The declaration of a holy war by Ibn Saud renewed the agitation against Great Britain holding mandates in the Near East, carried on by the “Evening Standard,” Lord Beaverbrook’s paper, which urges Britain’s withdrawal from the Middle East, including Palestine.
“What does Britain get from protecting Iraq and Transjordania against Ibn Saud,” the paper asks editorially and states: “If Great Britain fights, she will find desert fighting against the tribes who move rapidly from place to place in the vast deserts without fixed habitation, like searching in the dark for a mosquito. We get nothing from the mandated territories except proximity with unpleasant people whose ancestral hobby is pillage and massacre.
“It would be nice,” the paper continues, “if we could intervene everywhere to prevent massacres and other wichkedness, but we cannot afford it, especially in Arabia. We cannot police the world.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
