Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of Britain’s troubled history in the Middle East will be unsurprised by Lord Cameron’s increasingly pro-Palestinian pronouncements on the Gaza war.
Twice in recent days Cameron has called on Israel to ‘pause’ its offensive against Hamas in Gaza, and he says he has personally challenged the Israeli government and urged it to abide by humanitarian law. He has also reiterated Britain’s support for a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem and the endless feud between Israel and her implacable Arab enemies.
Ever since T.E. Lawrence went around Paris in flowing Bedouin robes putting the case for a united Arab nation to the peacemakers of Versailles after the first world war, the British Foreign Office has had a core of upper crust Arabists at its heart. These influential chaps, who are often also Tory politicians and clearly entranced by the romance of the desert, have been a decisive influence on British policy in the Middle East for more than a century. They have consistently advocated for the interests of Arab states – no matter how autocratic – and denigrated the only democracy in the region: Israel.
Sir Mark Sykes, the Tory MP, diplomat and Yorkshire landowner who carved up the Ottoman empire to create the states of the modern Middle East, was an early exemplar of this tradition. Before he fell a fatal victim to the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, Sykes was the architect of the Sykes-Picot plan that partly drew the borders of the modern Middle East.
Notoriously, another prominent Arabist whose actions and views changed the region’s history was Harry St John Philby, father of the infamous Soviet spy Kim Philby. Philby senior shared his son’s strange dislike for his native land, and was instrumental in persuading his Saudi Arabian friends to give the US rather than Britain drilling and extraction rights to the vast deposits of newly discovered oil in the Arabian peninsula.
Philby converted to Islam in 1930, became chief advisor to the Saudi monarchy and promoted their claims, rather than those of the rival Hashemite dynasty in Iraq and Jordan, as guardians of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
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