So let me begin by welcome everyone to the Israel Studies Seminar.
My name is Eugene Rogan and it's my distinction to be both your chairman and your speaker for today's seminar.
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.
And Sarah Hirschhorn is also written to give her regrets. And so it is down to me to keep the show going.
And what I will say by way of an introduction to myself is that I am the director of the etc. and I
teach the modern history of the Middle East here at the University of Oxford doing that job since 1991.
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.
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.
When Jacobi first asked if I'd be willing to give a paper looking at Arab perspectives on Israel for this Israel studies seminar,
my first response was, I'd love to, but I don't have any research on hand to do so.
My most recent work was on the Middle East in the First World War,
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.
So I gave my apologies and promised I would support his promotion of Israel studies in the university in some other way.
But then, about a week later, I suddenly remembered this paper.
As I said, this is a paper that takes you back to 1986,
when I had submitted it as an abstract to present at the Middle East Studies Association meeting in Boston that year.
Now, Boston's massive meeting in 1986 has since become the stuff of legend I still have in this.
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,
I was still I was just a doctoral student at this point at Harvard.
And so they wrote around in me to get us all excited about what was going to happen in Boston from Asia.
They said one of the high points in the program will be a discussion between Professors Bernard
Lewis and Edward Said of the relation between scholars of the Middle East and the media.
This is, of course, the very famous showdown between Lewis and Saeed that took place at Mazer in Boston.
Perhaps that meeting is better remembered for Lewis versus Saeed,
then the young doctoral candidate from Harvard who had come to give what was his second conference paper.
My first case in your trivia buffs was actually for the business meeting that met in London that summer, just before Visa met.
So I was off to a rollicking good start as a as an ambitious doctoral student.
And I wanted to share on this occasion the fruits of some research that I had
undertaken while on a Fulbright scholarship in Jordan in the 1980 485 academic year.
And I was primarily there to study Arabic. But the study of Arabic isn't quite enough to keep my intellectual curiosity at bay.
And I found myself taking on other research projects just to develop my Arabic, develop my knowledge.
I used to sit it on after my language classes. In the morning.
I'd go and attend the history lectures given by the University of Jordan faculty.
And there was one given by Professor Suhail remotely on the modern history of the Middle East.
My field. And, you know, sitting in her classes, I could follow perhaps 70 to 80% of what she said.
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.
And I talked to her about it afterwards. On one day, she had gotten to the First World War and the partition diplomacy.
She talked us through what was very familiar terrain.
There were references to Hussein McMann correspondence and how perfidious Albion undermined those by their Sykes-Picot agreement with France.
And how Britain once again betrayed its commitment to the Arab world through the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
And I'm writing notes and I'm nodding away. I'm familiar with all this.
And then she said, But before all of them laying the foundation for all of this was the Bannerman Report.
Okay. I'm glad you look puzzled too.
I stopped taking notes and wrote it down carefully and made a point of going up to Professor Inouye after the lecture and said,
What's the Batman report? You said what?
You're at Harvard and you've never heard of the Bannerman report. So I confess to both of those accusations.
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.
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,
it is the Western tradition and critical scholarship to try and find precisely the things that bring most shame to our societies.
If we write our histories on such things, it gets a lot of attention and we become famous.
But she wouldn't buy it for a minute.
She assumed that I was another deluded Westerner whose teachers were trying to spare themselves and callow youths like me.
The horrible legacy of our betrayals of the Arab world.
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.
A book by a man,
an Egyptian scholar by the name of Lotfi Sabry and Hooghly on imperial policy towards Palestine in the first half of the 20th century.
This is a book that was his thesis to Al-Azhar University, which was subsequently published by the Daily Maariv in the 1970s.
It's a well-known reference.
You'll find any scholar working on the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli conflict will refer to Lotfi Sabry and Julie's book.
And then she gave me what was Sabry and Julie's?
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,
in which he introduces the theme of the Batman report.
So armed with these two beatings, which took me a little bit of time to go through,
I'm still a cub reporter in Arabic and spent a lot of time in the company of Hans,
very trying to make sure I got every nuance of the Arabic to make sure I followed the story.
I then went to the special collection of the University of Jordan Library to go through everything they had in
Arabic on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict to find what other books referred to the Batman report.
What I found were about a half dozen more titles that constituted something of a historian's dirty snowball.
Books that became a kind of self-referential literature,
each author referring back either to suddenly and wholly or to other authors that had referred
to Campbell-bannerman without anyone ever being able to footnote or cite an actual document.
I also went through every Western source that I could find to see if I could situate Sir Henry Campbell-bannerman,
who, as those of you with familiarity of British political history will know, was the last Liberal Prime Minister.
He served as Prime Minister of only two years, between 90 or three years, 19 5 to 19 eight.
Now, this is not a man that I could associate any specific Middle East policies with,
let alone any policies that were particularly influential in binding Britain to the Zionist movement.
And certainly none of my readings in Western sources gave me any grounds to believe that he had been in some way involved
in the crafting of a document that would lay the foundations for British support for the Zionist movement in Palestine.
Now. I was a Harvard boy, but I still knew where the centre of all learning on the Middle East was.
And so I wrote to Albert Hourani here at the Middle East Centre in Oxford.
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.
So I felt emboldened to write to the great man in Oxford.
Dear Mr. Hourani, have you ever heard of the Bannerman report or the Campbell-bannerman report?
Hourani confirmed that indeed. Erudite man that he was.
He had never come across this document either, and that he thought that somebody must have confused something they'd read in the archive,
perhaps something to do with the British Imperial Committee that would meet from time to time
and discuss coordinating imperial matters across the many continents of the British Empire.
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
Committee records that for some resemblance to what Lucy and Holly or Cannon referred to in this essay on the Bannerman Report.
But I will not surprise you. But I tell you that my efforts in Q on that occasion were in vain.
And so I brought up my findings in Arabic.
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.
I didn't see the point in exposing to a Western readership the conspiracy laden approach to writing history in the Arab world.
That seemed to me to be a kind of unfair thing to do,
and it wouldn't be particularly constructive for the Arab historians who had first engage me in this debate by writing it in Arabic.
I published it for the major figure here.
I know you all subscribe to it.
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.
My opening sentence became laughingstock of all my Harvard colleagues.
It says in Arabic, Mohammed, what did the building and all of me in Libya ought to be it Islamic learning?
Hialeah in horrible. Luxor in Maghreb at the Chako.
She'd be glad to share well ad hoc. So the conspiracies against the Middle East are without end.
From its westernmost edges in Morocco to its easternmost edges in Bilal to Sham and Iraq.
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,
and that there are indeed conspiracies one can point to. We have obviously with us in the audience.
He's written about one of the best conspiracies ever, which was the protocol itself.
If you're looking for backroom dealings to conspire against the established order,
anyone who lived through the 1956 Suez crisis would have a good case study to base their suspicions on.
But my point to the Arab reader is not every conspiracy theory is worth your credence.
You should be asking critical questions of your sources.
And so in a bid to open this debate with the at least the Arab historians in Jordan, I wrote this article in Arabic.
I. Was pleased to see it published.
Sue Hillary, Maui. The professor who had first introduced me to the Bannerman report, wrote a rebuttal to my article.
This being a Jordanian publication. Out of deference to her seniority.
They published her rebuttal first, and then my article followed her rebuttal,
which was a curious way of ordering things, but of course, deference in all such things.
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.
I never got a lot of correspondence from any Arab historians about what I had suggested
about Arab history on the Arab-Israeli conflict or indeed on the Bardhaman report itself.
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.
And then after all was said and done,
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.
I was in Cairo in the summer of 1986.
I was talking to researchers at the American Research Centre in Cairo, RC about my recent obsession with this document.
And they said, Well, if you're a man who wrote the article in 1957, Anton Selim Kanaan was a lawyer.
He might still be a member of the lawyers union.
He's probably in the phone book. Look him up. Such a novel idea had never crossed my mind.
So I took the phone book right there. They had the RC offices and sure enough, Anton Slim Canard was a listed number.
I dialled the number and his very elderly voice said Hello.
So I had my man. I could actually go and talk to the man who had given us the story of the Diamond Report.
And I have here again resurrected for my personal archives with his business card and turns to the man on the tape
recording of my conversation with the man held in his apartment on Sherry branches in downtown Cairo in the summer of 1986.
So what I'd like to do after that lengthy introduction is share with you where I got to when I compiled all this
evidence together and how I made sense of what the spurious document's meaning was in the bigger scheme of things.
So in September of 1957, this is my basic 1986 paper.
I'd never given this paper before.
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,
which convened that year in Damascus. The article introduced a document called the Campbell-bannerman report said to be the working paper of a
secret imperialist conference summoned by the British Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-bannerman.
The report consisted of an investigation into the centre's imperial vulnerability and recommended appropriate courses of action,
as recounted by Cannon. Both the conference and the report, which it produced, were incredible.
With the fall of the Balfour Conservative government in December 1905, a Liberal ministry was formed, Cannon explained.
Noteworthy for the lack of experience in foreign affairs. This is not strictly true, but this is the way Cannon presented the world.
Consequently,
a bargain was struck with the Conservatives whereby the conduct of foreign affairs would be left to members of Balfour's defeated government.
It's that the Liberals free to address pressing domestic issues such as the Irish question.
The first matter of business, he maintained. Undertaken by those conservatives seconded to a Liberal Foreign Office,
was to augment the Anglo-French entente cordiale of 1905 with a broader imperialist front.
Hence the convening of a secret conference leading academics from European colonial powers including France,
Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Italy and Spain were sent to London to represent their nation's interests.
These were addressed by the Prime Minister, who did not otherwise participate in the conference,
beginning with a discourse on the rise and fall of past empires.
Campbell-bannerman supposedly charged the Assembly with the duty.
A proposing the means to prevent the fall of European Imperial Order and to permit the continued subordination of the non European world.
So that's the mission of the secret imperialist conference of all these imperial nations.
After a period of research and deliberation. The conferees drafted their conclusion in the form of a working paper.
And this is what becomes known as the Bannerman Report in Arabic to create a Bannerman, though,
rightly speaking, given the double barrelled name, we should call it the Campbell-bannerman report.
After defining the zones of each nation's interests, the report eliminated potential trouble spots from around the world.
Turning to the Mediterranean, however, the conferees agreed there was cause for concern,
particularly along its eastern and southern boundaries Eastern Mediterranean and the southern Mediterranean.
From Gibraltar to Alexandria to the Mediterranean was inhabited by a single people united by deep religious,
linguistic, historical and cultural links.
The Arab world straddles very important commercial routes, as well as vital strategic arteries connecting Europe with Asia,
such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and of course, the Suez Canal.
First and foremost. Predictions of great demographic growth across this region compounded the threat of shared Arab aspirations to make
the prospects of Arab unity across North Africa and the Middle East a great menace to the imperial order as a whole.
Again, this is all according to the Bannerman Report, as recounted to us by Anton Saleem Canard.
This is not Rogan telling you about imperial history.
In his article, Cannon does not specify exactly how the Campbell-bannerman report proposed to treat this danger.
He doesn't actually, in his article, reproduced the text of the Campbell-bannerman report.
He talks about it, but he doesn't quote it.
He does clearly state that the document laid the groundwork for a policy of British support for Zionist aspirations.
That's the whole point of his 1957 article.
Subsequent authors have filled in the connection between the threat of nascent Arab unity to the
imperial order and the laying of a British policy favourable to Jewish settlement in Palestine.
The Egyptian historian Hassan Sabri, actually, and he of course is the second author that my professor at the university,
Jordan, had given me to read it his 1967 Ph.D. dissertation.
Subsequent published by the Dotted Mod. If in 1973 wrote that the 1907 conferees proposed to address the security threat of greater Arab unity,
quote, by working to divide the African part from the Asiatic section of this region.
Towards this end, it was suggested that a strong foreign human barrier be placed in the land bridge,
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,
a force that would be friendly to the imperialists and an enemy to the residents of the region.
This is the notion of the human barrier.
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.
So actually is actually putting quote marks around text that CONAN never
actually cites himself serves to link the dangers outlined in Cannon's article
with subsequent British support for Zionism on the one hand and wholly only
footnoted Cannon's article and his treatment of the Campbell-bannerman report.
Though the document is referred to in a number of works in Arabic,
these must either draw on the Canon article or else on other works based on the Koran.
Article four There is no copy extent of the Campbell-bannerman report.
And as mentioned above, it was Antoine Saleem Kanaan who introduced the document to Arabic scholarship.
Dr. Yellowlees embellishments aside, the Campbell-bannerman report, as it's come down to us is at best a very spurious document.
Taking Mr. Cannon's account at face value.
For the moment, the report in question was circulated through the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office before disappearing.
It did not reappear until 1914,
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.
There is a recurring theme here that discovering the Bannerman report is very bad for your longevity.
So far I am defying the odds, but you might want to sit a little further from me in case by reawakening this article.
Unintended consequences unfold. No mention is made of the paper Cannon wrote for I am sorry that the journalist
who discovered it in 1914 wrote for or the articles he might have written,
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.
Mr. Cannon gave no indication in his article of how he discovered the report.
Indeed, his article is devoid of footnotes and references of any kind.
What then, is the historical value of such a document?
It has been rejected by respected Arab historians for lack of an original.
And what we're left with is a vague description provided by Mr. CONAN in his 1957
paper presented to his colleagues at the Arab Lawyer's Union conference in Damascus.
Placed in its own historic context. Mr. Keenan's article is a document of its time.
It was presented within a year of the Suez War of 1956,
and I think the timing of this is very important for understanding the broader meaning of what his document purports to say.
His audience in Damascus proved quite receptive to an account which pitted the British and
the French interests through a Zionist proxy against the unity of the greater Arab nation.
I mean, in some ways that captures the tripartite aggression of the 1956 Suez War.
Britain and France colluding with Israel to try and advance Israel's control across the Sinai Peninsula to the banks of the Suez Canal.
If you were making such an account in 1957, after the experience in 1956,
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.
I argued it had. So to me, it seems possible that the whole story was contrived,
both for the audience in Damascus and for the three year old government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo.
After all, as a lawyer in Nasser's Egypt, Mr. Kanaan was a member of an endangered profession.
Turning to studies of lawyers in Egypt when confronted with a profession whose
prestige and influence suffered major reversals following the 1952 revolution,
if under the monarchy, the legal profession was overcrowded, offering inadequate opportunities for advancement.
Yet lawyers dominated cabinets, the parliament and parties in the political struggle between General Naguib and Colonel Nasser.
In 1954, the Bar Association placed itself firmly behind General Naguib in his call for a return to parliamentary rule.
Coming out on top, Abdel Nasser acted decisively against the bases of lawyers power,
the abolition of Parliament, the dissolution of political parties,
the purging of the universities and the censorship of the press deprived
lawyers and politicians of all complexions of the bases from which to operate.
Lawyers are thus squeezed out of the profession or else driven into government employment,
as legal advisers referred to by Cannon as legal technocrats.
By 1957, the anti lawyer propaganda actually became so bad that law graduates both in and out of government,
formed an association to defend their rights against or rather to protect government jobs.
There were, of course, lawyers who continue to practice their trade after the revolution.
Anton said Cannon is one.
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.
In an interview with Mr. CONAN, which I conducted at his Cairo apartment in July of 1986,
I was afforded a glimpse into his thoughts and the course of his career, which cast some light on these questions.
Though perhaps not surprisingly, the discussion a little confirmed the existence of the Campbell-bannerman report.
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.
Mr. CONAN This is the man who authored that article in 1957 for the Damascus conference.
So the originator of the Campbell-bannerman story was born in Cairo in 1922, son of a Palestinian Catholic emigre from Jerusalem.
He received his schooling in Cairo before taking a certificate from the Sorbonne in history in 1940.
He returned to Cairo and, at his father's insistence, enrolled in law at the Cairo University.
He submitted a dissertation for the doctorate in law in 1947 entitled The Legal Justification of the Arab Cause of Palestine,
which was brought to the attention of Haj Amin al-Husseini.
One thing that came out in my interview with Mr. CONAN was he was a shameless name dropper,
and he really knew half the people that I am about to mention in the course of recounting our interview that I really should
have had more time interviewing this guy because he literally knew everyone from the 1940s to the 1980s when I was meeting him.
The Mufti of Jerusalem contacted Kenaan and requested that he make a lecture tour
of European universities on the basis of what he had said in his doctoral thesis.
In 1949, he spoke at Rome, where he met with the Pope, and September of that year he spoke in Naples and Turin,
in Paris, in Lille and London on the Holy Lands and the Zionist advances.
That was the title of his lecture in 1950.
Mr. Cannon returned to Cairo to begin what was to be a very successful legal career.
He rapidly climbed the rungs of the Egyptian courts, serving first as Stagiaires or an apprentice and then Saman.
I'm not entirely sure what that corresponds to in French legal jargon,
but it's a promotion about the statue and then premier and also the court of first instance and then the appellate court.
In 1964, the age of 42, he was appointed lawyer before the McComb at the Nugget,
which was Egypt's Egypt's Supreme Court of Appeal, or in the French, the Court of Cassation.
He was young. You're supposed to be 50 years before you, 50 years old, before you could be appointed to the market.
It didn't look good. So getting it at 42 is just a further sign of how advanced he was in his career.
He was the youngest lawyer ever to be admitted to the Court of Cassation in Egypt.
He was the Vatican's legal counsel.
In fact, he claimed that his apartment when I interviewed him in in schedule, Ramses actually belonged to the Vatican.
And he was a lawyer for the Tunisian president, Habib Bourguiba, in Cairo.
So he represented Bourguiba interests in Egypt. All the while,
Kanaan taught courses on civil law and international law at the Mahidol Mohammad or the Lawyers Institute attached to the Bar Association.
Comparing this career with the state of the legal profession as already described.
An explanation for Mr. Kanaan success is due.
When I suggested that Mr. Kanaan might have experienced difficulties as a young lawyer in a crowded profession at the time of the revolution,
he wouldn't elaborate. All he would say is, Robina, God gave us success.
He did say that his first contact with the Revolutionary Command Council after 1952
was a sequestration order suspended following the intervention of Ahmed Shukri,
who, of course, is going to be the first leader of the PLO. Clearly, Kanaan was at odds ideologically with the regime.
He said to me, I couldn't be a marxist. I'm a liberal Democrat.
I don't believe in socialism. I told this to Abdel Nasser.
So, in essence, as a young lawyer, he was setting himself apart from the ideological guiding lines of the new regime in Egypt.
Surely this would not endear you to a government that already looked at lawyers with a jaundiced eye?
All the same, Kanaan was frequently called on to represent his government on August 12th, 1956,
in the wake of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and coinciding with a conference of Canal users in London,
Cannon was sent to London to make some contacts with journalists and political parties
there about the Palestinian question and its relationship to the Suez Canal crisis.
So already he's linking us to his history, his personal history of engaging with the Arab-Israeli conflict around the Suez Canal.
It's very much in line with the human barrier thesis of his 1957 article.
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.
As was fitting, Kanaan was head of the Egyptian delegation to the Vatican in 1965,
sent to protest against the Ecumenical Council that would declare world jewellery faultless for the crucifixion of Christ.
You may recall the Catholics until then had always accused Jews of deicide for their responsibility for the crucifixion.
Kofi Annan's job in this otherwise benign moment was to try and discourage the Vatican from such a measure,
because he saw it as a first step towards recognising Israel and sort of naturalising Israel's position of the community of nations.
I was sent by Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Arab League and the PLO.
He claimed to lobby the Vatican unsuccessfully.
Finally, it would brings us back to the Campbell-bannerman report.
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.
The delegations were all official, drawn from members of the Bar Association of each country that attended.
Delegates were more or less free to write what they wanted, more or less for his words.
I kept trying to press him to see whether there was any intervention by the state
to tell members of these delegations what to say or what kind of line to take.
So more or less free to write what they wanted.
Though in view of the strict censorship, official approval of papers presented was a foregone conclusion.
Mr. Cannon insisted that the government never changed a thing in his articles.
Not one iota, he said, considering the nature of Mr. Cannon's paper, as suggested by the foregoing analysis of the Campbell-bannerman report.
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
imperial scheming in support of Zionist ambitions at the expense of Arab rights.
Returning to that document, I asked Mr. Cannon where he came across the working paper issued by the Secret
Imperialist Conference of 1907 and going back over my notes of the interview.
I mean, it's worth pausing here. I was 25 at the time of meeting this guy.
I was embarrassed because I'd written this denunciation of this article.
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.
Here was this elderly gentleman who received me in his apartment with great kindness and hospitality, and I felt like a total hypocrite.
So at this stage in my thinking about Campbell-bannerman report,
I was really much more interested in the strategy of a lawyer trying to advance their
professional standing against adversity in the revolutionary Egyptian political scene.
And a lot of the questioning that fills up most of my cassette here was really focusing on his life, his background.
And he keeps interrupting me suspicious. He's like. Are you?
Christian, Jewish and Christian. Okay.
Course. Why are you asking me this? I'm a historian.
Why are you interested in lawyers? Very interesting moment in the history of law.
You know, I get a fine if I didn't have the guts to just say.
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,
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.
And then now to be receiving his hospitality with, you know, such open frankness on my part.
So I did finally get to it. We got round to as we talked about his publications and his papers.
You know, you wrote one on this document called the Campbell Dated Report.
So I finally got to ask him, what's the background was to the document?
Where did he come across the working paper?
He claimed that he learned about the Campbell-bannerman report from an Algerian intellectual named Ali Hammami.
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.
And in 1949, Hammami was returning from a series of conferences in Pakistan.
So just after partition, when he was killed in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances.
And why is it for me there keep cropping up? Mysterious circumstances and those who had the misfortune of writing about campbell-bannerman.
Actually, I should take some comfort here because Anton's seen Cannon would have been in his sixties by the time I met him.
So clearly he'd survived the curse of Campbell-bannerman. And so too, for the past 32 years, have I.
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.
A collection of papers were traced to the British Museum Library.
Now the British Library, where Canon was looking into the life of Campbell-bannerman.
He maintains that there were a collection of Campbell-bannerman papers held by relatives in Scotland.
A nephew named Gilmore. Ian Gilmore. He went to Edinburgh and described what he was looking for.
Quote, They told me, Yes, there is all of this, however.
We removed it all. We left no trace of all of this.
This is Anton's line Cannon telling you what the Gilmore family told him about the papers.
A campbell-bannerman that related to the secret working paper.
The papers concerning his famous reports were removed, pure and simple, as all documents which are believed to be compromising, aren't removed.
That was Anton's dream. Cannon's final statement. Mr. Cannon's response is, of course, not entirely satisfying, let alone conclusive.
Before dismissing the Campbell-bannerman report, though,
it is worth remarking that what Mr. Cannon described is not altogether inconsistent with the larger historical picture at the time.
Thus, to the notion of conservatives running the liberals for an office can be rejected out of hand.
There was much continuity in the conduct of international affairs between the Balfour and the Campbell-bannerman cabinets.
Bearing this continuity in mind, the Balfour Cabinet's consideration of Herzl's Irish plan for Zionist colony colonisation of Northern
Sinai in 1902 1903 is quite consistent with the suggestions proffered by the secret conference of 1907.
In the Colonial Office, Joseph Chamberlain saw potential for Britain to gain strategically from the lavish project,
for he agreed with the idea, provided it had cromer's approval.
Considering the notion of separating the Asian and African parts of the Arab world.
Rashid Khalidi A study on British policy in Syria and Palestine demonstrates both an active Anglo-French policy to keep
Egypt isolated from Syria by railways and a more defined Arab fear of Zionism in the pre-World War one years for fear of,
quote, the interposition of an alien body between Egypt and Syria, thereby rupturing the tenuous but growing links between them.
This is quoting Rashid Howard, whose book British historians lend some meaning to such conspiratorial policies.
And they write the concept that there is a natural life and death for empires.
Had a powerful hold on the men of pre-war Europe.
The consciousness of possible decline exaggerated the defensive response of the Foreign Office to any signs of a challenge.
Now, what is that one from? I am recruiting there. Zara Steiner's Britain in the origins of the First World War.
From the foregoing, we may draw one of two conclusions.
Either the Campbell-bannerman report is at the very least, not inconsistent with the larger historical picture,
and thus not unlikely or else that the historical consistency confirms that the document was indeed contrived,
though, by someone who knew a bit of history. Once choice is likely to be determined by what one perceives to be the more
prevalent phenomenon imperialist machinations or spurious conspiracy theories.
And on that note, I brought my analysis of the Campbell-bannerman report to a close.