The World

In Cairo, in December 1947, Farouk hosted a new Arab League of the seven independent Arab countries, who decided on war. ‘It doesn’t matter how many [Jews] there are,’ said the League’s Egyptian secretary Azzam Pasha, ‘we’ll sweep them into the sea.’ Setting up the mufti of Jerusalem as Palestinian president, Farouk commanded 40,000 soldiers, but when he was warned that only half were equipped and of those only his Sudanese guard was ready for combat, he insisted that forty-five million Arabs could obliterate 600,000 Jews, who fielded just 35,000 fighters. But he had an Arab rival in the carve-up.

Abdullah, king of Transjordan, descended from Muhammad, mocked Farouk’s dynasty: ‘You don’t make a gentleman of a Balkan farmer’s son simply by making him a king.’ But he also possessed a crack unit of 10,000, the British-officered Arab Legion. Abdullah was determined to seize swathes of Palestine by war or guile, secretly negotiating a partition of Palestine with the Jews while publicly denouncing the Jewish state. Abdullah got himself elected supreme commander of Arab League forces and massed his legionaries; Farouk reviewed Egyptian troops on horseback and promoted his sisters to general.

On 15 May 1948, as the British evacuated, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel,^*

just as Farouk and Abdullah were joined by the Syrians plus Iraqi and Saudi contingents. Stalin, who was already arresting and shooting Soviet Jews, accusing them of split loyalties, was the first to recognize Israel. The Egyptian plan was to race up the coast and take Tel Aviv. Instead, in a ferocious war, accompanied by atrocities on both sides, the new Israeli army, well led by disciplined officers, armed with shipments of Soviet weaponry, defeated all the Arab armies. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the war, but their Catastrophe – the Nakba – was the birth of Israel, aided by the expulsion by Arab states of 800,000 Sephardic Jews, communities that had thrived in Alexandria, Damascus, Marrakesh and Baghdad for millennia, who now arrived in Israel, shaping its culture.

As the war progressed, the total commitment of the Israelis and the influx of Sephardic immigrants allowed them to field 115,000 men by early 1949, the Arabs still only 60,000. While Abdullah successfully invaded the West Bank and seized the Old City of Jerusalem, Farouk’s troops were routed, let down by the Stork, who had procured faulty Italian weapons. Two Egyptians distinguished themselves: General Mohamed Naguib was wounded three times, but was disgusted by Farouk, whose excesses he knew well. When 4,000 Egyptians were trapped for four months in the Faluja Pocket, one of them, a tall handsome postman’s son, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, wounded in the siege, was so incensed by Faroukian incompetence that he wrote Philosophy of the Revolution, and planned a coup.

In February 1949, Farouk agreed to an armistice, withdrawing from the Negev desert. Israel was established as a liberal democracy with a Jewish majority and an Arab minority – the only democracy in the region then and now. The Palestinians, like the Jews before them, did not give up their dream of Return.

Arab soldiers found it hard to forgive their inept leaders. In Syria, the fragile democracy left by France was overthrown by General Husni al-Zaim – the first of many Arab military coups. Leaders across the region would shamelessly use reckless violence, ethnic rivalries and kinship favouritism instead of building democracy and civil societies, with fatal consequences. The other winner was Abdullah of Jordan, as he called his kingdom, which doubled in size. Now that he possessed the Holy City, he declared himself king of Jerusalem, the first actually to rule there since the short visit of Emperor Frederick II in 1229. Many could not forgive his successful game of thrones: in 1951, he was assassinated in the al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – in front of his grandson and later successor, Hussein, a seventeen-year-old Harrovian schoolboy who never forgot the sight. In Egypt, a cholera epidemic exposed Farouk’s ineptitude, while the Muslim Brothers planned his downfall, assassinating his premier. Instead Farouk had al-Banna assassinated and banned the Brothers. Bald, obese and absolute but with a thriving economy and almost rid of the British and the Brothers, Farouk had survived.

Stalin had ordered his Czech vassals to provide Israel with the armaments that won the war, while in China he was transferring huge caches of weaponry that would change the world.

MAO, JIANG QING AND RED SISTER SONG