In Egypt before May 1948, the severities of economic repression and the ousting of people from hardly won positions and status in commerce and the professions were only theoretically mitigated for the Jewish community by the fact that in their early stage they were claimed to be directed against all foreigners and minorities. It was […]

On November 29, 1947-the day the United Nations Assembly decided to recommend the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state–there were no Arab refugees. The area allotted to the Jewish state was much smaller even than that established by the Armistice lines of 1949 (which lasted until June 5, 1967), to which […]

On November 29, 1947-the day the United Nations Assembly decided to recommend the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. There were no Arab refugees. The area allotted to the Jewish state was much smaller even than that established by the Armistice lines of 1949 (which lasted until June 5, 1967), to […]

The British government was privy to the Arab plans for invasion; and on every diplomatic front, and especially in the United Nations and in the United States, it pursued a vigorous campaign of pressure and obstruction to hinder and prevent help to the embattled Zionists and to achieve the abandonment of the plan to set […]

Early in the First World War, after the defeat at Gallipoli, a group of senior British officers serving in the countries on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire in Egypt and the Sudan conceived the idea of bringing the vast Arab-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire under British control after the war. In the words […]

The aid given to the Allied campaign against the Turks by the Arab Revolt was minor aind negligible; Lawrence himself in one of his outbursts of near penitence, once described it as "a sideshow of a sideshow." ‘Though the Sherif Hussein did send out his call for an Arab rising throughout the Ottoman Empire, in […]

In June 1918, an ingenious solution was accepted by the British government. Osmond Walrond, an intelligence officer attached to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, read out in that city a statement in which the British government officially pledged itself to recreate in the areas not yet conquered the "complete and sovereign independence of any Arab […]

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, providing for an international administration in Palestine, was the original reason for the exclusion of Palestine from the promises made to Hussein. But in 1917, the British government published the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. To achieve this promise of support in the restoration of […]

A dovetailed Middle East, with Arab client states and a Jewish client state coexisting and cooperating under a completely British umbrella, provided the motive power of official British policy in the period 1917-1920. On December 2, 1917, Lord Robert Cecil had said at a large public meeting in London: "The keynote of our meeting this […]

The elimination of eastern Palestine in 1921-1923 was only the first act — though stark, dramatic, and momentous — in a developing effort by the British to frustrate and emasculate the Jewish restoration that began in Palestine immediately after the British occupation. At first, British policy was confined to the military administration in Palestine itself […]