Parallel lies – British duplicity in Palestine and Ireland

Book Review

'Policy of Deceit – Britain and Palestine 1914-1939'

By Peter Shambrook 

As I write, the Israeli army is using Irish United Nations peacekeepers in Southern Lebanon as human shields. The Israelis are again invading Lebanon and killing its citizens. And in the past year Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble and continues to carry on a genocide that so far has taken the lives of over 40,000 Palestinians. 

The Israeli terror state from its beginning has been sustained by successive US governments, who have nurtured it as a key ally of the American empire. But it was the British Empire which handed Palestine over to Zionism in the first place and this timely book examines how the deed was done by deliberately deceiving the Arabs of the Middle East and then lying about it for decades. 

For over a century the Palestinian people have known the oppression and treachery of empires. When the Turkish Empire joined Germany and Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War, the British saw their opportunity to expand in the Middle East from their base in Egypt. 

Henry McMahon was the British High Commissioner in Egypt 1915-17. Although he was descended from a Gaelic clan and his great-grandfather was a United Irishman from County Down, McMahon's family had for long been on the side of the empire and he rose to the top in the British Raj in India. As the British fought the Germans for world domination, McMahon's new Middle East post became a crucial theater of war. It was there that they perfected the policy of deception which gives this book its title. 

The British saw that the Arabs could be useful in the war against the Turks and so McMahon wrote to Sharif Hussein of Mecca, a religious and political leader for Arabs and Muslims, to enlist his support. In return for leading an armed uprising against the Turks, the Arabs were promised a new independent state which would include Palestine. The British would later deny that Palestine was included in this pledge and much of the book is concerned with discrediting that denial which it does comprehensively. In fact, the most damning indictment of the British claim was the refusal of successive British governments to publish the McMahon-Hussein correspondence because, by their own secret admission, it supported the Arab claims and its revelation would be a huge embarrassment to the British government . 

• The British and French carve-up of the Middle East, 1922 

By the time the correspondence was finally revealed it was too late to make any difference because by then the British policy of deception had long done its work. While promising the Arabs an independent state, the British were also promising the Zionists a homeland in Palestine, a promise that they did keep. The British occupied Palestine after the war and facilitated Zionist immigration and dispossession of the Palestinians. This was part of a much bigger carve-up. Under an agreement with the French Empire, the British got Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, while the French got Syria and Lebanon. 

It is essential to understand this imperialist background if we want to fully understand the conflict in the Middle East today. Israel exists because British imperialism saw Zionists as useful allies in the region and there was a racist basis to this. 

While anti-semitism was rife in the West, many also saw Jews as superior to Arabs and bringing 'Western civilization' to the region. Arthur Balfour, in whose name the British promise to the Zionists was made, said he was "quite unable to see why Heaven or any other Power should object to us telling the Muslim what he ought to think". Lloyd George went further. He described "the Jews virile, brave, determined, intelligent; the Arabs decadent, dishonest and producing little beyond eccentrics, influenced by the romance and silence of the desert". Winston Churchill was also deeply racist. Former Cabinet Minister Malcom McDonald recalled: "He [Churchill] told me I was crazy to help the Arabs, because they were a backward people who ate nothing but camel dung." There are echoes of this racism in the Netanyahu regime today. 

Both Lloyd George and Churchill were key practitioners of the policy of deception in the Middle East in the early '20s. At the very same time they were following a similar policy in Ireland. The Treaty and Partition were accompanied by both deception and violence. The British repeatedly made contradictory commitments to nationalists and unionists, the crowning deception being Article 12 of the Treaty. Lloyd George convinced Collins and Griffith that it would establish a Boundary Commission that would make Irish unity inevitable; Churchill assured the Unionists that what they had they would hold. Palestine and Ireland – parallel lies.