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Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978

By Kai Bird

Simon & Schuster, 448pp, 17.99

The Balfour Declaration: Origins of the Arab Israeli Conflict

by Jonathan Schneer

Bloomsbury, 464pp, 25

Reviews by

Neil MacFarquhar

When playing the board game Risk as a teenager in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, Kai Bird avoided occupying the Middle East. So did his American friends. Their surroundings schooled them in the difficulty of holding the crossroads of three continents. His education in the region's seemingly endless cycles of war and armistice began when he was four and his father became US vice consul in East Jerusalem.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli war had left the city divided in two, with soldiers, minefields and coiled barbed wire gashing an often tense ceasefire line between Palestinian East and Israeli West. The line also divided the twin pillars of Kai's life. The family's rented house stood on the Arab side, but Kai attended the Anglican Mission School across the barbed wire. So he was driven almost daily through Mandelbaum Gate, the single crossing, its name drawn from the remnants of a once splendid family villa on the spot. (Technically the "gate" was two facing checkpoints.)

Ordinary Arabs and Jews could not cross, but Kai was an outsider. "My perspective was privileged," he writes. The schoolboy's commute across the chasm dividing the Middle East continued, in a sense, through more than two decades, culminating in his marriage to Susan Goldmark, the American-born daughter of Holocaust survivors. It is Bird's various transits that inform his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978.

The result is a meandering family scrapbook cobbled together with an earnest, condensed history of the region during those years. It illuminates a common experience among expatriates who crisscross the Middle East without being emotionally bonded to any side. They grow frustrated that the Arabs and Israelis – whom they come to know as two vital, urbane, hospitable peoples – cannot see past the sense of their victim-hood to accept the other as a neighbour.

For the real story of the seeding of that mutual distrust, however, we have to go a lot further back in history, to the premiership of Arthur Balfour, who as Jonathan Schneer points out in The Balfour Declaration, was the unlikeliest candidate to pen the foundational text of the state of Israel.

Born into the aristocratic Cecil dynasty in 1848, he was seen as a languid, willowy, effete figure. But although he cultivated an air of insouciant indolence, famously remarking that "nothing matters very much and few things matter at all", he was one of the dominant figures in British politics for more than two decades. By 1917, having already served as Prime Minister, he was Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George's wartime coalition.

And it was from that position that he issued the declaration for which he is now best remembered, voicing British support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people".

As Schneer explains in this splendid history, Balfour's short letter, originally sent to the Zionist banker Lord Rothschild, was at once a tremendous advance for the Zionist cause and a terrible blow for Palestine's largely Arab population.

It not only gave official sanction to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in modern-day Israel, but it seemed to betray the interests of millions of Muslims who considered Palestine their home already. The irony is that the Foreign Secretary and his colleagues were never very interested in either the Arabs or the Jews. Their priorities were simple: to beat the Ottoman Empire, win the First World War and ensure Britain the leading position in the post-war Middle East. Everything else was irrelevant.

Perhaps the supreme irony is the fact that the declaration was itself a product of a culture of anti-Semitism. Having grown up believing in the power of "international Jewry", senior British politicians were convinced that if they supported a homeland in Palestine, then they would gain the support of "Jewish bankers" across the world. The declaration, said Balfour, would be critically important as "propaganda both in Russia and America".

The problem with the declaration, however, was not merely the fact that Palestine was technically still a province of the Ottoman Empire, or even that its Jewish population was outnumbered at least six to one by Arabs. The real problem was that it was only one of three entirely incompatible promises made by British diplomats during the closing stages of the war. To Sharif Hussein, the Emir of Mecca, chief of the Hashemite clan and leader of the Arab Revolt, Britain rashly promised a pan-Arab empire in the Levant, including Palestine. At the same time, the government struck a secret deal with the French to divide up the Middle East between them, with Palestine turned into an "Allied Condominium". Deep down, though, what the British really wanted was to take it for themselves – as, eventually and disastrously, they did. The result of all this, as Schneer notes, was a "murderous harvest" that endures to this day.

A marvellously well-researched, balanced and clear-sighted guide to this hideously controversial territory, his narrative deserves to be read by anybody even vaguely interested in the Middle East. Sadly, however, it is a story from which Britain emerges very badly. Whatever Balfour himself may have thought, some things matter very much indeed.