Middle East #3: World War II

When France suffered a “nauseatingly swift collapse” to Germany in World War II, Britain was desperate to find someone who could serve as the face of French resistance, to create a feeling that they (the British) weren’t as “isolated as they felt”, writes James Barr in A Line in the Sand. They picked on Charles de Gaulle.

 

De Gaulle struggled to wield any real influence on within-France resistance. Why? For one, he was barely known in France at the time. Secondly, much of the army in France considered itself a professional unit – if the Vichy government of the day had surrendered to Germany, well, it was their professional duty to obey the government, not become outlaws. Thirdly, for the French who did resist, who said de Gaulle was their boss anyway? And lastly, since the ancient enemy (Britain) was backing de Gaulle, it only detracted from his credibility.

 

When the French in the Middle East aligned with the Vichy government in France, the British had a major problem. What if the Middle East was opened up to Hitler by the French? With Rommel coming from the Africa side, the British couldn’t afford to be encircled from the Middle East as well.

 

And so British tried to get their man, de Gaulle, to take over in the French Middle East. But de Gaulle would not always align with what the British wanted – he had to appear to be strong and independent, after all. Plus, he didn’t trust the British to not try and take over the French areas of the Middle East.

 

Both sides’ actions were as if they were Allies in Europe only, but continued their traditional enmity in the Middle East. Both sides would subvert and sabotage each other; and instigate the Arabs in the others’ territory to rebel.

 

Britain wanted a friendly Arab state to be established – both from an oil and Suez perspective. Therefore, they put a limit on how many Jews could immigrate to Palestine since that was a topic that infuriated the Arabs. But as the scale of Nazi massacres of Jews began to grow public, the Jews grew desperate – they started resorting to terrorism in Palestine. Since Palestine was under British control, the victims of this terrorism were both Arabs and the British. When the British started to act against the Jews, the outnumbered and outgunned Jews turned to the French for help. The French were only too glad to support the Jews against their old enemy – besides, weren’t the British doing the same in French controlled parts of the Middle East?

 

As the war in Europe started to swing clearly in favour of the Allies, things got even more muddy. Did any British agreements made to de Gaulle hold any sanctity? After all, he wasn’t the elected head of France. In turn, the French expected to be stabbed in the back by the British and started acting accordingly.

 

This then is how things stood at the end of World War II.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more