Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [133]
For Churchill the villains of the piece were not the Indian people, but their leaders. (In December 1946 he was still talking of the ‘Hindu Raj’.) The political class were ‘men of straw of whom in a few years no trace will remain’. And the proposal to divide the subcontinent into predominantly Hindu and Muslim states would mean destroying what he saw as the greatest British achievement – unifying an enormous expanse of often warring states. Years after the event, he was still talking of ‘Britain’s desertion of her duty in India’ as ‘the most serious political blunder … certain eventually to bring grief and sorrow to the entire Western World’. Nonetheless – and it was a testament to Churchill’s stature – he did eventually give his party’s assent to Mountbatten’s plans for a free, if divided, India, with the two new entities remaining within the Commonwealth. His prophecies of bloodshed and suffering at the time of independence came true, as people trapped on the wrong side of borders suffered the effects of mob violence or died attempting to escape it. But Churchill considered what was on offer to be better than some of the other possible outcomes, like independence outside the Commonwealth, and he recognized he was on the wrong side of history. In June 1948, George VI formally renounced the title of king-emperor – a ‘melancholy event’, said Churchill, ‘only typical of what is happening to our Empire and Commonwealth in so many parts of the world’. He didn’t like it, but he understood the current of events: no emperor, because soon there would be no empire. Once India had gone, what argument was there for denying freedom to Britain’s other colonies?
In the land for whose capture they had rung the bells of Westminster Abbey in 1917, things were going from bad to worse.
The League of Nations, whose Mandate the British were supposedly exercising, had long withered away under the burden of its own irrelevance. Yet British troops remained in Palestine, discharging one of the most thankless tasks on earth. For a start, the land had a great deal more significance for both Jews and Arabs than it did for Britons, whose presence was clearly temporary and whose main function soon seemed to be to get shot at by both sides. In 1945 Winston Churchill noted bleakly that he was ‘not aware of the slightest advantage that had ever accrued to Great Britain from the painful and thankless task’ they had given themselves in the Holy Land. And yet a permanent solution which would satisfy both sides seemed maddeningly unachievable. With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the full extent of Jewish suffering in Europe had become horribly apparent to the world, and the Zionists’ cry of ‘never again’ was unanswerable. The United States declared its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland, and the promises made by the British to the Arabs crumbled as growing numbers of European refugees smuggled themselves towards Palestine. Many of those the British intercepted were interned on the colony of Cyprus. But the arrival off the coast of Palestine in July 1947 of the SS Exodus, an old packet steamer with over 4,500 Jews aboard, showed how hopeless the British task was. The boat was halted and its desperate passengers, many of whom had only recently been liberated by the allies from concentration camps, were sent back to Europe. The French, who had allowed the refugees to board the vessel in Marseilles, refused