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Comment and Opinion

Meir Zamir – 19/01/2011

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“Charles de Gaulle and David Ben- Gurion accused Great Britain of having a conspiratorial policy in the Middle East. De Gaulle, who headed France’s provisional government after World War II, accused Winston Churchill of deliberately engineering the Syrian crisis in the summer of 1945 to evict France from the Levant and place Syria under tacit British hegemony. Ben-Gurion claimed, both before and after declaring independence in May 1948, that Britain was purposely working to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, or at any rate to reduce its territory, and that it secretly encouraged the Arab states to invade.

In either case, for lack of archival evidence, historians resorted to psychology to explain the two leaders’ charges which, it was argued, derived from their “Anglophobia,” “paranoia” and “obsession” with Britain. It was also alleged that Ben- Gurion’s accusations were intended to aggrandize the Zionists’ heroic achievements of 1948.”

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