A History of Zionism (42 page)

The Palestinian Arabs who had tolerated (and despised) the local Jews
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were genuinely afraid of the aggressive new immigrants who seemed to belong to an altogether different breed. They resented them for the same reasons that substantial mass immigration has always and everywhere produced tension: peasants were afraid of change, shopkeepers and professional men feared competition, religious dignitaries, whether Christian or Muslim, were anything but friendly towards the Jews for traditional, doctrinal reasons. Arab anti-Zionist propaganda after 1908 was, of course, highly exaggerated. The economic situation of the Arabs had certainly not deteriorated as a result of the influx of these strangers, and they overrated the Zionist potential. The Jews had neither the money nor the intention to buy up all the land (as Arab propaganda claimed), to dispossess and proletarianise all Arab peasants. Their political ambitions certainly did not extend to the Nile and the Euphrates.

But the Arabs were correct in the essential point, namely that the Jews wanted to establish a position of strength in Palestine, through their superior organisation and economic power, and that they intended to become eventually a majority. They sensed this logic of events more correctly than the Zionists themselves, who did not think in terms of political power and lacked the instinct for it. The early Zionists were all basically pacifists. The idea that it might be impossible to establish a state without bloodshed seems never to have occurred to them. The first to raise the question was a non-Zionist, the sociologist Gumplowicz, in a letter to Herzl: ‘You want to found a state without bloodshed? Where did you ever see that? Without violence and without guile, simply by selling and buying shares?’
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But even the most exemplary behaviour on the part of the Zionists would not have affected the real source of the conflict, namely, that the Jews were looking in Palestine for more than a cultural centre. However effective their propaganda, however substantial the material benefits that would have accrued to the Arabs from the Jewish settlement, it would still have left unanswered the decisive question – to whom was the country eventually to belong? It was more than a little naïve to put the blame for Arab anti-Zionism on professional inciters, frustrated Arab notables, and the notorious urban riff-raff, for there was a basic clash between two national movements. Full identification on the part of the Zionists with the aims of pan-Arabism from an early date would perhaps have helped to blunt the sharpness of the conflict. But this was of course not in accordance with the aims of the Jewish national revival. Nor would it have induced the Arabs to receive the Zionist immigrants with open arms. The Arab world was already plagued by the presence of religious and ethnic minorities and the conflicts between them. Any further increase in their number and strength would have only added to its anxieties. Given the character of the Zionist movement, with its basic demands (immigration and settlement), and given also the natural fears of the Palestinian Arabs, it is impossible even with the benefit of hindsight to point with any degree of conviction to an alternative Zionist policy, even before the Balfour Declaration, which might have prevented conflict.
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Jews and Arabs During the War

All political activity ceased in Palestine with the outbreak of war in 1914. Young Jews of military age joined the Turkish army, those of enemy nationality were expelled. During the later stages of the war the inhabitants of many Jewish settlements were forcibly evacuated by the Turkish authorities. But for the intervention of the German government, Djemal Pasha, the Turkish commander, would have transferred the inhabitants of Jerusalem east of the Jordan and removed the Jews from southern Palestine altogether. The Arab national movement also suffered major setbacks with the arrest of many of its leaders and the execution of some of them, accused by the Turks of separatism and treason. The centre of the political scene, as far as both Arab and Jewish national aspirations were concerned, shifted to London during the war years. Certain British statesmen (such as Kitchener) had favoured the idea of establishing an independent Arab state even before 1914, and there had been contracts, albeit vague and inconclusive in character, between the British and Hussain Ibn Ali, the sherif of Mecca.

After the outbreak of war the eastern question again became topical and policy planners were commissioned to prepare memoranda and blueprints for a postwar settlement in the Near East. British diplomats talked to the French and Russians. The Sykes-Picot agreement envisaged a division of spheres of influence between Britain and France. Palestine under this scheme was to fall into the so-called brown zone, which was to be under international control. Specific promises to the Arabs were made by Sir Henry McMahon, the chief British representative in Egypt. In a letter in October 1915 the idea of an independent Arab state was mooted from which only the Syrian coastal area west of Damascus, Homs, Hamma and Aleppo was to be excluded. Arab spokesmen have maintained ever since that Palestine was thus promised to them, and that this promise was subsequently broken. McMahon himself denied this, as did an investigation committee appointed in 1937. The British argued that the agreement was based on the understanding that the Arabs would rise against the Turks in both the Arab peninsula and Syria, and that since the Arab revolt in Syria never materialised, they were under no obligation to carry out their part of the bargain. However, the whole deal was so vaguely defined that it was bound to give rise to disputes, in the same way that Britain’s promise to the Jews, the Balfour Declaration, was open to more than one interpretation.

How did Zionism view its relationship with the Arabs in the framework of the new order likely to emerge in Palestine after the war? In a detailed memorandum for the new administration of Palestine, prepared in 1916, the Zionist leaders demanded equality of rights for all nationalities, autonomy in exclusively Jewish matters, official recognition of the Jewish population as a separate national unit, and recognition of the Hebrew language as equal and parallel to Arabic. The Zionists’ main concern was to gain British support for their aspirations. Conditions, as Weizmann said in a speech in Manchester in May 1917, were not yet ripe for a Jewish state, and relations with the Arabs therefore did not figure very highly on the list of Zionist priorities. A non-Jewish supporter of Zionism, Herbert Sidebotham, defined the aim of Zionism in July 1917 as the establishment of a Jewish state, one whose dominant national character should be as Jewish as the dominant national character of England was English – a definition to be repeated by Weizmann at the Versailles Peace Conference when asked what was meant by a Jewish National Home. But Weizmann also said on the very same occasion that the Zionists could not go into the country ‘like Junkers’; they could not afford to drive out other people.
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The first part of his definition was frequently quoted and criticised in later years. Was he not aware of the existence of the Arabs? There is evidence that Weizmann’s closest collaborators certainly realised that the Arab question would be of great importance and urgency after the war. As Harry Sacher wrote to Leon Simon in June 1917: ‘At the back of my mind there is firmly fixed the recognition that even if all our political schemes turn out in the way we desire, the Arabs will turn out our most tremendous problem. I don’t want us in Palestine to deal with the Arabs as the Poles deal with the Jews. … That kind of chauvinism might poison the whole yishuv.’
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Immediate Arab reaction to the Balfour Declaration was not one of unmitigated hostility. Like the Zionists, they were perhaps not quite aware what it would amount to in practice. In the great Zionist public meeting in Covent Garden on 2 December 1917, celebrating the Balfour Declaration, two Arab speakers brought cordial greetings on behalf of their people. Weizmann, speaking in Manchester one week later, said that if there had been misunderstandings between Arabs and Jews in the past, this was all over now. The tension had been created by the deadening hand of the Turks, playing off one part of the population against the other. The attitude of the leading Arab newspapers of Cairo, such as
Mukattam
and
Ahram
, was surprisingly friendly, the former declaring that the Arabs had nothing to fear from a Jewish state; the British government had after all only recognised a historical right of which no one could have deprived the Jews.
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Weizmann and Faisal

King Hussain’s newspaper in Mecca extended a cordial welcome to the returning exiles, ‘the original sons of the country from which their Arab brethren would benefit materially as well as spiritually’.
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To cement the new Arab-Jewish friendship, Dr Weizmann went to Aqaba in May 1918 to meet Faisal, Hussain’s son, who assured him of his goodwill towards Zionist aspirations. Like Weizmann, he put the blame for past misunderstanding on the Turks, whose intrigues, he said, had stirred up jealousy between the Jewish colonists and the Arab peasants. On various occasions, as at a banquet given in honour of Lord Rothschild in London, and at several meetings with Jewish leaders, Faisal claimed that he shared Weizmann’s ideals, that no true Arab could be afraid of Jewish nationalism, that there should be the most cordial goodwill between the two peoples. In his agreement with Weizmann, signed on 3 January 1919, he renounced any claim to Palestine, which was to become the territory of the Jews, separate from the new Arab state. There was a postscript in which Faisal announced that this agreement would be valid only if the Arabs obtained their independence as formulated by him in an earlier memorandum directed to the British. The document was thus not a binding treaty, but it certainly showed that Faisal clearly wanted the Zionists as allies during and after the peace conferences and that he was willing to accept unlimited Jewish immigration and settlement. His attitude towards a Jewish state was contradictory: if the Jews desired to establish a state and claim sovereign rights, he wrote on one occasion, he foresaw and feared serious dangers and conflicts.
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But when Felix Frankfurter, a leading member of the American Zionist delegation in Paris, asked for a clarification, Faisal reiterated that the Arabs looked with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement, and that they found its proposals moderate and proper. The Arabs would do their best to help them through: ‘We are working together for a reformed and revived near east, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist … and there is room in Syria for us both.’ Yet a few months later Faisal retreated from his pro-Zionist stand. He was, he said, in agreement with a moderate leader such as Weizmann, that there should be a ‘small infiltration’ of Jews into Palestine – say fifteen hundred a year – in such a way that the Zionists would one day constitute a sub-province of the new Arab kingdom. But he did not agree at all with those Zionists who wanted a Jewish state: ‘We Arabs cannot yield Palestine.’ They would fight to the last ditch against Palestine being other than part of the kingdom. They would not accept Jewish supremacy in the land.
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What caused Faisal’s change of heart? Arab sources, to whom needless to say the incident was highly embarrassing, have provided various explanations. The king himself later said about the Frankfurter letter that he did not remember having written anything of the kind. Arab commentators have suggested that the documents were forged by the Zionists, or that Lawrence, who acted as interpreter on various occasions, either wilfully misled the king or did not know Arabic sufficiently well, or that the Zionists came to the meetings with prepared drafts and somehow tricked the king into signing documents whose significance he did not understand.
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It seems more likely that Faisal agreed to flirt with the Zionist cause because he thought the Jews could help him to strengthen his claim on Syria. He was not well informed about the situation in Palestine, in which he took only a limited interest. The British wanted him to talk to Weizmann, and Faisal complied because he was under a heavy obligation to his protectors. His was, in the words of M. Merlman, the unenviable role of the moderate leader in a period of rising intransigence;
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when he realised that inside Palestine opposition to Zionism was much more formidable than he had believed, he decided to beat a hasty retreat. Later critics of the Zionist executive have asserted that Weizmann and his friends did not try hard enough at the time to win the confidence and friendship of the Arabs. Yet an anti-Zionist source reports that King Faisal was continually pestered by Weizmann: ‘What does this man want? I would do anything to get rid of him. He tires me out by his long speeches.’
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Postwar Tensions

Zionists everywhere attached tremendous importance to Faisal’s declaration and regarded it as the beginning of a new era in Arab-Jewish relations. Ruppin noted that they had tried to establish contact with the Arabs for a long time, but ‘we always returned disappointed and without hope’. There had been no willingness on the other side to discuss matters of principle.
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After Faisal’s solemn declaration, he expected a basic change. A few Jewish observers of the Palestinian scene dissented from this optimistic appraisal, realising that the Palestinian Arabs were not at all happy about the Balfour Declaration. When the Arabs sensed that many members of the British military administration shared their misgivings, they began to protest openly against ‘that terrible injustice which the whole world will regret’. Early in 1919 leaflets were distributed in Jerusalem and Jaffa calling on all Arabs to resist the Zionist danger. The Jews were compared in these manifestos to poisonous snakes. No nation in the world had tolerated them and Palestinian Arabs would defend their homeland to the very end against any Zionist encroachment.
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Even earlier, a small Arab terrorist organisation, the Black Hand, had been founded, and in February 1919 the first meeting took place in Jaffa of the Muslim-Christian Association which became the spearhead of anti-Zionist resistance.