I must restate that my objective in writing this article was to refute the contention made by certain pro-Israeli (or more accurately anti-Palestinian) authors that the concept of a Palestinian national identity was a Soviet creation through the foundation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964 and that therefore Palestinians are “Fakestinians”.
The same body of opinion seeks to collapse the Palestinian movement into a global Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy. To this end, I traced out the development of a Palestinian national identity through all the convulsions that affected the territory of Palestine from the late 19th century; the first of the successive waves of Zionist Jewish Aliyah; the defeat of the Ottoman Empire; the British Mandate period including the Balfour Declaration; the uprising from 1936-39 against the British authorities; the Second World War and the events leading up to the declaration of Israeli independence, Arab-Israeli war and subsequent Nakba; the formation of the PLO and, finally, the Six Day War in 1967 and the Israeli seizure of what are now commonly referred to as “The Occupied Territories”.
It was not my intention to give detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of these momentous events. It was to map out the contours of the evolution of Palestinian identity and to legitimise it in the face of those who seek to cancel it and deny the connection of Palestinian Arabs to historic Palestine. A similar desire to refute the cancellation of Jewish links to Palestine motivated my deconstruction of the Khazar hypothesis in another TPQ article.
I cannot understand how any reader could fail to see what I was trying to convey and especially my condemnations of anti-Palestinian authors such as Melanie Phillips and David Collier. When I described the uneven and contingent development of Palestinian national identity and how the influence of clans acted as obstacles to the emergence of a coherent and unified Palestinian movement (in contrast to the unity of purpose of the Zionist Yishuv which had assumed parastatal form by the late 1930s), I was merely reflecting the views of scholars such as Rashid Khalidi who writes very trenchantly about how Palestinians were riven by disunity in his The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.[1] I was not pathologising any supposed backwardness in the Palestinian national character as Cam appears to make out, much less making it out in the words of Khalididi to be ‘no more than recent expressions of an unreasoning (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination.’[2] As he points out, Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, of which the growth of Zionism was one. As newspapers like Filastin and al-Karmil show, this identity included love of country, a desire to improve society, religious attachment to Palestine and opposition to European control.
It was not my intention to give detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of these momentous events. It was to map out the contours of the evolution of Palestinian identity and to legitimise it in the face of those who seek to cancel it and deny the connection of Palestinian Arabs to historic Palestine. A similar desire to refute the cancellation of Jewish links to Palestine motivated my deconstruction of the Khazar hypothesis in another TPQ article.
I cannot understand how any reader could fail to see what I was trying to convey and especially my condemnations of anti-Palestinian authors such as Melanie Phillips and David Collier. When I described the uneven and contingent development of Palestinian national identity and how the influence of clans acted as obstacles to the emergence of a coherent and unified Palestinian movement (in contrast to the unity of purpose of the Zionist Yishuv which had assumed parastatal form by the late 1930s), I was merely reflecting the views of scholars such as Rashid Khalidi who writes very trenchantly about how Palestinians were riven by disunity in his The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.[1] I was not pathologising any supposed backwardness in the Palestinian national character as Cam appears to make out, much less making it out in the words of Khalididi to be ‘no more than recent expressions of an unreasoning (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination.’[2] As he points out, Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, of which the growth of Zionism was one. As newspapers like Filastin and al-Karmil show, this identity included love of country, a desire to improve society, religious attachment to Palestine and opposition to European control.
After the war, the focus on Palestine as a central locus of identity drew strength from widespread frustration at the blocking of Arab aspirations throughout the Middle East by European colonial powers. Just like Zionism (and other European origin nationalisms), Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, a product of late 19th and 20th century circumstances, not eternal and immutable.[3]
Having reiterated the purpose of my original article, I now modify my self-denying ordinance about going into detail about the events of 1948 and their antecedents by answering in greater depth Cam’s criticisms.
Nazi Collaboration: Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
Not only did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meet with Hitler and assist in the rebroadcasting of Nazi antisemitic propaganda throughout the Middle East, he also helped in the recruitment of an SS Bosnian Muslim brigade to fight on the Eastern Front – something which some apologists for the Bosnian Serb nationalist genocide of the Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims) in the 1992-95 conflict would throw back in their faces.
Matthias Kuntzel in Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of the concerted drive by Nazi Germany in the region between 1937 and 1945. Among the several channels through which they exerted influence was that of Amin El-Husseini, the afore mentioned Grand Mufti of Jerusalem whose pamphlet, Judaism and Islam first published in 1937, was distributed in large numbers by the Nazis. For Kuntzel, this was a foundational text of Islamic antisemitism, the first to link the Jew hatred of classical Islamic texts with the conspiratorial and racially charged antisemitism that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century.[4]
Kuntzel also points to the possible intermediary role of El-Hussaini between the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. In 1938-39, the focus of the collaboration between the two sides was Palestine and El-Hussaini, while not a member of the Brotherhood, had close links to it. In 1945 the Brotherhood, by then a mass movement, pushed the Arab rulers towards war with Israel.[5]
The Nazi antisemitic broadcasts addressed the audience as Muslims, rather than as Arabs, with each news report starting with a recitation of verses from the Koran. The Nazis’ focus on radio was particularly apposite as the Arab population was largely illiterate at the time, so radio was the main means of mass communication[6].
Even in the midst of their impending defeat in the Second World War, the Nazis were still providing support for a forthcoming war against the future state of Israel including an attempt to provide a large store of light arms for Muslims to use to fight the nascent Jewish state.[7]
Kuntzel’s work is a welcome contribution to study of the area of Islamic antisemitism, but he arguably focuses too much on the period 1937-45. For earlier, Christian missionaries had already begun to export traditional European myths and prejudices about Jews into the region; for example, the blood libel – that Jews drank the blood of non-Jewish children to bake Matzo bread for the Passover feast. The first Arabic edition of the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was published in Palestine in 1918. His case is that the Nazi influence helped to fuse traditional Islamic Jew hatred with racialised antisemitism imported from Europe. This merged perspective does not differentiate between opposition to Zionism as a political movement and calling for the extermination of world Jewry. This is despite the fact that there is nothing in the Koran about wiling out the entire Jewish people.[8]
It must be emphasised that while accounts of the fusion of traditional European and Islamist antisemitism may hold true about Hamas (itself a franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood), it does not hold true for secular Palestinian movements such as PLO/Fatah. Slogans such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” or “Globalise the Intifada” while anxiety generating for supporters of Israel and which, especially the latter, carry considerable ambiguity do not equate to calls for a latter-day Final Solution.
The LHI (Stern Gang)
The LHI (Lohamei Herut Yisraeli or Freedom Fighters of Israel) or “the Stern Gang” as they were dubbed by the British was a breakaway organisation of Jewish fighters who formed in 1939-1941 who continued to view the British not the Germans as the main enemies of the Jewish people because, through the White Paper of 1939, they were preventing Jews from escaping Europe, reaching Palestine and attaining independence.
Led initially by Avraham (“Yair” Stern), LHI tried to establish an “alliance” with Nazi Germany for the “common” struggle against Britain at the end of 1940. Berlin rebuffed an offer of “military, political and intelligence” cooperation made by operative Naftali Lubinczik to Otto Werner von Hentig, a German Foreign Ministry official and intelligence officer. On his return from Berlin, the British authorities in Palestine arrested Lubinczik. At the end of 1941, Stern tried again by sending one of his deputies, Natan Friedman-Yelin, to make contact with German officials in Turkey, with instructions to propose that Germany allow out hundreds of thousands of Balkan Jews. What he was to offer the Nazis in return is unclear. In any event, he never made his destination as Allied police picked him up in Aleppo.[9]
This attempt at collaboration with the Nazis by a fringe Jewish militant group had thus less than an infinitesimal impact compared with the efforts of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
The Haavara Transfer Agreement
The Haavara agreement was the only formal contract between the Nazis and a Zionist organisation. The signatories were the Reich Ministry of Economics, the Zionist Federation of Germany, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (then under the direction of the Jewish Agency of Palestine). Under it, Jewish emigrants had to hand over their possessions before they left Germany and the proceeds were used by a company set up for this purpose in Tel Aviv to purchase goods for sale in Palestine. The proceeds were then paid in Palestinian currency to emigrants in Palestine.[10]
It was controversial at the time as other Jewish organisations saw it as breaking the boycott of Nazi goods. At the time of the initial explosion of the antisemitism controversies in the British Labour Party, it was cited by Ken Livingstone, former London Mayor, and eminence grise of the Labour Left, as evidence that Hitler supported Zionism. He cited in support of this claim a book by obscure Trotskyite historian Lenni Brenner Zionism in The Age of The Dictators published in 1983. Livingstone continued to double down on his claims setting in train a process that would lead to his expulsion from Labour for antisemitism.
Holocaust historian Rainer Schulze in refuting Livingstone’s argument puts the Haavara agreement as part of the continuum of forced Nazi relocation of Jews including the expulsion of Polish and stateless Jews from Germany in October 1938 and the planned evacuation of German Jews to Madagascar which was abandoned due to the outbreak of the Second World War. It was part of an uneven but steady and sustained implementation of anti-Jewish policies including the Nuremberg Race Laws and the removal of Jews from Germany’s civic, economic, social, commercial, and cultural life. The only constant was that “the Jewish question” has to be “solved once and for all. For the Zionist Federation, Haavara was a way to save Jews from the claws of an ominously oppressive regime and to attract them to migrate to Palestine. For the Nazis, it was a means of attaining international legitimacy.[11] It was a coming together of temporary self-interests not collusion between kindred ideologies.
For as Schulze argues, no matter justifiably critical one can be of the working out of Zionist policies in practice, Zionism was originally a movement rooted in the right to self-determination. As proved by the establishment of the General Government in Central Poland in October 1939 to which Jews from all over Nazi occupied Europe would be deported (apart from those who would die in the “Holocaust by bullets” in the lands of the former USSR between in the latter half of 1941) as a prelude to ghettoisation and eventually the Final Solution, the Nazis were not the slightest bit concerned about the conditions in the territories in which they wanted to concentrate Jews.[12]
So, the historiography around the Haavara Agreement is thoroughly flawed and no serious Palestinian scholar or advocate has or would use it.
Plan D or Tochnit Dalit
Plan D or Tochnit Dalit was a call for securing the emerging State of Israel’s territory and borders and the lines of communication between the Jewish centres of population and the border areas. It is alleged by Ilan Pappe and others that it was a master plan by Hagenah (later the IDF) for the expulsion of the future country’s Arabs. Benny Morris states that the plan was unclear about whether the Hagenah was to conquer and secure the roads between the Jewish state’s territory and the blocs of Jewish settlement outside that territory. The Haganah’s “operational goals” would be to defend [the state] against … invasion,” assure “free Jewish movement ,” deny the enemy forward bases, apply economic pressure to end enemy actions, limit the enemy’s ability to wage guerilla war, and gain control of former Mandate government installations and services in the new state’s territory.[13]
Morris acknowledges that the plan permitted brigades to conquer the Arab villages and effectively to decide on each village’s fate – destruction and expulsion or occupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. In the main towns, the brigades were tasked with evicting the inhabitants of resisting neighbourhoods to the core Arab neighbourhoods. The plan stated:
Having reiterated the purpose of my original article, I now modify my self-denying ordinance about going into detail about the events of 1948 and their antecedents by answering in greater depth Cam’s criticisms.
Nazi Collaboration: Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
Not only did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meet with Hitler and assist in the rebroadcasting of Nazi antisemitic propaganda throughout the Middle East, he also helped in the recruitment of an SS Bosnian Muslim brigade to fight on the Eastern Front – something which some apologists for the Bosnian Serb nationalist genocide of the Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims) in the 1992-95 conflict would throw back in their faces.
Matthias Kuntzel in Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of the concerted drive by Nazi Germany in the region between 1937 and 1945. Among the several channels through which they exerted influence was that of Amin El-Husseini, the afore mentioned Grand Mufti of Jerusalem whose pamphlet, Judaism and Islam first published in 1937, was distributed in large numbers by the Nazis. For Kuntzel, this was a foundational text of Islamic antisemitism, the first to link the Jew hatred of classical Islamic texts with the conspiratorial and racially charged antisemitism that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century.[4]
Kuntzel also points to the possible intermediary role of El-Hussaini between the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. In 1938-39, the focus of the collaboration between the two sides was Palestine and El-Hussaini, while not a member of the Brotherhood, had close links to it. In 1945 the Brotherhood, by then a mass movement, pushed the Arab rulers towards war with Israel.[5]
The Nazi antisemitic broadcasts addressed the audience as Muslims, rather than as Arabs, with each news report starting with a recitation of verses from the Koran. The Nazis’ focus on radio was particularly apposite as the Arab population was largely illiterate at the time, so radio was the main means of mass communication[6].
Even in the midst of their impending defeat in the Second World War, the Nazis were still providing support for a forthcoming war against the future state of Israel including an attempt to provide a large store of light arms for Muslims to use to fight the nascent Jewish state.[7]
Kuntzel’s work is a welcome contribution to study of the area of Islamic antisemitism, but he arguably focuses too much on the period 1937-45. For earlier, Christian missionaries had already begun to export traditional European myths and prejudices about Jews into the region; for example, the blood libel – that Jews drank the blood of non-Jewish children to bake Matzo bread for the Passover feast. The first Arabic edition of the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was published in Palestine in 1918. His case is that the Nazi influence helped to fuse traditional Islamic Jew hatred with racialised antisemitism imported from Europe. This merged perspective does not differentiate between opposition to Zionism as a political movement and calling for the extermination of world Jewry. This is despite the fact that there is nothing in the Koran about wiling out the entire Jewish people.[8]
It must be emphasised that while accounts of the fusion of traditional European and Islamist antisemitism may hold true about Hamas (itself a franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood), it does not hold true for secular Palestinian movements such as PLO/Fatah. Slogans such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” or “Globalise the Intifada” while anxiety generating for supporters of Israel and which, especially the latter, carry considerable ambiguity do not equate to calls for a latter-day Final Solution.
The LHI (Stern Gang)
The LHI (Lohamei Herut Yisraeli or Freedom Fighters of Israel) or “the Stern Gang” as they were dubbed by the British was a breakaway organisation of Jewish fighters who formed in 1939-1941 who continued to view the British not the Germans as the main enemies of the Jewish people because, through the White Paper of 1939, they were preventing Jews from escaping Europe, reaching Palestine and attaining independence.
Led initially by Avraham (“Yair” Stern), LHI tried to establish an “alliance” with Nazi Germany for the “common” struggle against Britain at the end of 1940. Berlin rebuffed an offer of “military, political and intelligence” cooperation made by operative Naftali Lubinczik to Otto Werner von Hentig, a German Foreign Ministry official and intelligence officer. On his return from Berlin, the British authorities in Palestine arrested Lubinczik. At the end of 1941, Stern tried again by sending one of his deputies, Natan Friedman-Yelin, to make contact with German officials in Turkey, with instructions to propose that Germany allow out hundreds of thousands of Balkan Jews. What he was to offer the Nazis in return is unclear. In any event, he never made his destination as Allied police picked him up in Aleppo.[9]
This attempt at collaboration with the Nazis by a fringe Jewish militant group had thus less than an infinitesimal impact compared with the efforts of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
The Haavara Transfer Agreement
The Haavara agreement was the only formal contract between the Nazis and a Zionist organisation. The signatories were the Reich Ministry of Economics, the Zionist Federation of Germany, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (then under the direction of the Jewish Agency of Palestine). Under it, Jewish emigrants had to hand over their possessions before they left Germany and the proceeds were used by a company set up for this purpose in Tel Aviv to purchase goods for sale in Palestine. The proceeds were then paid in Palestinian currency to emigrants in Palestine.[10]
It was controversial at the time as other Jewish organisations saw it as breaking the boycott of Nazi goods. At the time of the initial explosion of the antisemitism controversies in the British Labour Party, it was cited by Ken Livingstone, former London Mayor, and eminence grise of the Labour Left, as evidence that Hitler supported Zionism. He cited in support of this claim a book by obscure Trotskyite historian Lenni Brenner Zionism in The Age of The Dictators published in 1983. Livingstone continued to double down on his claims setting in train a process that would lead to his expulsion from Labour for antisemitism.
Holocaust historian Rainer Schulze in refuting Livingstone’s argument puts the Haavara agreement as part of the continuum of forced Nazi relocation of Jews including the expulsion of Polish and stateless Jews from Germany in October 1938 and the planned evacuation of German Jews to Madagascar which was abandoned due to the outbreak of the Second World War. It was part of an uneven but steady and sustained implementation of anti-Jewish policies including the Nuremberg Race Laws and the removal of Jews from Germany’s civic, economic, social, commercial, and cultural life. The only constant was that “the Jewish question” has to be “solved once and for all. For the Zionist Federation, Haavara was a way to save Jews from the claws of an ominously oppressive regime and to attract them to migrate to Palestine. For the Nazis, it was a means of attaining international legitimacy.[11] It was a coming together of temporary self-interests not collusion between kindred ideologies.
For as Schulze argues, no matter justifiably critical one can be of the working out of Zionist policies in practice, Zionism was originally a movement rooted in the right to self-determination. As proved by the establishment of the General Government in Central Poland in October 1939 to which Jews from all over Nazi occupied Europe would be deported (apart from those who would die in the “Holocaust by bullets” in the lands of the former USSR between in the latter half of 1941) as a prelude to ghettoisation and eventually the Final Solution, the Nazis were not the slightest bit concerned about the conditions in the territories in which they wanted to concentrate Jews.[12]
So, the historiography around the Haavara Agreement is thoroughly flawed and no serious Palestinian scholar or advocate has or would use it.
Plan D or Tochnit Dalit
Plan D or Tochnit Dalit was a call for securing the emerging State of Israel’s territory and borders and the lines of communication between the Jewish centres of population and the border areas. It is alleged by Ilan Pappe and others that it was a master plan by Hagenah (later the IDF) for the expulsion of the future country’s Arabs. Benny Morris states that the plan was unclear about whether the Hagenah was to conquer and secure the roads between the Jewish state’s territory and the blocs of Jewish settlement outside that territory. The Haganah’s “operational goals” would be to defend [the state] against … invasion,” assure “free Jewish movement ,” deny the enemy forward bases, apply economic pressure to end enemy actions, limit the enemy’s ability to wage guerilla war, and gain control of former Mandate government installations and services in the new state’s territory.[13]
Morris acknowledges that the plan permitted brigades to conquer the Arab villages and effectively to decide on each village’s fate – destruction and expulsion or occupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. In the main towns, the brigades were tasked with evicting the inhabitants of resisting neighbourhoods to the core Arab neighbourhoods. The plan stated:
[The villages] in your area, which have to be taken, cleansed or destroyed - you decide [on their fate], in consultation with your Arab affairs advisers and HIS officers.
Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel “the Arab inhabitants” of Palestine or of any of its constituent regions; nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out “the Arabs.”[14]
The trauma and grief experienced by those Arab villagers forced out of their abodes as a result of Plan D operations must never be ignored. But their experiences were not unique. Almost as many Jews (700,000) as Palestinians displaced in the Nakba were expelled from neighbouring Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Up to 200,000 people experienced population transfer in both directions after the Treaty of Smyrna in 1922 between Greece and Turkey. Twelve million ethnic Germans were expelled from nations in East and Central Europe after the end of the Second World War. Refugee stories are always harrowing. Thankfully, the forced relocation or expulsion of ethnic or population groups (as in Israel’s ghastly “humanitarian camp” proposals for the Palestinians of Gaza) are now war crimes under international law.
Finally, Cam Ogie rightfully cites Caroline Elkins’ accounts of the brutal suppression by the British Mandate authorities of the Arab Uprising of 1936-39 following standard operating procedure deployed throughout the Empire. What he neglects to mention is that Elkins also relates how Britain used much the same methods of counter-insurgency, suspension of the rule of law, brutal repression by the Palestine Police and other human rights violations to deal with armed Zionist resistance (the legendary IRA leader Michael Collins was a role model for some of them). Furthermore, British interests were now focused on building good relationships with Arab countries like Saudi Arabia in order to ensure access to cheap oil. Acquiescence in the creation of a Jewish state would have been an obstacle to such objectives. [15] Sponsorship of Zionist goals had now shifted to the USA and, to a lesser extent, the USSR both of whom voted for the UN General Assembly partition motion which brought the State of Israel into being.
I conclude this article by proposing that the UN Security Council or, ideally, the General Assembly activate its Responsibility to Protect (RTP) policy by assembling a military force to ensure that full food and humanitarian aid reaches everyone in Gaza.
The trauma and grief experienced by those Arab villagers forced out of their abodes as a result of Plan D operations must never be ignored. But their experiences were not unique. Almost as many Jews (700,000) as Palestinians displaced in the Nakba were expelled from neighbouring Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Up to 200,000 people experienced population transfer in both directions after the Treaty of Smyrna in 1922 between Greece and Turkey. Twelve million ethnic Germans were expelled from nations in East and Central Europe after the end of the Second World War. Refugee stories are always harrowing. Thankfully, the forced relocation or expulsion of ethnic or population groups (as in Israel’s ghastly “humanitarian camp” proposals for the Palestinians of Gaza) are now war crimes under international law.
Finally, Cam Ogie rightfully cites Caroline Elkins’ accounts of the brutal suppression by the British Mandate authorities of the Arab Uprising of 1936-39 following standard operating procedure deployed throughout the Empire. What he neglects to mention is that Elkins also relates how Britain used much the same methods of counter-insurgency, suspension of the rule of law, brutal repression by the Palestine Police and other human rights violations to deal with armed Zionist resistance (the legendary IRA leader Michael Collins was a role model for some of them). Furthermore, British interests were now focused on building good relationships with Arab countries like Saudi Arabia in order to ensure access to cheap oil. Acquiescence in the creation of a Jewish state would have been an obstacle to such objectives. [15] Sponsorship of Zionist goals had now shifted to the USA and, to a lesser extent, the USSR both of whom voted for the UN General Assembly partition motion which brought the State of Israel into being.
I conclude this article by proposing that the UN Security Council or, ideally, the General Assembly activate its Responsibility to Protect (RTP) policy by assembling a military force to ensure that full food and humanitarian aid reaches everyone in Gaza.
References
[1] Rashid Khalidi (2024) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. A History of Settler Colonial Conquest. London: Profile.
[1] Rashid Khalidi (2024) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. A History of Settler Colonial Conquest. London: Profile.
[2] Ibid, p.30
[3] Ibid pp.30-31
[4] Daniel Ben-Ami Book Review: Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism, and the Middle East. Fathom Journal. February 2024.
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Benny Morris (2008) 1948. The First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press p.29
[10] Rainer Schulze. 'Hitler and Zionism: Why the Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were Zionists.' The Independent 3 May 2016
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid.
[13] Morris p.120
[14] Ibid, pp.120-21
[15] Caroline Elkins (2022) Legacy of Violence. A History of the British Empire. London: Vintage pp.436-58
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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