III. COLLUSION WITH GREAT BRITAIN
Shlaim writes that "Britain knew and approved of this secret Hashemite-Zionist agreement to divide up Palestine between themselves, not along the lines of the U.N. partition plan."50 This alleged British blessing was given in the above-noted conversation between Bevin and Abu'l-Huda, in which the foreign secretary gave the Transjordanian prime minister
The green light to send the Arab Legion into Palestine immediately following the departure of the British forces. But Bevin also warned [Trans]jordan not to invade the area allocated by the U.N. to the Jews. An attack on Jewish state territory, he said, would compel Britain to withdraw her subsidy and officers from the Arab Legion.51
This thesis is fundamentally flawed. True, the British were resigned to Transjordan's military foray into post-Mandatory Palestine, but this was not out of a wish to protect Jewish interests. Rather, it was directed against those interests: Israel was intended to be the victim of the Transjordanian intervention -- not its beneficiary.
* Contrary to Shlaim's claim, the British government did not know of a Hashemite-Zionist agreement to divide up Palestine, both because this agreement did not exist and because `Abdallah kept London in the dark about his contacts with the Jewish Agency. The influential British ambassador to Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbride, was not aware of the secret Meir-`Abdallah meeting until well after the event.52 How then could the British bless a Hashemite-Zionist deal?
* Glubb's memoirs alone indicate that Bevin gave Abu'l-Huda a green light to invade while warning him, "do not go and invade the areas allotted to the Jews."53 In contrast, declassified British documents unequivocally show that Bevin neither encouraged Abu'l-Huda to invade the Arab parts of Palestine as "the obvious thing to do," as claimed by Glubb, nor warned him off invading the Jewish areas. Bevin said only that he "would study the statements which his Excellency had made."54 Shlaim's choosing an old and partisan account over a newly released official document suggests a desperate attempt to prove the existence of such a warning.
* The British archives are bursting with evidence that the foreign secretary and his advisers cared not at all whether `Abdallah transgressed Jewish territory; they only wanted to be sure he did not implicate Britain in an embarrassing international situation. Shortly after the Bevin-Abu'l-Huda meeting, Bernard Burrows, head of the Eastern department, wrote (with Bevin's approval) that
It is tempting to think that Transjordan might transgress the boundaries of the United Nations Jewish State to the extent of establishing a corridor across the Southern Negeb [i.e., Negev] joining the existing Transjordan territory to the Mediterranean and Gaza . . . [thereby] cutting the Jewish State, and therefore Communist influence, off from the Red Sea.55
More important, on May 7, 1948, a week before the all-Arab attack on Israel, Burrows suggested to the Foreign Office intimate to King `Abdallah that "we could in practice presumably not object to Arab Legion occupation of the Nejeb [i.e., Negev]."56 In other words, not only was the Foreign Office not opposed to Transjordan's occupation of the Jewish State's territory but it encouraged `Abdallah to go in and occupy about half of it.
* Having grudgingly recognized their inability to prevent the partition of Palestine, British officialdom wished to see a far smaller and weaker Jewish state than that envisaged by the U.N. partition resolution and did its utmost to bring about such an eventuality. Limitations of space do not allow a presentation of the overwhelming documentary evidence of British efforts to cut Israel "down to size" and stunt its population growth through the prevention of future Jewish immigration.57 Suffice to say that British policymakers sought to forestall an Israeli-Transjordanian peace agreement unless it detached the Negev from the Israeli state.
CONCLUSIONS
Recently declassified documents in Israeli and Western archives fail to confirm the picture of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict painted by the new historians. The self-styled new historiography is really a "distortiography." It is anything but new: much of what it presents is old and much of the new is distortion. The "new historians" are neither new nor true historians but rather partisans seeking to give academic respectability to longstanding misconceptions and prejudice on the Arab-Israeli conflict. To borrow the words of the eminent British historian E.H. Carr,
what the new historians are doing is to "write propaganda or historical fiction, and merely use facts of the past to embroider a kind of writing which has nothing to do with history."58
Returning to political issues of today: the Palestinian claim to national self-determination stands on its own and does not need buttressing from historical falsification. Quite the contrary, fabricating an Israeli history to cater to interests of the moment does great disservice not only to historical truth but also to the Palestinians that the new historians seek to champion. Instead, they should heed Albert Hourani's advice. Securing the future means coming to terms with one's past, however painful that might be, not denying it.