It is now well established that in the colonial era, one of the most crucial forms of control developed by Britain for maintaining hegemony over a vast empire with relatively modest military forces was the management, and sometimes the encouragement, or even the creation, of religious and ethnic difference. The British did this in a manner not at all dissimilar to that followed by the French in Lebanon and elsewhere. This process was often grounded in existing distinctions within the societies the British ruled over, but it frequently involved the development and refinement of these existing differences, and sometimes even the production of new ones. [44] The net result was often a highly developed and systematized communitarian structure, within which the British could play their favored role of arbiter, and ideally be seen as above or outside a "local" conflict, rather than as part of it, or even the creator of it, as they were in many cases.
Of course official Britain, whether in the nineteenth century or the interwar period, was always pleased to be invisible in these sordid matters, or as close to invisible as was possible. The preferred posture of the greatest power of the age was to pose as the impartial external actor, doing its levelheaded, rational, civilized best to restrain the savage passions of the wild and brutish locals. One cannot read the memoirs or many of the official reports of British officials in mandatory Palestine - an entity that in its then-current form the British themselves had created, and that was riven by political conflicts they themselves had fostered - without being repeatedly struck by this tone of innocent wonderment at a bizarre and often tragic sequence of events for which these officials rarely if ever acknowledged the slightest responsibility. [45]
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The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
by Rashid Khalidi, pg. 50-51
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