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In the House of Commons at the end of the final debate on Foreign Affairs in the last days of 1937, Lieutenant-Commander Fletcher raised the question of anti-British propaganda by Italy which wielded, he said, the poison-pen of Europe. The recent story that we proposed to give away the Portuguese colonies was nothing but blackmail. The Bari broadcasts on the theme that the British Empire was decadent, and that ruthless British policy in Palestine was dynamiting property and outraging women, were in full blast in Arab countries where Italian agents practically gave away radio sets.

It was Lord Cranborne who gave the Government reply to this protest. The British Government, he said, took a most serious view of these activities. They had several times protested in the past with the result that the propaganda had lessened. Now there was a recrudescence. They did not want a quarrel, for they earnestly sought a restoration of the traditional friendship with Italy, but the Government would not fail to take all further appropriate measures.

This suspicion of Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean has not been lessened in many minds by that Rome-Berlin axis nor by the German anti-Communist pact with Japan reaching out to the Far East where we have other interests and other dangers.

Why is the Arab world susceptible to this hostile propaganda? Did we not defeat the Turks for them? Was it not our Colonel Lawrence who was their best friend? Did we not help them to independence? By what malign fate are they now conspiring against us and listening, not perhaps with complete belief, but with self-satisfied sympathy, to attacks upon us broadcast in their market-places?

That is another tragedy of errors which seems to convict us of that hypocrisy by which we are charged in almost all the countries of the world.

I was startled when I talked with an Austrian lady in Vienna just before Austria became a part of Germany. She was a very charming lady who spoke English rapidly and easily and was highly intellectual.

“You English,” she said, in a discussion about the state of the world, “are, of course, the Japanese of the West.”

That remark spoilt my appetite for a good lunch in the Hotel Kranz Ambassador.

“You are very patient,” she continued. “Everybody imagines for a time that you are abandoning your old ways, and becoming gentle and peace-loving. You delude the world into the belief that you have been converted to pacifism, and that the old lion has become lamb-like! Then suddenly something happens somewhere which challenges your interests or your power. Then you are merciless! Then you are ruthless! You do things which shock the conscience of humanity—and are encrusted in your self-conceit and say it is your moral right. ‘We are maintaining justice,’ you say; ‘we are defending liberty and democracy,’ you say. It was so in Ireland with your Black-and-Tans. It is now in Palestine with your shooting of the Arabs who are trying to defend their land and liberties. The other day because an Arab community would not betray the young men who had destroyed one of your aerodromes, you put marks on to a number of Arab houses and let it be known that you would destroy them one by one until the young men were denounced. They were not denounced. You destroyed those houses one by one. Then you criticise the atrocities of Mussolini in Abyssinia! There is in the English character a fanatical sense of self-righteousness, and in that belief you are ruthless of pity, mercy, and gentle qualities. You are like the Japanese.”

In the European Press, including that of France, there was this story about the dynamiting of Arab houses in Palestine. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps in the judgment of our officers in Palestine it was necessary. True or untrue the fact remains that on Christmas Day when the English people were listening to carols of the Christ Child, and when millions of them were hearing the message of peace on earth, British soldiers in Palestine were hunting for armed Arabs and shooting them. There was the sound of rifle-shots across the Sea of Galilee where once Christ talked to the fishermen. It is one of those frightful inconsistencies which challenge the Christian ideal. Those Arabs are criminals. They hide in ambush and kill unarmed Jews and British soldiers. Justice demands that they shall be punished. Unfortunately they believe with fanaticism that they are fighting for justice and for that possession which all brave men will defend to the death, their own land and liberty.

I once heard the Arab point of view in Palestine where one day at Haifa I saw the work of Jewish labourers who were speaking the American language as it is spoken in the Bowery of New York.

“It is our land,” say the Arabs. “Why should these Jews from all parts of the world come supplied with foreign money to take possession of our best soil and overwhelm us by their numbers?”

The Jews pay for the land. They make it flourish where the Arabs kept a desert. They are law-abiding people with a dream in their mind. They have come back to Zion after fifteen hundred years. But the Arabs don’t want them to come. They have been there longer than the Jews. They like their own way of life. They like their own way of laziness. Allah is great and Mahommed is their prophet. Why, they ask, should the English support and encourage this invasion of Palestine by a race which modernises and vulgarises life—even though it brings mass-produced gramophones and mass-produced wealth?

Like many others I am deeply sympathetic to this dream of a national home for Jews. They need it, with tragic urgency in this time of persecution. They are making good in Palestine. But many of our own people out there take the Arab point of view and it seems to them—as they have told me—that this adventure was one of our cardinal mistakes, due no doubt to a spirit of generosity, but entered into without forethought. The Arabs have been in Palestine for more than a thousand years. These Jewish new-comers have no right, they say, to dispossess them even by money payments to those tempted to sell their land. The numbers of their immigration are a threat to the Arab population who see themselves thrust back and eventually dominated by the Jewish communities.

We have made for ourselves a second Ireland, and the proposed partition of Palestine would only intensify the cause of conflict between two races deeply and lastingly hostile with an unending vendetta of blood. The Jews will call upon us always to defend their lives and property. The Arabs will defy our hangings and fines for what they believe to be their most sacred rights. And by our policy in Palestine we are giving to Signor Mussolini a fine field for his propaganda, broadcast in every market-place of the Arab world to the danger of French as well as British interests and peace. With both hands we give our enemies and our critics the very material for their trouble-making.

By this policy, inspired by no mean spirit, we find ourselves in the Holy Land, of all places on earth, fighting a guerrilla warfare with modern weapons, so that blood stains the lilies of the fields and shots ring out near Nazareth, and children are frightened in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. It is a very painful paradox for Christian folk in England.

France is involved in this Arab unrest. There are rebellious forces seething beneath her rule in Morocco and Algiers. The genius of Lyautey gained for a time the loyalty of Arab chiefs and subdued those who were disloyal. Lyautey’s iron hand in the velvet glove lies still and his successors are faced by new difficulties and hazards. French engineers have built good roads. Their officers, who have a fatherly touch with their men, have raised disciplined troops; but the world economic situation has caused grave discontent in the Arab populations because of bad trade and loss of markets. The French way with the Arabs has been generous and paternal, but there comes a time when paternalism does not satisfy those conscious of their manhood.

So once I was told under the stars of Egypt in a desert white in the moonlight.

“We are grateful to Mother England,” said my Egyptian friend whose camels were sleeping beyond our tents. “There was a time when we were weak and needed her protection. But it is not good always to be mothered. When the son reaches his manhood he must depart from his mother and go his own way, even if it leads to misery and disaster. So it is with us Egyptians. We wish to go our own way even if it leads to our own downfall. So it is with Arab people under French and British rule. They will break away one day. Nature itself forces them to break away. And they are an ancient people remembering their pride. Now they have learnt how to use rifles and machine-guns. You understand?”

In some such words he spoke under the stars, as I remember, for they gave me a kind of frisson, at the thought of dark forces moving in a world with which I am unfamiliar—the densely populated world of those who have the Crescent for their emblem, and Mahommed for their prophet. Now that we have taught them to use rifles and machine-guns there may be trouble. There is already trouble.