By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The post-WWII new order part two

The new United Nations Special Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories and a Trusteeship Council consisted of eight trustees, but a further eight were chosen from among the states. The Special Committee became a battleground between the colonizers and their critics since many of the members came from territories recently independent. The British and French refused to supply information in the mandatory annual report, arguing that they were internal affairs not subject to interference. Still, it was passed asking the trustees to submit additional information on human rights. The imperial powers now found themselves subject to scrutiny on the way they treated African peoples, a factor that contributed to the final scramble in the late 1950s and early 1960s to abandon the colonial model.1

 

Even under scrutiny, political repression was possible in the Trust Territories. In French Cameroon, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon, the independence movement founded in 1948 on the basis that self-determination was now a legal human right, was pursued relentlessly by the French colonial administration and in 1955 was banned as a communist organization, the first political party proscribed in a trust territory. The movement’s leaders fled to the neighboring Trust Territory of British Cameroon, where the French hunted down and assassinated the party’s president. The British followed suit in banning the party in June 1957 and deported the party’s leaders to Sudan. The New York human rights watchdog, the International League of the Rights of Man, calculated that France and Britain had violated at least five of the UN Declaration on Human Rights principal articles. In 1956 alone, there were 45,000 petitions concerning human rights abuse sent to the United Nations from Cameroon.2

 

Away from the scrutiny of the trusteeship committee, colonial governance could be as harsh as it was in South East Asia. In Kenya, a rebellion by elements of the Kikuyu people against loss of land and exploitation by the white settler community prompted another state of emergency, declared in October 1952. The ‘Mau Mau’ (literally ‘greedy eaters’ of traditional tribal authority) organized a Land Freedom Army, some of whose leaders had fought with the British against the Japanese in Burma. ‘We could no longer accept,’ claimed one, ‘the belief that a mzungu [European] was better than an African.’ 3 They settled scores with white farmers and their families through random killings by groups armed with a mix of modern and traditional weapons.4 The reaction of the authorities to the rebellion was the most extreme of all Britain’s counter-insurgencies. The Kikuyu were blamed indiscriminately for the violence, even though some served in a local ‘Home Guard’ in support of the colonial regime, responsible for much of the violence unleashed on the rebels in yet another example of colonial civil war.5 As in Malaya, a ‘New Village’ system was enforced, and 1 million Kikuyu were forced to inhabit them; detention centers were set up in remote areas where at the peak there were 70,000 detainees, subject to debilitating labor and regular violence, chiefly imposed by other Kenyans working for the colonial authorities.6

 

Over 1,000 Mau Mau leaders were hanged, and 11,503 (the official figure) killed in free-fire zones and security sweeps. The detainees were officially screened to extract confessions from those who had taken the Mau Mau oath, but screening involved routine torture, routines, threats, beatings, hanging upside down. The authorities turned a blind eye until news of the beating to death of eleven detainees at Hola Camp – notorious for years of abuse – in 1959 finally reached the public.7 After years of repression, the rebel Kikuyu had been bludgeoned into submission, and moderate nationalists led by Jomo Kenyatta bargained with the government, promising to respect the rights of white settlers in return for independence, granted in 1963. By this stage, the British and French governments realized that independence could no longer be reasonably denied, and twenty-three African states became independent between 1959 and 1961. 

 

The one exception provided the most violent drama of the end of the empire. French governments in the 1950s had moved from the idea of French Union to a French Community of former colonies, which would collaborate as nominally independent states while keeping close links with France, and it was this structure, following local referenda, that allowed almost all French African colonies to achieve independence by 1962. Algeria in North Africa was the exception. It was not a colony, even if its Arab and Berber populations were treated as if it were, but an integral part of France, divided into administrative departments, with a largely French settler electorate. During the war, Algeria had remained loyal to the Vichy regime until Allied occupation in November 1942, when thousands of Algerians were mobilized to join the Free French armies. In 1945, on the day Victory in Europe was celebrated, a violent clash between French settlers (the pieds noirs – ‘black feet,’ so-called because of European shoes) and Arab protesters at Sétif resulted in the deaths of around 3,000 Algerian rebels in the repression that followed and marked the onset of the long struggle for Algerian independence that did not end until 1962.8 

 

Because Paris politicians regarded Algeria as part of France, Algerian nationalism was regarded as a pro, even though Algeria’s indigenous society was far removed from the reality of metropolitan France. When Jacques Soustelle was appointed governor-general of Algeria in January 1955, he announced that Algeria and France were indivisible: ‘France will not leave Algeria any more than she will leave Provence and Brittany.’ 9 A few months before, a National Liberation Front (FLN), some of its leader’s veterans of the Sétif rising and long spells in prison, began a campaign of sporadic terrorist violence against the administration, settlers, and Algerian’ collaborators’. The French responded with a renewed wave of violent repression, urged on, as in Kenya, by a large settler community that wanted effective protection. This was the onset of a familiar counter-insurgency, with arbitrary detention, free-fire zones, the regular killing of unarmed suspects, and the routine torture of guerrillas and their alleged accomplices. The effect proved counterproductive; FLN forces grew in number and capability, forcing local communities to assist them and placing them in the firing line between both sides. By 1956, there were 450,000 French troops in Algeria, most of them conscripts. The response scale can be measured by the final tally of 2.5 million French soldiers serving at some time in the Algerian war. Of these, over 18,000 were killed. The number of Algerian dead has been calculated as half a million through war, revenge killings, famine, and disease.10

 

Algerian society was devastated by the decision to mimic the resettlement schemes in South East Asia. Under the direction of Maurice Papon, responsible during the war for sending French Jews to their death, the regime inaugurated a program to isolate the rebels from the broader population by a policy that forced resettlement into crude modern villages that destroyed traditional village or nomadic life. Around these villages, scorched-earth policies were pursued, with free fire zones for anyone foolish enough to trespass into them. By 1961 there were 2,380 regroupement centers. Official figures suggested that 1.9 million had been moved, but more recent estimates indicate 2.3 million, or a third of the rural population. Some 400,000 nomads from the Saharan fringes were moved and lost 90 percent of their livestock. The massive dislocation undermined Algerian agriculture: wheat and barley crops declined by three-quarters between 1954 and 1960, exposing thousands to the threat of famine. 

 

20 September 2021 France’s President Emmanuel Macron has apologized to Algerians who fought alongside French colonial forces in Algeria’s war for independence and were then massacred and ostracised as traitors.

 

Pursued by the French army, 60,000 Harkis (Algerian militia working for the French), and settler vigilantes, the guerrilla units were halved by 1959.12 Still, by then, the intractable and costly nature of the counter-insurgency had led to the fall of the French Fourth Republic and the recall of the wartime leader, Charles de Gaulle. He understood that the French public had had enough of an unwinnable colonial war that now pointlessly defied the wave of decolonization. On 16 September 1959, he announced that he would seek a ceasefire, authorize an amnesty, call elections and begin the move to self-determination. Bitter opposition from the settler community peaked in a wave of violence and a failed coup in 1960–61 launched by generals who supported the vicious counterguerrilla campaign of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS). In July 1962 Algeria became independent under the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella, a veteran of the wartime Italian campaign, decorated for his role at the Battle of Monte Cassino. 

 

Like the end of the Axis empire, the old empires’ drawn-out collapse provoked a further wave of resettlement as British, French, Dutch, and Belgian colonists, officials, and police sought a new home. The pieds noirs left Algeria, 1.38 million to settle in France, 50,000 in Spain, 300,000 Dutch left Indonesia; and 90,000 Belgians abandoned the Belgian Congo when independence was finally granted in 1960. Estimates suggest that between 5.4 and 6.8 million people from the former empire territories returned to Europe following the war and its long, violent aftermath. For the colonized, the last fling of empire produced high levels of death in all the insurgent areas, a result of war, inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict, hunger, and disease – perhaps as many as 1 million from Indonesia to Algeria, though most statistics remain speculative. In addition, forced labor, detention without trial, compulsory resettlement, exile, and deportation all dislocated local communities and permitted routine abuse of power on an unprecedented scale. These were the West’s first ‘wars on terror,’ and they violated not only the UN Declaration on Human Rights but the Nuremberg principles approved after the trial of the major german war criminals. The abuses generally went unpunished and unpublicized. The colonial ‘wars after the war’ provided a messy and violent coda to the era of new territorial imperialism that began in the 1870s, peaked in the 1940s and collapsed by the 1960s.

 

 

The end of empire in Asia and Africa transformed the United Nations

 

The end of empire in Asia and Africa transformed the nature of the United Nations. ‘Nation’ had been the defining term for Roosevelt and Churchill when the United Nations front was set up in 1942, even though Britain and France were empires. Neither leader thought very much beyond the established nations of Europe and the New World, but within two decades, decolonization gave the organization an overwhelming majority from the ‘Third World’ of independent states in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Even though the frontiers of the imperial world had been drawn up with little regard for cultural or ethnic differences, most of the independence movements after 1945 were forced to work with boundaries set by the colonial powers. Ideas of federation or community that transcended the straitjacket of nationhood, popular particularly in Francophone Africa, failed in the end to undermine the seductive appeal of national identity.13 At the founding conference there had been fifty-one nations represented. The test of inclusion was a declaration of war against the Axis states no later than 8 March 1945. After much argument between the Allies, Ukraine, and Belorussia, which were not strictly nations, those present included India, which was not yet independent, and Poland, whose admission was a bone of Cold War contention despite its status as the first to fight. By 1955 and the time of the Bandung Conference there were seven,ty-six states, including the former Axis states of Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Italy. By the time Algeria and Kenya had been granted independence in 1962 and 1963, there were 112, including all the major colonial territories except for Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, finally independent in 1975 and 1976, respectively. Japan was admitted in 1956, the two German states only in 1973. The United Nations Organization, for all the criticism then and now of its capacity to ensure peace and promote human rights, symbolized in a very palpable form the shift from a world of global empires to a world of nation-states.

 

Among the world of sovereign nations at the founding meeting in San Francisco in 1945 were the states of the Middle East: Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. Their presence masked a different reality, for all of them in 1945 were occupied by British Empire forces and officials, a wartime outcome that effectively compromised their sovereignty; the Soviet Union still occupied one-half of Iran under the terms of the agreement reached in autumn 1941. During the war, securing the region had been a central priority in British grand strategy and the nominal independence of all five states had been trampled over by British forces. In addition, Palestine and Transjordan were still held as Mandated Territories of the League of Nations, a status that temporarily survived the founding of the United Nations. It was nevertheless evident in 1945 that the pre-war domination by Britain and France could no longer be sustained. Syria and Lebanon had declared their independence after the Vichy French were defeated by British forces in 1941, and in 1944 both states were recognized by the Soviet Union and the United States. The Free French under de Gaulle hoped to restore the French position in Syria when the war ended and in late May 1945, the local French garrison began a bombardment of central Damascus, in retaliation against anti-colonial demonstrations, only to be halted by the British army, whose commander declared martial law and confined the French troops to barracks. Neither the British nor the Americans had any desire to be re-established in the Middle East and were happy to endorse independence. On 21 June 1945, the Syrian and Lebanese governments joined forces in rejecting any French claim to residual authority in the Mandates, and independence was assured. The last Allied troops left in summer 1946.14 The British League Mandate in Transjordan was also quickly terminated after agreement with King Abdullah that Britain would continue to enjoy the right to base troops there and might even support the king’s private ambition to create a ‘Greater Syria’ out of the adjoining territory until the American State Department rejected any prospect of Jordanian expansion. Transjordan became an independent state in March 1946. Still, because it remained closely tied to British interests, the United States and the Soviet Union did not recognize the new state until 1949, when Jordan, as it was now called, took its place in the United Nations.15 

 

Once France was expelled from the region, Britain’s principal concerns in the Middle East reflected wartime priorities: to prevent Soviet infiltration into the region, to protect British oil interests in Iraq and Iran, and to maintain a strategic grip on the Suez Canal as the route to the eastern empire. The situation appeared most dangerous in Iran, where fear of the Soviet presence and the threat to Iranian oil supplies were closely linked. The wartime agreement stipulated that British and Soviet forces would leave Iran six months after the end of the war. The British pulled out in March 1946, but the Soviet forces remained. The Soviet government tried to pressure the Iranian government, now led by the nationalist Ahmad Qavam, to grant an oil concession in the north of the country and backed the efforts of the Azerbaijani population in the north to set up an autonomous zone. In May 1946 Soviet forces withdrew on the assumption that Qavam had agreed to a treaty accepting the Soviet demands but under strong. Still, under British pressure, the Iranian government rejected the treaty. Once again Stalin backed down because he wanted to avoid a conflict while preoccupied with the political reconstruction of Eastern Europe.16 The communist threat remained, however, with t the Tudeh (Masses) Party and a wave of strikes and popular protests. The British Foreign Office and the local officials from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company launched an anti-communist propaganda campaign, bribing officials and newspaper editors, and when a major strike, prompted by Tudeh, hit the Abadan oilfield in July 1946, Bevin ordered troops to the British Iraqi base at Basra as a threat. The strike evaporated, but the following month Qavam rejected further foreign interference in Iranian affairs.17 Three years later, in March 1951, the new prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, won the support of the Iranian parliament to nationalize British oil holdings. Herbert Morrison, the new British foreign minister following Bevin’s death, wanted to send 70,000 troops to protect British interests, but the United States urged caution – ‘sheer madness’ according to Secretary of State Dean Acheson – and in October 1951, the British were expelled from Iran. ‘Their prestige in the Middle East,’ ran an Egyptian newspaper report, ‘is finished.’ 18 The judgment was premature. In 1953, the British secret service, working closely with the American CIA, prompted a coup in Tehran to overthrow Mosaddeq’s regime. Oil continued to flow to British and American companies in Iran until the Islamic revolution in 1979.19

 

Iraq was also in the front line for British hopes to contain the Soviet threat by maintaining air bases there for possible operations against Soviet targets. Iraq, although nominally independent, had been run as if it were a mandate from the suppression of the revolt in 1941 to the end of the war. Client politicians accepted the British presence, which remained in place after the war ended with the restoration of Iraqi independence, at least in the name. Iraq was a prime example of Bevin’s ambition to create ‘empire by treaty in the Middle East. Although British administrators and most British Empire forces left Iraq by 1947, a new treaty to supplant the 1930 treaty of independence was negotiated aboard HMS Victory in Portsmouth harbor, a symbolic imperial setting. The Treaty of Portsmouth (not to be confused with the treaty of 1906 signed at Portsmouth, Maine, to end the Russo-Japanese war) was agreed in January 1948, giving Britain continued military concessions in Iraq. But the British here, as elsewhere, had underestimated the strength of anti-imperial sentiment. Following widespread anti-British rioting, the Iraqi regent, Abd al-Ilah, rejected the treaty, and British interests in the country dwindled. In 1948 Iraq left the sterling currency bloc, and four years later negotiated a deal to take half the oil revenues from the British oil concession. In 1955 the two British airbases, from which putative bombing raids were to be mounted against the Soviet threat, were handed over to Iraqi control, and in 1958 an army coup finally ended what was left of the residual British connection.20 

 

Nothing mattered more for the British than retaining a presence astride the Suez Canal, which they had defended stoutly throughout the early years of the war. The chiefs of staff saw the canal as an essential artery linking Britain with the Asian empire and continued to do so even after India and Pakistan had become independent on the grounds that combating communism required bases from which to project air and ground forces against possible Soviet threats. The obsession with a military presence placed a premium on reaching an agreement with the Egyptian government and, above all, stabilizing the British Mandate in Palestine after years of argument about the future of the Arab and Jewish populations. Relations with the Egyptian king and government had been poor during the war and deteriorated as the United States replaced Britain as a major source of investment and commercial assistance.21 King Farouk wanted an end to the 1936 mutual defense treaty, which had allowed British Empire forces to campaign on Egyptian soil throughout the war. In 1945 the British-controlled Suez Canal Zone was the largest military base globally, with ten airfields, 34 army camps, and 200,000 troops.22 The numbers did decline with demobilization, and in 1946 British Empire forces left the rest of Egyptian territory, leaving only the Canal Zone under occupation. But the Egyptian government insisted on complete evacuation and abrogated the 1936 treaty of mutual defense, prompting an expansion of British forces once again at Suez to 84,000. The area became difficult to defend against persistent attacks by Egyptian irregulars, including the Muslim Brotherhood, while the viole. At the same time,after-attacks by British forces that these incursions provoked were strongly condemned by the United States.

After Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in an army coup, Britain continued to negotiate to retain its presence in the country to avoid what Churchill, now prime minister again, called ’a prolonged humiliating scuttle before all the world’.23 He nevertheless agreed two years later to terminate the Canal base and British forces left in October 1955. This was not the end of the story. In July 1956, under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting the last fling of Anglo-French imperialism in the Middle East. The decision to seize the Canal Zone by force in co-operation with the Israeli government was a disaster.

 

War began on 24 October, but by 6 November universal pressure, both from domestic opinion and from the United Nations, forced a ceasefire and withdrawal.24 The Commonwealth threatened to collapse as the former dominions condemned British action – ‘like finding a beloved uncle arrested for rape,’ complained Canada’s prime minister.25 The Suez crisis was the end of the British effort to remain a significant Middle Eastern player and the last feeble fling of an older imperial tradition. Given the problems in occupying Egypt, the British government had sought from 1945 to exploit the Palestine Mandate as an alternative strategic base and one that would be under direct British control rather than reliant on a treaty. This was in reality a strategic fantasy. Palestine was the site of a prolonged military crisis from 1945 with the end of the war and a resumption of the popular demand from the Arab population for an independent Arab Palestine, alongside Jewish hopes to turn their presence in the Jewish homeland into a national Jewish state. The issue of what to do with Palestine had been postponed until the end of hostilities. The British preference was to avoid doing anything that would alienate Arab opinion. The continued British presence in the Middle East would rely on, and that meant making no concession to Jewish demands for a state. The policy was still governed by the White Paper of May 1939, restricting Jewish immigration into Palestine and denying the right to Jewish autonomy. Nonetheless, during the war, the Jewish Agency as representative of approximately 650,000 Jews living in the Mandate, prepared for the possibility of statehood. ‘The Jews should act as if they were the state in Palestine,’ declared the Agency head, David Ben-Gurion, ‘and should so continue to act until there is a Jewish state there.’ 26 The Agency had a Jewish ‘parliament,’ an executive, and the illegal Haganah, a paramilitary force with the potential to mobilize at least 40,000 fighters. In May 1942, Zionists meeting at a hotel in New York drew up the ‘Biltmore Declaration,’ calling to create a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine and Jewish control of immigration. American support came from the numerous Jewish Americans who provided generous funding for the Agency and the American leadership. In October 1944, Roosevelt called for ‘the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration,’ a policy that the British opposed emphatically then and in the immediate post-war years.27

 

The radical wing of the Jewish nationalist movement came to see the British as a greater enemy to Jewish statehood than the Germans. During the war, the Lohamei Herut Israel (better known as the Stern gang after their leader, Abraham Stern) and the Irgun Zvai Leumi (led, among others, by Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister), began a terrorist campaign against British targets. Haganah publicly opposed the violence, but in private supported the aim of the terrorists. In November 1944, Lord Moyne, deputy minister of state in Egypt, was assassinated by members of Lohamei Herut Israel, and even Churchill, who had supported the Zionist cause, was shocked into reconsidering his loyalty ‘maintained so consistently in the past.’ 28

 

British sympathies lay more generally with the Arab cause. In March 1945, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia founded the Arab League, one of whose priorities were to campaign for genuine sovereignty for all Arab states, including a future Palestine.29 After Britain permitted political parties again in the Mandate, six Arab organizations emerged, the most significant among them the Palestine Arab Party, led by Jamal al-Husayni, which demanded the maximum – an independent Arab Palestine. In the months after the end of the war, with British approval, small groups of Arab al-Najjda (literally ‘ready for succor’) militants emerged under the guise of a network of sports clubs, which were actually units for paramilitary training against the coming crisis. In February 1946 the Arab League encouraged the Palestinian nationalists to work together under a Higher Committee, then under an Arab Higher Executive, led by Grand Mufti Amin al-Husayni. Other paramilitary units emerged, including the Army of Sacred Jihad and the Rescue Army based in Syria and composed chiefly of exiled Palestinians and Syrian volunteers. Each force was dedicated to eradicating the threat of a Jewish state with violence each too poorly trained and armed for serious conflict.30 Faced with incipient civil war, the British government reacted by stationing 100,000 troops in Palestine, supported by 20,000 armed police. So dangerous did it become for British service personnel to appear in the streets that their bases were nicknamed ‘Bevingrads’ in honor of the man who had sent them there. 

 

Montgomery, chief of the imperial general staff, insisted with an impolitic directness that the Jews’ must be utterly defeated and their illegal organizations smashed forever’.31 By the summer of 1946, British agents had linked the Jewish Agency directly with the terrorist campaign and on 29 June the army of occupation launched Operation’ Agatha’, raiding the Agency headquarters and arresting 2,700 suspects. British soldiers carrying out the raid, frustrated by the terrorism, chanted ‘what we need are gas chambers’ and scrawled ‘death to the Jews’ on raided buildings. In reaction, Begin ordered the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was blown up on 22 July, resulting in the deaths of ninety-one people trapped inside, twenty-eight of them British. The bombing was a turning point, alienating the British public from the cost and sacrifice of occupation and leaving the British forces stationed in Palestine with the prospect of conducting a harsh counter-insurgency operation in the full glare of public scrutiny. When a few months later martial law was proclaimed, it was suspended after two weeks because of the political risks involved. 

 

This did not prevent the British authorities from ruthless action in trying to prevent illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine to circumvent the rigid restrictions still in place. Ships, including the Ben Hecht, paid for with Zionist donations in the United States, were intercepted illegally outside Palestinian territorial waters. The crews were imprisoned and the refugees were sent to camps in Cyprus. Secret instructions from Bevin, appropriately codenamed Operation ‘Embarrass’, allowed British agents to sabotage ships in port in Europe for the transport of Jewish refugees, including the contamination of food and water supplies, and the use of limpet mines. Most famously the Exodus 1947, packed with refugees chosen for their vulnerability – the elderly, pregnant women, children – was rammed and damaged by two British destroyers (after narrowly escaping a plan to mine it). It was towed into port in Palestine, where the passengers were forced to disembark, re-embarked on three deportation ships, and sent on to Hamburg, to be greeted by British police and soldiers armed with hoses, teargas, and truncheons employed to force the exhausted and debilitated Jews off the boat and back into camps in Germany.32 The result was a public relations disaster. ‘The plain truth to which we so firmly shut our eyes,’ wrote an official at the Colonial Office, ‘is that in this emergency Detention business we are taking a leaf out of the Nazi book …’33 

 

The immigration issue became central to the final collapse of British responsibility for the Mandate. It divided American from British responses to the crisis in Palestine and damaged Britain’s international reputation. Initially, there were only some 27,000 Jewish Displaced Persons in the western zones of Germany and Austria in summer 1945, but they were soon supplemented by a flow of Jews from Eastern Europe sent by the Polish and Soviet governments as ‘unrepatriable’, ostensibly on humanitarian grounds but in truth to export the Jews in order to avoid the problems of integration in a climate of post-war anti-Semitism. By summer 1946 there were an estimated 250,000 Jewish DPs, most of them in the more sympathetic environment of American camps. Among the camp population, there was an overwhelming desire to emigrate to the British Mandated Territory. UNRRA circulated a questionnaire among 19,000 Jewish DPs to determine their stated preference for a new home, and 18,700 wrote Palestine. ‘We have worked and struggled too long on the lands of other peoples,’ an elderly Jew explained in 1945. ‘We must build a land of our own.’34 

 

President Truman sent Earl G. Harrison, a delegate on the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, to investigate the Jewish plight in Europe. His report was a devastating indictment of their condition and an unequivocal endorsement of their right to emigrate to Palestine. Truman asked Attlee to accept 100,000 immigrants, but the British government prevaricated. Bevin wanted to send just enough ‘to appease Jewish sentiment,’ but the entry of a vast number into Palestine would exacerbate the crisis and alienate Arab opinion.35 Although Truman’s initiative has been seen as a political gambit to mollify the large Jewish voting bloc in the United States and to avoid taking in large numbers of Jewish refugees, American opinion was generally critical of the British position and expected the British government to respond more fully and humanely to the Jewish desire to emigrate. Refugee organizations in Europe came to define the Jewish DPs first as stateless, then as a ‘non-territorial nation’, effectively granting national status. On 4 October 1946, Truman called for a ‘viable Jewish state’ to meet the Jewish demand for nationhood. For the British government the intractable conflict in Palestine, like the crisis in India, was impossible to resolve unilaterally. In February 1947, Bevin proposed a bi-national Palestine ruled by Britain as a trustee for at least five years, but it was already evident that neither side in the territory would accept this. The same month the British handed the problem to the United Nations to solve. ‘Nature may partition Palestine,’ was Bevin’s parting shot.36 

 

The UN Special Committee for Palestine concluded that partition into Jewish and Arab states was the only solution. Their report, strongly supported by the United States and the Soviet Union, was approved in a dramatic General Assembly vote on 29 November 1947 after applying strong pressure to ensure compliance from states in Latin America and Western Europe. The British abstained and refused to implement the partition terms drawn up by the Special Committee. Instead, the government announced that Britain would withdraw unilaterally from the Mandate on 15 May 1948 and the vast military presence in Palestine remained confined to barracks. The result was a civil war as Jews and Arabs began to fight over areas designated for one side or the other in a map drawn up by the Special Committee. The Rescue Army infiltrated Palestine from Syrian bases, accompanied by an assortment of Bosnian, German, British, and Turkish anti-Semitic volunteers. King Abdullah’s Arab Legion, trained by British officers, moved into the west bank area of the Jordan River to defend Jerusalem from Jewish attack. The Jewish Agency directed Haganah, now numbered between 35,000 and 40,000 armed men, including the 5,000 veterans of the wartime Jewish Brigade, to take the offensive. In a series of small but bloody battles, they took control of the partition areas and attacked Arab settlements in an effort to the territory.37 The Jewish forces were better armed, better disciplined, and better led than their Arab opponents. By the time Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel on 14 May, the day before the British withdrawal, the partition state was consolidated enough to begin operation at once. The Arab League then declared war to eliminate the newcomer, but the Arab armies were too poorly resourced and failed to cooperate. Temporary truces were imposed by the United Nations but largely ignored. By 1949 there were 650,000 Palestinian Arab refugees, more than half the Arab population. A separate Arab state failed to materialize; Jordan took over the West Bank, where most Palestinian refugees had fled, and Egypt, the Gaza strip. The United Nations finally brokered a series of armistice agreements in 1949, and on 11 May that year, Israel was admitted to the United Nations. Between 1948 and 1951, 331,594 European Jews emigrated to Israel.38 

 

 

1. Pearson, ‘Defending the empire’, 528–36; Meredith Terretta, ‘“We had been fooled into thinking that the UN watches over the entire world”: human rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s decolonisation’, Human Rights Quarterly, 34 (2012), 332–7. 

 

2. Terretta, ‘“We had been fooled into thinking …”’, 338–43. 

 

3. Daniel Branch, ‘The enemy within: loyalists and the war against Mau Mau in Kenya’, Journal of African History, 48 (2007), 298. 

 

4. Thomas, Fight or Flight, 218–19, 223–6. 

 

5. Branch, ‘The enemy within’, 293–4, 299. 

 

6. Timothy Parsons, The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md, 2014), 176–7. 

 

7. David Anderson, ‘British abuse and torture in Kenya’s counter-insurgency, 1952–1960’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23 (2012), 701–7; French, ‘Nasty not nice’, 752–6; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 232–3. 

 

8. Jean-Charles Jauffert, ‘The origins of the Algerian war: the reaction of France and its army to the two emergencies of 8 May 1945 and 1 November 1954’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21 (1993), 19–21. 

 

9. Thomas, Fight or Flight, 288. 92. Kennedy, Decolonization, 56–7. 

 

10. Kenedy, Decolonization, 56-7.

 

11. Keith Sutton, ‘Population resettlement – traumatic upheavals and the Algerian experience’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 15 (1977), 285–9. 

 

12. Thomas, Fight or Flight, 318–28. 

 

13. On France see Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa (Princeton, NJ, 2014), 5–9.

 

14. David Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958 (Oxford, 2006), 299–302, 326–7; Aiyaz Husain, Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 14–15, 135–42; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 68–70. 

 

15. Barr, Lords of the Desert, 94–6; Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism, 232–3. 

 

16. Edward Judge and John Langdon, The Struggle against Imperialism: Anticolonialism and the Cold War (Lanham, Md, 2018), 11–12. 

 

17. Alexander Shaw, ‘“Strong, united, and independent”: the British Foreign Office, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the internationalization of Iranian politics at the dawn of the Cold War, 1945–46’, Middle Eastern Studies, 52 (2016), 505–9, 516–17. 

 

18. Barr, Lords of the Desert, 126–30, 134–9. 

 

19. Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire (London, 2013), 288–92. 

 

20. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism, 107–11. 

 

21. Robert Vitalis, ‘The “New Deal” in Egypt: the rise of Anglo-American commercial competition in World War II and the fall of neocolonialism’, Diplomatic History, 20 (1996), 212–13, 234. 

 

22. Parsons, The Second British Empire, 124; John Kent, ‘The Egyptian base and the defence of the Middle East 1945–1954’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21 (1993), 45. 

 

23. Kent, ‘Egyptian base’, 53–60; Judge and Langdon, The Struggle against Imperialism, 78–9. 

 

24. Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France 1882–1956 (Oxford, 2017), 207–12, 215–27. 

 

25. Walton, Empire of Secrets, 298. 

 

26. Husain, Mapping the End of Empire, 29. 

 

27. Barr, Lords of the Desert, 24–8, 61; Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism, 184–5. 

 

28. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism, 205–6. 

 

29. Stefanie Wichhart, ‘The formation of the Arab League and the United Nations, 1944–5’, Journal of Contemporary History, 54 (2019), 329–31, 336–41. 

 

30. Eliezir Tauber, ‘The Arab military force in Palestine prior to the invasion of the Arab armies’, Middle Eastern Studies, 51 (2016), 951–2, 957–62.

 

31. Barr, Lords of the Desert, 73–4; Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism, 187–8. 

 

32. Barr, Lords of the Desert, 84–8; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 117. 

 

33. Walton, Empire of Secrets, 105–6. 

 

34. Wyman, DPs, 138–9, 155; Cohen, In War’s Wake, 131–40. 

 

35. Barr, Lords of the Desert, 63–4. 

 

36. Ibid., 88–90. 

 

37. Tauber, ‘The Arab military force in Palestine’, 966–77; James Bunyan, ‘To what extent did the Jewish Brigade contribute to the establishment of Israel?’, Middle Eastern Studies, 51 (2015), 40–41; Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism, 193–5. 

 

38. Wyman, DPs, 155. 

 

 

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