The Purpose of the British Mandate for Palestine

Britain was ultimately concerned with just three principals: control of the oil fields of northern Iraq, control of the Suez Canal and control of the oil pipelines, which fuelled the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean (from Basra) and the Mediterranean (from Haifa). Indeed, the whole project of planting a Jewish emigrant population in Palestine can be seen to be no more than a project to help guard both the oil pipelines and the Suez Canal.

Source 

That's a review of this book, A Line In The Sand, by James Barr,

which claims this:

Elements within the British Foreign Office then tried to bury the shame of being hated by both sides in Palestine by secretly promoting the cause of a "Greater Arab Syria" – even if it meant betraying its wartime ally France. British generals enforced free elections in both French-ruled Lebanon and Syria (ultimately at gunpoint) to produce independent nationalist regimes while at the same time refusing to hold free elections in any of their own mandates. No wonder French administrators tried to find a word more expressive than "perfidious" to describe their neighbour.  By way of revenge, and to help establish a new friend in the region, Barr provides incontrovertible evidence that France directly supported Jewish terrorist organisations, such as the Stern gang, in their struggle against Britain in the years after 1945. Indeed, he hints that it seems possible that Colonel Alessandri of the Bureau Noir may have been implicated in the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo [in 1944?]...

I mentioned the book in November, and also dealt with his charge that Gt. Britain was willing to sink the Jewish National Home idea here.

Is there a lesson in this apropos Obama's American foreign policy?

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The "line":-

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