British camps for deported Jewish immigrants in Cyprus(1946-1949)

The strategic significance of the Near East has long attracted the attention of Great Britain, which recognized it as important for her global interest. Its keystone was Palestine, awarded to Britain under a League of Nations mandate. The territory offered not only a natural hinterland for the British- -controlled Suez Canal, but also a bridge between it and oil-bearing Persian Gulf and more remote possessions of the British Empire. Thus the British intended to maintain the pax brittanica in the region. Given the twin nationalities inhabiting Palestine, Jews and Arabs, the British eventually chose to place their sympathies with the latter, believing that in this way they would be able to maintain their influence in the region. Consequently, they opposed the creation of Eretz Israel and tried to stem the flow of illegal Jewish immigrants. The idea of a Jewish Palestine met with disapproval among Arabs and many other Muslims. When the measures they took failed to produce expected results and the numbers of immigrants kept growing, in August 1946 Britain decided to resort to deporting captured refugees to Cyprus, then a British colony, where they were interned in special high-security camps: Karaolos and Xylotymbou. In their two-and-a-half years of existence, they received 51 thousand Jews. Nor did the British stop this practice after the creation in May 1948 of the state of Israel: draft-aged men were still held in captivity. This was intended to prevent them entering Israeli forces in the war against the Arab coalition. It was a combination of factors at play in London’s political strategies for the Near East (rather than anti-Semitism) that had Britain involved on one side of the Arab-Jewish conflict.