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The Israeli daily “Haaretz” claims that former Syrian Prime Minister Jamil Mardam was a double agent between the French and the British, and contributed to the information he provided in the policies that led to the declaration of the State of Israel by the head of the Agency. Jewish David Ben-Gurion.
The newspaper published a report by the writer and professor at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Meir Zamir, who will publish a book next year on “the Franco-British secret war in the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel.” in which he said:
In the summer of 1945, no one was hated more by French officials in Syria and Lebanon than Jamil Mardam. Intelligence obtained by France revealed that Mardam, Syria’s prime minister under French mandate, had been recruited by Brigadier General Elted Nicole Clayton, the MI6 official in the Middle East, and Nuri al-Saeed, the Iraqi prime minister.
Mardam also reportedly agreed to a plan whereby Syria, after France was driven out of the territories under his rule, would unite with Iraq and Transjordan under the Hashemite family, and Britain, which had controlled these two countries, too. he would enjoy hegemony in Damascus. As for Mardam’s role in the so-called “Greater Syria” plan, he received large sums of money and was promised that he would rule Syria under the Hashemite king.
This information was just the opening tour of a previously unknown dramatic episode that helped shape the Middle East as we know it. What happened was that the French decided to exploit the situation for their own ends and began to blackmail a landfill. And they threatened to publish the documents in their possession and to leak information to their political opponents. Mardam finally resigned in August 1945 after consulting with the British, but they were unaware that he had succumbed to blackmail and became a double agent. In that period, with the future of the region at stake, Mardam provided the French with valuable information about the intentions of the British army and intelligence services in the Middle East.
But the story does not end there. Research in French and Israeli archives, as well as access to Syrian government documents, show that the Syrian prime minister was actually treated by a Zionist intelligence agent alongside the French. The information he relayed to David Ben-Gurion was crucial to the Zionist leader’s strategy during the pre-state era.
It all started in October 1945, when the French faced a new problem. Mardam had been appointed Syrian ambassador to Egypt and his envoy at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo, but the French had difficulty exploiting him there without arousing suspicion. The solution was to recruit Eliyahu Sasson to pass on the information Mardam provided.
Sasson, who was then head of the Arab division in the political department of the Jewish Agency, had been appointed by the agency’s head, Ben-Gurion, to coordinate cooperation with French intelligence. Sassoon, born in Syria, met Mardam and met him in 1937, when the latter had been prime minister for a previous period.
The documents reveal that Mardam was very important to Ben-Gurion. He laid out the British-Iraqi plan to establish what would be called “Greater Syria” to Jewish agencies in Cairo.
From July 1945, Ben-Gurion prepared for the possibility of an attack by the Arab states if the Jewish state declared its independence. But Mardam’s information shifted the focus elsewhere. Ben-Gurion learned that the immediate threat to the establishment of the Jewish state did not reside in an attack by the Arab armies, but in the plan of British military leaders and intelligence agencies in the Middle East to thwart this development by various other media.
This included declaring the “Haganah” militia a terrorist organization and disarming it, and implementing the Greater Syria Plan, under which a limited Jewish entity would be established in Palestine by mandate, but not an independent state. Apparently, Mardam was the one who exposed the fact that British intelligence had recruited an agent who worked for the Jewish Agency and transmitted to his superiors information about the discussions held by the leaders of the agency, including copies of the minutes of their meetings. more secret.
According to information relayed by Mardam, Arab rulers who feared Soviet intervention decided to help the British in the event of an all-out war in the Middle East between the Soviet Union and the West, while London policy played with the time factor to rehabilitate its economy and strengthen relations with the United States on the Palestinian cause.
In the end, the plan for Greater Syria was foiled by the Saudi monarch, Ibn Saud, who saw it as a threat to his kingdom. He won the support of US President Harry Truman and the State Department, which put heavy pressure on London. On July 14, 1946, the British government was forced to declare that it did not support the Greater Syria Project. However, British military and intelligence forces in the Middle East continued their efforts to create Greater Hashemite Syria as part of a regional defense alliance against the Soviet threat.
The events that took place in 1946 confirmed the veracity of the information that Mardam relayed about British military intentions in Palestine. On June 29, 1946, in what is known as “Operation Agatha,” or “Black Saturday,” in Hebrew, British Army units arrested the leaders of the Jewish Agency, particularly the foreign policy chief Moshe Sharett, and they confiscated files at the agency’s Jerusalem headquarters, and raided several A large number of “kibbutzim”; In search of prohibited weapons. The real objective of the operation was to disarm the Haganah and replace it with more moderate figures.
In May of that year, Brigadier General Ted Clayton, in cooperation with Abd al-Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the League of Arab States and British agent, began a meeting with the heads of Arab states at the Inshas Palace in Cairo.
The decisions of the conference confirmed for the first time that Zionism poses a threat, not only to the Palestinians, but to all Arab countries. In June, a second meeting of the Council of the League of Arab States was held in Bloudan, near Damascus. Some of their secret decisions stipulated the danger of a military confrontation with the Zionist movement, and in this case the Arab countries will have a duty to help their Palestinian brothers with money, weapons and manpower.
Mardam was present at Bloudan’s conversations, as was Sasson, who later returned to Jerusalem with information about the secret decisions.
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