THE TABLET. February 23rd, 1957. VOL. 209. No. 6092.

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

FEBRUARY 23rd, 1957

NINE PENCE

“Held together with Algebra ": Technical Education in a Liberal Society A Century ol Divorce: The Repudiation of the Christian Tradition in the Act of 1857 Baden-Pow-eH’s Centenary: Catholics and the Movement he Founded. By E. E. Reynolds Conciliar Aspirations: The Call for the Council of Trent. By Outram Evennett The BBC and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Myth Remains. By Leonard Johnston The Holy Week Liturgy: Minor Modifications in the New Order

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

THE ARAB

CAF what use are fifteen thousand British troops in Libya?

Too few to invade Egypt, too many to honour King Jdris ? When the Treaty with the new kingdom of Libya was negotiated, they were thought of as part of a general system of British alliances and garrisons in the Canal Zone, in Jordan, in Iraq, round the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Looking after the Suez Canal, supporting friendly Governments, watching the oil, they were a survival from the nineteenth century, when the shadow of the Indian Empire, and the Indian Army of the British Raj, projected itself westward over all this part of the world, largely to make sure that the Russian Czars did not let the attraction of the warm southern waters bring them too far south. In the period following the end of World War II everything changed, and a series of major British decisions registered the changes, and did not create them. The Indian Empire came to an end in 1947, and with it the Indian Army as an instrument of*British Middle Eastern policy disappeared. There had already for a quarter of a century been an increasing reliance on the aeroplane and the cautionary or punitive bomb, but that never enjoyed the prestige which the British enjoyed as the rulers of India whose path between their homeland and their empire lay across these middle countries. The period of British military predominance lay between the decrepitude of the Ottoman Empire, ending in its total collapse, and the rise of the Soviet Empire, as efficient and dynamic as the Ottoman Turks in their first two centuries.

Libya is but the latest of a number of Arab kingdoms erected by Britain out of the lands ruled for so long by the Turk or his nominal subordinates, lands which were then the colonies or mandates of one or other of the European Powers with Mediterranean interests. In all these countries there was an immense lack of Arab self-confidence, the legacy of the miserable record of voluntary servitude under the Turk, through generations when the Turk’s Balkan subjects had, people by people, asserted their independence. They did so largely because they had Europe or Russia

AWAKENING behind them, but, even so, the Arab awakening came very slowly, and the Arabs had counted for so little for so long that British statesmen forty years ago made the appalling miscalculation they did make, that they could safely indulge in the hobby of planting a Jewish national home among the Arabs and watching it grow.

The years in which it has grown into a tough little State have also seen the Arab political consciousness grow, from even smaller beginnings, till it has become the great reality of which Western statesmanship has to take account. British statesmanship, unlike French, has taken account, to the extent of concluding that there is no military advantage in attempting to garrison these countries if the presence of such garrisons brings with it the hostility of the local population, is seen as an occupation, and is boycotted and its activities sabotaged. That was the great decision which Sir Winston Churchill’s administration made in 1954, when they left the Canal Zone. They secured their legal right to return in the event of a general war, and they told their critics that they could always be back within forty-eight hours should the need arise. Britain, they said, would be off the actual banks of the Canal by 1956, but she would be watching from friendly bases each side of Egypt, from Jordan and from Libya, while from Cyprus the Canal Zone was covered by British fighters.

When Egyptians were being hanged for working for the British, the Conservative Government of three years ago argued that it was far preferable to remove the source of irritation. But they miscalculated the intensity of the feeling against Israel resulting from the Jewish actions of 1948 ; the proclamation of the State of Israel, the exodus and the driving out of nearly a million refugees whose places were to be taken by new-comers whose presence would make the new State more formidable and perhaps in a position to draw itself new and wider boundaries, always .at Arab expense. The State of Israel was created by force, by terrorist action against Britain, because Britain was the