But Segev has done nothing of the kind. Instead, he simply employs the same local materials that serve him so well in his descriptions of social life under the Mandate. From these sources he culls chance comments and accounts concerning British policy by individuals who had no discernible impact on either this policy or its implementation, and upon these he bases his entire discussion of British policy. It should come as no surprise, then, that through the extensive use of these sources Segev comes to the conclusions he apparently wanted: That Britain came to Palestine by chance; that its rule was established by mistake; and that its government did not at any stage know what it really wanted to achieve in a land so far from home. Thus in Segev’s retelling, as soon as the British encountered systematic resistance to their rule, during the first year of the Arab Revolt in 1936, they decided that they should pack up and leave. With this conclusion, Segev fulfills his duty as myth-slayer by portraying the Zionists as marginal, loathed by the British but without any serious impact on their policy; they certainly did not “drive the British out,” as we have been told.

This outcome is foreshadowed from the beginning of the book, when Segev analyzes Britain’s motives for conquering Palestine during World War I. “The conquest of the land...,” Segev writes, “did not give them any strategic advantage.” Indeed, Palestine’s place in British strategy “was not a function of its geopolitical situation,” but merely a consequence of the British “emotional experience” regarding the Holy Land—that is, its mythic, Christian affinities for the land of Israel.

On what does Segev base this outlandish claim? On records of cabinet meetings? On statements by government ministers or memoranda from senior officials? Segev has no patience for these. On the contrary, his book is filled with derisive comments about the “piles” of “memoranda and documents” that were constantly being manufactured by British statesmen and officials. Rather, the foundation of Segev’s new historical edifice is a comment Segev discovered in the diary of a relatively minor British official named Charles Robert Ashby, who ruminated about the defilement Europeans were bringing upon the pristine biblical land.

As anyone who has studied Britain’s policy in the Middle East prior to and during World War I knows, the conquest of Palestine was part of an articulated strategy, adopted by Britain’s military and political leadership, of trying to establish a land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Such a bridge would enable the rapid deployment of troops to the Gulf, which was the forward line of defense for British interests in India, as well as protecting against possible invasion from the north, primarily by Russia. This land bridge would also serve as an alternative to the Suez Canal in Egypt and as a line of defense for it. These facts are evident, for example, in the proceedings of the De Bunsen Committee, a panel of experts appointed for the express purpose of discussing Britain’s aims in the Middle East during World War I. But the De Bunsen Committee receives no mention in Days of the Anemones. Instead, we have only Segev’s unfounded ruminations about British sentimentalities, religious motivations, the influence of the Bible, and so on.

Segev does not even take advantage of the historical material that helps his case. It is well known, for example, that David Lloyd George, the British prime minister at the time of the invasion of Palestine, was one of the leading advocates of the British conquest. Mention of Lloyd George’s background could have bolstered Segev’s claim about the role of sentimental considerations in the British calculus: Lloyd George, after all, began his career as the leader of a Welsh religious movement which struggled for secession from the Anglican church and for the creation of an independent Welsh church more faithful to the literal meaning of the scriptural texts. It seems reasonable to draw a connection between Lloyd George’s past and his interest in the Holy Land. But Segev mentions none of this (he even describes Lloyd George as “English,” not Welsh), and leaves his claim on the level of vague, undocumented assertion.

Segev’s neglect of the basic historical material is also evident in his treatment of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Here, too, he asserts that the British government issued the declaration out of religious caprice rather than diplomatic reasoning:

While such thinking may have had some impact on British policymaking, was that all there was to it? A significant body of research, based in large part on the work carried out by the historian Mayir Veretté, has clearly shown that Britain’s motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration were fundamentally strategic in nature—and not sentimental, nor religious, nor a show of gratitude to Chaim Weizmann for his scientific contribution to the British war effort. Britain’s principal goal in supporting the Zionist cause in the Balfour Declaration was, according to this school of thought, to nullify the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement calling for the establishment of international rule in Palestine after its conquest from the Ottomans. The Balfour Declaration and the British commitment to Zionism, the British strategists believed, would justify exclusive British rule there.

Other scholars, most notably A.J.P. Taylor, have emphasized Britain’s desire, beginning in late 1916, to convince American Jewry to support America’s entry into the war alongside Britain, France and Russia. American involvement in the war faced staunch domestic opposition, including that of the Jewish community, which was uninclined to support going to war on the side of the anti-Semitic regime of the Russian Czar. Britain’s support for Jewish demands concerning Palestine, it was thought, would encourage American Jews to support their country’s entry into the war, or at least to mitigate their opposition. Again, Segev makes no mention of the copious research that has been conducted on this subject.

 

As soon as the British established their rule in Palestine, Segev writes, they began to have second thoughts. Their continued presence became a matter of controversy, and the British quickly came to feel that the whole invasion of Palestine had been a mistake. It was then that they recognized that there was no good reason to remain in Palestine.

Such a debate did indeed develop in 1922 and 1923, and involved political leaders, journalists and military figures. Segev cites a number of the writers and public figures who took part, but he also leaves out the most important players. In order to settle the debate, the British prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law, appointed a special cabinet commission at the end of 1922. Leading experts and representatives of all administrative branches involved in British rule in Palestine appeared before the commission, which eventually submitted a report advocating continued British rule, and rejecting any concession to Arab demands. The report was adopted in the summer of 1923 by the British government under Bonar Law’s successor, Stanley Baldwin, and it served as the basis for the continued British presence in the country. This is a highly inconvenient fact for Segev, since it is extremely difficult to reconcile with his thesis that by 1923 the British were no longer interested in continuing the Mandate. Days of the Anemones contains no mention of the commission’s appointment, of its conclusions, or of the adoption of those conclusions by the government of Britain.

In this spirit, one can also understand Segev’s errors in evaluating the importance of the views expressed by Sir John Shuckburgh, head of the Middle East Division in the Colonial Office. During the period under discussion, Shuckburgh did in fact express reservations about what Britain stood to gain in Palestine. But the relevance of these misgivings is substantially inflated when Segev, apparently by mistake, gives Shuckburgh the title of “Under Secretary of the Colonial Office,” a position of considerable political weight. Shuckburgh was in fact a civil servant, albeit a senior one, who alongside his responsibility for Middle Eastern matters also held the title of Assistant Under Secretary of the Colonial Office: He was therefore not a political figure, and throughout his career he never held political office. One would be hard-pressed to defend the claim that his views were of significance in determining British policy.

If the British were already uneasy about staying in Palestine in 1923, as Segev insists, then once the Arab Revolt erupted in 1936, it follows that they must have wanted to leave as quickly as possible. The establishment of the Peel Commission investigating the revolt in autumn 1936 is one of Segev’s central proofs of this claim: “The Royal Commission was of course not set up to ‘investigate’ anything,” writes Segev. “It was established in order to help the government free itself of the administration of Palestine.” The second proof he brings is a journal entry of Col. Bernard Law Montgomery in 1938, after the revolt had been mostly quashed: “Because the Jew kills the Arabs and the Arabs kill the Jew. This is the situation today. Almost certainly this will continue to be the case for another fifty years.” From this, Segev concludes that the British “were trapped in a dead-end situation and they understood this,” and that the Arab Revolt, despite having been defeated, nonetheless succeeded in convincing the British, once and for all, that there was no longer any point in staying in Palestine, leading to their eventual departure a decade later.