tomas abraham

“a joint operation with them might have to be abandoned, and that he was looking for other partners in the war against Nasser. He added that there were three different timescales: the French advocated immediate military action against Egypt, the British wanted to allow two more months for diplomatic action, and the Americans wanted a much longer period to undermine Nasser’s regime without the use of military force. He assumed that Israel’s timescale was closer to Britain’s than to France’s.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The Balfour Declaration, as this letter came to be known, represented a major triumph for Zionist diplomacy. At the time of its issue, the Jewish population of Palestine numbered some 56,000 as against an Arab population of 600,000, or less than 10 percent. Considering that the Arabs constituted over 90 percent of the population, the promise not to prejudice their civil and religious rights had a distinctly hollow ring about it, since it totally ignored their political rights. Britain’s public promise to the Jews could not be reconciled either with its earlier promise to Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, to support the establishment of an independent Arab kingdom after the war in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire or with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 to divide the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence in the event of an Allied victory. These irreconcilable wartime promises returned to haunt Britain on the morrow of the Allied victory.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“the Jews, and led a full-scale revolt in 1936–39 against the British authorities and their Jewish protégés.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“conclude that Ben-Gurion was simply trying to score points off his opponent. Anderson tried his best to persuade Nasser to grant Ben-Gurion’s wish for a high-level meeting, but Nasser rejected the idea. He said that the Egyptian people, the Egyptian army, and the Arab nation would not allow such a meeting. Nasser made two additional points. First, Israel was not just an Egyptian problem but an all-Arab problem, and Egypt had to keep in step with the other Arab states. Second, as far as Egypt was concerned, the only basis for a settlement with Israel was the UN partition resolution of 1947. This was, of course, a complete nonstarter for Israel.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World