The World

The vicious ethnic war at the heart of Palestine was exacerbated by the ambitions of the two leading Arab dynasts, the cunning Hashemite king Abdullah of Jordan, and flashy King Farouk, scion of House Mehmed Ali, king of Egypt, to expand their kingdoms and bid for the leadership of the Arab world.

Most of the states of west Asia – Syria, Israel, Lebanon – were created out of the old Ottoman empire in the two years after the Second World War. In April 1946, the French granted independence to two newly crafted countries, Syria and Lebanon;^* Britain did the same to Transjordan, and in Egypt withdrew British troops to the Canal. Palestine was more complicated: in 1917 the British had promised a ‘Jewish homeland’, but there was no promise of a state and even the promise of a ‘homeland’ did not mean it would ever happen. The Kurds, Armenians, Alawites and Druze had also been promised states – which had never materialized. The Palestinian Arabs had long been the majority alongside a small Jewish community – both ancient. But there had been a Jewish majority in Jerusalem since the 1880s.

The Arabs resented the arrival of Jewish immigrants, who soon formed a thriving agricultural community. British backing for a Jewish homeland did not last twenty years: as the conflict intensified, Britain totally reversed and in 1937 promised independence to the Arabs, just as they launched an insurgency that was crushed by British arms. Now, as independence was granted to new Arab states, the 600,000 Jews, led by a diminutive pugnacious Polish-born pragmatist with a shock of white hair, David Ben-Gurion, launched a Jewish rebellion against the British to win their own state. The Jewish experience was unique, as were the circumstances in Palestine, but in other ways, as Stalin put it, Zionism was simply ‘Jewish national expression’. The suffering of the Holocaust persuaded many to support a Jewish state. But not Britain: Attlee banned Jewish immigration into Palestine and hoped to hand it over to an Arab state. Jewish militias attacked British troops: Israel, like Türkiye in 1922, was forged by an anti-imperial rebellion against British wishes. Attlee desperately passed the problem to the United Nations.

On 29 November 1947, in Resolution 181, the UN voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, a plan not unlike those in Ireland and India. President Truman backed it. ‘I am Cyrus,’ he joked, referring to the Persian king. Ben-Gurion, believing in ‘a state at any cost’, accepted the compromise; the Palestinians preferred to fight for the whole. Arab paramilitaries attacked the Jewish community, defended by its well-organized militia, Haganah.

Watching this was Farouk, the young ruler of the greatest Arab nation, Egypt. King at sixteen, six foot and matinee-idol handsome, he had been educated in Britain and was vastly rich, owning 75,000 acres; he was so sheltered he had never visited the Pyramids but quickly became the Beloved King, al-malik-al-mahbub. During the Second World War, he had been humiliated by the British proconsul who had imposed his will on Farouk by surrounding Abdeen Palace with tanks; now he was keen to assert Egyptian power.

Farouk, who was married, was addicted to showgirls, nightclubs, fast cars and casinos, his Egypt a cosmopolitan mix of Turks, Circassians, Copts, Jews, Greeks and Lebanese. He ‘was fascinated by the fact I was a Jewess’, recalled his mistress Irene Guinle. ‘The only person Farouk ever listened to was his father, Fuad … [who] told him that the best women in the world were Jewish women.’ But all Farouk’s girlfriends agreed that he was a lazy man-child who was so lonely that his best friend was the grifter son of the palace electrician, Antonio Pulli, known as the Stork for his ability to fall asleep standing up in nightclubs.

Still in his late twenties, Farouk was learning politics, embracing the new Arab nationalism while warily monitoring the rise of an Islamicist sheikh, Hassan al-Banna. The sheikh’s followers, the million-strong Muslim Brothers, believed that ‘Islam is the solution’ and were infuriated by Faroukian decadence and by Jewish immigration to Jerusalem. They started to assassinate Farouk’s ministers. Farouk tried to promote a Muslim monarchy, but when he made the hajj it was on his yacht Mahrousa. Now he hoped to neutralize the Brothers by fighting Jews and annexing south Palestine. After all, Mehmed Ali had ruled the lot.