The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949. Simon Ball

¹³ As the Mufti told a Nazi diplomat, the Muslims of Palestine hoped fervently for ‘the spread of fascist and anti-democratic leadership to other countries’. ¹⁴

      Britain’s second foe was Ali Maher Pasha, minister of the royal household, éminence grise to the monarchs of Egypt. ¹⁵ Radio Bari blared that the English hypocrites took risks for infidel savages, the Abyssinians, but reduced civilized Muslims to slavery. Ali Maher’s mobs cheered Mussolini as a Copt killer–the Patriarch of the Abyssinian church being traditionally chosen from amongst the Coptic monks of Egypt. Unlike the Grand Mufti, Ali Maher’s espousal of violent Mohammedanism was not particularly sincere. His loathing of democracy, however, was just as real. In his view the ‘illiterate electorate’ should be no more than the attendees of disciplined rallies as in Fascist Italy. His main purpose was to recruit zealous thugs. Like the Italians he looked to the Green Shirts of Young Egypt as potential shock troops. His alliance with the sheikhs provided him with squads of embittered young men who found that their religious education was mocked by secular technocrats. Ali Maher could put violent gangs on the streets. He knew, however, that he had to bide his time.

      The true mass movement in Egypt was the Wafd, ‘the Delegation’, the secular anti-royalist nationalist party created at the end of the First World War. The Wafd, too, was determined to make use of the Abyssinian War to its best advantage. Enemies of the Wafd charged that it was a Coptic conspiracy, its second-in-command and most outspoken radical, Makram Ubeid, was a Christian, reviled as ‘Master William’ by his Muslim opponents. Ubeid too, however, admired the Black Shirts. He raised his own paramilitary militia, the Blue Shirts. Egypt proved one of the most prolific creators of movements which looked to Fascist Black Shirt street violence as a model for emulation. Ciano’s agents had great success in recruiting genuine Black Shirts from amongst the Italian population in Egypt. When Ciano visited in 1936, twenty thousand Black Shirts greeted him. ¹⁶ The appeal of Fascist methods was potent. The Wafd leadership remained, however, Italophobes. They saw little advantage in swapping British imperialism for the Italian variety ¹⁷ After much thought, the leader of the Wafd, Nahas Pasha, denounced the Italian bogey. The Blue Shirts were turned upon the Green Shirts. Nahas and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, agreed that the best answer to ‘Italian intrigue’ was an Anglo-Egyptian treaty ¹⁸ The treaty would serve both their interests. The British could tell the world that they had secured untrammelled rights to bases around the Suez Canal. Nahas could tell the Egyptians that he had secured independence. ¹⁹

      The tawdry insincerity of the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations provided fertile ground for Ali Maher and his Fascist allies to exploit. In Farouk, the boy-king of Egypt, Ali Maher saw the perfect blank canvas from which he could create an Islamo-Fascist monarchy. The Wafd’s elderly candidate for head of the royal household was discredited by his dalliance with a seventeen-year-old Austrian girl. With his competitor disposed of, Ali Maher became once again officially the King’s chief adviser. Farouk invited a circle of Italian Fascist advisers to the Palace. Chief amongst them was the ‘royal architect’. He did little design work. Instead he was a conduit for intelligence and influence to flow between Rome and Cairo. His influence was cemented by his equally important role of royal pander, supplying the young European girls so prized at Court. ²⁰

      Fascists in the Palace were not Nahas’s only problem. The Wafd had won power by aping Fascist models of street violence. Yet it was unclear whether they controlled the power on the streets that they had unleashed. The gangs created in the image of the Black Shirts did not necessarily agree with their leader’s contention that the British, although repugnant, were better than the Italians. Although Nahas proclaimed himself‘supreme leader’ of the Blue Shirts, they increasingly appeared as much a threat as a boon. The government of Egypt had declared against the Italians but contained elements of Fascist decay within it. The Blue Shirts turned on their own corrupt pashadom. The Party had to use all the powers of the State to destroy its own mass movement, to the benefit of Ali Maher and the Palace.

      Egyptian Islamo-Fascism emboldened others. ²¹ The Mufti of Jerusalem himself had never had much in common with his fellow Islamic militants in Egypt. Egyptian clerics dreaming of a Caliphate in Cairo distrusted their more charismatic Palestinian brother, who made no secret of his own ambition to lead Sunni Islam. The Egyptian Islamo-Fascist successes, however, egged on the Syrians. The Syrian National Bloc created its own paramilitaries on the Fascist model, the Steel Shirts. ²² The Syrian Emir Shakib Arslan, the best-known spokesman of militant Arab nationalism, whose anti-French, anti-British propaganda was financed in equal measure by Mussolini and Hitler, goaded the Mufti in the Palestinian press. ²³ The circumstances overrode the Mufti’s preference for mezzi insidiosi. ²⁴ The terrorist cells were activated. In April 1936 the Mufti himself arrived on the Mediterranean coast. Arabs started murdering Jews. The Mufti emerged as the head of the Arab Higher Committee. A general strike was declared. ²⁵ The priority of the strike was to close down Palestine’s modern commerce. The first target was the Mediterranean ports, and the railways which took imports inland. The struggle centred on Haifa, Palestine’s great hope for modernity. It contained a new port built by the British and the railway workshops, the largest industrial site in Palestine. ²⁶ Old Haifa was the base of the most notorious Islamic terrorists, the Black Hand. Modern Haifa was a heterogeneous place with many new immigrants. There, where the strike could have had most effect, its hold was patchy. On the other hand, the old Arab port of Jaffa was completely closed down. In order to solidify the strike in Haifa, and maintain it in Jaffa, the leaders of the revolt required a great deal of money. They needed to offer wavering Arab workers alternative incomes. Appeals to fellow Muslims raised very little. ²⁷

      The Italians, on the other hand, were more than willing to provide the Mufti with ‘millions’. Both the Italians and the insurgents got what they wanted. British troops were transferred from the Egyptian-Libyan border to Palestine, where they struggled to deal with terrorism. At last it seemed that money and violence would close down Haifa. In extremis, the British Army acted decisively. It sent troops into Haifa to protect those who kept working. But British success in Haifa provoked even more violence. Insurgents took to the countryside. If they could not close the ports they would sabotage the economy inland. In the towns the paramilitaries forced shops to close, preventing what arrived at the ports from being sold. Foreign fighters arrived from around the Arab world. Those with military training were able to deploy heavier weapons such as machine guns, making the bands even more deadly.

      The British response was hobbled by disagreement over the nature of the revolt. Sir John Dill, the officer dispatched from Britain to deal with the insurgents, argued that the surest and most effective way of crippling the uprising was to decapitate it. He wanted to eliminate the Mufti. The High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, however, remained the Mufti’s dupe. Wauchope’s own desire that Palestine should become a peaceful, multi-racial, multi-religious society, led him astray. ²⁸ The effect, one of his senior police officials remarked, was a policy of glossing things over’. ²⁹ In the autumn of 1936 London finally agreed to overrule Wauchope. He was ordered to extirpate the leaders of the revolt. Despite these orders Wauchope remained determined to subvert the ‘hard policy’. His first response