One Palestine, Complete

"It was a mock receipt for the handover between high commissioners in Palestine: the one handing on to his successor ‘one Palestine, complete’, in the same way someone handing over a battleship might give it into the hands of the next commander, itemising all aspects of the battleship. So it’s very much a reflection of a British notion of their responsibilities as commanders of this colony or ship. But the irony of it is, of course, that Palestine was made, by the British, into a twice-contested land: between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionist immigrants. It was a country slated for partition. Arabs and Jews in Palestine were taking Palestine in the direction of a divided land, not ‘one Palestine, complete’. But, actually, Segev doesn’t dwell on that irony at any length. Instead, what he gives us is a very human history about the encounter between British imperial rulers, the indigenous Arab people and the Jewish immigrants in the inter-war years, when Palestine was created as a British mandate. The book is very richly peopled – these vivid characters from all three communities – and Segev tracks the way they didn’t live in isolation from one another, but interacted and were shaped by each other. It’s a book full of startling challenges to assumed wisdoms and borrowed wisdoms. My favourite is his description of the Hebron Riots in 1929. This is an instance where growing tension between Arab and Jewish communities led to violence where Arabs attacked Jewish places of worship. They attacked the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and that set off a wave of attacks of other areas where there were Jewish communities in Hebron. As I recall, around 69 people were killed by Arab rioters, and it’s always portrayed as an instance of Arab intolerance towards the Jewish community in their midst, evidence of a genocidal streak. But what you get from reading Segev, is that what saved the Jewish community in Hebron from a much worse massacre was the fact that so many Arabs took in their Jewish neighbours to protect them. And, in this way, what could have been an elimination of the Jewish community in Hebron, led instead to two or three score people being killed rather than hundreds. I’d never read that anywhere else and I just think that this is a great example of how powerful a well-written book can be, for challenging people’s pre-conceptions. Segev also gives us the very best portrait of Chaim Weizmann who was the Zionist diplomat responsible for the Balfour Declaration. He explains how Weizmann was able to leverage European misconceptions about international Jewry: he really played on their belief that he was the head of a kind of diaspora nation that he was in direct communication with, that they were organised and a force. The reality, as Segev points out, is that Weizmann was a guy in a small flat off Piccadilly, whose office was the suitcase of letters that he kept under his bed. There wasn’t more to him than that. But he was able to present himself and gain access to the very highest levels of British policymakers, and in this way shaped their views, so that they would come around to declaring British policy in favour of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. There was always this notion among anti-Semites in Europe that there was a kind of Jewish International. And for some, this meant Jews were in some way seeking to dominate or control the economy or world politics. And Weizmann never fought that. He let people continue to work on such false assumptions and then presented himself as the head of the world Zionist organisation, as someone who was almost of head of state status; somebody who represented the interests of a lot of powerful, wealthy, influential Jews around the world. And he really wasn’t that. So it’s a book full of very rich and cliché-overturning anecdotes, told in a very lively and engaging way."

"Yes, this is a proper factual account of what really happened. I rate Tom Segev very, very highly. He is a crusty thinker and I don’t always agree with him, but if you think that English is his second language, he is an extremely good writer and this book looks at the Arab community with a very empathetic intellectual and open attitude. Both groups in Palestine had a major bone to pick with the colonial power – Britain. And there was a fair amount of terrorism from both camps. British soldiers and diplomats were killed at the time. The 1930s was just as bloody as the Intifadas; it’s just that it was against the British. Segev is a fine historian who looks at the history. And his family have been in Palestine for generations. He writes exceptionally well and he plays a very straight bat."