The Last Crusade?

British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917-18

Abstract

Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives, the campaign in Palestine during the First World War was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Events in the Holy Land were shaped, staged and represented to boost public morale in Britain. The almost instinctive evocation of the Crusade in this context—and the equally-instinctive impulse to suppress these evocations—exposed inherent faultlnes and tensions which normally remained obscured within the self assured ethos of imperial order. This applied not only to the fragile relationship between Britain and its Moslem subjects abroad, but also to rifts within metropolitan British society. The difficulties in generating a coherent propagandist policy suggest that the Orientalist vocabulary was far from monolithic: indeed, class and culture were crucial to the ways in which the East was imagined and understood. This article explores the images and narratives that evolved around the British conquest of Palestine not only to shed new light on the British presence in Jerusalem, but also to demonstrate that any attempt to comprehend the colonial vision must take into account the contradictory interests and alternative visions which characterize the imperial center no less than its dominated provinces.