The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (66 page)

To such objections, the British always replied that the Balfour Declaration specifically protected the rights of non-Jews in Palestine. But in 1917 Arabs outnumbered Jews there by six or seven to one. A promise to protect the vast majority from a tiny minority seemed upside down to them. And British officials sometimes grew impatient with expressions of Arab unease. When he learned of the Syrian telegram to Balfour, General Clayton called its authors to a meeting. He told them “the Zionists were very
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powerful … Throughout the world the Jews controlled the capital … In their determination to obtain Palestine as a Home for the Jews they would undoubtedly succeed.” So, he advised, the Arabs had better cooperate when the Zionists arrived in Palestine. When Sykes read the resolutions submitted by the Islamic Society to the Foreign Office, he scrawled upon the file in his round, boyish hand: “I strongly urge
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no notice be taken of this … crew of seditionists and C.U.P. agents … Most of the members ought to be behind the barbed wire. In any other country they would be.” This almost makes one wonder whether he intended to square Arab-Zionist conflict after all.

Whether he could have done so remains moot, for in 1919 Sykes passed unwilling from the scene. The Britons who followed him, to whom the
League of Nations gave a mandate for governing Palestine in 1920, certainly could not keep the peace there, but then wartime British officials who had done so much to facilitate the Zionist and Arab movements had never aimed primarily to keep the peace in Palestine, they aimed to win the First World War and to maintain their country’s place in the world. Here are the primary motivations (although not the only ones) for all their dealings with Grand Sharif Hussein and Chaim Weizmann. Of course neither man, nor any of their followers, acted as mere pawns in British hands. Zionists and Arabs fought fiercely and tenaciously for their goals during the war and after. But we cannot be surprised at the results of so complex and fraught a process as the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration.

The most famous result was the Declaration itself. Zionists and many others have viewed it ever since as a terrific achievement, a foundation stone along the way to the establishment of modern Israel. Many Arabs, on the other hand, have seen it as a terrible setback, the real starting point of their dispossession and misery.

An equally consequential result of the process was the development of profound mistrust, of all parties by all parties; and growing from that mistrust a bitterness that would lead to the spilling of much blood.

At the end of the war Britain ruled Palestine by virtue of military occupation. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and the San Remo Conference in 1920 ratified her rule and extended it indefinitely within the mandate system established by the League of Nations. Zionism had achieved its objective, yet Zionist doubts about Britain were reviving. Many Zionists thought Ronald Storrs, Britain’s first military governor of Jerusalem, favored the Arabs over them; and that the new colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, hitherto a staunch ally, favored Arabs too, at least at a conference in Cairo in 1922, when he carved Transjordan out of Palestine and established Hussein’s son, Abdullah, as its ruler. Even Herbert Samuel, British Palestine’s first high commissioner, shocked and displeased Zionists by temporarily suspending Jewish immigration after anti-Zionist riots in May 1921 and by pardoning jailed rioters. That certain British officials continued to express anti-Semitic views did not improve matters.

Tension between Zionists and British officials eased after 1922, but in 1930 a Labour Government, wishing to assuage Arab resentment of the Jewish presence, accepted a white paper issued by Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield, the Fabian socialist formerly known as Sidney Webb. Webb questioned the very bases of the Zionist program: Jewish immigration into Palestine (again); exclusive labor practices; the wholesale purchase of Arab land. Against this paper Zionists protested so vehemently that the government
backed down, but in 1937 a Conservative government, hoping to settle the problem once and for all, accepted the recommendations of another investigative commission, this one led by Lord Peel: Palestine should be divided into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a territory still under British mandate. Among Zionists this plan aroused grave suspicion and a storm of protest, although Weizmann ultimately urged acceptance. Then in 1939 Neville Chamberlain’s government repudiated the Peel Report: Palestine should not be partitioned; it should become an independent binational Arab-Jewish state. Over the next five years seventy-five thousand more Jews would be allowed to enter; then Jewish immigration should cease altogether. At this point Arabs outnumbered Jews in Palestine by about three to one, and Zionist mistrust of British intentions scaled new heights. It hardly diminished even during World War II, despite the fact that Chamberlain’s plan remained on the drawing boards only.

Arab mistrust and resentment also grew after 1918. Hussein did not get his Arab kingdom but merely the kingdom of Hejaz (and that only until 1924, when Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi fundamentalists overthrew him and established Saudi Arabia). Feisal never became king of an independent Syria: The French expelled him from Damascus in 1920; a year later the British established him as their puppet ruler of Iraq and his brother Abdullah as an equally dependent ruler of Transjordan. Were they better off with British or Ottoman overlords? It seems fair to conclude at least that their attitudes toward Britain, and the attitudes of their followers, were not simple.

As for the majority of Palestinian Arabs, they directed their resentment against Jews (whom they thought were stealing their land) and against British officials (whom they thought were protecting the Jews). In 1920 and 1921 Arab rioters killed more than half a dozen. In 1929 pogroms in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and elsewhere resulted in the deaths of 133, the injury of hundreds more, and the destruction of much property. In 1936 a full-blown Arab Palestinian revolt developed. The recommendations of the Peel Commission, which were meant to tamp it down, only added fuel to the fire. Arab leaders denounced Peel even more vociferously than Zionists did and rejected his proposals unanimously. A general strike of Arab Palestinians demanded immediate cessation of Jewish immigration, prohibition of the sale of Arab land to Jews, and establishment of a national government. Something like civil war ensued. Volunteers from throughout the Arab world poured into Palestine to fight Zionists and Britons alike.

Britain had a mandate
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to govern Palestine but lacked the means. Her empire reached the zenith of its extent just after World War I weakened it irreparably. In the Middle East during the spring of 1919, General Allenby
was demobilizing soldiers at the rate of twenty thousand a month. A year later the chief of the general staff complained, “In no single theatre
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are we strong enough. Not in Ireland, nor England, not on the Rhine, not in Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopotamia, nor Persia, nor India.” Britain would experience during the coming half century something like what the Ottomans endured half a century before: gradual diminution of an empire whose subject peoples demanded control of their own destinies and would take up arms to gain them. In Palestine, Jews and Arabs took up arms; Britain had not the strength to keep the peace.

The Jews established a paramilitary organization, Haganah, in 1920 because Britain failed to defend them effectively during the pogroms of that year. Two additional armed groups appeared in the 1930s: Etzel (which the British called Irgun), and Lechi (which they called the Stern Gang), a breakaway from Etzel. Both groups moved from defensive to offensive operations and eventually to terrorist campaigns against Arabs and Britons too. They reached a bloody climax in the years immediately after the Second World War, when Etzel and Lechi carried out assassinations, beatings, and bombings, most notoriously against the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where they killed 91 and injured 46.

To such a low ebb had sunk British-Zionist relations, but British-Arab relations sank lower still. The most important Palestinian leader of the Mandate period, Haj Amin al-Husseini, gained the lifetime post of grand mufti, the highest Muslim religious office in Jerusalem, with the support of none other than Herbert Samuel, who thought he would help maintain order among Arabs. In fact, al-Husseini was an uncompromising Palestinian nationalist, thus an implacable enemy of British occupation and Zionism both. He led the Arab Revolt in 1936. Hunted by the British, he fled, landing finally in Nazi Germany during World War II, where he sought Hitler’s support for Arab independence. Al-Husseini would be sidelined during the 1948 war between Arabs and the nascent state of Israel when hatred and violence overboiled yet again, this time with decisive results. But al-Husseini’s viewpoint was not sidelined. It remains potent as ever.

During World War I, then, Britain and her allies slew the Ottoman dragon in the Middle East. By their policies they sowed dragon’s teeth. Armed men rose up from the ground. They are rising still.

I had a lot of help on this project.

First I want to thank the archivists with whom I worked in the United States, Britain, and Israel. All of them went out of their way to help me, none more than Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and Merav Segal, director of the Weizmann Archives, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot.

I am grateful to Bruce Henson, a librarian at Georgia Tech, who managed after much effort to track down the weather report with which this book begins.

Then I wish to thank Natalya Staros for helping with translations from Russian, Uri Rosenheck for helping with translations from Hebrew, and Shari Youngblood for helping with translations from French. I am grateful, too, to Luke Dickens, and to an old friend, Jim Obelkevich, both of whom tracked down, photographed, and sent as email attachments documents I realized I wanted from England months after I had left the country. Alexandra Ramirez helped me find images for reproduction in the book.

I am grateful to Leonard Smith for inviting me to lecture on the Balfour Declaration at Oberlin College, and to Oded Irshai, who arranged for me to give a seminar on the same subject at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. In both places students and faculty in the audience asked questions that helped me to clarify my thinking.

Peter Oppenheimer, former director of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton Manor, oversaw my stay there, enabling me to visit British archives; Tony Judt arranged my stint as a visitor at the Erich Remarque Center, New York University, which enabled me to work at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and at the New York Public Library. Thanks to both of you.

Tony Judt, Lisa Anderson, Stephen P. Cohen, David Taal, Dorothy Gilbert Goldstone, John Drucker, and John Krige all read the manuscript, or sections of it, and gave good advice for which I am grateful. But I alone am responsible for errors of fact and interpretation and for such infelicities of style as remain.

During the years this book has been in preparation, I have discussed it, always to my advantage, with many friends, including Bernard Wasserstein, David Gilbert, Chris Clark, Peter Weiler, David Large, Ross McKibbin, Peter Schizgal, Peter Mandler, Peter Dimock, Gary Kornblith, Carol Lasser, Kurt Tauber, and most of my colleagues in the School of History, Technology and Society at Georgia Tech. Thank you all.

My editors, Amy Black in Toronto, Bill Swainson in London, and Will Murphy in New York City, have encouraged me when necessary and offered helpful suggestions when a draft of the manuscript finally became available. To them too I offer thanks.

I acknowledge with thanks the Georgia Tech Foundation, which twice granted subventions for travel to archives abroad.

My agents Peter Robinson and Christie Fletcher have been terrific.

So have been my wife and two sons. By now they realize I am happiest when working on a big project.

Jonathan Schneer
Atlanta, Georgia
August 10, 2009