This claim, however, is totally false. During the second half of the 1930s, Britain’s strategic interest in Palestine in particular and in the Middle East in general actually grew. It was then that Britain began to extract petroleum in large quantities from the region. The only oil pipeline fully under British control was the one they laid from Kirkuk in Iraq via Transjordan to the Mediterranean Sea at Haifa. For this reason, the British Mandatory government built the port in Haifa, and the Iraq Petroleum Company, which was mostly British-owned, set up oil refineries just outside Haifa. This created an important British strategic interest, whose significance only increased as the winds of war began to stir in Europe, making the preservation of a stable flow of oil a vital British consideration.

Moreover, even if Montgomery did recommend leaving Palestine in 1939, this proves nothing. He was not a top officer at the time, and his journal entries are in no way representative of British policy. Even in 1946, once Montgomery had become a celebrated field marshal and held the office of Chief of the Imperial General Staff of the victorious British forces, his impact on British policy was still quite limited. During the summer of that year, for example, following the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Montgomery submitted a detailed memorandum to the British cabinet in which he recommended that the Mandatory government brutally suppress the Zionist uprising, just as it had done to the Arab Revolt in 1938 and 1939. The British Cabinet did not think as he did, and rejected his proposals.

Furthermore, the Peel Commission proves the opposite of what Segev claims it does. Among the commission’s recommendations was that a Jewish state be established in a small portion (15 percent) of Palestine, in the Galilee and the northern and central coastal plains. The commission recommended leaving an even smaller part of the land (the corridor connecting Jerusalem to Jaffa) in British hands, and giving the rest of the territory to the Arabs. At first glance, Segev appears to be right: The Peel Commission supported taking the British out of at least 90 percent of the country. But Segev fails to mention that the territory to be given to the Arabs was not going to be handed over to an autonomous Palestinian Arab government, but was instead to be annexed by the emirate of Transjordan under the rule of Abdullah. At the time, and for ten years thereafter, Transjordan remained firmly under Mandatory rule, and in everything having to do with its security and foreign policy, the British were in complete control. Giving the Arab part of Palestine to Abdullah did not mean ending British rule. It meant continuing it.

Similarly, the White Paper of May 1939, which was issued after the British had supposedly given up on ruling Palestine, did not signify what Segev thinks it did, and in fact contradicts his thesis. Segev writes: “In May 1939, after endless consultations and negotiations... the British declared that an independent, binational state would be established in the territory within ten years.” What Segev neglects to inform his reader is that unlike the White Paper’s infamous edicts restricting Jewish immigration or the purchase of land by Jews, the creation of an independent state was conditional upon an agreement being reached between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Without such agreement, British rule would continue. Did this recommendation reflect a desire to leave Palestine—as Segev insists—or was it a transparent exercise in order to perpetuate British rule? As everyone at the time knew full well, Jewish-Arab agreement on a “Palestine State” (this was the British term, not “binational” state) was not remotely in the offing, so long as the Zionist leadership clung to its vision of unfettered immigration of the Jewish people to its ancestral land.

 

Days of the Anemones is better when dealing with the Arab side of the conflict, particularly in the context of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Here Segev offers a convincing, solidly researched portrayal of Arab decisionmaking and the suppression of the rebellion by the British. And yet this too is marred by Segev’s insistence on portraying Arab resistance as a well-developed movement that had been struggling for Palestinian national independence since the end of World War I—a claim which, if true, would be of no small historical importance. But as with his claims about British policy, Segev’s research on Palestinian nationalism reveals itself to be highly selective and tendentious, ignoring or offering distorted readings of anything the Arabs did which does not square with his theory.

When, for example, Segev describes the “Arab rebellion in the desert,” the uprising of the Arabs of Hejaz against Ottoman rule between 1916 and 1918, as well as their recruitment activities in Palestine and their advance into Transjordan, he compares the rebels to the Jewish Legion that operated within the framework of the British army during the war. Like the Jewish Legion, Segev argues, these Arabs insisted that they would serve only in Palestine, demanded their own national flag and struggled for Palestinian national independence.

But Segev does not directly quote the draft appeals written by this Arab army, nor does he refer to any contemporary Arab source to support these statements. And indeed, the truth was altogether different. First, the army of the Arab rebellion did not even reach the borders of Palestine, but advanced from Hejaz toward Damascus via Transjordan. Those Palestinian Arabs who volunteered to serve in its framework necessarily left Palestine’s borders. The recruiting officers of Faisal, son of the Hashemite King Hussein and commander of the rebel army, worked to enlist volunteers from among the Palestinian Arabs for an army whose goal was overall Arab independence under the Hashemite crown. They were not concerned with Palestinian independence, but with overall Arab national independence in the Fertile Crescent and Hejaz regions. The flag they proposed was a pan-Arab national flag of four colors (black, red, green and white), which was adopted by the Palestinian nationalist movement only years later. The Palestinian Arab volunteers continued to serve in the rebel army even outside the borders of Palestine and went with it as far as Damascus.

The most prominent among these volunteers, including Subhi al-Hadra, Awni abd al-Hadi and Izzat Darwaza, continued to serve the cause of Arab independence in Damascus, as officials of the regime Faisal established there, until July 1920 when the French conquered Damascus and toppled his regime. Only then did these Palestinian activists return to Jerusalem, Nablus and Safed. The idea of independence for an Arab “Palestine” that would be separate from the overall Arab effort on behalf of a united state became a real issue only after the defeat of Faisal’s government. As long as Faisal ruled in Damascus, Arab national activists in Palestine referred to their own country as “Southern Syria” (suria el-janubia) and not as “Palestine.”

A second point that does not square with Segev’s belief in a well-developed Palestinian nationalist movement is the cessation of the general strike by Palestine Arabs, which lasted for about six months in 1936. This strike concluded without any political gains, and it ended because the Arab public could not sustain it for economic reasons. By the end of the summer of 1936, the strike had begun to disintegrate. The Arab Higher Committee, which had led the general strike, sought an honorable way out, and it asked the rulers of the Arab states to issue a public call for the strike’s end. The Palestinian Arabs would then accede to this call, while expressing their hope that the Arab rulers would work to advance their cause with the British.

The kings of Iraq and Saudi Arabia agreed, and even attempted to extract British concessions in exchange for ending the strike. But the British refused—and it was only at this point that the two kings, joined by the Emir Abdullah of Transjordan, issued their call. This sequence of events can be seen clearly in sources such as the proceedings of the Arab Higher Committee (available at the state archive in Jerusalem) and the correspondence between the British representatives in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Transjordan and the British government. But this less-than-heroic ending is evidently not to Segev’s taste. He prefers to repeat the now unsubstantiable claim (which had been widely accepted prior to the opening of the British and Israeli archives) that “the British invited several Arab kings to intervene in the crisis, and their intervention led to the conclusion of the strike.”

The emphasis on a unique, developed and independent Palestinian movement, at the expense of the pan-Arab national movement, also finds expression in Segev’s description of George Antonius’ famous book, The Arab Awakening, published in 1938. Segev describes this as “the most important book written until that time on the history of the Arab national movement in Palestine.” But here too, the truth is the opposite of what he claims: Antonius’ book is a history of the Arab national awakening throughout the Arab world. The struggle of the Arab Palestinian national movement only appears in the final chapter of the book, as part of a wider description of Arab nationalist movements throughout the Fertile Crescent. That all these efforts were part of an overarching movement for the independence of a single, unified Arab nation is a fundamental premise of Antonius’ book. A small error on our author’s part, perhaps—but with Segev, the little mistakes always seem to fall in the same direction.

Days of the Anemones makes for good reading, offering vivid accounts of life in Mandatory Jerusalem. Beyond this, however, one should not expect much. Segev’s answers to the larger political questions—why the British chose to invade Palestine, why they continued to rule there and why they eventually left, what the Palestinian Arabs were struggling for during World War I and thereafter, why their strike failed in 1936 and how it ended—are well worth ignoring. Moreover, the book has nothing interesting to say about the Zionist movement in Palestine, which developed during the period under discussion into a distinct national entity with its own political institutions, economy and system of settlement. The yishuv was, for the most part, left out of the banquet society of Mandatory Jerusalem, and it is the latter that is apparently of greatest interest to Tom Segev—a peculiar focus that permits him to turn his back on the world of overflowing archives, rich diplomatic sources, and the inconvenient demands of intellectual honesty.

Yehoshua Porath is Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Contributing Editor of Azure.