A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East

by James Barr

Britain’s sponsorship of the Jews in Palestine and France’s favouritism of the Christians in the Lebanon were policies designed to strengthen their respective positions in the region by eliciting gratitude from both minorities. The appreciation they generated by doing so was short-lived, but they deeply antagonised the predominantly Muslim Arab population of both countries, and the wider region, with irreversible effects. As Britain and France became increasingly unpopular, they were forced into oscillating alliances that only polarised Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim further. The mandatories’ abrupt changes of policy under pressure, and their refusal to institute meaningful, representative government, made it clear to those they ruled that violence worked. Until the Second World War the British reluctantly accepted the presence of the French as what their ambassador to Cairo, Lord Killearn, termed ‘an unnecessary evil which we must just make the best of’.26 While a further war with Germany looked possible, then likely, and finally inevitable, Britain’s relations with metropolitan France were more important. ‘The plain fact was that the presence of the French in the Levant States was a perpetual irritant which upset British policy in the Middle East,’ Killearn acknowledged, ‘but I had always realised that we here ought to conform and adapt our local policy to the needs of our higher interests in regard to metropolitan France which was our neighbour just across the chann...