A Durable Peace (12 page)

In the aftermath of the rioting, it looked at first as though Meinertzhagen’s views might prevail. His protests to the still-sympathetic
Foreign Office and his subsequent testimony before the commission of inquiry so shocked the government in London that it determined
to dismantle the military government. General Sir Louis Bols and Waters-Taylor were dismissed, and in July 1920 Palestine
was turned over to a high commissioner, Lord Herbert Samuel, who was a professed Zionist. Jabotinsky and his men were amnestied
for their activities during the riots. Meanwhile, the French invaded Damascus and deposed the British-installed Hashemite
government, staking their own claim to Syria and ruining forever the Arabist scheme of incorporating Palestine into a British
Syria.

But within months it became clear that the battle for Britain’s fulfillment of its commitments would be protracted and bitter.
“Bols went,” wrote Colonel Patterson, “but the system he implanted remained. The anti-Semitic officials that he brought with
him into the country remained.”
²⁷
The well-meaning Lord Samuel proved inadequate to the task of resisting his subordinates, and the situation rapidly deteriorated.
These underlings harangued ceaselessly about the hatred that was growing against Britain because of the Jews, and they saw
to it that key non-British positions were filled by Arabs, even in the security services.
²⁸
They prevailed
upon Lord Samuel to pardon Husseini as a “gesture” and allow the instigator of the riots to return to Jerusalem, where he
immediately resumed orchestrating more of them.

Worried about being “led into a clash with our Arab friends,”
²⁹
Samuel, after some initial opposition, finally acquiesced in the scheme to detach Transjordan from the rest of Palestine.
When the post of Mufti (Moslem religious leader) of Jerusalem became vacant, Husseini grew determined to use the prestige
and financial muscle of the post against the Jews, and he ran for the position. Although he lost the election, coming in fourth,
the anti-Zionists in Samuel’s administration deposed the actual winner and duped Samuel into believing that Haj Amin alone
represented Palestinian Arabs. Samuel appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini to the newly manufactured post of “Grand Mufti,” Mufti
for life—in one fateful stroke legitimizing the most violent and radical element among the Palestinian Arabs to a position
of preeminent leadership and establishing a pattern that was to continue through the rest of the century. “He hates both Jews
and British,” wrote Meinertzhagen. “His appointment is sheer madness.”
³⁰
“Samuel is rather weak,” Lloyd George concluded glumly
³¹

By 1921, hostility to Zionism was quickly making inroads in London as well. In that year, the authority over Palestine was
transferred from the Foreign Office to the new Middle East Department at the Colonial Office, made up of old empire-building
hands from colonies such as Kenya, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and southern Rhodesia.
³²
The new department was headed by Sir John Evelyn Shuckburgh; a man “saturated with anti-Semitism, [he] loathes Zionism and
the Jews.”
³³
Shuckburgh was among the leaders of the effort to convince the government that it could maintain Britain’s hold on the Middle
East by opposing Zionism and thereby earn the gratitude and loyalty of its new Arab subjects in Egypt, Iraq, and the Gulf.
Although they were captivated by the mystique of the Arab, the British Arabists had another, much less romantic interest in
backing the Arabs. In a peculiar combination of patronizing sympathy and subconscious contempt, they believed
that the Arabs were a backward people who could be more easily controlled than the Jews and indefinitely manipulated to postpone
demands for independence—as long as their disdain for Jews did not rile them into opposition to British domination. Shuckburgh
was joined in the Colonial Office by veterans of relations with the Arabs during the war, including T. E. Lawrence. “Lawrence
of Arabia” had been made famous in Britain and America by a widely exaggerated stage-show about the war effort against the
Ottomans—which had depicted him and his minuscule band of Arab raiders as the heroes of the war. In order to substantiate
this undeserved reputation, Lawrence worked doggedly to promote the impression that Britain owed a great deal to the Arabs
in general and to Feisal and the Hashemites of Mecca in particular.
³⁴
Seasoned subordinates like Shuckburgh and Lawrence were able to play on the inexperience of the new minister above them (as
had happened to Lord Samuel and countless other top officials over the course of this century) and convert him to their policies:
In this case, the man in charge was the mercurial colonial secretary, Winston Churchill.

Churchill took office as a man of outspoken sympathy for Zionism. In February 1920, he sent chills down the spines of government
Arabists by telling the Sunday Herald
that
he envisioned “a Jewish State by the banks of the Jordan… which might comprise three or four million Jews.”
³⁵
In this he was heir to the tradition of Versailles, which had clearly supported the idea that, as in biblical times, the
Jewish nation was to be reinstated on
both
banks of the Jordan River. On this matter Lord Balfour had written to Lloyd George that Palestine’s eastern border had to
be well east of Jordan “for the development of Zionist agriculture.”
³⁶
Lord Samuel had concurred that

… you cannot have numbers without area and territory. Every expert knows that for a prosperous Palestine an adequate territory
beyond the Jordan [River] is indispensable.
³⁷

The
Times,
too, had argued that Palestine needed a “good military frontier… as near as may be to the edge of the desert.” According
to the
Times,
the Jordan River

… will not do as Palestine’s eastern boundary. Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State but
one that is capable of a vigorous and independent national life.
³⁸

Lord Arnold, the Undersecretary for the Colonies, retrospectively summed up the position of official Britain during the war
for Parliament a few years later:

During the war we recognized Arab independence, within certain border limits…. There were discussions as to what territories
these borders should take in. But there was no dispute as to Trans-Jordan. There is no doubt about the fact that Trans-Jordan
is within the boundaries to which the [Balfour] Declaration during the War refers.
³⁹

Even Abdullah, the emir of the new entity of Transjordan, recognized that Transjordan had been intended by the British to
be part of the Jewish National Home:

[God] granted me success in creating the Government of Transjordan by having it separated from the Balfour Declaration[,]
which had included it since the Sykes-Picot Agreement [in 1916] assigned it to the British zone of influence.
⁴⁰

Like his brother Feisal, Abdullah was apparently convinced of the value of Jewish immigration to building Transjordan’s economic
base, and at various points between 1924 and 1935 he attempted to arrange the sale and lease of land in Transjordan to Jews
from western Palestine. These efforts were eventually aborted by the British government in western Palestine.
⁴¹

With such strong currents in favor of Jewish settlement east of
the Jordan, it was clear that Churchill, if left to his own devices, might well act out his idea of “a Jewish State by the
banks of the Jordan”—and the functionaries of the new Middle East Department moved quickly to ensure that he did not. It was
Shuckburgh, Lawrence, and their associates who led Churchill to believe that Transjordan had been promised to Feisal and the
Hashemites of Mecca during the war. They thereby triggered the installation of Feisal’s brother Abdullah and his army of two
hundred Bedouins as rulers of Jordan—despite the objection by High Commissioner for Palestine Sir Herbert Samuel and others
that Jordan was part of Palestine. Lloyd George, too, insisted that even if there were no choice but to make Transjordan Arab,
it had to be considered an ‘Arab province [of] or adjunct to Palestine.”
⁴²

But Churchill’s subordinates were convinced that by throwing such favors to the Arabs, they would earn the Arabs’ loyalty.
They told Churchill that making such a gift would really not harm the Jews—a line which Churchill, like so many other Western
leaders after him, did not know enough to refute. Meinertzhagen, who had been assigned to the Middle East Department in London,
once again found himself alone in attempting to maintain the commitment that Britain had made to the Jews:

The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe [i.e., anti-Semitic], the worst offender being Shuckburgh who
is head of the Middle East Department….

I exploded on hearing that Churchill had severed Transjordan from Palestine…. Abdullah was placated at the expense of the
Jewish National Home which embraces the whole of Biblical Palestine. Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced
him…. This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of Biblical Palestine. The Colonial Office and the Palestine Administration
have now declared that the articles for the mandate relating to the Jewish Home are not applicable to Transjordan…. This discovery
was not made until it became necessary to appease an Arab Emir.

Outraged, Meinertzhagen insisted on seeing Churchill:

… I went foaming at the mouth with anger and indignation[.] Churchill heard me out; I told him it was grossly unfair to the
Jews, that it was yet another promise broken and that it was a most dishonest act, that the Balfour Declaration was being
torn up by degrees and that the official policy of His Majesty’s Government to establish a Home for the Jews in Biblical Palestine
was being sabotaged; that I found the Middle East Department whose business was to implement the Mandate, almost one hundred
percent hebraphobe…. Churchill listened and said he saw the force of my argument and would consider the question. He thought
it was too late to alter[,] but a time limit to Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan might work.

I’m thoroughly disgusted.
⁴³

To Churchill’s credit, he rejected effort after effort to persuade him not to implement the Balfour Declaration
west
of the Jordan River. But his rejections were not enough to discourage the Arabs, who correctly recognized that Britain was
caving in under the pressure of their violence. Less than two months after Churchill’s decision, in March 1921, to establish
Abdullah in Transjordan, Arab mobs, somehow not appeased, again went on the rampage. A British judge in the Mandatory government
named Horace Samuel (no relation to Lord Herbert Samuel), who was involved in the subsequent trials, recorded the events in
Jaffa:

The Arabs of Jaffa… started to murder, wound, and loot the Jews under the official protection and assistance of a substantial
number of Jaffa police.… A mob of Arabs… began to attack [the Zionist Commission immigration depot] with stones and sticks,
but were at first successfully kept at bay by the immigrants. Finally, reinforcements for the attackers were supplied by certain
Arab policemen, well equipped with rifles, bombs, and ammunition. The door was forced by the police, and under their
leadership and escort the mob burst into the building. Thirteen of the immigrants were murdered.

Faced with the murder of Jews, the British instantly knew what to do. As Judge Samuel explained:

The riots of the 1st of May and the massacre of the Jews at the Immigration Hostel were a pretty broad hint that the Jaffa
Arabs resented any further Jewish immigration into the country. Under these circumstances the High Commissioner [Lord Samuel],
preferring a policy of tact to one of drastic repression, within forty-eight hours of the massacre telephoned Mr. Miller,
the Assistant Governor of Jaffa, instructing him to announce to the Arabs that in accordance with their request, immigration
had been suspended.
⁴⁴

Still unappeased, Arab mobs spent the following week attacking Jewish communities all over the country. British soldiers were
under orders not to shoot.
⁴⁵
In the end, thirty-five Jews were left dead and hundreds more wounded. According to Judge Samuel, Storrs argued for a policy
of “throwing the Arabs as many sops as they could swallow, in the hope of thereby getting them to desist from open revolt.”
⁴⁶
His view prevailed, and a general freeze on Jewish immigration was imposed for the first time. And while the freeze lasted
only two months, it set a precedent of sacrificing Jewish rights to Arab blackmail, which was soon to replace the Balfour
Declaration as London’s policy.

But by this time, many of the Arabists did not see the Arab threats as blackmail at all. On the contrary, the Arabists found
themselves in sympathy with Arab revulsion against this “nowhere very popular people,” as Storrs called them.
⁴⁷
With astonishing hypocrisy, these avowed imperialists and colonialists began to argue that “foreign” Jewish control of Palestine
was an injustice to the indigenous Arabs. Thus in 1920 the new foreign minister, Lord Curzon, a staunch colonialist, argued
that the Mandate, which
“reeks of Judaism in every paragraph,” was inherently unfair to the local Arabs.
⁴⁸
He was joined in his opinion in 1921 by the new commander of the British Army in Palestine, General W N. Congreve, who circulated
a memorandum to his troops decreeing that while the army of course was not supposed to have political opinions, it could not
ignore the injustice being done to the Arabs by allowing the Jews to settle in Palestine.
⁴⁹
The effect of this new moralizing on the part of the British imperial establishment had an almost immediate effect on the
execution of British policy It propelled Lord Samuel’s adviser on the Arabs, Ernest Richmond, to conclude that the Zionist
policy was “inspired by a spirit which I can only regard as evil”
⁵⁰
—and to engineer the appointment of Haj Amin al-Husseini to the post of Grand Mufti as a curative.