Quote of the Day

It was in this context that the second Russian Revolution was seen by British officials as the latest manifestation of a bigger conspiracy. Jews were prominent among the Bolshevik leaders; so the Bolshevik seizure of power was viewed by many within the British government as not merely German-inspired but as Jewish-directed.

When the uprisings in the Middle East after the war occurred, it was natural for British officials to explain that they formed part of a sinister design woven by the long-time conspirators. Bolshevism and international finance, pan-Arabs and pan-Turks, Islam and Russia were pictured by British Intelligence as agents of international Jewry and Prussian Germany, the managing partners of the great conspiracy. In the mind of British officialdom, bitter enemies such as Enver and Kemal were playing on the same side; and so, they believed, were Arabs and Jews.

British officials of course were aware that significant numbers of Palestinian Arab Moslems, reacting against Zionist colonization, expressed violent anti-Jewish feelings; but this observation did not necessarily negate their view that Islam was controlled by Jewry. Islam, in the sense that Britons feared it, was the pull and power of the Caliph, whom they viewed as a pawn moved by Britain’s adversaries—a view that, oddly, they continued to hold even after the Sultan-Caliph became their virtual prisoner in Constantinople. As they saw it, it was evident that Arabs could not govern themselves; so that the question came down to whether the Arabic-speaking Middle East should be governed by Germans and Jews, acting through the agency of Turks, or whether it should be governed by Britain. The appeal of British government, they felt, was that it was decent and honest; the appeal of Britain’s adversaries was that Turkish government was Moslem government. Islam was thus being used, as was Bolshevism, and as were Turks and Russians, by a cabal of Jewish financiers and Prussian generals to the detriment of Britain.

While in the clear light of history this conspiracy theory seems absurd to the point of lunacy, it was believed either in whole or in part by large numbers of otherwise sane, well-balanced, and reasonably well-informed British officials.

[...]

In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own.

What Britain faced in the Middle East was a long and perhaps endless series of individual and often spontaneous local rebellions against her authority. The rebellions were not directed by foreigners; they were directed against foreigners.

- DAVID FROMKIN, A Peace to End all Peace

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