“Yesterday we heard the Leader of the [Labour] Opposition [Harold Wilson], its spokesman on foreign affairs, and the leader of the Liberal Party [Jeremy Thorpe] urging our government [prime minister Edward Heath’s Conservative one] to supply arms to Israel, when the Israeli Army is fighting 125 miles inside Egypt and over 20 miles inside Syria,” R.G. Cookson, FRS, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southampton – apparently an ideological antecedent to today’s monstrous regiment of anti-Israel academics – wrote from his Winchester home to The Times newspaper in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. “When will they think Israel has conquered enough territory – or do they support the Zionist ideal of a state stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile?”
At the London headquarters of the very proper and rather patrician Anglo-Jewish Association, a body steeped historically in anti-Zionist or at least non-Zionist sentiment, its Council, anxious to avoid the accusation of “dual loyalties,” chose its words carefully in arguing the opposing view in the same venerable publication. The eleven men and one woman settled upon the following text:
“We … express our distress at the violation of the ceasefire by Egypt and Syria.
With our sympathy for Israel reinforced by a shared historical experience, we believe that this onslaught sustained by Soviet equipment must inevitably damage the strategic interests of Britain, the country of our allegiance.
We therefore call on His Majesty’s Government not to persist in an embargo on arms for Israel which will inevitably and unfairly injure Israel in her struggle to survive.”
It bore the signatures of Victor Lucas (businessman and multi-faceted communal heavyweight), (Sir) Leon Bagrit (industrialist), (Sir) Isaiah Berlin (political philosopher), Maurice Edelman (MP, Labour), (Sir) Louis Gluckstein (ex-MP, Conservative), Toby Jessel (MP, Conservative), David Kessler (Jewish Chronicle proprietor), Ewen Montagu (judge and famous wartime intelligence officer), Frances Rubens (wife of prominent Judaica expert Alfred Rubens), Neville Sandelson (MP, Labour), Harold Sebag-Montefiore (Greater London Council official and judge), and Harold Soref (MP, Conservative).
Although derided in less squeamishly and more overtly pro-Israel quarters as fustily cautious in its wording, the AJA’s statement was a welcome addition to the robust Jewish communal protest against the Heath government’s embargo – which although imposed upon all combatants in the war was in practice disadvantageous only to Israel, and extended even to a ban on supplying spare parts for that country’s British-made Centurion tanks.
Meanwhile the usual anti-Israel propaganda was at work on other fronts, for example in an obnoxious letter to The Times (19 October) by Sir Kennedy Trevaskis (1915-90), a Foreign Office Arabist who, as his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography regarding the Aden phase of his diplomatic career notes, “was back in an environment, essentially Muslim, where his experience, personal qualities, and sympathies were at home”. In short, a typical member of the Foreign Office “Camel Corps” that is still going strong today: consider Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Sir Oliver Miles, Sir Vincent Fearn, Frances Guy, James Watt, and many others.
Trevaskis’s jaundiced claptrap, with, among other points, its nasty reference to “immigrants from Europe” displacing the “indigenous” inhabitants, was ably refuted by D. M. (David Malcolm) Lewis of Christ Church, Oxford, whose letter appeared in The Times of 22 October. Lewis – subsequently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, and well versed in Jewish, Persian and Greek antiquity – wrote, inter alia:
“I must say that Sir Kennedy Trevaskis does not inspire much confidence in the command of the facts enjoyed by British Arabists. I can attach very little precise meaning to his assertion that nine-tenths of the indigenous population of Israel has been expelled from its home …. Apart from the Israeli-born Jewish population, the total of Jewish immigrants to Israel from Asia and Africa between 1948 and 1970 was 723,073. The vast majority of these came from Arab lands, leaving their homes and possessions of centuries behind them. No doubt this fact would be more clearly recognised if they had been left in refugee camps.”
He added:
“I certainly have sympathy for Palestinians, but we should nevertheless realise that part of what has gone on in the Middle East in the past 25 years has been a massive exchange of populations. If philhellenes were still agitating for the return of the Greek population of Asia Minor, they would universally be regarded as stupid and dangerous.”
I’ll continue this issue of British reactions to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in my next column, but right now I want to draw attention to what the British Labour MP Richard Crossman, a staunch and enduring friend of Israel, had to say regarding the issue of the arms embargo. For in so doing so he made a withering indictment of Foreign Office Arabism which appears as relevant today as it did then. His op-ed in The Times (17 October 1973), under the heading “Arabists hold all the cards at the FO” – which had prompted Trevaskis’s sour little outburst commending the Arabist outlook – commenced:
‘The official British attitude to the Arab-Israeli War is odious – but not more odious than usual. Ever since in the mid-1920s the Foreign Office discovered that in backing Zionism, Lloyd George had acquired not a Jewish goldmine but a political liability, the Foreign Office has been politely anti-Zionist. Every time an Arab-Jewish crisis breaks out, the officials concerned work out a policy which can be shown in legal terms to be strictly fair to the Jewish side but which also provides some undercover material advantage to “our friends the Arabs”.
It was absurd to hope that in this crisis the Foreign Office would suddenly acquire a genuine impartiality between Jew and Arab, and a sense that a commitment to the Jews should be honoured even when it pays to get rid of it. No – the policy which evolved within a matter of hours was one which in legal terms would be strictly fair but in military terms would be of enormous benefit to the Arabs.’
In order to achieve that aim, he continued, the Foreign Office had advised Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home that three things were necessary. First, that Sir Alec “should send a telegram to [Britain’s] representative at the [UN] Security Council making sure that at the very first session he should propose a ceasefire though there was not the slightest chance of anybody paying attention”. Second, that Sir Alec should state publicly, as he duly did, that “as the proponent of a ceasefire, Britain must impose on herself a quite unusually severe form of neutrality”. Third, that “having made this statement, he should coolly assert that this new and severe neutrality required a total embargo on arms to both sides”.
The effect, Crossman went on, “is to deny to the six Arab states we have been supplying with arms a small amount of the superfluity of ultramodern weapons systems they have been acquiring from us, among others. For many months they will not feel it, and if they do the Russians will fill the gap”. In sharp contrast, however,
“The arms embargo we have imposed on Israel is of an entirely different dimension. For many years we have divided with the Americans the responsibility for providing a very large part of the armaments used by the Israeli army. The navy has come to rely on us for certain kinds of vessels – submarines, frigates, torpedo boats. Even more important, we have become a main purveyor to the army of a vast amount of military hardware – a huge list with, right at the top, artillery, armoured cars, and tanks plus spares and ammunition.
Quite deliberately, the Americans left this side of the job to us. As a result, when the Russians began to pour arms into the Arab side and the Americans began to redress the balance, our high-minded statement that in pursuance of our policy of trying to obtain a truce we must at once embargo all kinds of British arms exports to Israel meant that the deadly imbalance as regards this aspect of the war would not be rectified. The spare parts and ammunition for the armoured divisions in the desert are not to be sent: Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with the strict impartiality which has inspired British foreign policy in the Middle East for 50 years, has imposed an arms embargo which leaves the Arabs almost unaffected while it stabs the Jews in the back.”
Not that Sir Alec had acted very differently from a Labour Foreign Secretary in the circumstances, conceded Crossman, although more of an objection would have been made had Michael Stewart, let alone George Brown, held that portfolio. “Whatever politician is in charge of Britain’s Middle East policy, the Foreign Office is unbeatable.”
“We have had real Foreign Secretaries whose presence in that august office made a real difference to British policy in other parts of the world,” Crossman observed.
‘But in this one area, a tight little group composed of the officials at home and the ambassadors abroad, has always managed to impose its will on the politicians. These, of course, are the “Arabists” who monopolize the Middle Eastern department and regard the Middle Eastern embassies as theirs by right. Lesser mortals can be sent to an area where the language is new. An Arabist can hope that once he has been through his special linguistic training and established his special pro-Arab reliability, he can spend a lifetime either sitting at an Arab desk in the Foreign Office or sitting in a British Embassy in an Arab state.’
Crossman recalled that, when he was a minister in Harold Wilson’s government, he had witnessed “the Arabists’ techniques”. Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence, Crossman explained,
“was going into business in a big way as an arms merchant trying to cut his ministry’s cost by upping its sales. It was the time when the Chieftain tank was being developed. The Centurion was marketed as the best tank in the world and the Chieftain as one better. The Arabs were biting and the Israelis began to show an interest. So a long dialogue took place in the course of which two prototypes were sent out for testing and development by the Israeli army, which had had much more battle experience than ours.
My Israeli friends were proud of the new example of Anglo-Israeli cooperation and certain they would get the contract. I was sure they wouldn’t, and tried to show them that Britain is not the right place to buy military hardware, since in any Jewish-Arab crisis, when the Arab pressure was applied we would let Israel down whatever promises we had made.”
He attempted to persuade the Israelis to buy their artillery from Sweden. He warned them that in reality they stood no chance of obtaining Chieftain tanks, since as soon as news leaked that such a deal with Britain was in the offing, the UK’s Arabist diplomats would unleash their mischief on the government, claiming that British embassies in the Middle East were in danger of being torched by angry demonstrators – and, consequently, the Israelis would be out of the running.
“Of course, I was right,” his op-ed concluded.
“But what I did not foresee was this total arms embargo in the first week of a war. But I should have known. One of the rules of the unique kind of strip poker they play is that a British Arabist is entitled to have an extra ace up his sleeve.”
Daphne Anson is an Australian who under her real name has authored and co-authored several books and many articles on historical topics including Jewish ones. She blogs under an alias in order to separate her professional identity from her blogging one.
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