1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:03,600 So let me begin by welcome everyone to the Israel Studies Seminar. 2 00:00:04,140 --> 00:00:10,770 My name is Eugene Rogan and it's my distinction to be both your chairman and your speaker for today's seminar. 3 00:00:11,370 --> 00:00:20,790 I come with the apologies of Professor Younger who has taken ill with a bug, and there are so many going around at the moment. 4 00:00:21,210 --> 00:00:29,460 And Sarah Hirschhorn is also written to give her regrets. And so it is down to me to keep the show going. 5 00:00:30,120 --> 00:00:39,419 And what I will say by way of an introduction to myself is that I am the director of the etc. and I 6 00:00:39,420 --> 00:00:45,239 teach the modern history of the Middle East here at the University of Oxford doing that job since 1991. 7 00:00:45,240 --> 00:00:53,880 So I'm in my 27th year, and the story I'm about to tell you is a story that actually predates my arrival in Oxford. 8 00:00:54,130 --> 00:01:02,280 This is a story that's waited some 30 years to be told, and it's kind of fun to have the opportunity to share this one with you. 9 00:01:02,910 --> 00:01:10,770 When Jacobi first asked if I'd be willing to give a paper looking at Arab perspectives on Israel for this Israel studies seminar, 10 00:01:11,340 --> 00:01:15,840 my first response was, I'd love to, but I don't have any research on hand to do so. 11 00:01:16,170 --> 00:01:19,410 My most recent work was on the Middle East in the First World War, 12 00:01:20,040 --> 00:01:26,760 and it doesn't really have any spinoffs that are relevant to what the Arab world has made of Israel in the years since 1948. 13 00:01:26,940 --> 00:01:34,350 So I gave my apologies and promised I would support his promotion of Israel studies in the university in some other way. 14 00:01:35,280 --> 00:01:39,000 But then, about a week later, I suddenly remembered this paper. 15 00:01:40,120 --> 00:01:44,010 As I said, this is a paper that takes you back to 1986, 16 00:01:45,240 --> 00:01:52,950 when I had submitted it as an abstract to present at the Middle East Studies Association meeting in Boston that year. 17 00:01:53,640 --> 00:02:01,650 Now, Boston's massive meeting in 1986 has since become the stuff of legend I still have in this. 18 00:02:01,650 --> 00:02:09,450 I was a very able young man, so all the paperwork associated with my application and acceptance as a paper giver to one of my very first conferences, 19 00:02:09,450 --> 00:02:13,050 I was still I was just a doctoral student at this point at Harvard. 20 00:02:13,830 --> 00:02:19,680 And so they wrote around in me to get us all excited about what was going to happen in Boston from Asia. 21 00:02:20,190 --> 00:02:25,019 They said one of the high points in the program will be a discussion between Professors Bernard 22 00:02:25,020 --> 00:02:30,000 Lewis and Edward Said of the relation between scholars of the Middle East and the media. 23 00:02:30,270 --> 00:02:35,880 This is, of course, the very famous showdown between Lewis and Saeed that took place at Mazer in Boston. 24 00:02:37,440 --> 00:02:41,400 Perhaps that meeting is better remembered for Lewis versus Saeed, 25 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:48,840 then the young doctoral candidate from Harvard who had come to give what was his second conference paper. 26 00:02:49,380 --> 00:02:57,090 My first case in your trivia buffs was actually for the business meeting that met in London that summer, just before Visa met. 27 00:02:57,510 --> 00:03:02,250 So I was off to a rollicking good start as a as an ambitious doctoral student. 28 00:03:02,940 --> 00:03:07,710 And I wanted to share on this occasion the fruits of some research that I had 29 00:03:07,740 --> 00:03:14,940 undertaken while on a Fulbright scholarship in Jordan in the 1980 485 academic year. 30 00:03:15,180 --> 00:03:23,550 And I was primarily there to study Arabic. But the study of Arabic isn't quite enough to keep my intellectual curiosity at bay. 31 00:03:24,030 --> 00:03:30,420 And I found myself taking on other research projects just to develop my Arabic, develop my knowledge. 32 00:03:31,020 --> 00:03:34,470 I used to sit it on after my language classes. In the morning. 33 00:03:34,740 --> 00:03:39,600 I'd go and attend the history lectures given by the University of Jordan faculty. 34 00:03:40,200 --> 00:03:45,690 And there was one given by Professor Suhail remotely on the modern history of the Middle East. 35 00:03:45,900 --> 00:03:52,850 My field. And, you know, sitting in her classes, I could follow perhaps 70 to 80% of what she said. 36 00:03:52,860 --> 00:03:58,739 So it was good for my Arabic, it's good for my history. And every now and again, I came across something that I couldn't make sense of. 37 00:03:58,740 --> 00:04:07,020 And I talked to her about it afterwards. On one day, she had gotten to the First World War and the partition diplomacy. 38 00:04:07,650 --> 00:04:10,260 She talked us through what was very familiar terrain. 39 00:04:10,830 --> 00:04:20,010 There were references to Hussein McMann correspondence and how perfidious Albion undermined those by their Sykes-Picot agreement with France. 40 00:04:20,970 --> 00:04:27,780 And how Britain once again betrayed its commitment to the Arab world through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. 41 00:04:28,560 --> 00:04:32,540 And I'm writing notes and I'm nodding away. I'm familiar with all this. 42 00:04:32,550 --> 00:04:38,460 And then she said, But before all of them laying the foundation for all of this was the Bannerman Report. 43 00:04:39,780 --> 00:04:41,340 Okay. I'm glad you look puzzled too. 44 00:04:41,370 --> 00:04:49,020 I stopped taking notes and wrote it down carefully and made a point of going up to Professor Inouye after the lecture and said, 45 00:04:50,090 --> 00:04:53,090 What's the Batman report? You said what? 46 00:04:53,120 --> 00:05:00,050 You're at Harvard and you've never heard of the Bannerman report. So I confess to both of those accusations. 47 00:05:00,890 --> 00:05:08,750 And she said, Well, it's typical of you in the West to try and hide the acts of your imperialist past about which you're rightly ashamed. 48 00:05:09,020 --> 00:05:15,840 Your teachers are keeping it a secret from you. Now, this seemed very unlikely to me, and I tried to explain to her that, on the contrary, 49 00:05:16,500 --> 00:05:23,370 it is the Western tradition and critical scholarship to try and find precisely the things that bring most shame to our societies. 50 00:05:23,730 --> 00:05:27,240 If we write our histories on such things, it gets a lot of attention and we become famous. 51 00:05:27,510 --> 00:05:28,890 But she wouldn't buy it for a minute. 52 00:05:29,400 --> 00:05:36,720 She assumed that I was another deluded Westerner whose teachers were trying to spare themselves and callow youths like me. 53 00:05:37,500 --> 00:05:39,900 The horrible legacy of our betrayals of the Arab world. 54 00:05:40,590 --> 00:05:49,290 Before, during and after the First World War, she assigned me to readings that would explain everything I needed to know about the Bannerman report. 55 00:05:49,920 --> 00:05:51,479 A book by a man, 56 00:05:51,480 --> 00:05:59,730 an Egyptian scholar by the name of Lotfi Sabry and Hooghly on imperial policy towards Palestine in the first half of the 20th century. 57 00:06:00,150 --> 00:06:08,340 This is a book that was his thesis to Al-Azhar University, which was subsequently published by the Daily Maariv in the 1970s. 58 00:06:08,850 --> 00:06:10,050 It's a well-known reference. 59 00:06:10,380 --> 00:06:18,480 You'll find any scholar working on the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli conflict will refer to Lotfi Sabry and Julie's book. 60 00:06:19,200 --> 00:06:22,170 And then she gave me what was Sabry and Julie's? 61 00:06:23,190 --> 00:06:35,400 Reference or a source for the Bannerman Report, which is an article published in 1957 by a lawyer in Egypt by the name of Anton Selim Kanaan, 62 00:06:35,760 --> 00:06:39,450 in which he introduces the theme of the Batman report. 63 00:06:40,650 --> 00:06:45,360 So armed with these two beatings, which took me a little bit of time to go through, 64 00:06:45,360 --> 00:06:49,919 I'm still a cub reporter in Arabic and spent a lot of time in the company of Hans, 65 00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:54,750 very trying to make sure I got every nuance of the Arabic to make sure I followed the story. 66 00:06:55,500 --> 00:07:01,319 I then went to the special collection of the University of Jordan Library to go through everything they had in 67 00:07:01,320 --> 00:07:06,690 Arabic on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict to find what other books referred to the Batman report. 68 00:07:07,350 --> 00:07:13,440 What I found were about a half dozen more titles that constituted something of a historian's dirty snowball. 69 00:07:14,720 --> 00:07:17,990 Books that became a kind of self-referential literature, 70 00:07:18,380 --> 00:07:23,120 each author referring back either to suddenly and wholly or to other authors that had referred 71 00:07:23,120 --> 00:07:28,910 to Campbell-bannerman without anyone ever being able to footnote or cite an actual document. 72 00:07:30,420 --> 00:07:38,130 I also went through every Western source that I could find to see if I could situate Sir Henry Campbell-bannerman, 73 00:07:38,460 --> 00:07:44,520 who, as those of you with familiarity of British political history will know, was the last Liberal Prime Minister. 74 00:07:44,910 --> 00:07:50,520 He served as Prime Minister of only two years, between 90 or three years, 19 5 to 19 eight. 75 00:07:52,270 --> 00:07:57,790 Now, this is not a man that I could associate any specific Middle East policies with, 76 00:07:58,930 --> 00:08:04,750 let alone any policies that were particularly influential in binding Britain to the Zionist movement. 77 00:08:05,440 --> 00:08:12,040 And certainly none of my readings in Western sources gave me any grounds to believe that he had been in some way involved 78 00:08:12,040 --> 00:08:19,030 in the crafting of a document that would lay the foundations for British support for the Zionist movement in Palestine. 79 00:08:20,240 --> 00:08:25,820 Now. I was a Harvard boy, but I still knew where the centre of all learning on the Middle East was. 80 00:08:26,270 --> 00:08:29,510 And so I wrote to Albert Hourani here at the Middle East Centre in Oxford. 81 00:08:30,200 --> 00:08:37,340 I'd met him on my way out to the Middle East. He'd been introduced to me by his Harvard student, Phillip Coorey, who was my supervisor. 82 00:08:37,730 --> 00:08:41,240 So I felt emboldened to write to the great man in Oxford. 83 00:08:42,380 --> 00:08:47,630 Dear Mr. Hourani, have you ever heard of the Bannerman report or the Campbell-bannerman report? 84 00:08:48,560 --> 00:08:52,310 Hourani confirmed that indeed. Erudite man that he was. 85 00:08:52,460 --> 00:08:58,010 He had never come across this document either, and that he thought that somebody must have confused something they'd read in the archive, 86 00:08:58,340 --> 00:09:03,200 perhaps something to do with the British Imperial Committee that would meet from time to time 87 00:09:03,200 --> 00:09:08,450 and discuss coordinating imperial matters across the many continents of the British Empire. 88 00:09:09,230 --> 00:09:17,570 I even paid my first visit to Kew in the aftermath of all this to see whether there was anything you could track down among Imperial 89 00:09:17,570 --> 00:09:28,790 Committee records that for some resemblance to what Lucy and Holly or Cannon referred to in this essay on the Bannerman Report. 90 00:09:29,760 --> 00:09:35,460 But I will not surprise you. But I tell you that my efforts in Q on that occasion were in vain. 91 00:09:36,810 --> 00:09:40,230 And so I brought up my findings in Arabic. 92 00:09:40,260 --> 00:09:45,420 That's the only time I've ever written an article in Arabic. My reason for wanting to write this piece in Arabic were pretty simple. 93 00:09:46,080 --> 00:09:53,700 I didn't see the point in exposing to a Western readership the conspiracy laden approach to writing history in the Arab world. 94 00:09:54,030 --> 00:09:56,930 That seemed to me to be a kind of unfair thing to do, 95 00:09:57,030 --> 00:10:04,200 and it wouldn't be particularly constructive for the Arab historians who had first engage me in this debate by writing it in Arabic. 96 00:10:04,600 --> 00:10:08,250 I published it for the major figure here. 97 00:10:08,830 --> 00:10:10,200 I know you all subscribe to it. 98 00:10:10,380 --> 00:10:19,800 But I hold up the issue just so that you'll see the one that I was in and I still played to the gallery a little bit for the Arabic readership. 99 00:10:20,280 --> 00:10:23,700 My opening sentence became laughingstock of all my Harvard colleagues. 100 00:10:24,420 --> 00:10:31,469 It says in Arabic, Mohammed, what did the building and all of me in Libya ought to be it Islamic learning? 101 00:10:31,470 --> 00:10:35,410 Hialeah in horrible. Luxor in Maghreb at the Chako. 102 00:10:36,120 --> 00:10:41,490 She'd be glad to share well ad hoc. So the conspiracies against the Middle East are without end. 103 00:10:41,910 --> 00:10:47,460 From its westernmost edges in Morocco to its easternmost edges in Bilal to Sham and Iraq. 104 00:10:48,120 --> 00:10:55,560 Why am I playing to the gallery? Because I wanted to reassure my Arabic reader that I understand their point of view and where they're coming from, 105 00:10:55,830 --> 00:11:00,900 and that there are indeed conspiracies one can point to. We have obviously with us in the audience. 106 00:11:01,260 --> 00:11:05,100 He's written about one of the best conspiracies ever, which was the protocol itself. 107 00:11:05,550 --> 00:11:09,960 If you're looking for backroom dealings to conspire against the established order, 108 00:11:10,200 --> 00:11:17,010 anyone who lived through the 1956 Suez crisis would have a good case study to base their suspicions on. 109 00:11:17,520 --> 00:11:24,630 But my point to the Arab reader is not every conspiracy theory is worth your credence. 110 00:11:25,050 --> 00:11:29,310 You should be asking critical questions of your sources. 111 00:11:29,580 --> 00:11:38,910 And so in a bid to open this debate with the at least the Arab historians in Jordan, I wrote this article in Arabic. 112 00:11:39,660 --> 00:11:43,510 I. Was pleased to see it published. 113 00:11:44,120 --> 00:11:49,150 Sue Hillary, Maui. The professor who had first introduced me to the Bannerman report, wrote a rebuttal to my article. 114 00:11:49,870 --> 00:11:54,040 This being a Jordanian publication. Out of deference to her seniority. 115 00:11:54,220 --> 00:11:59,020 They published her rebuttal first, and then my article followed her rebuttal, 116 00:12:00,040 --> 00:12:04,750 which was a curious way of ordering things, but of course, deference in all such things. 117 00:12:05,260 --> 00:12:16,810 And so anyone who got through to Haley's denunciation of my work as utter rubbish would they had the stomach to continue on, have found my arguments. 118 00:12:17,170 --> 00:12:21,909 I never got a lot of correspondence from any Arab historians about what I had suggested 119 00:12:21,910 --> 00:12:27,970 about Arab history on the Arab-Israeli conflict or indeed on the Bardhaman report itself. 120 00:12:28,360 --> 00:12:36,250 I think it's just one of those pieces that fell into Jubilee, but was a great exercise for me in extending my Arabic skills after all of that. 121 00:12:36,820 --> 00:12:38,560 And then after all was said and done, 122 00:12:38,950 --> 00:12:45,460 and I'd published my article and I'd made my statement and I submitted my application to Mesa to go and give this paper. 123 00:12:46,060 --> 00:12:48,550 I was in Cairo in the summer of 1986. 124 00:12:49,600 --> 00:12:57,400 I was talking to researchers at the American Research Centre in Cairo, RC about my recent obsession with this document. 125 00:12:58,090 --> 00:13:05,020 And they said, Well, if you're a man who wrote the article in 1957, Anton Selim Kanaan was a lawyer. 126 00:13:05,020 --> 00:13:08,620 He might still be a member of the lawyers union. 127 00:13:09,850 --> 00:13:13,960 He's probably in the phone book. Look him up. Such a novel idea had never crossed my mind. 128 00:13:13,970 --> 00:13:19,970 So I took the phone book right there. They had the RC offices and sure enough, Anton Slim Canard was a listed number. 129 00:13:20,400 --> 00:13:23,630 I dialled the number and his very elderly voice said Hello. 130 00:13:24,800 --> 00:13:31,430 So I had my man. I could actually go and talk to the man who had given us the story of the Diamond Report. 131 00:13:31,820 --> 00:13:38,240 And I have here again resurrected for my personal archives with his business card and turns to the man on the tape 132 00:13:38,240 --> 00:13:45,710 recording of my conversation with the man held in his apartment on Sherry branches in downtown Cairo in the summer of 1986. 133 00:13:46,730 --> 00:13:52,610 So what I'd like to do after that lengthy introduction is share with you where I got to when I compiled all this 134 00:13:52,610 --> 00:14:00,110 evidence together and how I made sense of what the spurious document's meaning was in the bigger scheme of things. 135 00:14:00,860 --> 00:14:05,150 So in September of 1957, this is my basic 1986 paper. 136 00:14:05,240 --> 00:14:06,650 I'd never given this paper before. 137 00:14:06,740 --> 00:14:15,860 32 years in September of 1957, an Egyptian lawyer named Antoine Saleem Kanaan presented a paper to the third conference of the Arab Lawyers Union, 138 00:14:16,370 --> 00:14:25,589 which convened that year in Damascus. The article introduced a document called the Campbell-bannerman report said to be the working paper of a 139 00:14:25,590 --> 00:14:30,870 secret imperialist conference summoned by the British Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-bannerman. 140 00:14:31,560 --> 00:14:39,450 The report consisted of an investigation into the centre's imperial vulnerability and recommended appropriate courses of action, 141 00:14:40,380 --> 00:14:47,160 as recounted by Cannon. Both the conference and the report, which it produced, were incredible. 142 00:14:48,830 --> 00:14:56,540 With the fall of the Balfour Conservative government in December 1905, a Liberal ministry was formed, Cannon explained. 143 00:14:57,080 --> 00:15:03,680 Noteworthy for the lack of experience in foreign affairs. This is not strictly true, but this is the way Cannon presented the world. 144 00:15:04,760 --> 00:15:05,510 Consequently, 145 00:15:05,510 --> 00:15:12,530 a bargain was struck with the Conservatives whereby the conduct of foreign affairs would be left to members of Balfour's defeated government. 146 00:15:13,190 --> 00:15:17,450 It's that the Liberals free to address pressing domestic issues such as the Irish question. 147 00:15:18,470 --> 00:15:24,980 The first matter of business, he maintained. Undertaken by those conservatives seconded to a Liberal Foreign Office, 148 00:15:25,550 --> 00:15:31,790 was to augment the Anglo-French entente cordiale of 1905 with a broader imperialist front. 149 00:15:32,690 --> 00:15:39,380 Hence the convening of a secret conference leading academics from European colonial powers including France, 150 00:15:39,590 --> 00:15:47,570 Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Italy and Spain were sent to London to represent their nation's interests. 151 00:15:48,230 --> 00:15:53,600 These were addressed by the Prime Minister, who did not otherwise participate in the conference, 152 00:15:54,860 --> 00:15:57,919 beginning with a discourse on the rise and fall of past empires. 153 00:15:57,920 --> 00:16:01,940 Campbell-bannerman supposedly charged the Assembly with the duty. 154 00:16:03,310 --> 00:16:12,610 A proposing the means to prevent the fall of European Imperial Order and to permit the continued subordination of the non European world. 155 00:16:13,040 --> 00:16:18,010 So that's the mission of the secret imperialist conference of all these imperial nations. 156 00:16:18,970 --> 00:16:25,750 After a period of research and deliberation. The conferees drafted their conclusion in the form of a working paper. 157 00:16:25,750 --> 00:16:31,510 And this is what becomes known as the Bannerman Report in Arabic to create a Bannerman, though, 158 00:16:31,510 --> 00:16:36,340 rightly speaking, given the double barrelled name, we should call it the Campbell-bannerman report. 159 00:16:37,810 --> 00:16:44,800 After defining the zones of each nation's interests, the report eliminated potential trouble spots from around the world. 160 00:16:45,760 --> 00:16:50,920 Turning to the Mediterranean, however, the conferees agreed there was cause for concern, 161 00:16:51,190 --> 00:16:56,260 particularly along its eastern and southern boundaries Eastern Mediterranean and the southern Mediterranean. 162 00:16:57,580 --> 00:17:06,549 From Gibraltar to Alexandria to the Mediterranean was inhabited by a single people united by deep religious, 163 00:17:06,550 --> 00:17:09,310 linguistic, historical and cultural links. 164 00:17:10,090 --> 00:17:17,680 The Arab world straddles very important commercial routes, as well as vital strategic arteries connecting Europe with Asia, 165 00:17:18,190 --> 00:17:22,090 such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and of course, the Suez Canal. 166 00:17:22,120 --> 00:17:32,769 First and foremost. Predictions of great demographic growth across this region compounded the threat of shared Arab aspirations to make 167 00:17:32,770 --> 00:17:39,590 the prospects of Arab unity across North Africa and the Middle East a great menace to the imperial order as a whole. 168 00:17:40,030 --> 00:17:46,570 Again, this is all according to the Bannerman Report, as recounted to us by Anton Saleem Canard. 169 00:17:47,170 --> 00:17:50,230 This is not Rogan telling you about imperial history. 170 00:17:51,690 --> 00:17:58,950 In his article, Cannon does not specify exactly how the Campbell-bannerman report proposed to treat this danger. 171 00:17:59,130 --> 00:18:03,870 He doesn't actually, in his article, reproduced the text of the Campbell-bannerman report. 172 00:18:03,990 --> 00:18:06,390 He talks about it, but he doesn't quote it. 173 00:18:06,510 --> 00:18:13,620 He does clearly state that the document laid the groundwork for a policy of British support for Zionist aspirations. 174 00:18:13,890 --> 00:18:17,430 That's the whole point of his 1957 article. 175 00:18:18,180 --> 00:18:24,030 Subsequent authors have filled in the connection between the threat of nascent Arab unity to the 176 00:18:24,030 --> 00:18:30,120 imperial order and the laying of a British policy favourable to Jewish settlement in Palestine. 177 00:18:31,020 --> 00:18:37,110 The Egyptian historian Hassan Sabri, actually, and he of course is the second author that my professor at the university, 178 00:18:37,110 --> 00:18:43,080 Jordan, had given me to read it his 1967 Ph.D. dissertation. 179 00:18:44,720 --> 00:18:54,110 Subsequent published by the Dotted Mod. If in 1973 wrote that the 1907 conferees proposed to address the security threat of greater Arab unity, 180 00:18:54,320 --> 00:19:00,320 quote, by working to divide the African part from the Asiatic section of this region. 181 00:19:00,920 --> 00:19:07,880 Towards this end, it was suggested that a strong foreign human barrier be placed in the land bridge, 182 00:19:08,240 --> 00:19:16,790 which ties Asia to Africa and which binds them both to the Mediterranean so as to form in this region and in proximity to the Suez Canal, 183 00:19:17,240 --> 00:19:22,340 a force that would be friendly to the imperialists and an enemy to the residents of the region. 184 00:19:22,820 --> 00:19:24,800 This is the notion of the human barrier. 185 00:19:25,970 --> 00:19:33,560 On the one hand, this account with a quoted passage which would lead the reader to assume it originated from the Campbell-bannerman report itself. 186 00:19:34,130 --> 00:19:38,090 So actually is actually putting quote marks around text that CONAN never 187 00:19:38,090 --> 00:19:44,180 actually cites himself serves to link the dangers outlined in Cannon's article 188 00:19:44,450 --> 00:19:48,649 with subsequent British support for Zionism on the one hand and wholly only 189 00:19:48,650 --> 00:19:51,950 footnoted Cannon's article and his treatment of the Campbell-bannerman report. 190 00:19:53,320 --> 00:19:56,380 Though the document is referred to in a number of works in Arabic, 191 00:19:57,130 --> 00:20:01,850 these must either draw on the Canon article or else on other works based on the Koran. 192 00:20:01,870 --> 00:20:05,890 Article four There is no copy extent of the Campbell-bannerman report. 193 00:20:06,550 --> 00:20:11,920 And as mentioned above, it was Antoine Saleem Kanaan who introduced the document to Arabic scholarship. 194 00:20:13,680 --> 00:20:22,950 Dr. Yellowlees embellishments aside, the Campbell-bannerman report, as it's come down to us is at best a very spurious document. 195 00:20:24,480 --> 00:20:27,000 Taking Mr. Cannon's account at face value. 196 00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:34,110 For the moment, the report in question was circulated through the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office before disappearing. 197 00:20:35,020 --> 00:20:37,600 It did not reappear until 1914, 198 00:20:38,080 --> 00:20:45,490 when it was said to have been uncovered by an ambitious young reporter who subsequently lost his life in the battlefields of the First World War. 199 00:20:46,480 --> 00:20:52,150 There is a recurring theme here that discovering the Bannerman report is very bad for your longevity. 200 00:20:52,630 --> 00:21:01,180 So far I am defying the odds, but you might want to sit a little further from me in case by reawakening this article. 201 00:21:02,350 --> 00:21:09,549 Unintended consequences unfold. No mention is made of the paper Cannon wrote for I am sorry that the journalist 202 00:21:09,550 --> 00:21:13,210 who discovered it in 1914 wrote for or the articles he might have written, 203 00:21:13,570 --> 00:21:22,540 or if his name for that matter, the buried for another 40 years until Mr. Cannon learned of the document in the course of some academic research. 204 00:21:23,320 --> 00:21:27,430 Mr. Cannon gave no indication in his article of how he discovered the report. 205 00:21:27,670 --> 00:21:32,230 Indeed, his article is devoid of footnotes and references of any kind. 206 00:21:33,700 --> 00:21:36,970 What then, is the historical value of such a document? 207 00:21:38,580 --> 00:21:44,250 It has been rejected by respected Arab historians for lack of an original. 208 00:21:44,940 --> 00:21:50,339 And what we're left with is a vague description provided by Mr. CONAN in his 1957 209 00:21:50,340 --> 00:21:55,110 paper presented to his colleagues at the Arab Lawyer's Union conference in Damascus. 210 00:21:56,050 --> 00:22:02,740 Placed in its own historic context. Mr. Keenan's article is a document of its time. 211 00:22:03,490 --> 00:22:07,389 It was presented within a year of the Suez War of 1956, 212 00:22:07,390 --> 00:22:13,000 and I think the timing of this is very important for understanding the broader meaning of what his document purports to say. 213 00:22:13,990 --> 00:22:19,120 His audience in Damascus proved quite receptive to an account which pitted the British and 214 00:22:19,120 --> 00:22:23,620 the French interests through a Zionist proxy against the unity of the greater Arab nation. 215 00:22:23,890 --> 00:22:28,540 I mean, in some ways that captures the tripartite aggression of the 1956 Suez War. 216 00:22:28,870 --> 00:22:36,730 Britain and France colluding with Israel to try and advance Israel's control across the Sinai Peninsula to the banks of the Suez Canal. 217 00:22:37,210 --> 00:22:41,890 If you were making such an account in 1957, after the experience in 1956, 218 00:22:42,100 --> 00:22:51,400 you could imagine it would be falling on fertile ears had not the Nasser's ideology of pan-Arabism just suffered precisely such an assault. 219 00:22:51,730 --> 00:22:58,800 I argued it had. So to me, it seems possible that the whole story was contrived, 220 00:22:59,220 --> 00:23:05,640 both for the audience in Damascus and for the three year old government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo. 221 00:23:06,120 --> 00:23:13,680 After all, as a lawyer in Nasser's Egypt, Mr. Kanaan was a member of an endangered profession. 222 00:23:14,550 --> 00:23:19,230 Turning to studies of lawyers in Egypt when confronted with a profession whose 223 00:23:19,230 --> 00:23:25,080 prestige and influence suffered major reversals following the 1952 revolution, 224 00:23:26,130 --> 00:23:33,210 if under the monarchy, the legal profession was overcrowded, offering inadequate opportunities for advancement. 225 00:23:33,810 --> 00:23:42,209 Yet lawyers dominated cabinets, the parliament and parties in the political struggle between General Naguib and Colonel Nasser. 226 00:23:42,210 --> 00:23:49,470 In 1954, the Bar Association placed itself firmly behind General Naguib in his call for a return to parliamentary rule. 227 00:23:50,460 --> 00:23:56,760 Coming out on top, Abdel Nasser acted decisively against the bases of lawyers power, 228 00:23:57,480 --> 00:24:00,660 the abolition of Parliament, the dissolution of political parties, 229 00:24:00,930 --> 00:24:04,799 the purging of the universities and the censorship of the press deprived 230 00:24:04,800 --> 00:24:09,930 lawyers and politicians of all complexions of the bases from which to operate. 231 00:24:10,940 --> 00:24:15,679 Lawyers are thus squeezed out of the profession or else driven into government employment, 232 00:24:15,680 --> 00:24:20,450 as legal advisers referred to by Cannon as legal technocrats. 233 00:24:21,530 --> 00:24:28,970 By 1957, the anti lawyer propaganda actually became so bad that law graduates both in and out of government, 234 00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:35,000 formed an association to defend their rights against or rather to protect government jobs. 235 00:24:35,690 --> 00:24:41,000 There were, of course, lawyers who continue to practice their trade after the revolution. 236 00:24:41,630 --> 00:24:43,730 Anton said Cannon is one. 237 00:24:45,170 --> 00:24:53,930 It's tempting to trace this success to Cannon's anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist writings, which were so consonant with the regime's ideology. 238 00:24:55,010 --> 00:25:00,350 In an interview with Mr. CONAN, which I conducted at his Cairo apartment in July of 1986, 239 00:25:00,860 --> 00:25:08,210 I was afforded a glimpse into his thoughts and the course of his career, which cast some light on these questions. 240 00:25:08,810 --> 00:25:14,270 Though perhaps not surprisingly, the discussion a little confirmed the existence of the Campbell-bannerman report. 241 00:25:15,330 --> 00:25:23,580 However, his career profile is of great interest to this study, to the study of Egyptian lawyers and the history of Abdel Nasser, his presidency. 242 00:25:24,960 --> 00:25:30,390 Mr. CONAN This is the man who authored that article in 1957 for the Damascus conference. 243 00:25:30,750 --> 00:25:40,200 So the originator of the Campbell-bannerman story was born in Cairo in 1922, son of a Palestinian Catholic emigre from Jerusalem. 244 00:25:41,190 --> 00:25:47,010 He received his schooling in Cairo before taking a certificate from the Sorbonne in history in 1940. 245 00:25:47,790 --> 00:25:52,620 He returned to Cairo and, at his father's insistence, enrolled in law at the Cairo University. 246 00:25:53,400 --> 00:26:00,720 He submitted a dissertation for the doctorate in law in 1947 entitled The Legal Justification of the Arab Cause of Palestine, 247 00:26:01,230 --> 00:26:04,050 which was brought to the attention of Haj Amin al-Husseini. 248 00:26:04,470 --> 00:26:10,140 One thing that came out in my interview with Mr. CONAN was he was a shameless name dropper, 249 00:26:10,530 --> 00:26:16,079 and he really knew half the people that I am about to mention in the course of recounting our interview that I really should 250 00:26:16,080 --> 00:26:24,150 have had more time interviewing this guy because he literally knew everyone from the 1940s to the 1980s when I was meeting him. 251 00:26:25,230 --> 00:26:29,549 The Mufti of Jerusalem contacted Kenaan and requested that he make a lecture tour 252 00:26:29,550 --> 00:26:33,510 of European universities on the basis of what he had said in his doctoral thesis. 253 00:26:34,380 --> 00:26:43,350 In 1949, he spoke at Rome, where he met with the Pope, and September of that year he spoke in Naples and Turin, 254 00:26:43,350 --> 00:26:47,670 in Paris, in Lille and London on the Holy Lands and the Zionist advances. 255 00:26:48,360 --> 00:26:51,840 That was the title of his lecture in 1950. 256 00:26:51,870 --> 00:26:56,850 Mr. Cannon returned to Cairo to begin what was to be a very successful legal career. 257 00:26:57,390 --> 00:27:06,000 He rapidly climbed the rungs of the Egyptian courts, serving first as Stagiaires or an apprentice and then Saman. 258 00:27:06,210 --> 00:27:09,960 I'm not entirely sure what that corresponds to in French legal jargon, 259 00:27:09,960 --> 00:27:16,740 but it's a promotion about the statue and then premier and also the court of first instance and then the appellate court. 260 00:27:17,520 --> 00:27:23,190 In 1964, the age of 42, he was appointed lawyer before the McComb at the Nugget, 261 00:27:23,460 --> 00:27:28,590 which was Egypt's Egypt's Supreme Court of Appeal, or in the French, the Court of Cassation. 262 00:27:29,670 --> 00:27:34,380 He was young. You're supposed to be 50 years before you, 50 years old, before you could be appointed to the market. 263 00:27:34,400 --> 00:27:40,300 It didn't look good. So getting it at 42 is just a further sign of how advanced he was in his career. 264 00:27:40,320 --> 00:27:45,150 He was the youngest lawyer ever to be admitted to the Court of Cassation in Egypt. 265 00:27:46,170 --> 00:27:47,910 He was the Vatican's legal counsel. 266 00:27:48,060 --> 00:27:54,000 In fact, he claimed that his apartment when I interviewed him in in schedule, Ramses actually belonged to the Vatican. 267 00:27:54,720 --> 00:27:58,230 And he was a lawyer for the Tunisian president, Habib Bourguiba, in Cairo. 268 00:27:58,560 --> 00:28:02,250 So he represented Bourguiba interests in Egypt. All the while, 269 00:28:02,250 --> 00:28:11,370 Kanaan taught courses on civil law and international law at the Mahidol Mohammad or the Lawyers Institute attached to the Bar Association. 270 00:28:12,300 --> 00:28:17,340 Comparing this career with the state of the legal profession as already described. 271 00:28:17,940 --> 00:28:20,670 An explanation for Mr. Kanaan success is due. 272 00:28:21,420 --> 00:28:28,890 When I suggested that Mr. Kanaan might have experienced difficulties as a young lawyer in a crowded profession at the time of the revolution, 273 00:28:29,490 --> 00:28:35,600 he wouldn't elaborate. All he would say is, Robina, God gave us success. 274 00:28:36,740 --> 00:28:42,140 He did say that his first contact with the Revolutionary Command Council after 1952 275 00:28:42,410 --> 00:28:47,930 was a sequestration order suspended following the intervention of Ahmed Shukri, 276 00:28:47,990 --> 00:28:55,220 who, of course, is going to be the first leader of the PLO. Clearly, Kanaan was at odds ideologically with the regime. 277 00:28:55,520 --> 00:28:58,970 He said to me, I couldn't be a marxist. I'm a liberal Democrat. 278 00:28:59,540 --> 00:29:02,840 I don't believe in socialism. I told this to Abdel Nasser. 279 00:29:03,740 --> 00:29:13,160 So, in essence, as a young lawyer, he was setting himself apart from the ideological guiding lines of the new regime in Egypt. 280 00:29:13,550 --> 00:29:20,570 Surely this would not endear you to a government that already looked at lawyers with a jaundiced eye? 281 00:29:21,290 --> 00:29:27,470 All the same, Kanaan was frequently called on to represent his government on August 12th, 1956, 282 00:29:27,770 --> 00:29:33,440 in the wake of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and coinciding with a conference of Canal users in London, 283 00:29:33,830 --> 00:29:38,719 Cannon was sent to London to make some contacts with journalists and political parties 284 00:29:38,720 --> 00:29:43,280 there about the Palestinian question and its relationship to the Suez Canal crisis. 285 00:29:44,270 --> 00:29:52,970 So already he's linking us to his history, his personal history of engaging with the Arab-Israeli conflict around the Suez Canal. 286 00:29:53,540 --> 00:29:58,100 It's very much in line with the human barrier thesis of his 1957 article. 287 00:29:59,420 --> 00:30:09,170 Between 1960 and 64, Kanaan was sent on mission to a number of African states to Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, his Abdel Nasser's official envoy. 288 00:30:09,800 --> 00:30:15,530 As was fitting, Kanaan was head of the Egyptian delegation to the Vatican in 1965, 289 00:30:15,950 --> 00:30:24,110 sent to protest against the Ecumenical Council that would declare world jewellery faultless for the crucifixion of Christ. 290 00:30:24,140 --> 00:30:30,170 You may recall the Catholics until then had always accused Jews of deicide for their responsibility for the crucifixion. 291 00:30:31,310 --> 00:30:37,280 Kofi Annan's job in this otherwise benign moment was to try and discourage the Vatican from such a measure, 292 00:30:37,550 --> 00:30:45,590 because he saw it as a first step towards recognising Israel and sort of naturalising Israel's position of the community of nations. 293 00:30:46,130 --> 00:30:49,670 I was sent by Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Arab League and the PLO. 294 00:30:49,700 --> 00:30:53,750 He claimed to lobby the Vatican unsuccessfully. 295 00:30:54,470 --> 00:30:57,560 Finally, it would brings us back to the Campbell-bannerman report. 296 00:30:57,860 --> 00:31:06,440 Mr. Canon was a frequent member of the Egyptian delegation to the conferences of the Arab Lawyers Union, for which he wrote most of his publications. 297 00:31:07,370 --> 00:31:12,740 The delegations were all official, drawn from members of the Bar Association of each country that attended. 298 00:31:13,730 --> 00:31:17,450 Delegates were more or less free to write what they wanted, more or less for his words. 299 00:31:17,780 --> 00:31:22,309 I kept trying to press him to see whether there was any intervention by the state 300 00:31:22,310 --> 00:31:25,970 to tell members of these delegations what to say or what kind of line to take. 301 00:31:26,420 --> 00:31:29,240 So more or less free to write what they wanted. 302 00:31:29,330 --> 00:31:34,670 Though in view of the strict censorship, official approval of papers presented was a foregone conclusion. 303 00:31:35,570 --> 00:31:39,320 Mr. Cannon insisted that the government never changed a thing in his articles. 304 00:31:39,350 --> 00:31:47,450 Not one iota, he said, considering the nature of Mr. Cannon's paper, as suggested by the foregoing analysis of the Campbell-bannerman report. 305 00:31:47,960 --> 00:31:54,920 No changes were necessary. He was playing to the gallery. He was writing exactly what the regime would have wanted to hear about the kind of 306 00:31:54,920 --> 00:32:01,580 imperial scheming in support of Zionist ambitions at the expense of Arab rights. 307 00:32:02,880 --> 00:32:09,120 Returning to that document, I asked Mr. Cannon where he came across the working paper issued by the Secret 308 00:32:09,120 --> 00:32:13,710 Imperialist Conference of 1907 and going back over my notes of the interview. 309 00:32:14,410 --> 00:32:19,230 I mean, it's worth pausing here. I was 25 at the time of meeting this guy. 310 00:32:19,710 --> 00:32:23,790 I was embarrassed because I'd written this denunciation of this article. 311 00:32:23,790 --> 00:32:32,850 He had written in no uncertain terms and only got to meet him after going to the world of Arabic letters saying that he had made up this whole thing. 312 00:32:33,750 --> 00:32:40,650 Here was this elderly gentleman who received me in his apartment with great kindness and hospitality, and I felt like a total hypocrite. 313 00:32:41,780 --> 00:32:45,769 So at this stage in my thinking about Campbell-bannerman report, 314 00:32:45,770 --> 00:32:51,049 I was really much more interested in the strategy of a lawyer trying to advance their 315 00:32:51,050 --> 00:32:56,060 professional standing against adversity in the revolutionary Egyptian political scene. 316 00:32:56,840 --> 00:33:04,580 And a lot of the questioning that fills up most of my cassette here was really focusing on his life, his background. 317 00:33:04,880 --> 00:33:08,420 And he keeps interrupting me suspicious. He's like. Are you? 318 00:33:08,420 --> 00:33:11,510 Christian, Jewish and Christian. Okay. 319 00:33:12,570 --> 00:33:15,590 Course. Why are you asking me this? I'm a historian. 320 00:33:16,580 --> 00:33:20,480 Why are you interested in lawyers? Very interesting moment in the history of law. 321 00:33:20,730 --> 00:33:24,840 You know, I get a fine if I didn't have the guts to just say. 322 00:33:25,070 --> 00:33:31,460 Did you make up the Campbell-bannerman report? You know, looking back on it now, it's the one question, of course, I most wanted to ask him, 323 00:33:32,210 --> 00:33:42,970 but I just felt constrained under my own sense of guilt at having written about this man in terms that I had that were very critical. 324 00:33:42,980 --> 00:33:48,800 And then now to be receiving his hospitality with, you know, such open frankness on my part. 325 00:33:48,830 --> 00:33:54,350 So I did finally get to it. We got round to as we talked about his publications and his papers. 326 00:33:55,040 --> 00:33:58,280 You know, you wrote one on this document called the Campbell Dated Report. 327 00:33:58,940 --> 00:34:03,890 So I finally got to ask him, what's the background was to the document? 328 00:34:04,670 --> 00:34:06,500 Where did he come across the working paper? 329 00:34:06,800 --> 00:34:15,410 He claimed that he learned about the Campbell-bannerman report from an Algerian intellectual named Ali Hammami. 330 00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:28,680 Brought it to his attention. He had been expelled by the French from some unspecified part of North Africa, where Ali Hammami next went to Iraq. 331 00:34:29,460 --> 00:34:35,820 And in 1949, Hammami was returning from a series of conferences in Pakistan. 332 00:34:35,850 --> 00:34:42,420 So just after partition, when he was killed in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances. 333 00:34:42,870 --> 00:34:50,430 And why is it for me there keep cropping up? Mysterious circumstances and those who had the misfortune of writing about campbell-bannerman. 334 00:34:50,610 --> 00:34:56,819 Actually, I should take some comfort here because Anton's seen Cannon would have been in his sixties by the time I met him. 335 00:34:56,820 --> 00:35:01,650 So clearly he'd survived the curse of Campbell-bannerman. And so too, for the past 32 years, have I. 336 00:35:02,070 --> 00:35:10,080 But Ali Hammami and the unnamed British journalist who died in World War One aren't fortunate victims, and they took the secret with them. 337 00:35:10,980 --> 00:35:18,510 A collection of papers were traced to the British Museum Library. 338 00:35:18,510 --> 00:35:22,830 Now the British Library, where Canon was looking into the life of Campbell-bannerman. 339 00:35:23,790 --> 00:35:28,260 He maintains that there were a collection of Campbell-bannerman papers held by relatives in Scotland. 340 00:35:28,740 --> 00:35:36,460 A nephew named Gilmore. Ian Gilmore. He went to Edinburgh and described what he was looking for. 341 00:35:37,330 --> 00:35:41,200 Quote, They told me, Yes, there is all of this, however. 342 00:35:41,470 --> 00:35:44,860 We removed it all. We left no trace of all of this. 343 00:35:45,760 --> 00:35:50,379 This is Anton's line Cannon telling you what the Gilmore family told him about the papers. 344 00:35:50,380 --> 00:35:54,130 A campbell-bannerman that related to the secret working paper. 345 00:35:55,930 --> 00:36:03,370 The papers concerning his famous reports were removed, pure and simple, as all documents which are believed to be compromising, aren't removed. 346 00:36:04,330 --> 00:36:12,280 That was Anton's dream. Cannon's final statement. Mr. Cannon's response is, of course, not entirely satisfying, let alone conclusive. 347 00:36:13,060 --> 00:36:15,280 Before dismissing the Campbell-bannerman report, though, 348 00:36:15,280 --> 00:36:21,940 it is worth remarking that what Mr. Cannon described is not altogether inconsistent with the larger historical picture at the time. 349 00:36:23,080 --> 00:36:28,630 Thus, to the notion of conservatives running the liberals for an office can be rejected out of hand. 350 00:36:29,110 --> 00:36:35,140 There was much continuity in the conduct of international affairs between the Balfour and the Campbell-bannerman cabinets. 351 00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:43,959 Bearing this continuity in mind, the Balfour Cabinet's consideration of Herzl's Irish plan for Zionist colony colonisation of Northern 352 00:36:43,960 --> 00:36:51,250 Sinai in 1902 1903 is quite consistent with the suggestions proffered by the secret conference of 1907. 353 00:36:51,910 --> 00:36:57,790 In the Colonial Office, Joseph Chamberlain saw potential for Britain to gain strategically from the lavish project, 354 00:36:58,090 --> 00:37:01,960 for he agreed with the idea, provided it had cromer's approval. 355 00:37:03,260 --> 00:37:07,130 Considering the notion of separating the Asian and African parts of the Arab world. 356 00:37:07,460 --> 00:37:14,510 Rashid Khalidi A study on British policy in Syria and Palestine demonstrates both an active Anglo-French policy to keep 357 00:37:14,510 --> 00:37:23,389 Egypt isolated from Syria by railways and a more defined Arab fear of Zionism in the pre-World War one years for fear of, 358 00:37:23,390 --> 00:37:31,280 quote, the interposition of an alien body between Egypt and Syria, thereby rupturing the tenuous but growing links between them. 359 00:37:31,310 --> 00:37:38,450 This is quoting Rashid Howard, whose book British historians lend some meaning to such conspiratorial policies. 360 00:37:38,450 --> 00:37:42,559 And they write the concept that there is a natural life and death for empires. 361 00:37:42,560 --> 00:37:45,740 Had a powerful hold on the men of pre-war Europe. 362 00:37:46,930 --> 00:37:54,580 The consciousness of possible decline exaggerated the defensive response of the Foreign Office to any signs of a challenge. 363 00:37:54,940 --> 00:38:01,120 Now, what is that one from? I am recruiting there. Zara Steiner's Britain in the origins of the First World War. 364 00:38:01,390 --> 00:38:03,790 From the foregoing, we may draw one of two conclusions. 365 00:38:04,360 --> 00:38:10,299 Either the Campbell-bannerman report is at the very least, not inconsistent with the larger historical picture, 366 00:38:10,300 --> 00:38:18,070 and thus not unlikely or else that the historical consistency confirms that the document was indeed contrived, 367 00:38:18,280 --> 00:38:25,479 though, by someone who knew a bit of history. Once choice is likely to be determined by what one perceives to be the more 368 00:38:25,480 --> 00:38:32,080 prevalent phenomenon imperialist machinations or spurious conspiracy theories. 369 00:38:32,320 --> 00:38:37,360 And on that note, I brought my analysis of the Campbell-bannerman report to a close.