Fighting World War Three from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945-1954 (review)

130 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 gaily compounds the arrogance of ignorance with the ignorance of arrogance: the . players do not explicitly recognize that they themselves are replacing one myth with another, nor do they understand the easy interchangeableness ofnational or other group myths. By marginalizing the work of colleagues, programmatically, the postmodem scholar merely recapitulates the domination of discourse by the sort of agenda which he or she projects onto everyone but him- or herself. Out of a decent consistency, postmodernists should logically fall silent not just about scholarly questions, but about everything. Baruch Halpern Jewish Studies Pennsylvania State University Fighting World War Three from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945-1954, by Michael 1. Cohen. London: Frank Cass, 1997. 349 pp. $49.50. In February 1951 General Sir Brian Robertson, the commander-in-chief of British Middle East Land Forces, visited Tel Aviv and met with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Robertson's mission was an extraordinarily delicate one. He wanted British forces to use Israeli facilities in the case of war with the Soviet Union. "We would want to come through Israel as soon as there was a defmite threat of aggression, or at least as soon as the ftrst Russian entered Persia or Turkey.... The question for me," said Robertson, "is, whether British troops would be allowed to go through your country and whether our planes could use your airfIelds when aggression against the Middle East became imminent." Ben-Gurion shocked Robertson. In case of global war, he noted, Israel should act as if it were a member of the British Commonwealth. Ben-Gurion did not mean that Israel should become a member of the Commonwealth. Rather, he meant "that she should behave and be treated as if she were." Ben-Gurion's conftdential comments represented a shift in Israeli foreign policy, a willingness to align itself unequivocally with the Western powers in the Cold War. Heretofore Israel had assumed a stance ofneutrality. Beneftting from Soviet recognition and from arms sales from Soviet satellites, Israelis were still angered by former British control ofthe Palestine mandate and by British favoritism toward the Arab nations. Yet now Ben-Gurion was saying that he would collaborate with the British in wartime if London assigned Israel a privileged position. He was suggesting that he wanted Britain to guarantee Israeli security as if it were an integral part ofthe Commonwealth. The British, of course, were not willing to do this. Strategic planners in London wanted to coordinate their war plans with the Israelis, but wanted to do this secretly, Book Reviews 131 without alienating the Arabs and without committing themselves to guarantee the integrity of Israeli territory either in the case of a local war or a global war. The talks with Israel never produced any concrete results. Yet they illustrated the degree to which Britain's strategy for waging global war affected its diplomacy. Michael Cohen's book describes in great detail the contingency war plans of Great Britain and the United States. Although military historians have long been aware of these war plans, many Middle East specialists still do not realize the extent to which the initial war plans of Great Britain and the United States depended upon launching a strategic attack on the Soviet Union from bases in the Middle East. When American and British military planners fIrst pondered the practicalities of fIghting a global war against the Soviet Union in 1946 and 1947, they believed they would be unable to defend Western Europe. Their ability to respond to a Soviet land attack depended on the use of air power; the best bases from which to launch this air power were in England and Egypt. The British had a huge strategic complex around the Suez Canal. By using air strips at Abu Sueir, military planners estimated they could reach a large percentage of Soviet targets. Most important, from the Cairo-Suez area, British and American bombers could attack Soviet petroleum refmeries and deprive Russian forces of oil, the life-blood for waging modem war. American and British military planners met frequently in the late 1940s and early 1950s to discuss plans for using the...