A Durable Peace (11 page)

The government of Lloyd George had adopted the Balfour Declaration and pursued it at Versailles for two reasons not dissimilar
to those that many Americans have used for supporting Israel today. Lloyd George believed that British support for the Jewish
National Home was morally correct because of the justice of the Jewish cause. But he had also advocated supporting Zionism
for a second reason, no less important: that Zionism was in Britain’s own interest. Lloyd George believed (as had the Kaiser
before him) that the Jews were a power in the world to be reckoned with, and that an alliance with a Jewish nation in Palestine,
situated by the crucial Suez Canal and straddling the land route to India, would be a lasting asset to Britain.
²
He was therefore convinced that strengthening the Jewish people in Palestine would in fact strengthen the British people
and ultimately the Western values of which he believed Britain was the guardian.

The shift to an anti-Zionist Britain over the course of the next few years entailed a dual change in British governmental
opinion. British policymakers came to believe, first, that an alliance with the Arabs, rather than with the Jews, was in Britain’s
interest. Second,
since many Arab leaders rejected Feisal’s diplomacy and opposed the settlement of Jews in Palestine, British officials came
to believe that it would be unjust to override local Arab opinion and support Zionism. Fixed during the interwar period, these
British positions on both interest and justice have retained their vitality well into the second half of the century. Laying
the foundations for a remarkable readiness to accept even the most exaggerated claims of later Arab propaganda as truth, they
have had immense influence in determining Western, and most recently American, policy toward Israel up to our own time. It
is therefore necessary to understand the genesis of these beliefs and to gauge how well the policies based on them actually
served the causes of justice and interest.

Clearly, the rejection of the Jewish National Home was not the policy of either Balfour or Lloyd George. Rather, it came from
the imperial calculations of the officials of the British War Office and Foreign Office, who grabbed much of the Arab world
from the Ottomans during World War I. The idealism of Wilson and Balfour was fine for wartime propaganda, but once Palestine,
Syria, Iraq, and Arabia were actually in British hands, someone had to govern them—and that someone was a small army of rather
clannish Foreign Office “Arabists,” who had spent their lives learning to speak Arabic, moving about places such as Cairo
and Khartoum, and becoming intoxicated with the romance of the “noble” Bedouin. Dreaming of a vast pro-British Arab federation
from the Sudan to Iraq (creating a continuous overland empire from South Africa to India), these men had spent the war fighting
zealously for the “liberation” of the Arabs. They had schemed tirelessly to manufacture Arab “leaders” who could bring the
scattered and chronically divided Arab tribes of the Ottoman Empire into an alliance with Britain—and with one another. Strangely,
these Arabists seem to have been untroubled by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Arabs were fighting and dying for the
Moslem Ottomans and that only the most lavish “subsidies” and the most exorbitant promises of future independent Arab kingdoms
could pry a few
thousand disunited Bedouin raiders away to side with the Western Allies.

To the Arabists, the small, relatively backward Arab population of Palestine was of little interest. But Palestine itself,
as the land bridge between Cairo on the one hand and Damascus and Baghdad on the other, was an indispensable link in their
chain. Restless to win the affections of their new Arab subjects, they were more than eager to co-opt the Arab antagonism
toward Zionism into their policies in Palestine, which they at first believed might be incorporated into a British-dominated
Syria.

As early as the British conquest of Jerusalem on December 11, 1917, one month after the Balfour Declaration, resistance to
Zionism was manifest among the imperial administrators, who saw their job not in terms of serving justice or even keeping
British promises but in winning over the Arabs. Thus, General Sir Edmund Allenby’s chief political officer, Brigadier-General
Gilbert Clayton, worried that the declaration had been a mistake: “We have… to consider whether the situation demands out
and out support for Zionism at the risk of alienating the Arabs at a critical moment.”
³
His argument to the pro-Zionist Sir Mark Sykes foreshadows the argumentation of generations of Arabists:

I must point out that, by pushing [for] them [i.e., the Zionists] as hard as we appear to be doing, we are risking the possibility
of Arab unity becoming something like an accomplished fact and being ranged against us.
⁴

In this Clayton was backed by the high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Reginald Wingate, who warned Allenby that “Mark Sykes is
a bit carried away with ‘the exuberance of his own verbosity’ in regard to Zionism and unless he goes a bit slower he may
quite unintentionally upset the applecart.”
⁵

The new military governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, also
worked to cool British enthusiasm for Zionist plans and declarations. He urged sympathy for the point of view of the local
Arabs and demanded that any changes come about only “gradually,” so as not to leave “an abiding rancour.”
⁶

For his part, General Allenby refused even to allow the publication of the Balfour Declaration in Palestine. Instead, the
military government issued a declaration of its intentions of “encouraging and assisting the establishment of indigenous government
and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia,” which the local Arab notables assumed to apply to them since they understood
Palestine to be part of Syria (and since the British went to the trouble of sending them copies). Jabotinsky summed up the
approach of the administration as being “to apologize to the Arabs for a slip of the tongue by Mr. Balfour.”
⁷

Soon, reports of this resistance to official policy began to alarm the Foreign Office in London, which was still under Lord
Balfour. On August 4, 1918, the British administration in Palestine received a cable explicitly ordering it to consider the
Balfour Declaration to be British policy.
⁸

But to no effect. The British administration’s contempt for the Jewish National Home policy and for the Jews themselves only
grew more open. General Arthur Money, Allenby’s successor as head of the military administration who complained about Lloyd
George’s “hook-nosed friends,”
⁹
ordered that government forms should be printed in English and Arabic only
¹⁰
and refused to stand for the playing of “Hatikva,” the Jewish national anthem.
¹¹
The military governor of Jaffa, Lieutenant-Colonel J. E. Hubbard, organized and funded the first political organizations
among the Arabs with the intention of relying on the opinions of these “representatives” to undermine Zionism.
¹²
Hubbard was reputed to have announced that if the Arabs wished to riot against the Jews, he would not stop them.
¹³
As for allowing Jews to actually come and live in the land, British Intelligence feared the effects of this bold step as
well, and it urged the Foreign Office to deny immigration applications to Jews until the military situation could be
resolved.
¹⁴
Jabotinsky, who had been an ardent advocate of cooperation with the British, was now forced to conclude ruefully that the
British administration had been swept up in “an unprecedented epidemic of anti-Semitism.” He wrote: “Not in Russia, nor in
Poland had there been such an intense and widespread atmosphere of hatred as prevailed in the British army in Palestine in
1919 and 1920.”
¹⁵

But the British establishment continued to boast a handful of genuine Zionists, who waged a tireless (and ultimately futile)
battle to implement the policies of Lloyd George and Balfour. These few believed the exact opposite of what the proponents
of Arab appeasement were advocating. They thought that Britain ultimately could not rely on the Arabs, and that even those
Arabs who were in league with Britain were weak and unstable. They believed that it was in the interest of Britain to help
the Jews build a solid Western base in the heart of the Middle East—which paradoxically would help stabilize the Arab domains
around it.

No one argued this more forcefully than Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the British chief of intelligence in the Middle East
who had used brilliant deception techniques to help drive the Turks out of Palestine in 1917. Although himself a onetime anti-Semite,
Meinertzhagen’s opinion of Jews and Zionism had changed after he started using Jewish and Arab agents in the Middle East.
By the time he was appointed chief political officer in Palestine in 1919, Meinertzhagen had become one of the greatest non-Jewish
Zionists in history, a commitment that eventually culminated in his meeting with Hitler to try to rescue Jews from Germany
and bring them to safety in Palestine. Meinertzhagen was a thoroughly independent-minded British patriot, and his approach
to Zionism was fashioned first and foremost by its coherence with British interests. The remarkable character of this man
is revealed in his first meeting with Hitler. The Fuhrer marched up to Meinertzhagen, extended his arm, and said, “Heil Hitler!”
Not missing a beat, Meinertzhagen responded: “Heil Meinertzhagen!”
¹⁶

As the representative of Balfour’s foreign office in Palestine,
Meinertzhagen found himself “alone out there among gentiles, in upholding Zionism.”
¹⁷
Nevertheless, he argued that support for the Jewish National Home was unassailably in Britain’s interest:

The force of nationalism will challenge our position. We cannot befriend both Arab and Jew. My proposal is based on befriending
the people who are more likely to be loyal friends—the Jews…. Though we have done much for the Arabs, they do not know the
meaning of gratitude; moreover they would be a liability; the Jew would be an asset…. The Jews have moreover proved their
fighting qualities since the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. The Arab is a poor fighter, though an adept at looting, sabotage
and murder…. [Mine] is a proposal to make our position in the Middle East more secure.
¹⁸

Three decades before Israel’s independence, Meinertzhagen was convinced that the alliance with the pro-Western Jews would
ultimately be the only way to defend Britain’s position in the Middle East:

We [will] cease to control the Suez Canal in 1966; by that time we shall have been pushed out of Egypt[,] who can then close
the Canal against our shipping….

I have always regarded Palestine as the key to Middle East Defence. I therefore approached Weizmann last week with a view
to ascertaining whether, when and if Palestine becomes a Jewish Sovereign State, Great Britain would be granted air, naval
and military bases in Palestine in perpetuity. Moreover the Jews can be relied on to keep agreements, the Arabs can never
be relied on.… With British Bases in Palestine our position in the Middle East is secure forever.
¹⁹

The struggle between Meinertzhagen and the British anti-Zionists over the future direction of the Mandate finally boiled over
in March 1920 with the installation of Feisal, the candidate of
the British Arabists, as king of all Syria—including Palestine. The British administration in Palestine, unable to officially
recognize his kingship over Palestine,
²⁰
orchestrated violent demonstrations demanding the end of the Jewish National Home policy and the incorporation of Palestine
into Syria. In coordination with Feisal, Storrs, the governor of Jerusalem, and his chief of staff, Richard Waters-Taylor,
had cultivated a coterie of Pan-Arabist radicals led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, who they believed could be counted on to support
the incorporation of Palestine into a British-controlled Syria under Feisal’s family, the Hashemites. According to Meinertzhagen
(who had been forced to plant agents to monitor the anti-Zionist activities of his own government), Waters-Taylor approached
these Arabs in early 1920 with the idea of organizing “anti-Jew riots to impress on the Administration the unpopularity of
the Zionist policy” Both Storrs and Feisal were informed of this effort.
²¹

Waters-Taylor met with Husseini to emphasize the importance of the riots, as Meinertzhagen later related:

Waters-Taylor saw Haj al Amin on the Wednesday before Easter and told him that he had a great opportunity at Easter to show
the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine; that Zionism was unpopular not only
with the Palestine Administration but with Whitehall; and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at
Easter, both General Bols and General Allenby would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish National Home.
²²

On the day of the rioting Jerusalem was covered with posters reading: “The Government is with us, Allenby is with us, kill
the Jews; there is no punishment for killing Jews.”
²³
Arab inciters shouted, “Long live our King—King Feisal! In the name of our King we urge you to fight the Jews!”
²⁴
Jewish police officers had been taken off duty, and the security forces were nowhere to be found (except for some of the
Arab policemen who took part in
the rioting), as the Arab mob beat, raped, and looted for three days. Most of those whom the British detained were released
again before the violence had ended and simply went back to rioting.
²⁵
Six Jews were killed and 211 wounded. When order was finally “restored,” the British had arrested two Arabs for raping Jewish
women and twenty Jewish men (including Jabotinsky) for having organized a Jewish self-defense unit. Husseini, who had orchestrated
the mayhem, slipped out of the country. At a meeting of Moslem notables immediately following the riots, a leading agitator,
Aref el-Aref, said: “Fortunately, the British Administration is on our side and we shall not be hurt. My advice, then, is
to continue the assault on the Jews.”
²⁶