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The Hebrew newspaper “Haaretz” sparked widespread controversy after publishing an article revealing the important role played by the Syrian prime minister during the French mandate, Jamil Mardam Bey, in which he addressed the important and decisive information that the latter transmitted to Ben Gurion, prominent leader of the Zionist movement, which led to the rise of “Israel.
Jamil Mardam Bey is considered one of the symbols of Syrian independence and one of the founders of the Syrian Republic, and he has a great issue in the memory of Syrians for his national positions.
Jamil Mardam Bey
The article prepared by the Israeli researcher Meir Zamir and published in the Hebrew newspaper “Haaretz”, and translated by the Al-Hurra website, stated that the recruitment of Jamil Mardam Bey began in the summer of 1945, after French intelligence revealed that the Prime Minister of Syria under the French mandate was recruited by the British intelligence chief in the Middle East, Elted Nicole Clayton, and by the then Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Saeed.
According to the article, Mardam Bey dreamed of establishing a Greater Syria that included Syria, Iraq and Jordan under the rule of King Faisal Ibn Sharif Hussein, while he would be the Prime Minister.
However, the French decided to blackmail Mardam with you after they threatened to leak documents in their possession to his political opponents, prompting him to resign in August 1945, after consulting with Britain, which did not know he had become. in a double agent.
“Haaretz” reported that Mardam Bey had provided the French with valuable information about the intentions of the British army and intelligence services in the Middle East.
When Mardam was appointed Syrian ambassador to Egypt and his representative at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo, the French had difficulty blackmailing and exploiting him without raising suspicions. For this reason, they resorted to hiring the head of the Arab division of the political department of the Jewish Agency, Eliyahu Sasson, to transmit the important information that the Syrian ambassador Paris had.
What helped facilitate Sasson’s mission was that he was of Syrian origin and had a good relationship with Mardam Bey since 1937, and Ben-Gurion appointed him to the Jewish Agency to coordinate cooperation with French intelligence.
An important source of information
Documents indicate that on November 12, 1945, Sasson met with Mardam in Cairo, before meeting again 6 days later, when Mardam visited Jerusalem at the head of the Arab League delegation to organize Palestinian representation at the university. .
After these meetings, Ben-Gurion met with Sasso, and in the November 22 diary), details related to the Jewish Agency official’s conversations with Mardam.
According to the documents, this is one of the few occasions when Mardam can be directly identified as an intelligence source for Ben Gurion, who later became the first prime minister of the State of Israel.
In the years that followed, both French intelligence and Sasson concealed by various means the fact that Mardam was the source of the information, so as not to be revealed.
However, the information that was first revealed in the diary of Maurice Fischer, an intelligence officer at the Free French Forces military headquarters in Beirut, who previously served in the Haganah militia before the establishment of the Hebrew state, and then he became Israel’s ambassador to France, it is further proof that Esa Mardam was an important source of information for Ben Gurion.
In his memoirs, Fischer explained that Mardam revealed a secret Anglo-Iraqi plan to establish the so-called Greater Syria for agents of the Zionist movement at a meeting in Cairo.
The Israeli investigator’s report indicated that Ben-Gurion had been preparing since July 1945 for the possibility of an attack by the Arab armies in the event that Israel declared its independence, but the information received by Mardam diverted attention in another direction, for Ben-Gurion learned that the direct threat to Israel’s establishment does not lie in attack. Probably from neighboring Arab countries, but in British plans to thwart the establishment of the Arab state
This was evident in declaring the “Haganah” militia a terrorist organization and in seeking to implement the “Greater Syria” plan, whereby a Jewish entity with limited powers and not an independent state would be created.
Fears of a Soviet intervention
According to the information that Mardam Bey relayed to Ben-Gurion, the Arab leaders, who feared Soviet intervention, were determined to support the United Kingdom in the event of an all-out war between Britain and the Soviet Union in the lands of the Middle East.
In the end, according to the newspaper “Haaretz”, the idea of ”Greater Syria” was frustrated by the efforts of the then Saudi monarch, King Abdulaziz bin Saud, who considered it a threat to his country, and managed to do so after obtaining the support of US President Harry Truman.
On July 14, 1946, London had no choice but to accept that it did not support the establishment of the Greater Syria project. However, British intelligence continued its efforts to establish Greater Syria as the government of the Hashemites (members of the Sharif Hussein bin Ali family), in order to form part of a regional alliance against any potential Soviet threat.
According to the Israeli newspaper, the information that Mardam Bey transmitted to David Ben-Gurwin was extremely important, noting that the events of 1946 confirmed the veracity of this information about the intentions of Great Britain.
And in May 1946, the British head of intelligence in the Middle East, Alted Clayton, had initiated cooperation with the secretary of the League of Arab States, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, after a meeting of Arab leaders in the Inshas Palace of Cairo, where the conference decisions confirmed for the first time that “Zionism is a danger in all Arab countries.
“Secret decisions”
In June, a second meeting of the Council of the League of Arab States was held in the Bludan compound, near the Syrian capital Damascus, where “secret decisions” were issued stipulating the need for a military confrontation with the Zionist movement and they supported the Palestinians with money, weapons and manpower.
Mordam Bey and Sassoon attended that meeting, who then returned to Jerusalem with information about the secret decisions.
Subsequent movements by the British Army and the secret services confirmed Mardam’s information. On June 29, 1946, in what became known as “Operation Agatha” – or “Black Saturday” in Hebrew – units of the British army arrested the leaders of the Jewish Agency, in particular the head of foreign policy, Moshe Sharett, and confiscated files at the agency’s Jerusalem headquarters.
And he raided large numbers of kibbutzim for banned weapons. The real objective of the operation was to disarm the Haganah and replace Ben-Gurion.
The British operation largely failed, as its details were leaked to Haganah leaders two months ago, while Ben-Gurion escaped arrest as he was in Paris at the time.
. The British also tried to find evidence of French support for the Zionist movement (Eliyahu Sassoon’s files were among the first they seized), but found nothing to suggest this.
‘A moderate Arab leader’
In December 1946, Clayton forced Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli to remove Prime Minister Saadallah al-Jabri for his role in thwarting the Plan for Greater Syria, and replaced him with Jamil Mardam.
The aim of this step was to allow Mardam to secure a parliamentary majority for the plan, but Mardam began to distance himself from the British, despite the fact that British intelligence continued to regard him as a reliable agent.
Mardam’s return from Cairo allowed the French to administer it directly without Sassoon’s mediation. In the summer of 1946, France established diplomatic relations with Syria and established a consulate in Damascus where intelligence agents would operate under diplomatic cover. These actors were able to meet Mardam in his official capacity without arousing suspicion.
However, after the failure of British efforts to resolve the Jewish problem in Palestine by force, the task was imposed on the Arab armies. He described this phase, which began in August 1947 and culminated in the war of May 1948.
In the wake of the defeat of the Arab states in the 1948 war, winds of political, social, and economic turmoil swept through the former regimes in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.
Jamil Mardam was one of the victims of the December riots following a serious political and economic crisis in Syria, where he was once again forced to resign from his post to spend the rest of his life in Cairo until the date of his death. in the world 1960.
In February 1947, Ben-Gurion met British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in London and praised Mardem as a moderate Arab leader.
