226 A Short History of the Middle East

communities. But it was never part of the British pledge to force
the Arabs to submit to a Jewish majority, still less to accept a
Jewish State.

Had the British Embassy and military authorities in Egypt not
supported the return to power of the Wafd early in 1942, it would
have made trouble throughout Egypt which might seriously have
embarrassed the British at a time when they were fully engaged
with the Axis forces in Libya. The British authorities must have
been aware, as a result of previous experience, that the advent of
the Wafd government would mean a decline in administrative
efficiency and, in condition of wartime scarcity, an increase in cor-
rupt practices even beyond the Egyptian norm. But the supreme
necessity of prosecuting the war presumably made these dis-
advantages appear a lesser evil than the alternative of nation-wide
anti-British agitation organized by the Wafd; and the British
authorities probably did not appreciate the extent to which the
ageing Nahhas in indifferent health was becoming the tool of his
enterprising wife and her family and friends. After Makram
Ubaid's breach with Nahhas, the keen-witted and spiteful Copt
devoted himself to the compilation and eventual publication in a
1'Black Book* of charges of corruption against those near to
Nahhas.
King Faruq was naturally anxious to avenge his humiliation of
4 February by ridding himself at the first opportunity of the
contumacious Nahhas, and the Black Book charges provided him
with admirable justification for such an act. The first royal attempt
to dismiss the government was prevented by the British Embassy
in the spring of 1943, shortly before the final expulsion of the Axis
from North Africa. In the following year the failure of the Wafd
to deal adequately with the severe and acute malaria epidemic of
Upper Egypt, which was aggravated by a wartime decline in
nutrition below even the miserable peace-time standards and
caused the deaths of scores of thousands of wretched villagers, and
the growing volume of rumour about the prevalance and scale of
corrupt practices very near to the Prime Minister himself, greatly
impaired the prestige of the Wafd, even among its customary
supporters. The recession of the war from the Middle East made