Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914–1939

Historian Shambrook (French Imperialism in Syria, 1927–1936) offers an exhaustive study of official diplomatic documents pertaining to Britain’s control of Palestine. Confident that the Ottoman Turks would lose their empire in the Middle East after WWI, the British, in a series of diplomatic letters sent from 1915 to 1916 between Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Cairo, and Sharif Hussein of Mecca, an Ottoman-appointed religious authority, promised the Arabs an independent state, possibly including Palestine, if they would revolt against Ottoman rule. Yet London also committed itself to ruling a part of Palestine and placing the rest under international control as part of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, and to establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” under the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Perhaps embarrassed by its conflicting promises, Britain refused more than 20 requests to publish the McMahon-Hussein exchange before finally doing so in March 1939. Shambrook occasionally lapses into simplistic formulations, such as claiming that Britain’s intransigence resulted from a “desire to maintain a pro-Zionist policy,” though he acknowledges, “I have not found a single document by any British official” to that effect. Still, this is a thorough examination of a subject with profound and ongoing ramifications. (Sept.)