Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [134]
In Palestine itself, the thankless mission of the soldiers trying to keep the two communities apart grew ever worse. There were 100,000 British troops – infantry, mechanized troops, elite airborne units and artillery regiments – deployed, along with thousands of members of the Palestine Police Force. Yet every week brought more evidence of their inability to keep a lid on things.
The British found themselves attacked by mobs, blown up by landmines, machine-gunned, mortared and kidnapped. Grenades were thrown from passing cars, haversack bombs left in public buildings. In the most spectacular attack, Jewish terrorists smuggled bombs into the basement of the King David Hotel, part of which served as British headquarters in Jerusalem, and murdered ninety-one people. The British military had a choice – get a grip and enforce law and order, or quit the country. But Clement Attlee had been elected prime minister to create the New Jerusalem in Britain: there was no interest in the old one and no enthusiasm for a new colonial war so soon after the ruinously expensive victory over Germany. In the end, in perhaps the most shameful demonstration of the emptiness of their imperial pretensions, the British declared that since they could not get Arabs and Jews to agree, they would hand the problem to the new United Nations. They then walked away. As the Chief Justice of Palestine put it in a letter, ‘it surely is a new technique in our imperial mission to walk out and leave the pot we placed on the fire to boil over’.
The Mandate in Palestine had been a thirty-year exercise in hubris, and the British got out quickly and (for them) relatively painlessly. When Sir Henry Gurney, the unflappable Chief Secretary to the Mandate, was asked by a Jewish delegation what he planned to do with the keys to his office, he replied, ‘I suppose I shall put them under the mat.’ On the morning of 14 May 1948 the Union Jack was lowered and the Red Cross flag raised in its place. Gurney left the building, was escorted to an airstrip and flew via Malta to Britain. He was being driven into London as the clocks struck midnight and the whole sorry Mandate interlude was finished. By then the shooting had already begun in Jerusalem.
The comfort blanket under which the British snuggled was called the Commonwealth. This was a concept no one could really object to, for the simple reason that no one has ever been able to say precisely what it is. The word started being bandied about in the 1880s, as the British sought a new relationship with Australia. The young Queen Elizabeth had a stab at explaining what it was in her Christmas message of 1953 – nothing to do with empire, but ‘an entirely new conception, built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man’, in which Britain was just one of many members, and leading ‘still backward nations’ on to a glorious future. In a later speech the queen’s advisers amplified this as ‘a group of equals, a family of like-minded peoples whatever their differences of religion, political systems, circumstances and races, all eager to work together for the peace, freedom and prosperity of mankind’. Who could possibly object to that?
In 1956, it fell to Elizabeth’s second Prime Minister, Anthony Eden – a clever, sensitive man – to learn the harshest lesson about how the days of empire were well and truly over. Despite the withdrawal from Palestine, Britain still appeared to have plenty of power in the Middle East, with outposts at either end of the Suez Canal, in Aden and Cyprus, and air-force bases in Iraq. It financed and officered the Jordanian army and in 1953 had collaborated with the CIA in orchestrating a coup to overthrow the popularly