The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (65 page)

But France thought that Syria included Palestine, and this Britain could not accept. It was one thing for Zionists to claim that land as home under a British protectorate, or for Arabs to govern it under some form of British tutelage; it was quite another for a great power like France to have power over territory bordering Egypt and overlooking, albeit from a distance, the Suez Canal. Sykes persuaded Picot that neither Britain nor France should govern Palestine, but rather an international condominium. Palestine was not “a twice promised land,” as some have written then, but rather a thrice-promised one: to the Arabs (or at least the Arabs thought so), to the Zionists, and to a prospective international consortium whose members had yet to be determined.

Nor is this the end of the very tangled web Great Britain wove for that eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. To detach the Ottomans from the Central Powers would do more to win the war for Britain than anything connected to Arabs or Jews. From October 1914 onward certain Britons bent their minds precisely to that task. At first they could not gain much purchase on events. But when the easterner David Lloyd George became prime minister, the project gained a supremely influential advocate, and various pourparlers went forward. Eventually through his emissaries Lloyd George offered to the Turks, among other inducements, that their flag continue to fly over Palestine if they would make a separate peace, even as other British officials were promising to Zionists and Arabs that the Ottomans and their flag would be expelled from the Middle East altogether. In the end Enver Pasha spurned Lloyd George’s offer. Nevertheless, it seems right to suggest that Palestine was not thrice-promised really. It was promised, or at any rate dangled as bait, four times: before the Zionists and the Arabs, before Picot by Sykes in the shape of an as-yet-unformed international consortium, and before the Turks, who would otherwise lose it as a result of the war.

Of course during most of our period, for imperial-economic-strategic reasons, Britain meant to keep the primary governing role in Palestine for herself.

The Balfour Declaration was the highly contingent product of a tortuous process characterized as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy. Weizmann was a genius, but his triumph, even among his British coreligionists, was hardly preordained. The victory over Lucien Wolf was near-run and not entirely edifying. His paramount position among British Zionists was secure, but that did not stop members of his inner circle from severely criticizing his judgment. Nor did it inhibit others among the larger Zionist community from condemning his authoritarian manner, so that more than once Weizmann felt obliged to offer them his resignation. Had Harry Sacher and Leon Simon prevailed in the argument over his attitude toward the separate peace with Turkey, or had Weizmann carried through on any of his several threats to resign, the history of Palestine, and of the world, might be very different.

So might it be if King Hussein’s forces had been able to occupy parts of Syria a little bit earlier than they did. That was what T. E. Lawrence thought would happen. On the night he rode out of Aqaba with George Lloyd, he predicted that Hussein’s writ would run “along the coast from Acre northwards.” He did not realize it was already too late, that the War Cabinet had just endorsed Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild.

Or imagine that Hussein had possessed in London an advocate for Arab nationalism who was as skillful and eloquent as Chaim Weizmann. He himself could not travel there to play that role, so he relied instead upon British proxies such as Lawrence and Mark Sykes. Both these men possessed genius, but Sykes—juggling Jews, Arabs, Armenians, French, and various Britons, among others—could never advocate solely for the Arabs even if he wished to, which he never did. As for Lawrence, his views must be termed ambiguous. He was pro-Arab, he wrote to Sykes, and pro-British too. Anyway, during the war he was not often in London, and afterward it was too late. Perhaps one of Hussein’s sons, Abdullah or Feisal, could have lobbied for Arab nationalism as Weizmann did for Zionism, although one doubts they would have exhibited his extraordinary combination of skills. In any event Hussein needed them both in Arabia. Nevertheless, just because that was how it was does not mean that was how it had to be.

Moreover, the movement for a separate peace with Turkey had the potential for spoiling Zionist and Arab plans altogether. In June and July 1917, with three British agents (Pilling, Herbert, and Zaharoff) and one American (Morgenthau) engaged in talks with Turks or preparing to talk with them, the Ottomans still held Syria, including Palestine. A separate peace with the Allies at that juncture might well have left them with more
than symbolic control over those lands. That was why Weizmann opposed the idea so fiercely. He managed to stymie Morgenthau. He could not stymie Herbert, but the Turks did, in the sense that they did not follow up on their initial contact with him. Weizmann learned about J. R. Pilling in late November, after publication of the Balfour Declaration. We have evidence that he realized that everything gained by that document still could be lost. He and the Armenian, James Malcolm, called immediately upon Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office to express their “serious concern not
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to say alarm.” Graham reassured them: Pilling had no authority. He did not mention the role of Basil Zaharoff, because neither he nor anyone else in the Foreign Office knew about it.

Zaharoff’s several journeys to speak with Turks would have caused Weizmann much greater alarm, for they had a greater chance of success. His penultimate trip was most dangerous from the Zionist point of view. Even after publication of the Balfour Declaration, Lloyd George offered to allow the Turkish flag to continue flying over Jerusalem. Imagine that Enver Pasha, through his intermediary, Abdul Kerim, had sealed the deal with the arms merchant in that Swiss hotel room and arranged the separate peace early in 1918. In that case one may doubt that Jews celebrating Passover in subsequent years would have charged their annual vow with the new practical meaning they thought the Declaration made possible.

Because it was unpredictable and characterized by contradictions, deceptions, misinterpretations, and wishful thinking, the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration sowed dragon’s teeth. It produced a murderous harvest, and we go on harvesting even today.

When the Zionists learned of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which envisioned an international condominium administering Palestine, they were enraged. It contradicted everything British officials had led them to believe they could hope for in the Middle East. They concluded they must obtain from the British government a written guarantee of support. They took the Balfour Declaration to be that guarantee. In fact, Britain’s deceptive practices never ceased. During the summer of 1917, after Zionists learned of the Sykes-Picot Agreement but before they obtained the Declaration, the Foreign Office satisfied Weizmann by allowing him to checkmate Morgenthau on his way to speak with Turks about a separate peace. Simultaneously it encouraged Aubrey Herbert to travel to Switzerland to speak with Turks about that very subject. Needless to say, it did not tell Weizmann. After the Declaration it remained true that what Lloyd George gave with one hand
he might negotiate away with the other—if only Enver Pasha would let him. Of the discussions between Zaharoff and Abdul Kerim, the Zionists never learned. Still, the prime minister’s conduct did not augur well for future transparency or good relations between Jewish nationalists and the British government.

King Hussein and the Arab nationalists felt British duplicity more keenly than Weizmann and the Zionists did. The Sykes-Picot Agreement contradicted their aspirations too. But when Sykes told Hussein in Jeddah that France would treat the Syrian littoral including northern Palestine just as Britain would treat Mesopotamia, Hussein made a fatal mistake. He remembered his correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon and references in it to a temporary British occupation of Baghdad and Basra. We know that McMahon was purposely vague in his letters, but Hussein did not. He thought he had ironclad guarantees for Mesopotamia and now for Syria too. He trusted Sykes implicitly. Hussein’s son Feisal and his adviser Fuad Selim, not to mention even a few British imperial officials, feared he misjudged. We shall never know—perhaps Sykes could somehow have squared even this circle. Unfortunately he died in Paris on February 16, 1919, of Spanish influenza. And then at Versailles Lloyd George allowed France to take Syria so long as Britain could take Iraq and Palestine “from Dan to Beersheba.” So with Clemenceau he bargained away part of the Arab nationalist dream, just as months earlier he had been prepared to bargain away part of the Zionist dream with Enver.

Historians who have written about the Hussein-McMahon correspondence and the Sykes-Picot Agreement have spilled oceans of ink tracing the initial reaction of Hussein and his sons to the Balfour Declaration. Did they promise to welcome and work with Jewish colonists and only develop reservations later, or did they express disquiet at the outset? We can no more settle this debate than the others; the evidence, as always for this subject and period, is mixed and ambiguous. When Hogarth of the Arab Bureau traveled to Jeddah to explain the Declaration to Hussein, the “King seemed quite
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prepared for [the] formula and agreed enthusiastically, saying he welcomed Jews to all Arab lands.” But note that Hussein considered Palestine to be Arab land. Then Sykes coached Feisal on the subject in an extraordinary letter that reveals his own fantastic understanding of Jews:

Feisal replied: “I do not, and never did,
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despise anyone on account of his religion … Therefore on general grounds I would welcome any good understanding with the Jews.” Was the Balfour Declaration a “good understanding”? Feisal was not sure. He continued in this letter to Sykes: “But I do not know what is going on, nor what is the basis of the arrangement intended to be concluded about Palestine for Jews and Arabs.” To Hakki Bey, a prominent Muslim from Damascus, he expressed doubts in December 1917. He did not look
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favorably upon the Balfour Declaration, he told him, but he was not yet prepared to protest it.

Whatever Hussein and his immediate family thought of the Declaration, it produced grave reservations among Arabs and Muslims more generally. Hakki Bey found that when Arab leaders with Feisal in Aqaba learned of it, they did not hesitate to denounce “the ambitions and
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designs of Great Britain and France.” Elsewhere, two days after publication, William Yale of the U.S. State Department was reporting that “the Syrians have held meetings to protest against Zionism to all the Allies, and the younger and more hot-headed among the Moslems are laying plans for the future that bode no good for the peace of Palestine.” The Syrian leaders dispatched a telegram to Balfour:

In London the Islamic Society convened on November 5 at 46 Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, not far from the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square where the Zionists had gathered the previous summer to draft the
claim to their Promised Land. The Muslims, however, wished “to remind the British government of its pledge to keep inviolate the places of Moslem worship including Masjid-i-Aksa which is synonymous with the Latin name of Palestine.” They passed a second even more pointed resolution:

Five days after that an eminent member of the Anglo-Muslim London community, the barrister Amir Ali, founder of the Red Crescent Society, reiterated these concerns: “Palestine is unquestionably regarded by Moslems as a Holy Land, and Jerusalem as next in sanctity to Mecca and Medina,” he wrote to Lord Hardinge. “The soul of their Prophet
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rested in Jerusalem on its ascent to communication with the Divinity. Jerusalem and its environs are covered with Moslem shrines, mosques and mausoleums. Your Lordship will readily realize how offensive the idea must be to them that their holiest places in Palestine should be placed under Jewish control.”