

This second promise was in effect made to the global Zionist Organization, whose head, the Russia-born Chaim Weizmann, would become Israel’s first president in 1949.

Indians knowledgeable about their history will at once notice parallels and common elements. We know that on June 8, 1946, UK Cabinet Minister Stafford Cripps, who had just returned to London after three months of negotiations in India with the Indian National Congress and its rival-cum-foe, the All-India Muslim League, candidly told the House of Commons that he and his British colleagues had kept the language of their proposal for India’s future “purposely vague” so as to enable both the Congress and the League to “accept” it.

And Henry McMahon, Britain’s High Commissioner in Cairo, the one who with due vagueness had promised Palestine to the Arabs in his letter of 24 October 1915 (which Shambrook reproduces in the original Arabic and in an English translation) was the India-born and India-based British official of Irish ancestry who in 1914 had negotiated with Tibet the “McMahon Line” that continues to be central to the ongoing border dispute between India and China.

Moved to Cairo in 1915, McMahon features in almost every historical discussion today about Palestine-Israel andabout the India-China relationship. It’s a rare distinction.

Although “the British promise to the Arabs” is the focus of his book, Shambrook also gives us multiple connected histories. Including the history of the Zionist movement for a Jewish nation in the heart of the Arab world – in Palestine, where in 1914 Jews made up a mere 7 percent of the population, the rest being Arab. Shambrook informs us that culturally the people of Palestine had been “an integral part of an Arab-Islamic civilization for some thirteen centuries” although in more ancient times the land had indeed served as the cradle first of Judaism and then of Christianity.

From the 1890s, however, Jewish leaders in Europe, repelled by antisemitism on their continent and led by, among others, the Hungarian journalist, Theodor Hertzl, started preparing plans for settling European Jews in Palestine and evacuating Arabs out of Palestine. Hailed as being a “divine” concept and destined to find substantial fulfilment, the audacious idea was given a crucial fillip in 1917 by the well-publicized “Balfour Declaration” through which the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, promised Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew, that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The meticulous Shambrook supplies the opinions of all the major scholars who over time have written on Britain’s policy regarding Palestine and Israel, some of them offering conclusions not shared by Shambrook.

Before summarizing the Zionist movement, Shambrook provides an equally helpful precis of clashing imperialist drives and also of the European rivalries that led to World War I. Reminding readers that Queen Victoria had said that it was “a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world,” the author also recalls the deals among European powers for “sharing out” African spoils. Dominance over Africa was achieved with staggering speed.

As Shambrook puts it, “By 1900, only about one tenth of Africa had not fallen under European rule, whereas twenty years earlier only one-tenth had been colonized.” (Emphasis added.)

As far as Palestine is concerned, Shambrook appears to find that Britain, other European powers, and the Zionist movement saw Palestinians as a “penniless” and “backward” people whose eviction from their homes, farms and land was a matter of little consequence.

Brimming with pictures and maps, providing context and explanations where needed, and yet retaining its focus on the integrity or its absence in Britain’s policy regarding Palestine and Israel, Shambrook’s book is a careful history that will be read, I suspect, for decades to come. The Times Literary Supplement calls it “the work of a lifetime.” It has also been described as being “empirically rich and analytically rigorous”.

The wide praise is fully deserved.

This book is available from Oneworld at https://oneworld-publications.com/work/policy-of-deceit/