Bible and Sword (44 page)

“Lloyd George began to fire questions at me,” runs Weizmann’s account, “about Palestine, about our colonies there, about the number of Jews in the country and the number who could go there. Then I had the surprise of my life when Herbert Samuel interposed some helpful remarks.… Lloyd George pointed out that I ought to talk with Balfour and the Prime Minister, Asquith. At this point Herbert Samuel said—I could hardly believe my ears—that he was preparing a memorandum on the subject of a Jewish state in Palestine to present to the P.M.”

Weizmann had supposed Samuel to be an anti-Zionist; but, though he found him instead an advocate, he seems never to have worked closely with him. The next move, however, was Samuel’s. In January 1915 he presented his Memorandum on “The Future of Palestine” to the Prime
Minister. Asquith found it distasteful. Samuel, he noted, proposed “the British annexation of Palestine, a country the size of Wales, much of it barren mountain and part of it waterless. He thinks he might plant in this not very promising territory about three or four million European Jews and that this would have a good effect upon those who are left behind. It reads almost like a new edition of
Tancred
brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted by this proposed addition to our responsibilities, but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favorite maxim that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H. S.”

More cold water was poured by the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Bertie, whom Weizmann sounded out. Lord Bertie, who was a Catholic, considered the whole thing “an absurd scheme” and trembled as to “what the Pope would say.”

Meanwhile Samuel, having revised his Memorandum—though without toning it down, for it still spoke of “an autonomous Jewish State”—sent it back to the Prime Minister, with little effect except to elicit the petulant remark that this “dithyrambic” proposal found its only other partisan in Lloyd George, “who I need not say does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass under the protectorate of ‘agnostic, atheistic France.’ “

Here Asquith was quite wrong, but he was temperamentally incapable of fathoming Lloyd George. In Balfour’s opinion Lloyd George’s interest was initially caught by the reappearance of the Old Testament in modern politics, and Lloyd George himself confessed that “when Dr. Weizmann was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place names which were more familiar to me than those of the Western front.” Indeed, there was hardly an Englishman to whom Dan and Beersheba did not mean more than Ypres or Passchendaele. In any event Asquith’s disapproval did not matter in the long run. Under the stress
of the war and divided councils he melted away before the more vigorous Lloyd George and finally disappeared from the scene altogether. For the time being, in a preliminary shake-up, Lloyd George moved nearer to direct control as minister of munitions, and at the same time Balfour entered what was now a coalition government as First Lord of the Admiralty. A year and a half were to pass before the line-up changed again, and it was not until Lloyd George became prime minister and Balfour foreign secretary, in December 1916, that the government began seriously to consider a public statement of policy on Palestine and opened official talks with the Zionists on the question.

But before that happened policy began to take shape in the field. We are still in the spring of 1915. The scene shifts to the Ottoman front. Two figures appear somewhere between Cairo and Damascus—“private eyes,” one might call them today, for the War Office. In command at the War Office was a great and imaginative soldier, the onetime surveyor of the Holy Land, the savior of Khartoum, now the country’s hero, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener. He had an eye for remarkable men. On his staff, buried at a desk job because he was undersized for the army, was a young archaeologist, an Arabic scholar, a wanderer of the lands from the Euphrates to the Nile who had just before the war done a survey of Sinai for the Palestine Exploration Fund. Perhaps it was this fact that led Kitchener to pick out T. E. Lawrence, a “desert man” like himself, and to send him to Cairo on what was vaguely called “military intelligence.”

Ever since the proud days of Pasha Mehemet Ali rumbles of revolt against Ottoman rule had been heard from one corner or another of the Arab world. No one had paid much attention, but now it was suddenly to Britain’s interest to mobilize what harassment of the Turk she could. The Arabs, ridden by their own rivalries, were of questionable value as allies, and their price was even more questionable; but Britain was now committed to the overthrow
of the Turk and fully intended to take over his Arab dominions in some form or other. Whether by direct sovereignty, protectorate, or sphere of influence depended on how things developed; but it was necessary, or at least it would be convenient, to win the inhabitants over to her side.

Lawrence’s dramatic adventures, the desert campaign, the disguises, the wooing of Hussein the old Sherif of Mecca and of his sons Feisal, the future king of Iraq, and Abdullah, the future king of Jordan, have passed into history. The promises concerning future autonomy and concerning the territory that it was to cover, made by Lawrence to the Arabs and confirmed in the correspondence between the Emir Hussein and Sir Henry MacMahon, are only tangential to this story, for they did not cover Palestine this side of the Jordan.

Before coming to them we must follow another figure in the story. Sir Mark Sykes, the one man who came the nearest to holding all the threads in his hand at any one time, and who, but for his sudden death, might have been able to bind them into a workable policy. In 1919, in the midst of the peace conference, he was stricken by influenza and died within five days at the age of forty. “Had he lived,” wrote Ormsby-Gore, another veteran of the Arab Bureau, in which Sykes and Lawrence both served, “the history of the Near East would have been different.… The disastrous delays which followed the Armistice would never have been possible had Mark been alive, buzzing about the government offices, speaking in Parliament, interviewing everybody, compelling attention.…”

Sykes compelled Kitchener’s attention in 1914 when, as a brilliant, erratic, adventurous foreign service officer, already widely traveled in the East, he was serving on the War Office general staff. “Sykes,” said Kitchener, suddenly turning on him one day, “what are you doing in France? You must go to the East.”

“What am I to do there?” Sykes asked.

“Just go there and come back,” said the War Minister, whose distaste for written orders was an agony to his colleagues. But Sykes was not a man to need further instruction. He was off, he investigated, he prowled around, he interviewed, he came back. What he saw, more especially what he foresaw, shaped policy as it developed during the next four years. Like Lawrence, he exerted an influence far beyond his official position; Lawrence because he had the force that attaches to all dedicated men, Sykes because of his irresistible energy and enthusiasm. Both belonged in that long line of Englishmen possessed by the spell of the East, now fallen into neglect and decay, but once the teeming center of the world, in which the faith, the arts, the laws of nations had their birth. Upon such men the East exerted the imperative pull of a natal land. Like Lawrence, Sykes was gripped by a vision of a renaissance of the East, and both believed that the time was now at hand. With the sweeping away of the Ottoman pall the ancient Semitic peoples, Israel and Ishmael, could renew themselves and their land.

“I meant to make a new nation,” wrote Lawrence in the
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, “to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.” The restoration of Israel he included in this dream-palace. “I back it,” he said elsewhere, “not because of the Jews but because a regenerated Palestine is going to raise the whole moral and material status of its Middle Eastern neighbours.”

Sykes’s motive was the same. He came home determined to work for an Arab nation, and later, when he discovered the Zionists, he saw in their zeal and energy an auxiliary to the goal of Middle Eastern revival. “It might be the destiny of the Jewish race,” he said, “to be the bridge between Asia and Europe, to bring the spirituality of Asia to Europe and the vitality of Europe to Asia.”

At the moment what was urgent, coincidently with the
Dardanelles campaign designed to take Constantinople, relieve Russia, and annihilate the Turk, was a settlement among the Allies as to the future share of each in the Ottoman dominions. Sykes was picked to negotiate terms, and the Sykes-Picot Treaty, one of the most unpopular documents of the war, was the result. In an
ex post facto
explanation made available to Sykes’s biographer, the Foreign Office described the treaty in a matchless phrase as one of “imperative expediency.” One can see why. It was indeed the most delicate of problems. Each of the Allies was on tiptoe to gratify century-old ambitions and acutely sensitive to any pretensions by a fellow eagle to grab more than its share of the carcass. But how to deal out the spoils without at the same time upsetting the applecart of the Arab Bureau, which was just then slowly drawing Hussein nearer and nearer to revolt against Turkey by promises of hegemony as future king of the Arabs? Obviously secrecy was essential lest the Arabs catch a whiff and balk. Both sets of negotiations were running concurrently. While Sykes was bargaining in Petrograd and Paris, Sir Henry MacMahon was exchanging correspondence with Sherif Hussein, who had Lawrence at his elbow in Arabia. While the Sherif was being promised one form of sovereignty, his future territories were being allotted among the Allies under another form.

The Sykes-Picot Treaty, negotiated and signed in secrecy and never revealed until the Bolsheviks threw open the czarist files, was a pure imperialist bargain of the old pattern. It did allow for an Arab federation of states within Turkey’s former dominions, but its terms, no matter how you stretch them, cannot be made to fit the pledge made to the Arabs. No promises having as yet been made to the Jews, their interests cannot be said to have been jeopardized. Sykes himself was not yet aware of the Zionists’ existence (though he knew all about the dealings with Hussein), and anyway, if there was one thing clear in the dark maze of the Sykes-Picot terms, it was that Palestine was
reserved for “special treatment” and not promised to anybody. All around it the former dominions of the Turk were most explicitly and exactly divided up, separated into Red and Blue zones, A and B areas, apportioned with regard to different levels of influence for ports, railroads, cities, districts, vilayets; this place promised to that power in return for that place to another power if the third power should not take a third place, and in the event that—Enough. But Palestine alone is designated a “Brown” zone and its fate left vague. The exact wording of the Treaty was: “Palestine, with the Holy Places, is separated from Turkish territory and subjected to a special regime to be determined by agreement between Russia, France and Great Britain.”

Exactly the same exception of Palestine was made in the terms of a bargain then being committed to paper between MacMahon and the Sherif of Mecca. Britain was “prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs,” stated the critical letter, dated October 24, 1915, within certain limits and boundaries previously agreed on. But one area within these limits was explicitly excluded: namely, “the portions of Syria lying to the West of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” This awkward phraseology simply means Palestine, a word that the experts could not use, because it always suffered from an unfortunate geographical inexactitude. In short, “the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was thus excluded from Sir Henry MacMahon’s pledge.” The authority here speaking was Winston Churchill when, as colonial secretary in 1922, he lopped off trans-Jordan from the rest of Palestine.

No one, neither Feisal nor Lawrence nor Weizmann nor Sykes nor the Cabinet nor anyone else, thought of the promise to the Arabs as conflicting with the still inchoate plans for the Zionists, or even with the Balfour Declaration once it was issued. A huge bulk of territory was covered by the MacMahon promise to the Arabs, but not what Balfour
used to call the “small notch”
^*
that was Palestine proper. All the Arab claims of later years cannot conceal the fact that both the old Sherif Hussein and Feisal, the active leader, were cognizant of and acquiesced in the exclusion of Palestine from the area of their promised independence, whether or not they had any mental reservations. Even after the British intention to make room in Palestine for the Jews was made public they did not take exception. When the Zionist Commission headed by Weizmann came to Palestine in 1918, while the guns were still firing, it was greeted by an article in the Mecca paper, published under Sherif Hussein’s name, that exhorted the Arabs to welcome the Jews as brethren and to co-operate for the common welfare. Weizmann visited Feisal at his desert headquarters in Amman, and there under the stars, with the omnipresent Lawrence making the third of a remarkable trio, the basis for a common understanding was reached. Later, in Paris, it was put in the form of a written document, signed by Feisal and Weizmann, in which the Emir agreed to “the fullest guarantees for carrying into effect the British government’s [the Balfour] Declaration of November 2, 1917,” including “all necessary measures to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” Feisal moreover addressed a letter to the American Zionist delegates at the Peace Conference saying that the Arabs and Jews “are working together for a reformed and revived Near East,” that the Arabs wish the Jews “a most hearty welcome home,” that “there is room in Syria for us both,” and that “indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”

Only later, after the Hashimite family failed to unify all the Arab lands and people, when they were pushed out of
Syria and lost Arabia to Ibn Saud, did a new set of Arab leaders maintain that Britain’s pledge to the Jews had conflicted from the beginning with Britain’s pledge to the Arabs. Only then was the MacMahon correspondence unearthed and construed as a
casus belli
. By this time the British, caught in the high tide of appeasement, were themselves engaged in a double effort to repudiate the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the Mandate and to look righteous while doing it. Government spokesmen dug Sir Henry’s correspondence out of the files, shook off twenty years’ dust, and declared with pained surprise that, in view of this pledge, there might indeed be some doubt of the validity of the Mandate. Nothing is more hollow than the air of sanctimony worn to cover a mean act; but there still remained participants in the original transaction willing to restate the facts. Feisal, Sykes, Lawrence, and Balfour were all dead before 1935, but Ormsby-Gore, who had served in the Arab Bureau throughout the negotiations, made it clear in Parliament that “it was never in the mind of anyone on that staff, that Palestine west of the Jordan was in the area within which the British government then undertook to further the cause of Arab independence.”