By then Gray had already left the Foreign Office for the Jesuits at Manresa House Roehampton in the footsteps of Gerald Manley

By then, Gray had already left the Foreign Office for the Jesuits at Manresa House, Roehampton, in the footsteps of Gerald Manley Hopkins.McCormack couches this life-change in mythic terms: “The man who was Dorian Gray had died To rise again” For Gray, the penalty to be paid was that of his own poetry. It would not survive the character Wilde had irrevocably imposed upon it. His resurrection could not dispel the decadent ghosts of his past, nor could he escape the portrait in the attic – whose dust sheet this book has pulled away.*Philip Hoare’s new book ‘Spike Island’ is published next month by Fourth Estate. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev (Little, Brown, £25, 612pp)

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev (Little, Brown, £25, 612pp)
Since the late 1980s, the history of modern Israel has been rewritten by a group of Israeli scholars and journalists. Among them, Tom Segev single-handedly uprooted a thicket of myths about the country’s development.

Segev, whose coruscating journalism is obligatory reading for aficionados in Israel, specialises in debunking.Unlike the ponderous institutional histories and dull political biographies that characterise Israeli historiography, his approach to the history of Palestine during the British Mandate is unashamedly anecdotal. Making excellent use of published and new sources, Segev weaves the lives of individual Arabs, Jews and British into a masterly narrative of this crucial period.The writings of Kalil al-Sakakini, an Arab educationalist and nationalist ideologue, shed light on the increasingly restive mood of Palestine’s Arabs. The papers of Alter Levine, an early American Jewish immigrant, exemplify the enterprise and persistence of the settlers. Segev reconstructs the outlook of British administrators from the letters they wrote to sons left at home. In the extraordinary case of General Evelyn Barker, who commanded the British forces in Palestine in 1945-7, he discovered the billets doux the general wrote to his Arab mistress. These passionate and indiscreet missives, laced with anti-Semitism, were taken from the plundered house of Barker’s lover in Jerusalem and found their way into the Israel State Archive.At times the vignettes threaten to obscure the argument and give the book a whimsical feel, but the salience of individual experience is crucial. The Balfour Declaration, Zionism, and the Arab national movement all had an impact, often violent and brutal, on the lives of men, women, and children.

Their fate is a sobering reminder that the great causes and “forces of history”, so beloved of Ben Gurion or the Mufti of Jerusalem, can bring hope or misery, deliverance or destruction. They are an essential counterpoint to the cool, cynical prose in which Segev unfolds a tale that could have been told by a madman.Contrary to the explanations in standard accounts of Britain’s Middle Eastern adventure, Segev cannot detect any pragmatic rationale for it. Balfour’s pledge to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine under British protection “was the product of neither military nor diplomatic interests but of prejudice, faith, and sleight of hand”.The British drove the Turks out of Palestine and wanted a reason for keeping it: patronage of Zionism, as against support for an Arab state, was doubly useful. To men who believed that Jews wielded great financial and political power, it was a way of buying their favour and help to win the war. Segev is not the first to reveal how Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, manipulated the myth of Jewish power, but it remains shocking to read of his guile and the gullibility of men like Lloyd George and Arthur James Balfour.A few statesmen, like Lord Curzon, saw through the bluff, but honour demanded that the British fulfil their “contract” with the Jews.

In Segev’s narrative, the empire’s agents in Palestine then became hapless tools of an ill-conceived and underfunded enterprise. Yet he also points out that many British actors, like Wyndham Deedes, the administration’s chief secretary from 1920-23, were Christian Zionists who were enthralled by the restoration of the Jews to their homeland.For many colonial administrators, “Jerusalem was their Camelot”. Despite having picturesque and courtly qualities, the Arabs could not compete with Jewish influence. Their political structures were underdeveloped, while their propaganda was crude and usually anti-Semitic. Segev challenges orthodoxy by arguing that the British consistently favoured the Jews and allowed the Zionists to exploit their “mutual interests”. There is something of a contradiction here, since he denies the British had any interest in being in Palestine.Segev also neglects the detail of the Mandate which stipulated that the British manage the territory to the benefit of the Jews.