ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE: JEWS AND ARABS UNDER THE BRITISH MANDATE
By Tom Segev. Metropolitan Books, 613 pages, $35.

The Jews accuse the Arabs of committing acts of terror and violence in the Holy Land. The Arabs counter that the Jews overreact to their demonstrations. Both appeal to the world’s leading foreign power to sort out their dispute. Although this might sound a lot like today’s Middle East, the above dynamic actually refers to the 31-year period when the British governed Palestine.

Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev — PhD from Boston University — chronicles those years in his new One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate. Segev, author of 1993’s The Seventh Million, is one of a cohort of writers in Israel who fall under the rubrick of the “New Historians” or “Revisionists,” whose broad mandate is to rewrite the so-called founding myths of the Jewish State. The myth Segev tries to deflate here is that of British pro-Arabism; the British, he contends, actually helped the Zionists. Although One Palestine has value as a fresh look at a period that at times prefigured the present, too often the author’s zeal to rewrite history papers over the facts that contradict his revisionist agenda.

The book nonetheless provides depressing evidence that the cycle of violence that is taking place now has occurred before and can lead to even to more dire events. One Palestine also offers up a compelling body of evidence that it was the British governance’s failure in Palestine that caused war to break out at Israel’s 1948 creation. Segev shows some narrative flair in focusing on such characters as Alter Levine, a Jewish insurance man, and Khalil al-Sakakini, a cosmopolitan-minded Christian Arab writer and intellectual. He also provides interesting nuggets: while wanted by the British on charges of terrorism, future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir went by the name Michael, after Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about One Palestine is the coincidence of its timing with the outburst of violence that has rocked the region since September.

But though Segev paints a complete portrait of some illustrative individuals, he fails to provide a fair account of others, such as the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and British officers Orde Wingate and Richard Meinertzhagen. Regarding Husseini, he gives us too much puff and too little punch, devoting a scant two pages to the mufti’s nefarious activities during World War II, which included traveling to Berlin in 1941. Segev does describe the mufti’s plan to forge an alliance between the Arabs and Hitler, but he neglects to articulate the obvious commonality of interest between the two potential allies: hatred of Jews. Wingate and Meinertzhagen, two influential pro-Zionists, Segev dismisses as, in essence, kooks.

The most serious flaw in One Palestine involves the series of anti-Jewish Arab riots that reverberated throughout the Middle East in the ’20s and ’30s — including Jerusalem (1920), Jaffa (1921), Hebron (1929), and the territory-wide Arab Revolt (1936-’39). In each case Segev overlooks the British role in encouraging the violence, and he generally underplays the seriousness of the mayhem.

Consider the first Jerusalem riots — dubbed the “Nebi Musa riots” for an Islamic festival that coincided with Easter and Passover. Segev writes that “no one knew exactly what set off the riots,” which killed five and wounded another 216. He neglects the evidence of Meinertzhagen’s diary, which shows that a prominent British officer — Colonel Harry Bertie Waters-Taylor — actually fomented Arab violence. According to a key passage reprinted in Shmuel Katz’s two-volume biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Lone Wolf, the pro-Arab British officer had told the mufti that “he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine. . . . He [Waters-Taylor] explained that freedom could only be attained by violence.”

Segev sticks to his claim that the British were pro-Zionist despite evidence to the contrary. He glosses over the British freeze on Jewish immigration to Palestine, which cost countless lives during the Holocaust. He quotes British prime minister Neville Chamberlain as saying, “If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs,” yet goes on to argue that British policy was just the opposite. Pro-Zionist? His own evidence suggests otherwise.

The sad thing is that what’s too often missing from One Palestine is what’s also absent from so much of the Middle Eastern coverage today: an understanding of the extent to which some seemingly spontaneous outbursts of Arab violence are actually the product of pre-planned military-style campaigns. Although unpleasant, this is a reality that must be understood if future foreign-policy makers are to do a better job of handling the Middle East than did their British predecessors.

Issue Date: April 5-12, 2001