PARIS 1919 (75 page)

Even in 1919, the British in Palestine were finding themselves caught between Zionists and Arabs. The Zionists complained, with some truth, that the military authorities were at best insensitive, at worst anti-Semitic. Jabotinsky, from the Jewish Legion, said that the British could deal with the Arabs, “just the same old ‘natives' whom the Englishman has ruled and led for centuries, nothing new, no problems.” The Zionists were a different matter: “a problem from top to toe, a problem bristling with difficulties in every way—small in numbers, yet somehow strong and influential, ignorant of English, yet imbued with European culture, claiming complicated claims.”
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(Jabotinsky's own contribution to the problems was to organize an underground army.)

The British, of course, had created their own dilemma by making promises during the war that they could not now fulfill. On the one hand they had supported a Jewish homeland on land largely inhabited by Arabs, and on the other they had encouraged the Arabs to revolt against their Ottoman rulers with the promise of Arab independence. When the Arabs pointed out that Palestine had not been exempted from the land to come under Arab rule, the British accused them of ingratitude. “I hope,” noted Balfour, “remembering all that, they will not begrudge that small notch, for it is no more geographically, whatever it may be historically—that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it.”
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The Arabs did begrudge it, particularly the Palestinian Arabs. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the arrival of the Zionist commission in 1918, the waving of the blue and white Zionist flag throughout Palestine, the tactless demand of a Zionist conference in Jaffa that the name of the area immediately be changed to Eretz Israel (“the Land of Israel”), all worried them exceedingly. Curzon had warned about this: “If we were supposed to have identified ourselves with the Jews, and the whole Arab force backed by Feisal on the other side were thrown into the scale against us, that would produce complications.”
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Complications there were to be.

In an attempt to avoid the consequences of their own actions, the British encouraged the Zionists and Arab nationalists to come to terms. When Weizmann visited Palestine in 1918, the Foreign Office urged him to remember that “it is most important that everything should be done to . . . allay Arab suspicions regarding the true aims of Zionism.” When Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, gave a dinner party for the Zionist visitors and local notables, Weizmann made a gracious speech: “There was room for both to work side by side; let his hearers beware of treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power—rather let both progress together until they were ready for joint autonomy.” That summer, Weizmann and Feisal met in Feisal's camp near the Gulf of Aqaba. The meeting was amiable, even friendly, and Weizmann put on Arab headdress for a photograph of the two of them. Both agreed that they did not trust the French. Feisal appeared well disposed toward a Zionist presence in Palestine but warned that he had to be careful of Arab opinion. He could not, in any case, make a definite commitment without consulting his father. Weizmann left with the impression that Feisal did not place much value on Palestine: “He is contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn't even regard as Arabs!”
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Later in the year, after the war had ended, they met again, this time in London. Again all went well. Weizmann assured Feisal that the Zionists could use their influence to get American support for the Arabs, and Feisal in return indicated that he did not foresee any trouble over Palestine. “It was curious there should be any friction between Jews and Arabs,” he told Weizmann. After all, there was plenty of land to go around. On January 3, 1919, the two signed their agreement full of expressions of goodwill and hope for the future: Jewish immigration to Palestine would be encouraged, while the Zionists would lend their assistance to developing the independent Arab state which presumably was about to be set up by the Peace Conference. Feisal scrawled a brief proviso to the effect that his consent depended on the British carrying out their promises to the Arabs. The agreement, always improbable, vanished into the widening gulf between Feisal and the British and between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.
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The fate of Palestine rested, as it had done for centuries, with outside powers and in 1919 that meant mainly Britain and France. Italy tried to smuggle in some Italian priests disguised as soldiers during the military occupation to further its halfhearted claims to protect Christians in the Holy Land. The main Italian concern, however, was to ensure that France did not get anything that Italy did not.

The United States, in contrast to what happened after the Second World War, played a minor role. The American government had quietly approved the Balfour Declaration and Wilson himself was sympathetic to Zionism. “To think,” he told a leading New York rabbi, “that I the son of the manse should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” It would do the Jews good, he thought, to enjoy their own nationality. He even contemplated, although only briefly, an American mandate for Palestine. But then there was the sacred tenet of self-determination. Why should the wishes of a minority of Jews prevail over those of a much larger number of Arabs? Balfour and Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice and the leading American Zionist, came up with an ingenious solution. It was wrong to use mere “numerical self-determination”: a great many potential inhabitants of the Jewish home in Palestine still lived outside its borders. “And Zionism,” said Balfour, “be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” In any case, he pointed out, reverting to the language of the old diplomacy, the Great Powers were behind Zionism. Wilson nevertheless insisted that his Commission of Inquiry into the Middle East include Palestine. The two American commissioners, Charles Crane and Henry King, the businessman and the professor, reported back at the end of the summer of 1919 that the Arabs in Palestine were “emphatically against the entire Zionist program” and recommended that the Peace Conference limit Jewish immigration and give up the idea of making Palestine a Jewish homeland. Nobody paid the slightest attention.
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Where Palestine was concerned, the main issue by this point was its future borders. Lloyd George's airy talk of a land stretching from Dan to Beersheba worried the French, who saw it as enlarging Palestine in the north at the expense of Syria. Did Dan include the Litani River and the upper reaches of the Jordan? Water was always an important consideration in the Middle East. The Zionists pushed for the most generous border. “It is absolutely essential,” Weizmann argued, “for the economic development of Palestine that this line be drawn so as to include the territories east of the Jordan which are capable of receiving and maintaining large Jewish mass settlements.” His borders would have included part of today's Jordan. The British government supported him for its own ends: to limit French influence and to protect railway routes (even though the railways did not yet exist) between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. The Quai d'Orsay protested: Palestine would stretch right up to the suburbs of Damascus.
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Clemenceau refused to concede any more to the Zionists or, as he saw it, to Britain. The border between Syria and Palestine remained substantially where it had been set by the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French conceded only that Palestine could use surplus water from Syria; this has caused trouble down to the present day.

In April 1920, at San Remo, Britain and France set the final terms of their agreements on the Middle East. Britain got the Palestine mandate. (Its terms included carrying out the Balfour Declaration.) The French made one last attempt to keep their old rights to protect Christians. With an alacrity that suggests a previous deal with the British, the Italians said that, with the disappearance of the Ottoman empire and a “civilized nation” taking over in Palestine, it was no longer necessary to have special arrangements. At the end of the conference Lloyd George said to Weizmann, who had rushed over from Palestine: “Now you have got your start, it all depends on you.”
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The Palestinian Arabs were not represented in San Remo but they had made their feelings clear in the riots against Jews that had broken out in Palestine two weeks earlier.

All that remained was to draw up the details of the mandate and get it ratified by the League of Nations. This took another two years, mainly because it proved impossible to sign a treaty with Ottoman Turkey. The British simply carried on as though Palestine were officially theirs. Mindful of its promises to the Arabs, the British government, at the urging of Churchill, now colonial secretary, divided the mandate in two, with Palestine confined to the area west of the Jordan and a new little Arab state of Transjordan under the rule of Feisal's brother Abdullah. Weizmann was disappointed. He had stressed to Churchill that the lands east of the Jordan had always been “an integral and vital part of Palestine.” The soil was rich, the climate “invigorating,” and there was plenty of water. “Jewish settlement,” he concluded optimistically, “could proceed on a large scale without friction with the local population.”
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The Zionists, however, were not prepared to antagonize the British over the issue. It was much more important to ensure that the terms of the mandate were written in their favor.

This was not easy. Among the British, the realization was dawning that a Jewish homeland in Palestine meant trouble for Britain. Curzon spoke for many in the Foreign Office when he told Balfour, “Personally, I am so convinced that Palestine will be a rankling thorn in the flesh of whoever is charged with its Mandate, that I would withdraw from this responsibility while we yet can.” Zionism had produced what had not previously existed, an organized Palestinian Arab opinion, which learned rapidly to use letters of protest, petitions and the language of self-determination. On the streets of Jerusalem mobs took more direct action; from 1920 on the British authorities had to deal with sporadic outbreaks of violence there and elsewhere against Jews. Churchill was usually sympathetic to Zionism, but he warned Lloyd George: “Palestine is costing us 6 millions a year to hold. The Zionist movement will cause continued friction with the Arabs. The French ensconced in Syria with
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divisions
(paid for by not paying us what they owe us) are opposed to the Zionist movement & will try to cushion the Arabs off on to us as the real enemy.”
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The British grasped at one expedient after another. Perhaps the Arabs and the Zionists might still come to an understanding. In the summer of 1921 a delegation of Palestinian Arabs traveled to London. Churchill listened with a certain amount of impatience to their rambling complaints about the Zionists. (He dodged the awkward question posed by their leader, “What is this promise that you made and what does it mean?”) “Have a good talk with Dr. Weizmann,” he advised the Arabs. “Try to arrange something with him for the next few years.” Neither side was prepared to talk seriously to the other. “Political blackmailers” and “trash” was Weizmann's view.
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The Arabs simply repeated that they refused to recognize the Balfour Declaration and anything done in its name.

At this point the British toned down the language of the mandate to imply that the Jewish national home would merely be in Palestine rather than occupying the whole. In place of the duty of the mandatory power to develop a self-governing commonwealth, they substituted “self-governing institutions.” Weizmann, traveling endlessly, firing off telegrams and letters, calling on all his extensive contacts, struggled to prevent the British government from making the terms even weaker. He wrote in despair to Albert Einstein: “All the shady characters of the world are at work, against us. Rich servile Jews, dark fanatic Jewish obscurantists, in combination with the Vatican, with Arab assassins, English imperialist anti-Semitic reactionaries—in short, all the dogs are howling.” He was not as alone as he felt. Support kept coming, often from unexpected quarters such as German Zionists, Anglican clergy or Italian Catholics. The United States Congress roused itself from its introspective, isolationist mood to pass resolutions in favor of the Jewish national home. And Weizmann's chief British allies remained firm. In a private meeting at Balfour's house on July 22, 1921, Lloyd George and Balfour assured him that “they had always meant an eventual Jewish state.” When the awkward issue of Zionist gunrunning into Palestine came up, Churchill winked: “We won't mind it, but don't speak of it.” All present agreed that the Palestinian Arab delegation was a nuisance. Why not bribe them, Lloyd George suggested cheerfully? The prime minister was full of helpful ideas. “You ought,” he told Balfour, “to make a big speech again in the Albert Hall on Zionism.”
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In July 1922 the League of Nations approved the Palestine mandate brought before it by the British government. In Palestine, an Arab congress rejected the mandate completely. Weizmann was elated: the mandate gave official recognition to the Jews as a people. This was, however, only the end of the first chapter of the Jewish struggle; “if only we go on working and working in Palestine, the time will come when there will be another opportunity of giving the Mandate its true value.”
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That opportunity was to come in a terrible and unexpected fashion with the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

Balfour visited Palestine for the first time in 1925, with Weizmann and his wife. In Jerusalem, he opened the new Hebrew University with a stirring speech in which he talked proudly of his own share in the establishment of a Jewish home. He was touched by the reception he received throughout Palestine from Jews but failed to notice the Arabs in mourning and the shops closed in protest. His private secretary destroyed the hundreds of angry telegrams he received from Arabs before he could see them. When he and his party moved on to Syria to do some sightseeing, the French authorities mounted a guard around him, much to his annoyance. In Damascus, his hotel was surrounded by an excited crowd of 6,000 Arabs. As the paving stones started to fly and the French cavalry fired back, Balfour watched bemused. A young Arab attached to his party tried to explain why there was such opposition to Zionism. Balfour merely replied that he found the results of his experiment “extraordinarily interesting.” He sailed back to Europe on the Sphinx.
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