>>485
(www.haaretz.com, Apr. 10, 2018)
Uncovered:
U.K. Intel Encouraged Arab Armies to Invade Israel in 1948
ttps://www.haaretz.com/.premium-u-k-intel-goaded-arabs-into-48-war-papers-show-1.5300880

...Information passed on by the French, after the UN partition vote on November 29, 1947, was even more alarming.
On January 13, 1948, Maurice Fischer - the SHAI [Haganah intelligence service] liaison officer to French intelligence -
reported from Paris that, based on totally reliable information from French sources,
Brig. Clayton had, on December 17, 1947, reached an understanding with Lebanese Prime Minister Riyad al-Sulh,
according to which the British forces would evacuate northern Palestine and
give free rein to the irregular forces of the Arab Liberation Army, headed by Fawzi al-Qawuqji, to attack Jewish settlements.

The next day, January 14, two French intelligence officers from Beirut arrived in Haifa and informed the French military attache that
the Syrian prime minister, Jamil Mardam Bey, was mobilizing an irregular force of 20,000 volunteers to invade Palestine,
with tacit British agreement.

...The British secret agents, diplomats, military officers and civil servants returned home,
leaving behind their legacy of a divided, violent Middle East, in which the states formed by
two colonial powers in the aftermath of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement failed to withstand the test of time.

Meir Zamir teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
His book, “The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East: Intelligence and Decolonization, 1940-1948,” is
due to be published by Routledge this December.