Unexpected State

British Politics and the Creation of Israel

Carly Beckerman

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253046444
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This provocative historical reassessment sheds new light on the decisions of British politicians that led to the creation of Israel. Separating myth and propaganda from historical fact, Carly Beckerman explores how elite political battles in London inadvertently laid the foundations for the establishment of the State of Israel. Drawing on foreign policy analysis and previously unexamined archival sources, Unexpected State examines the strategic interests, international diplomacy, and political maneuvering in Westminster that determined the future of Palestine. Contrary to established literature, Beckerman shows how British policy toward the territory was dominated by domestic and international political battles that had little to do with Zionist or Palestinian interests. Instead, the policy process was aimed at resolving issues such as coalition feuds, party leadership battles, spending cuts, and riots in India. Considering detailed analysis of four major policy-making episodes between 1920 and 1948, Unexpected State interrogates key Israeli and Palestinian narratives and provides fresh insight into the motives and decisions behind policies that would have global implications for decades to come.

1A Usable Past

History Is Not Neutral

All histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are contentious, not just because they cover sensitive issues but because they have become weaponized in the service of contemporary political aims. These historical narratives are not “true” in the neutral sense but, instead, provide a version of the past that helps define a community and hold it together. Historians are intrinsically aware that these stories are biased, selective, and tailored to the community’s needs, creating “a usable past.”¹ Unfortunately, this perpetual reinforcement of different versions of the same history tends to promote conflict. The dueling stories perpetuate a sense of danger, victimhood, and blame while justifying a continuation of hostilities and rationalizing the use of illegal or unethical tactics.² An awareness of this unhelpful cycle burdens historians with a moral obligation to dissect those versions of the past that promote conflict and preclude compromise.³

Although neither Israeli nor Palestinian public opinion is monolithic, it is accurate to describe a dominant narrative valuable to each nation. Consequently, it is possible to grasp how a lack of scholarship investigating British intents and motives during the Mandate period has helped fuel myths of Israeli (or, in this instance, pre-state Zionist) power versus Palestinian Arab helplessness—ideas that reinforce the larger, conflict-promoting narratives.

Since the state’s creation in 1948, Israel’s traditional historical narrative has been constructed as a celebration of triumph against overwhelming odds. The events preceding Israel’s independence were, naturally, interpreted in light of this heroic image. Stories of Britain’s Mandate in Palestine were dominated by somewhat contradictory claims of Zionist influence in the halls of Westminster and accusations of British negligence and betrayal. The construction of a colossal enemy was also necessary to paint the Israel Defense Forces as a moral military. Although Zionist militias fought British and then Arab troops after World War II, their status as the forerunner to Israel’s Defense Forces was based on the idea of reluctance, the result of internal and external aggression forcing war upon the proto-Israeli community.

Israel’s traditional narrative, for example, blames Arab leaders for the Palestinian refugee crisis, for commanding villagers to flee and then refusing to accept partition or coexistence. This moment of “birth” left Israel surrounded by purported enemies and subject to Palestinian terrorism, despite an alleged willingness to pursue peace if only their adversaries would do the same. This romantic image, of David facing Goliath, has also been adopted by Israel’s supporters around the globe. In the United States, for example, features of the unrevised, unfiltered Zionist histories are repeated through news broadcasting, school textbooks, church teachings, and general discourse.⁴ Although it seems absurd in many respects, the old myth that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land” still persists under these conditions.⁵

Understandably, early histories of the Mandate followed a similar ethos. These books were chiefly about the struggles and successes of Zionist, eastern European elites. Interestingly, these histories seem to have gone hand in hand with the years of Labor Party dominance in Israel—celebrating the values of socialism and democracy. Examples include Koestler’s Promise and Fulfilment and Kimche’s Both Sides of the Hill.⁶ Ultimately, these works portrayed Zionism as a national liberation ideology. Within this context, the complexities of British politics and individual politicians’ roles, motives, and frustrations when dealing with the question of Palestine were largely immaterial. History had simply become “proof of the legitimacy, morality, and exclusivity of the Jewish people’s right to the country, to the entire country.”⁷ Although the Israeli narrative has subsequently been punctured by a revisionist movement that gained momentum in the 1980s, Britain’s role in the history has remained relatively constant.

Mostly looking inward, scholars such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, and Avi Shlaim built on the earlier work of Simha Flapan and other critical writers to interrupt the accepted doctrine. Ostensibly, they focused on atrocities, falsehoods, general aggression, Israel’s culpability for the Palestinian refugee crisis, and Israeli belligerence that sabotaged tentative opportunities for peace. Ultimately, however, Israel’s “new” history did not shed its Zionist roots and represented an additional rather than a replacement paradigm, and the scholarship attracted a great deal of domestic criticism. Shabtai Teveth and Efraim Karsh were particularly vitriolic, with Karsh accusing the revisionists of falsifying evidence. As the dominant Israeli narrative had operated “invisibly and involuntarily,” research that challenged this widely accepted version of events felt subversive and aggressive.⁸

This is why it is crucial to note that the revisionist process did not occur in a disinterested vacuum. Collective memory had helped form an Israeli identity in the initial years of state formation, but the traditional narrative began to break down as the state became more secure. A groundbreaking triumph for the right-wing Likud Party in Israel’s 1977 elections caused further disintegration. This was because an inflammatory rivalry between electoral campaigns in the next election, in 1981, included intense “history wars.” A heated debate ensued about the nature of Likud leader Menachem Begin’s role in resisting British imperialism versus the alleged corruption among Labor Party members who had enjoyed decades of uninterrupted power.⁹ By contesting Israeli history between them, the two major political blocks exposed the traditional narrative’s arbitrary character and provided the catalyst for a new period of critical social thinking.¹⁰ Dealing with the controversies of 1948 seemed pertinent under these political conditions, but a revised history of British policy during the Mandate has never felt urgent or necessary, in the same way, for Israeli politics. Interestingly, the same is true for Palestinian or Arab narratives, leading to curious agreement on points of history involving Britain that have somewhat escaped scholarly attention.

In contrast to the dominant Israeli history, Arab and Palestinian perspectives have never presented a singular narrative. Like the Israeli version, they veer between celebrating perceived victories and lamenting the weaknesses imposed by an outside power. Although they tend to agree on basic principles, a great deal of the narrative has always been internally disputed.¹¹ Wider Arab and Palestinian narratives are joined in blaming Great Britain and the United States for establishing a Jewish state in the predominantly Arab Middle East and united in condemning the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs to create a Jewish state. All versions of the Arab narrative reject Israel’s assertion that Palestinian villagers took voluntary flight in 1948, but details of the history change from state to state, between classes (populist vs. elite), and depending on how critical they are of civilian as opposed to military leaders, among many other details.¹² Wider Arab historiography, for example, has celebrated Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian fighters in the war of 1948 but simultaneously portrays the Palestinians as weak and ineffectual.¹³

In the specifically Palestinian context, collective memory celebrates figures such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian-born Islamic preacher and fighter who was killed in a firefight with British Mandate police in 1935. Al-Qassam’s death is remembered as a key moment that sparked the general strike and uprising beginning in 1936; his memory was used during the First Intifada, which began in 1987, to rally Palestinians as “people of martyrs, grandsons of al-Qassam,” and, of course, al-Qassam also lends his name to the military brigades of Hamas today.¹⁴ However, the memory of al-Qassam and the celebration of many subsequent Palestinian martyrs exist in parallel with a more dominant narrative of collective helplessness. This is embodied in the memory of Deir Yassin. Although a massacre took place at this village, there was also a pitched battle in which Palestinian fighters resisted a stronger Israeli force for eight hours, a factor conveniently thrown aside in favor of the powerlessness motif.¹⁵ As Saleh Abdel Jawad notes, “[. . .] Palestine was seen as a weak, unprepared society overwhelmed by a stronger and more organized force [. . .]” and even Palestinians tend to favor explanations of the Nakba that blame external factors, like British deceit and Arab disunity.¹⁶

A good example of this enduring attachment to the idea of Palestinian helplessness is Al Jazeera’s 2008 documentary Al-Nakba in which an entire hour-long episode is devoted to the Palestinian Arab uprising of 1936–1939, in which not a single victory—military or otherwise—is mentioned. As “[r]esistance is fundamental to the new Palestinian narrative,” it seems incongruous that Palestinian resistance to the British in the 1930s is still portrayed solely in terms of victimization.¹⁷ Even in a British-made fictional television show such as The Promise, Palestinian Arabs lack agency and are helpless in the face of both British troops and Zionist paramilitary fighters. Palestinian helplessness, then, is a paradigm that is also paradoxically repeated and reconstructed by outside observers wishing to support the community and further its interests, even when that narrative is unnecessarily self-defeatist.

There are, of course, exceptions to the widespread characterization of Palestinians as helpless and/or victimized. Rashid Khalidi’s work provides a pertinent example of “new” Palestinian history. He details the shortcomings of Palestinian Arab leadership during the Mandatory period, blaming catastrophes in both the 1930s and the 1940s on its failure “to agree on appropriate strategies, to mobilize and organize the populace effectively, to create an accepted and recognized representative national quasi-state forum [. . .], and to break decisively with the structures of colonial control.”¹⁸

Likewise, overall approaches to studying the Mandate have shifted to recognize how the Arab community in Palestine was sidelined in overly Zionist-oriented histories of the era. The “new” historians ostensibly challenged the traditional Israeli narrative, but their intellectual freedom to do so was largely hampered by a preexisting Zionist-centric attitude that left the Palestinians as observers rather than participants in their own history.¹⁹ Works that redress this imbalance include Hadawi’s Palestine: Loss of a Heritage, his Bitter Harvest, and Walid Khalidi’s From Haven to Conquest.²⁰ As these newer histories were based largely on oral testimonies—since many archives remain closed in Israel—“it was the voices of the dispossessed who were now to be heard [. . .].”²¹

In terms of the Mandate, these “new narratives asserted a benign rather than conspiratorially hostile Britain.”²² However, this characterization appears to have been chiefly a reaction against the Israeli narrative of Britain’s compliance and then betrayal. Recasting the empire from a lead role to a background player has not altered the victimization narrative. Therefore, although scholars such as Nicholas Roberts and Zeina Ghandour²³ have leveled criticism at Mandate history texts for ignoring or misrepresenting the less powerful sid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Usable Past
• 2. The Balfour Zeitgeist, 1917–1928
• 3. The Passfield Reversal, 1929–1935
• 4. The MacDonald Betrayal, 1936–1939
• 5. From War to Withdrawal, 1940–1948
• The Last Word
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author