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PART I
Synthesis: The Interplay of Policies
I945 - I950
The political atmosphere of the Middle East during the Second World War1 may be compared with a gas under compression in a closed vessel. For the Allies the region was strategically important during the war, not merely or even primarily as a link in British imperial communications or as a source of oil supplies (which had been its significance between the two World Wars), but as the principal avenue (other than the dangerous Arctic sea-route) through which the United States and Britain had access to the Soviet Union. It was the supply of war material to the Soviet Union through Persia that brought United States troops into the Middle East for the first time since the young Republic’s campaigns against the Barbary pirates at the beginning of the nineteenth century; it was through the Middle East that statesmen and soldiers from the West travelled on their difficult missions to Moscow; and it was at Tehran that the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders met for the first time in 1943. For the Governments and politically conscious classes of the Middle Eastern countries, however, the war supervened on the efforts which they had been making since the First World War or earlier to achieve their complete independence of Great Power influence and control; a control which, exercised primarily by imperial Britain and secondarily by France, had in 1919-20 been greatly intensified over the countries of the Fertile Crescent (hitherto subject to the Ottoman Empire) at the very time that it was already being challenged in Egypt, Turkey, and Persia. By 1939 the two last-named countries had for more than fifteen years been fully independent and sovereign; but the Turkish Republic nevertheless had difficulty in maintaining its non-belligerent status between the warring Powers in the Second World War, and Persia in 1941 temporarily lost her effective independence on account of the desire of Britain and the Soviet Union to establish communications across her territory. To the south, the independence of the Arabic-speaking states was in 1939 less complete than that of Turkey and Persia. Egypt and 'Iraq, who between the wars made the transition to sovereignty from their status of protectorate and mandated territory respectively, had been required by Britain to accept treaties of alliance with her; and the Levant States and Palestine were still under mandates. This unequal status was challenged, when opportunities presented themselves, during the Second World War itself. Britain used force, or the threat of force, in Egypt and 'Iraq respectively to secure the observance of her treaties of alliance against attempts at collusion or reinsurance with the Axis on the part of militant nationalists. In the Levant States the authority of the French mandate had been undermined, first by France’s capitulation to the Axis in 1940, but more especially by the eviction of the Vichyist regime from the Levant by the British and Free French a year later; and the nationalists took advantage of the marked differences between the British and Free French attitudes towards their demands to achieve almost complete independence by the end of the war. In Palestine from 1942 onwards, while the intransigence of the most influential of the Arab politicians had manoeuvred them into an impotent exile, the Zionist movement was energetically bent on achieving a sovereign status that would allow it complete control of immigration, land-purchase, and settlement. In Persia, even while her territory was occupied by the forces of the three principal Allies, the rejection of a Soviet demand for an oil concession in 1944 was accompanied by envious references to the valuable concession held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.2
An American historian of the Middle East has observed that, as a byproduct of the war effort, Britain had unified most of the region politically and economically as it had not been unified for centuries, and that the British creation of the Arab News Agency and the Arabic broadcasting station ash-Sharq al-Adna were symbols of the process.2 In many cases, however, this unification was achieved against the wishes of local governments and nationalist movements; and their reaction against British influence was therefore likely to be at least as strong at the end of the Second World War as it had been in 1919-20. It had been Britain’s policy between the wars to safeguard her essential interests in the Middle East by a series of balances and compromises effected with other foreign interests such as those of France or those of United States oil companies, or with the more moderate nationalists themselves. This policy would continue to be pursued after 1945, but would call for all the greater finesse because the great depletion of Britain’s financial resources by the war had lessened both her absolute power and her relative status as a world Power. Britain had recognized with some reluctance during 19443 that the predominant interest in Sa'udi Arabia would henceforward belong to the United States, who were operating an oil concession that had begun to …
1 See Survey for 1939-46: The Middle East in the War.
2 See Survey for 1939-46: The Middle East in the War, p. 479. The Persian Government afterwards sought to recover sales tax on petroleum products used by the British forces in Persia during the war. This point had apparently not been covered by any Anglo-Persian agreement at the time, and the British Government afterwards contended that there ‘could be no question’ of paying tax on products that had been used in Persia ‘for the common allied cause and thus, indirectly, for the defence of Persia’ (The Times diplomatic correspondent, 9 September 1952).
3 J. C. Hurewitz: ‘Unity and Disunity in the Middle East’, International Conciliation, May 1952, pp. 222-4, 232-
4 Sec Survey for 1939-46: The Middle East in the War, pp. 261-3.
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