num_pages: 266
description: In November 1917, after four months of deliberation and rewriting, Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild that the British Government 'view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. With this, Britain took upon itself the mantle of responsibility in the troubled Middle East and its tortuous politics. The trail that led to the founding of the State of Israel in the summer of 1948, amid civil war and bloodshed, is one that does not do the British credit, contrary to received opinion.Making use of previously unpublished official papers, Sidney Sugarman shows that the Foreign Secretary after 1945, Ernest Bevin, held the fledgling Zionist state in abhorrence and would bend over backwards to put obstructions in its way, to the benefit of its Arab neighbours. However, Bevin was not the tradition of anti-Semitism had been rife throughout British policy-making since before the Balfour Declaration, and the soldiers who stood aside while Jews were killed by mobs in Jerusalem, or who sent back ships full of Jewish refugees to persecution and torture were only obeying orders sent from on high.
language: English
title: The Unrelenting Conflict: Great Britain and the Making of Israel 1917-1948
titlecomplete: The Unrelenting Conflict: Great Britain and the Making of Israel 1917-1948
publisher: Book Guild Ltd