Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during World War II

9780195062663

0195062663

Estranged Bedfellows examines the hitherto neglected subject of Anglo-French imperial rivalry in the Middle East, concentrating on the course of relations between the two powers in Syria and Lebanon during World War II. Roshwald begins his narrative with an account of the bungled Free French coup attempt in 1940 against the Vichy authorities in Beirut. In the following summer, a British invasion force ousted the Vichy French from the region in what amounted to an incongruous colonial side-show, acted out in the midst of World War II. For the remainder of the war, Syria and Lebanon were governed by an unwieldy Anglo-Free French condominium, which became the focus of bitter clashes between Churchill and de Gaulle, and which was used by Arab nationalists as a means of playing the two colonial powers off against each other. Drawing on both British and newly opened French archival sources, as well as OSS and Jewish Agency material, Roshwald examines the impact of this episode on overall relations between the wartime allies, and highlights the Byzantine plots and arcane intrigues which characterized local policymaking in what was one of the last acts in the opera-bouffe of Anglo-French colonial rivalry.