ABSTRACT
I N t h e First World War Britain confirmed the dominant position which she had in the nineteenth century established in the Middle East for the purpose of using it as an inert shock-
absorber interposed between her European rivals and her Indian Empire. However, immediately after that war nationalism, which the Foreign Office had cautiously encouraged during the war as a tactical instrument against the Ottoman Empire, continued to press its demands for independence so violently and at so many points that Britain could not offer it a total resistance without becoming involved in repressive military operations, for which the war-weary British public were not prepared. Such repression would, moreover, have sharply conflicted with the principle of national self-determination then manifest in the world, to which the rulers of Britain, conscious that the period of her unchallengeable supremacy in the world had passed, could not entirely run counter.1 Accordingly, successive British governments sought to compromise with the nationalist forces, conceding a large measure of self-government but striving to retain for Britain strategic bases and some control over their foreign policy designed to prevent the Middle Eastern countries from becoming the allies or instruments of any Power unfriendly to Britain. Compromises providing temporary satisfaction to both parties were thus reached with Egypt, Iraq, Sa’udi Arabia and Transjordan. In Palestine, while permitting a ten-fold expansion and consolidation of the Jewish National Home, Britain made concessions to the growing insistence of Arab nationalism by ever-increasing attention, in her interpretation of the elastically-worded Balfour
Declaration and the Mandate, to the clauses safeguarding Arab rights.
