In weaving together the crucial elements in the history of Palestine — the Zionist pursuit of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs’ resentment at being displaced from their ancestral lands, and British frustration at the impossibility of implementing the terms of the Mandate — Durrell captured the ironies, injustices and ignominies of that history. The personal quests of Judith, for the fulfilment of her father’s scientific work, and of Grete, for her lost child (a feature also of Justine Hosnani in the Quartet) are set within the brutal period when the inevitability of British withdrawal from Palestine and the equally inevitable Arab — Israeli conflict not only brought to a head these three strands of history, but predicted and, indeed, precipitated the Middle East crisis which persists to this day. Given that the film of Judith (and the serialisation of the supposed excerpts from the filmscript) appeared in 1966, there is an uncanny prescience of the Six Day War that would erupt slightly more than a year later.
The role of Major Lawton in Judith and the episode in which Colonel Macdonald makes arms available to the kibbutz (‘A Gift for Ras Shamir’, pp. 261–263) highlight the ambivalence of both British policy and personal affiliations which runs throughout the period of the Mandate, and they also make clear the fact that the Mandate itself was based on what at best can be described as a misconception, and at worst as a series of deceits and betrayals. The founding document of the conflict was the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, a statement by the British Government that it supported ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, while also guaranteeing ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. One might therefore assume that Britain wished to see Jews and Arabs living in co-operation, harmony and mutual respect. There were, however, several other factors which not merely complicated the fulfilment of the project and flawed the ground of the Mandate, but actually created a situation impossible of resolution.
Not least of these was another document, secretly agreed upon between the British and French governments and known as the ‘Sykes — Picot Agreement’, which made similar promises to the Arabs in respect of the same land area. As a Royal Commission of inquiry into the Palestine situation reported in 1937:
Under the stress of World War the British Government made promises to Arabs and Jews in order to obtain their support. On the strength of those promises both parties formed certain expectations…An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.
21
George Antonius, the principal apologist for the Arab cause prior to the Second World War, referred to the Sykes — Picot Agreement as ‘a shocking document’:
It is not only the product of greed at its worst, that is to say, of greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity: it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing.
22
The Commission, whose report would be suspended until after the Second World War, recommended partition of the country, on which Antonius commented:
Forcible eviction [of settled Arabs] or subjection to a Jewish state…runs counter to the lessons of history, the requirements of geography, the natural play of economic forces, and the ordinary laws of human behaviour.
23
As I shall discuss below, it was an early example of ‘geopolitics’, but in this case, taken together with the Balfour Declaration, it meant that the British right hand was unaware of what its left-hand counterpart was trying to exploit.
At the same time, the fact that the Sykes — Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration were mutually exclusive points not only to a lack of foresight by the British (during a time of acute anxiety as far as the conduct of the world war was concerned) but also to a level of incompetence, if not of dishonesty. As Jonathan Schneer remarks, ‘the Balfour Declaration was the highly contingent product of a tortuous process characterized as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy’.24 As a Palestinian commentator has recently written: ‘on what basis did the British believe that they were entitled to promise to the Zionists land that belonged to others?’25
Even though the Balfour Declaration had avoided saying that Palestine would become the home of the Jews, but stated, rather, that a home would be established in Palestine, Balfour himself and Lloyd George (the prime minister at the time of the Declaration) told Winston Churchill (at that time Colonial Secretary) in 1921 that ‘by the Declaration they always meant an eventual Jewish State’.26 In the following year, a British White Paper aiming to clarify the situation stated that
When it is asked what is meant by the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole but the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.
27
Whether or not British policy — or lack of it — for the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was based on the strategies of war, on imperialist imperatives, or on a genuine sense of philanthropy, it is incontestable that British support was vital to the Zionist cause, and, as Sir Henry Gurney (the last Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government) put it, ‘The undertaking given by Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine represented the only attempt made by any nation in history to help the Jews’.28
The ambivalence and apparent lack of policy on the part of the British administration was due in part to the fact that many in the army were pro-Arab, despite acknowledging their admiration for Jewish endeavours and the fact that an Arab attack on Jewish settlements would most probably be overwhelming. At the same time, the Jewish Agency, set up in 1922 under the terms of the Mandate (and the organisation responsible for ‘springing’ ‘Judith Roth’ from Germany), had become ‘an undisguised alias for the Zionist Organization’,29 while ‘under the authority of the Jewish Agency, the Jewish community in Palestine had created its own virtual state within the superstructure of British administration’.30
This state-within-a-state, tolerated by the British, had an undercurrent of violence in its vigilance against Arab attack, but also in its own occasional attacks on British installations, including the bomb blast at the British headquarters, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed eighty officials. Under the aegis of the Zionist Organisation (forerunner of the Jewish Agency), a paramilitary defence organisation called the Haganah, was instituted in 1920, ‘because Britain failed to defend them [the Jews] effectively during the pogroms of that year’.31 In the 1930s, the Haganah ran parallel to two other armed groups, the Etzel (known by the British as ‘Irgun’), led by the future prime minister Menachem Begin, and Lechi, better known as the ‘Stern Gang’, led by Avraham Stern, composer of its anthem, ‘Anonymous Soldiers’. Another member of Irgun was yet another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who was one of those who sanctioned the assassination of Lord Moyne (the British minister of state in Cairo) in 1944.
That the British military turned its back on many instances of arms smuggling is indisputable; members of the armed forces may well have preferred the Arabs to the Jews (‘I wish the Arabs would come and wipe the whole lot out’ was the view of one soldier),32 but it was considered necessary for the Jews to be armed in preparation for the Arab onslaught that would follow British withdrawal. ‘Arms acquisitions, training and even manoeuvres had been winked at as long as they were reasonably discreet.’33 In 1937, Churchill was unequivocaclass="underline" ‘To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army’.34 In Judith, Durrell, as already mentioned, even went so far as to show a British officer donating arms, ammunition and other equipment to Ras Shamir on the eve of the Arab attack, a detail which he most likely derived from the well-known fact that ‘especially towards the end of the Mandate there were numerous cases in which weapons, ammunition and other material were “lost” from military stores’.35 The less palatable side of Haganah activity is also to be found in Judith, when Aaron declares proudly: