Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
On 5 June 1969, the second anniversary of the
outbreak of the Six Day War, a four-page advertising spread appeared in The Times and other major British
newspapers. Sponsored by the League of
Arab States, and issued by the Anglo-Jordanian Alliance, it proclaimed that the
Alliance’s committee “salutes the Palestinians rendered homeless and those in
occupied territory”. Beneath were the
names of five Labour MPs: Margaret McKay, William Wilson, David Watkins, John
Ryan, and David Ensor. As well as a
quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Rosalind and Helen”:
Fear not the tyrants shall rule forever,
Or the priests of the bloody faith;
They stand on the brink of that mighty river,
Whose waves they have tainted with death
The four-page spread contained nine articles, by
contributors including Ian Gilmour, Christopher Mayhew and Anthony Nutting,
three MPs prominently associated with the Council for Arab-British
Understanding (CAABU), which, funded by Arab money, had been established
immediately after the Six Day War. (David Watkins, mentioned above, was also a
zealous member; indeed, he would serve as CAABU’s director from 1983 to 1990.) Retired diplomat Sir Geoffrey Furlonge
(1903-84), another contributor, would serve as treasurer of CAABU and write Palestine is my country: the story of Musa
Alami (London, 1969); also a contributor was retired diplomat Sir Harold
Beeley (1909-2001), who that same year had begun lecturing at London
University, and would eventually chair the World of Islam Festival Trust.
The article by Gilmour – a
born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth future Secretary of State for Defence
under Edward Heath, whose government so appallingly refused to supply Israel
with spare parts for British-made tanks during the Yom Kippur War –
was referred to the Race Relations
Board as “likely to have an unsettling effect on race relations”; however, the
Board declined to proceed with the complaint, citing a lack of remit.
The extract
from Shelley’s poem caused a furore, as the second line was widely believed to
refer to Judaism. Anglo-Jordanian
Alliance president Margaret McKay – a working-class firebrand feminist who
nevertheless espoused the Arab cause with vigour, wore Arab dress in
Parliament, and ended up living in Dubai – wrote to The Times (10 June 1969) explaining that the line referred to “the
Zionists”. Ensor – a colourful
upper-middle-class member of the Labour benches – apologised for the extract;
the other three refused to do so. In any
case, many supporters of Israel, Jew and non-Jew alike, remained unconvinced by
Mrs McKay’s assurance. (She would make
headlines later in the year when she declared in New York that Britain’s Middle
East policy was controlled by the fact that 62 Jews sat in Parliament.) The
Times itself had in the very issue in which the advertisement appeared
distanced itself in a leading article from the contents, which it called
“extremely partisan” and “not calculated to bring a settlement any nearer”; on
7 June, beneath a complainant’s letter, it added that it “much regretted”
publication of the “grossly offensive” Shelley extract, which it would not have
carried had the advertisement, owing to a mix-up, not escaped the usual
practice of being “submitted for editorial clearance”.
This furore
took place against the backdrop of what the late Professor Lionel Kochan, in
his review of events in Britain for the American Jewish Committee’s Year Book, described as “an
intensification of pro-Arab propaganda” – which had made headway in the United
Nations Association, Oxfam, and Save the Children Fund, and was tightening its
grip on sections of the Labour and Liberal parties. Michael Foot (later a life peer), former
editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune,
had recently been recruited to the Arab cause.
Nastiness had infiltrated the Movement for Colonial Freedom (an
organisation with many Labour Party parliamentarians, including that future foe
of Israel, Tony Benn) whose monthly bulletin for September carried two
offensive cartoons: one using a dollar sign to depict Israel, the other bearing
the inscription “Apartheid-Zion Nazi system”.
The Palestine
Solidarity Campaign (PSC) was consolidating.
It, to quote Kochan, consisted of “most of the members of the General
Union of Arab Students (with about 30 branches at the universities, and a
variegated collection of British and Commonwealth New Left groups dominated by
Trotskyites and Maoists” and was supported by a number of extreme left
expatriate Israelis. Thirty left-wing British students were reportedly among
145 students from Europe and the United States who flew out of Jordan to join
Arafat’s Al-Fatah. It was suspected that
the person who bombed the Zim Shipping Line’s Regent Street offices was not an
Arab but a far left adherent of the Arab cause.
The year saw numerous attacks on Jewish premises in London, including
bombs at a Marks & Spencer store, and more attacks were warned of by the
Amman-based PFLP leader George Habash, who added that
“Our enemy is
not Israel full stop. Israel is backed
by imperialist forces…. Consequently, if the West continues to back Israel, we
have to regard the west as part of … the enemy.”
A Scotland
Yard Special Branch officer told The
Times:
“Frankly, keeping an eye on all these places is
almost impossible. All we can do is hope
for the best luck in the world.”
(Sounds
familiar.)
CAABU
was also gaining influence. Unlike the
PSC, CAABU was the respectable face of the anti-Israel cause. One of its contributors to the 1969
advertisement mentioned above –
Christopher Mayhew (1915-97; created a life peer as Baron Mayhew in 1981; a
Labour MP until 1974, when he joined the Liberals ) – received in 1969 from
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Dubai £50,000 to set up an Arab Friendship
Foundation in Switzerland. Mayhew
recalled in 1977 (see the pamphlet CAABU's Tenth Anniversary, published
in London that year by the Arab-British Centre):
"Those who founded CAABU, at
a meeting here in the House of Commons ten years ago, took on a formidable task
– to challenge the deeply held beliefs about Palestine of the overwhelming
majority of the British people.
An opinion poll just published by
the Sunday Times had shown that only 2% of the
British people supported the Arabs. It was almost universally agreed that
the 1967 war had been planned and started by the Arabs with Russian support;
that the Arabs were racialists who aimed to drive the Jews into the sea; that
the Palestinian refugees had left Israel in 1948 and should resettle elsewhere
in the Arab world; that the refugee camps were kept in being by the Arab
Governments as a political weapon against Israel; that Israel, a small country
surrounded by numerous enemies, had no designs at all on Arab territory unless,
reasonably enough, to secure her own security; and that, in general, after the
appalling sufferings of the Jewish people, Israel was entitled, on moral, legal
and historical grounds, to the wholehearted support of the civilised world.
To make things worse, these
opinions were shared at that time by almost all newspaper proprietors and
editors, almost all the directing staff of the BBC and ITV, almost all MPs, and
almost the entire publishing and film industries.
They were also supported, with
enthusiasm and sincerity, by the great bulk of Britain's large, lively and
influential Jewish community, many of whose members were totally dedicated to
Israel's cause and were willing to make great sacrifices of time and money to
support it…
None of the founders of CAABU, I
feel sure, expected to enjoy the experience of challenging the Zionist lobby
... but it was plainly a job that had to be done by someone…”
Another of the contributors to the
advertisement, baronet’s son (Sir) Anthony Nutting (1920-99), a Foreign
Office Arabist who became a Conservative MP in 1945 and was once talked of as a
future prime minister, had resigned as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs
during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and soon afterwards lost his seat in the
Commons. On 12 November 1969 the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency reported that he had been
refused entry to Israel
‘because of "hostile"
remarks he was reported to have made while visiting Arab countries…
Mr. Nutting attributed the Israeli
ban to his remark that the Israel-occupied West Bank was "one large
prison" [sounds
familiar!] adding that they "must have something terrible to
hide."
An Israeli spokesman said yesterday
that Mr Nutting would have been welcomed to visit the West Bank and see
conditions for himself. He was barred
because of a speech he made to students in Beirut several days ago in which he
reportedly said that the Palestine question can be solved only by force and
that it was up to the Palestinian guerrillas to impose such a solution. The
spokesman called those remarks inimical to Israel's security.’
Among CAABU’s enthusiasts was journalist
Michael Adams (1920-2005), its
inaugural director. He had worked for the BBC early in his career (his
son Paul is its chief diplomatic correspondent) but had later joined The Guardian. It had been
one of his articles which prompted a columnist in the Jewish Chronicle (30 June 1967) to observe:
"It is with a sinking feeling
and eventually turning stomach that one examines the Guardian each
morning."
While
still employed by The Guardian, Adams
had gone on a CAABU-sponsored trip to
the Middle East, which resulted, as intended, in a series of articles biased
against Israel. The Guardian printed them without explaining that
they had been subsidised by Arab money. There was also a despatch by
Adams from Cairo which talked of the "forcible expulsion across the
burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza". In fact, those
deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army and a threat to
Israel's security, as The Guardian afterwards grudgingly
acknowledged. Adams also used the offensive term "final
solution" to describe Israeli policy. In
the summer of 1969, on the BBC's Panorama, a flagship weekly current
affairs programme, Adams spewed out vitriol about "nation-wide and even
world-wide Jewish pressure" – in
other words, a certain lobby.
And in one of his platform
appearances, he foreshadowed the avoidance by the BBC and its ideological twin The
Guardian of the T-word, rhetorically enquiring why the British press
referred to "Arab terrorists".
Nevill Barbour (1895-1972), an
Oxford-educated Arabic scholar from Northern Ireland, was another CAABU
activist with influence at the BBC. He had lived in Tangier and then
Cairo for some years before moving to Palestine in the 1930s with his wife and
children, acting as local correspondent for The
Times, and editing the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War he returned to Britain, joining
the BBC in 1940 as Arabic Public Relations Officer. He launched the
magazine Arabic Listener and subsequently became Assistant Head of the
BBC's Eastern Service, retiring in 1956. The best-known of his
publications, Nisi Dominus: A Survey of the Palestine Controversy, was
published in 1946.
Yet another facilitator of a CAABU/BBC
nexus was Doreen Ingrams (1906-97), wife of a British colonial
administrator, Harold
Ingrams (1897-1973), who had been
stationed in Zanzibar, Hadhramaut, and southern Arabia, dressing like the
locals. Her diaries of the couple’s travels formed the basis for her book
A Time in Arabia (1970). Adams himself wrote her obituary in The Independent (31 July 1997):
'Doreen Ingrams spent 12 years as a
Senior Assistant in the Arabic Service of the BBC, where she was in charge of
talks and magazine programmes, especially programmes for women. Gathering
material for these, she travelled widely and after her retirement in 1967 she kept
closely in touch with developments in the Arab world.
In 1972 she made use of
little-known archive material to produce a work of lasting historical
significance in Palestine
Papers 1917-1922 with the subtitle Seeds of Conflict, pinpointing the
responsibility of British ministers and officials for the subsequent tragedy in
Palestine. She was a founder-member of [CAABU] and served for many years on its
Executive Committee. At a reception in her honour in 1994 the members of the
Arab Club in Britain presented her with a silver tray as a symbol of "her
outstanding contribution to the promotion of Arab-British
understanding"....'
But it was the BBC’s Keith Kyle
(1925-2007) who, thumbing his nose at the terms of his employer’s Charter,
provided CAABU with its biggest boost from that quarter. Kyle seems to have been
the first BBC broadcaster to flout the neutrality incumbent upon the BBC
when, during the tension leading up to the Six Day War, he declared that
"fundamentally in this dispute the Arabs
are completely in the right. There can be no question about this at
all."
These words were also printed in the 1 June 1967
issue of The Listener, a BBC publication.
Kyle thus anticipating Jeremy Bowen and the rest of today’s BBC Israel-bashing coterie by several decades. However, unlike Bowen, so infuriatingly and risibly out of his depth, the intellectual Kyle clearly possessed an academic knowledge of history and politics which, but for the overt bias in which he unashamedly indulged, undoubtedly fitted him for his post as a foreign correspondent. The Oxford-educated son of an Anglican clergyman, he joined the BBC following five years as Washington correspondent of The Economist.
Kyle thus anticipating Jeremy Bowen and the rest of today’s BBC Israel-bashing coterie by several decades. However, unlike Bowen, so infuriatingly and risibly out of his depth, the intellectual Kyle clearly possessed an academic knowledge of history and politics which, but for the overt bias in which he unashamedly indulged, undoubtedly fitted him for his post as a foreign correspondent. The Oxford-educated son of an Anglican clergyman, he joined the BBC following five years as Washington correspondent of The Economist.
Outrageously – why did the BBC let him
get away with it? – he identified
openly with CAABU from its infancy. He was a keynote speaker at one of
its first major rallies, where the Jewish Chronicle (29 November
1968) noted "the intense anti-Jewish feeling generated in the CAABU
audience – and among some of the speakers – by the very existence of the Jewish
State, referred to as the Zionist State" as well as the way pro-Israel
Jewish questioners were mocked and shouted down.
One of the
worst examples of Kyle’s pro-Arab stance concerned the bungled hijacking
attempt (with innocent casualties) by PFLP terrorists of an El Al aircraft at
Zurich Airport in February 1969. He had learned of the plan from Arab
contacts in Damascus, but had not disclosed the information "to avoid
Israeli retaliation against it". In
a subsequent attempt to prevent him visiting Israel there were threats of him
being prosecuted as “an accessory before the fact” if he set foot there.
In the same
year he presented on BBC programmes such as 24 Hours reports on the
Middle East highly biased against Israel and replete with gratuitous comments
of his own. For example, he suggested that the nine Iraqi Jews convicted
on trumped up charges of spying charges and publicly hanged in Baghdad in
January were indeed guilty, accused Israel of violating the 1949 Geneva
Convention on the treatment of populations under occupation, and denounced
Israel’s policy of “massive retaliation”.
Aghast, a Jewish Chronicle columnist (9 May 1969) observed:
"The casual viewer will
doubtless have been fooled into believing that the Israeli occupation of Arab
territories is barbaric and ruthless."
On behalf of
the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Sir Barnett Janner (later Lord Janner;
1892-1982) and Victor Mishcon (later Lord Mishcon; 1915-2006), discussed
communal concerns regarding Kyle’s “slanted” reports with the Chairman of the
Board of Governors of the BBC, Lord Hill.
But following an investigation of the transcripts – by the BBC itself,
as all complaints of bias to the BBC still are – the BBC (to quote Lionel
Kochan again)
“were apparently satisfied with the
objectivity of their reporter, who happens to be political and foreign affairs
adviser to the BBC TV Current Affairs group”
(Sounds
familiar.)
Kyle was
quoted in The Times (16 July 1969) as saying:
“I simply refuse to discuss the
Middle East in terms of pro- and anti. I
am not a Middle East expert. I went
there to look at the situation afresh … I have a bias towards peace.”
Lionel Kochan
considered that
“The balance was restored, to some
extent, when opportunity was given to Kyle’s critics, in July, to confront him
on two separate occasions in the studio.
With Kyle in the chair, a confrontation between Tel Aviv University professor
Zvi Yavetz [the distinguished Romanian-born historian] and [American University
of Beirut] Professor Yusaf [Yusuf] Sayigh – who refused to appear in the same
studio – representing the PLO – was widely held to have been a verbal victory for the Israeli. A week later, Kyle met four of his Jewish
critics in the studio in a “Talkback” programme.”
(The latter
may or may not have been have been the occasion on which, according to The
Times (19 July 1969), Kyle was due to face David Pela, deputy editor of the
Jewish Chronicle, Professor Zvi Yavetz, and non-Jewish Labour MP Raymond
Fletcher.)
Also incensed
by Kyle’s bias was Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who cancelled a
scheduled interview with the BBC journalist.
Kyle, on entering Israel, was refused security clearance to examine the
work of the UN observers in the Suez Canal zone. He subsequently became
prominently associated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA;
Chatham House) and wrote tendentious books on Suez and on Israel. In
1983, when membership secretary of the RIIA, he invited as speaker Dr Israel
Shahak, chairman of the so-called (and miniscule) Israel League for Human and
Civil Rights, who had written a book containing this evil claim:
"In
the Jewish State, only the Jews are considered human. Non-Jews have the
status of beasts."
Need we be surprised that Kyle's obituary in that
infamously anti-Israel newspaper The Guardian
(27 February 2007) observed that Kyle "would have made a wise foreign
secretary"?
Daphne Anson is an Australian who under her real name has authored and co-authored several books and many articles on historical topics including Jewish ones. She blogs under an alias in order to separate her professional identity from her blogging one.
