The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

56 APRIL 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL That question is, as the editors put it: Did these partitions “intended to cure the sickness of ethnic violence” serve as a “long- standing or natural solution to the problem of pluralism” and the presence of national minorities seen as “demo- graphic misfits”? Editors Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson, professors of history at George Washington University and Portland State University, respec- tively, and their nine fellow contributors hold a unanimous view: The partitions did not lead to a “stabilization of conflict.” Rather they unleashed a “toxic miasma” of communal carnage and ethnic warfare that included massacres, ethnic cleansing, widespread rape and pillage, and unresolved feelings of betrayal, revenge, and irredentism that continue to plague these former British territories. As University of Sydney history profes- sor A. Dirk Moses explains, instead of an “atrocity prevention measure,” partitions “paradoxically … begat still more violence in the form of genocidal massacres and massive ethnic cleansings.” Prof. Moses adds, partitions are never “ethnically clean.” Suspect, even disloyal minorities usually remain within the new, ostensibly homogenous states. The editors assert that the partitions are “among the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century” and were modeled after another, earlier painful “transfer of inconvenient populations”—the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory exchange and resettlement of populations sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne. But in their etiology of these debacles, the editors deliberately forgo a compara- tive analysis tied to primordial antago- nisms and aspirations between Irish Catholics and Protestants, Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and Indian Muslims and Hindus, opting instead to focus on British imperial objectives to extricate His Majesty’s Government from these rivalries while maintaining a level of political and economic influ- ence, especially on the Indian subcontinent. Their treatment of these conflicts “from below” is disjointed and, in the case of Ireland, quite superficial. Noted Irish nationalists Michael Collins and Charles Stewart Parnell are men- tioned just once in Partitions , while Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein and the chairman of the Irish delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, isn’t cited at all. Much greater attention is paid to Pales- tine and India. With regard to both, several contributors lament that the British failed to promote movements in Mandate Pales- tine and Raj India that opposed partition. Amherst history professor Adi Gordon provides a fascinating account of “bina- tional Zionism” led by the Ihud (Unity) Party and Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), whose members campaigned for a joint Jewish-Arab Palestine. They rued that ChaimWeizmann and other Zionists aligned themselves with British imperial- ists and regretted that their organizations did not win over skeptical Palestinian nationalists. Stanford University professor Joel Beinin, in turn, offers a thoughtful account of those Arab nationalists who vehemently opposed partition, notably Musa al-Alami, Jamal al-Husayni, Albert Hourani, and George Antonius, whose book The Arab Awakening is still regarded as the most persuasive presentation of the Arab side. As for India, a “clean” partition was implausible. Indian nationalists argued that their country was simply too ethni- cally and religiously mixed for a surgical partition. They were bitterly opposed to any territorial division of India. In an ironic twist, the Palestinians and other Arabs opposed Ali Jinnah’s and the All-India Muslim League’s quest for a Muslim-majority Pakistan, fearing that it would set a precedent for Palestine’s partition. Likewise, Gandhi, Nehru, Hindus in general, and Sikhs—who feared being a discriminated minority in case Punjab would become part of Pakistan—opposed Palestine’s partition because it would set a precedent for India. They had a similarly negative opinion of Ireland’s division, denouncing an earlier short-lived British effort in 1905 to partition Bengal into Muslim- and Hindu-majority enclaves as an attempt to “Ulsterize” eastern India. Zionists, on the other hand, supported Ali Jinnah’s ambitions on behalf of India’s minority Muslim population, assuming it would strengthen their argument that Jews, as a persecuted minority, needed their own Jewish-majority state. For those interested in the parti- tions of India and Palestine, Partitions is timely reading. Those keen on Ireland will be left wanting. Further, the book would have been more instructive had the editors taken a deliberate compara- tive approach and offered a timeline of events and charts showing similarities and disparities common to the three case studies. n George Aldridge is a retired Foreign Service officer who served overseas in Jamaica, Denmark, Ethiopia, Belize, Morocco, Kenya, Tunisia, Sudan, and Lebanon, in addition to two assignments in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1990, he was director of the southwest office of the National Association of Arab Americans.