PARIS 1919 (73 page)

To bring Syria under control, the French shrank it. They rewarded their Christian allies by swelling the borders of Mount Lebanon with the Bekáa Valley, the Mediterranean ports of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli, and the land in the south, north of Palestine. Thousands of Muslims now joined a state dominated by Christians. The result was a Syria which even after the French finally left still remembered what it had lost, and a Lebanon dancing uneasily around unresolved religious and ethnic tensions. In the 1970s, Lebanon blew up; to no one's surprise but the outside world's, the Syrian government took the opportunity to send in its troops, which have stayed ever since.

For the Arabs, 1920 remains the year of disaster: Palestine gone, then Syria, Lebanon and finally Mesopotamia. In the summer of 1920, rebellions broke out over about a third of Mesopotamia, up and down the Euphrates valley and in the Kurdish areas of Mosul. Bell, who had long since come around to the view that Mesopotamia must have self-government, had warned of this. Arnold Wilson, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, blamed it all on outside agitators and the influence of his namesake's Fourteen Points.
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Railway lines were cut and towns besieged; British officers were murdered. The British reacted harshly, sending punitive expeditions across the land to burn villages and exact fines. In a new but very effective tactic, their aircraft machine-gunned and bombed from the air. By the end of the year, order had been restored and Wilson had been replaced by his old mentor, the more diplomatic Cox.

The events in Mesopotamia shook the British government badly. “We are at our wits' end,” said Churchill, “to find a single soldier.” Critics asked whether Mesopotamia was worth the cost. Curzon, Churchill and Lloyd George all wanted to keep it if they could. The practical, and cheap, solution, which Bell and Cox had been urging, was to find a pliable Arab ruler. Conveniently, they had Feisal, to whom, after all, they did owe something. At a conference in Cairo in March 1921, Churchill, as colonial secretary, agreed to make him king. As a second prize, his older brother Abdullah, “a sensualist, idle, and very lazy,” would get the little state of Transjordan. Feisal was duly invited to visit Mesopotamia, where the stage management of Cox and Bell produced a stream of supplicants asking him to stay as their king. St. John Philby, who favored a republic and said so loudly, was sent packing. An election produced a vote of 96 percent in favor of Feisal. Bell designed his flag, his coronation and his kingship. “I shall have to set about getting proper ceremonial for Feisal's court,” she sighed. On August 23, 1921, in the cool of the early morning, Feisal was crowned king of what was henceforth known as “the well-rooted country”: Iraq. “It was an amazing thing to see all Iraq, from North to South, gathered together,” reported Bell. “It is the first time it has happened in history.”
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Gertrude Bell remained close to Feisal at first but, as he grew in experience and confidence, he chafed under the stream of advice.
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He was proving generally to be less amenable than the British had hoped. He pushed for the independence of his new country, and in 1932 Iraq joined the League of Nations as an independent state. Feisal died the following year. His son, a cheerful playboy, died in a car crash in 1939. His successor, Feisal's grandson, was killed in the coup of 1958 which made Iraq a republic. Hussein, Feisal's father, who had hoped to found a great Hashemite dynasty to run the Arab world, lost first his reason and then his throne in the Hejaz in 1924, when Ibn Saud finally overran it and created the kingdom that still bears his name. The only Hashemite kingdom that still survives is Jordan, where Abdullah, much to everyone's surprise, proved a very effective ruler. Abdullah's great-grandson is now king.

T. E. Lawrence, never really happy again after the war in the desert, also died in a crash, in 1935, when he swerved on his motorcycle to avoid two boys. Gertrude Bell committed suicide in 1926. Arnold Wilson left public service to work for Anglo-Persian Oil. At the age of fifty-five he was killed in action as an air force gunner over Dunkirk. Picot, whose agreement with Sykes had caused such trouble between France and Britain, ended his career under a cloud. Replaced in Syria in 1920, he was shipped off to Bulgaria, where he caused a scandal by an open affair with a woman of dubious reputation. Another posting in Buenos Aires brought more scandal and stories of unpaid bills. He retired from the French diplomatic service in 1932 and disappeared from history.
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Britain and France paid a price for their role in the peace settlements in the Middle East. The French never completely pacified Syria, and it never paid for itself. The British pulled back in Iraq and Jordan as quickly as they could, but they found they were stuck with Palestine and an increasingly poisonous atmosphere between Arabs and Jews. The Arab world as a whole never forgot its betrayal and Arab hostility came to focus on the example of Western perfidy nearest at hand, the Zionist presence in Palestine. Arabs also remembered the brief hope of Arab unity at the end of the war. After 1945, those resentments and that hope continued to shape the Middle East.

28

Palestine

AT THE END of February 1919 a middle-aged British research chemist wrote to his wife from Paris: “Yesterday, the 27th February, at 3:30 p.m. at the Quai d'Orsay there took place an historic session.” It was, he told her, “a marvellous moment, the most triumphant of my life!” Chaim Weizmann had been at the Supreme Council with a deputation of fellow Zionists to make the case for a Jewish home in Palestine. That day in Paris he had spoken briefly, with his customary clarity and energy. He appealed to the self-interest of the powers: millions of Jews were trying to leave the former Russian and Austrian empires. Where could they go? “The Great Powers would naturally scrutinize every alien who claimed to enter their countries, and the Jew would be regarded as a typical wandering alien.” The obvious solution was to let them go to Palestine; it was underpopulated, with plenty of empty space. With money and work, both of which the world's Jews were ready to provide, it could support millions more. All that was needed was the signal from the peacemakers. He was demanding this, he said proudly, “in the name of the people who had suffered martyrdom for eighteen centuries.” As he finished speaking, he told his wife, “Sonnino got up and congratulated me there and then, so did Mr. Balfour and all the others, except the French.”
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There were many such delegations in Paris and many demands. The Zionists did not have the influence or power of the Czechs or the Poles, nor was there in the public mind a Jewish cause like the Armenian one. They had some friends in powerful places, but they also faced hostility and indifference. Yet Weizmann was right to feel triumphant. He knew that, even if the French were hostile, the Americans and British were behind him; indeed, he had previously vetted his statements with members of their delegations.
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Both Weizmann and Zionism had come a long way from their origins and would go a long way yet.

The son of a modest timber merchant, Weizmann was born in Russia in 1874, in a tiny hamlet in, as he said, one of the “darkest and remote corners of the Pale of Settlement.” Almost half the world's Jews, some seven million, lived in Russia, most forced into the Pale, in what is today Belarus, Ukraine and eastern Poland. The country was flat and marshy— “mournful and monotonous,” said one Jewish writer—bitterly cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. The Jews were rich in tradition and faith, desperately poor in almost every other way. While their numbers were increasing, the land and resources allowed them by the tsarist government were not. “It was as if,” said an observer, “all the Jews of Russia were to be violently crowded in and piled on top of one another like grasshoppers in a ditch.” The government, which veered between indifference and brutality, offered no way out and no protection from anti-Jewish riots and pogroms. “It is an ugly life,” said a Jewish poet, “without pleasure of satisfaction, without splendour, without light, a life that tastes like lukewarm soup, without salt or spice.”
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Even in that world, though, ideas were stirring, ideas of socialism, democracy, nationalism. Some Russian Jews, such as Trotsky, turned to revolution; far more, hundreds of thousands, left for North America and Western Europe. In the years before 1914, the Jewish population in the United States went from 250,000 to 3 million; in Britain, from 60,000 to 300,000. Among the Russian Jews who moved westward was the young Weizmann. In Western Europe, he discovered a different world, where the ghettos and the old legal discrimination against Jews had vanished. Jews were able to live as British or French or Germans, with simply a different religion from most of their compatriots. Weizmann acquired a wife, a young medical student, herself from Russia, and two lifelong passions— for chemistry and Zionism.

At first Zionism—the struggle for a Jewish homeland, perhaps even a Jewish state, where Jews would be in a majority, where they would be safe and would be able to live with dignity—appealed to only a small number, to cranks or visionaries. By 1900, however, much had changed. Nationalism, which itself helped to produce Zionism, had also brought fresh dangers to Jews, when other nationalists turned a suspicious eye on the minorities among them. There was a bewildering and horrifying resurgence of the old dark European hatred for the Jews, even integrated, secular Jews. Sigmund Freud's father had his hat knocked off his head by a stranger who shouted, “Jew, get off the pavement.” Surprising numbers of French, in the home of liberty, equality and fraternity, showed themselves ready to believe a trumped-up charge of treason because the officer in question, Alfred Dreyfus, was Jewish. In prewar Vienna, the mayor was a notorious anti-Semite and in the charming coffeehouses the Viennese told crude anti-Jewish jokes. In 1897 Theodor Herzl, a journalist from Vienna, held the world's first Zionist congress. Weizmann attended the next one, and every one that followed.

Tall, balding, looking with his goatee like “a well-nourished Lenin,” Weizmann even then carried himself with great assurance. He criticized his seniors in the Zionist movement for being too timid. He publicly disagreed with Herzl over the scheme to buy Uganda from the British government and set up a Jewish state there. For Weizmann—and, in the end, for the overwhelming majority of Zionists—the only possible location was Palestine, in those days a small backward province of the Ottoman empire. That was where the holy places were and the reminders of the last Jewish kingdom, destroyed by the Romans. When Weizmann was once asked why the Jews had a right to Palestine, he simply replied: “Memory is right.”

Weizmann despised assimilated Jews and those who would not support Zionism. They were blind; worse, they were unpatriotic. “The essential point which most Jews overlook,” he said about the German Jews he had known as a student, “and which forms the very crux of the Jewish tragedy, is that those Jews who are giving their energies and their brains to the Germans are doing it in their capacity as Germans, and are enriching Germany and not Jewry, which they are abandoning.” A Jewish home in Palestine was essential. “Palestine,” he insisted, “and the building up of a Jewish nation from within, with its own forces and its own traditions, would establish the status of the Jews, would create a type of 100% Jew.”
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By 1914 Weizmann had established himself in Manchester as a reader (assistant professor) in biochemistry at the university. He had also risen in the Zionist organization, which now had 130,000 paid-up members, but he did not have the position he felt he deserved. Jews from the East felt he had become too Anglicized, English Jews that he was too Russian. He had offended too many of the older generation with his criticism of Herzl and too many of his contemporaries with his sarcasm and lack of tolerance for bores. His speeches were lectures, from a platform of superiority. Abba Eban, later Israel's foreign minister, worked for him as a young man: “He revealed a scientist's economy of phrase and emotion, a hard sense of realities, and an almost cruel insistence on telling his Jewish audiences how difficult and complex their Zionist task was going to be.” Weizmann became Zionism's leader in the end because there was no one else who could do the job. He frequently grew discouraged, often threatened to resign, but he never gave up on his long-term goal to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Zionism was his extraordinary ability to win over key figures, both within the Jewish community and among the world's leaders. “Starting with nothing,” he told an opponent, “I, Chaim Weizmann, a
yied
from Pinsk and only
almost
a Professor at a provincial university, have organized the
flower
of Jewry in favour of a project which probably by Rothschild (Lord) and his satellites is considered as mad.”
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With the war, Weizmann moved up a gear. By his own estimate he had 2,000 meetings with politicians, civil servants, diplomats: anyone who could be useful in gaining Palestine for the Jews. He overcame the offhand distaste for foreigners and Jews among the British upper classes. One forgot, said Cecil, with surprise, his “rather repellent and even sordid exterior” in the face of his “subdued enthusiasm” and “the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude.”
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Weizmann made a conquest of Cecil; more important, he made one of Cecil's cousin Balfour, foreign secretary after 1916. It was a strange friendship—the intense, committed Jew from the Pale and the charming, worldly Englishman who had drifted through life with such ease—but for Weizmann and Zionism it was crucial.

Balfour has always been hard to pin down: a philosopher who became a politician; an aesthete who loved tennis and golf; ruthless, as the Irish learned to their cost, but invariably kind and polite to his subordinates. When he forgot the name of a favorite thriller writer, he was mildly distressed. “That's always the way,” he said sadly, “so ungrateful; so ungrateful.” Languid, dressed with casual elegance, with a smile, said one, “like moonlight on a tombstone,” he rarely seemed to take himself or anything else seriously. He was a great parliamentary speaker, but he made light of it. “I say what occurs to me,” he told Churchill, “and sit down at the end of the first grammatical sentence.” He told a lunch party that, alas, he had a strange mental quirk when it came to decisions: “I can remember every argument, repeat all the pros and cons, and even make quite a good speech on the subject. But the conclusion, the decision, is a perfect blank in my mind.” His defenders called this a pose, just as his habit of staying in bed all morning was his way of working hard. Others were not so sure. “If you wanted nothing done,” said Churchill, “A.J.B. was undoubtedly the best man for the task.” Lloyd George was once asked what he thought Balfour's place in history would be. His answer: “He will be just like the scent on a pocket handkerchief.”
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From his father Balfour inherited a fortune that made him one of the richest men in Britain; from his mother, a deeply religious woman, the Cecil family tradition of public service and Conservative politics. Like Curzon, who succeeded him in the Foreign Office, he was part of that cosy, aristocratic world where everyone was somehow connected to everyone else. He once nearly got engaged, but the girl he had chosen died of typhoid fever. He never married, and one of his devoted sisters kept house for him. He was attached to his family and friends, but he did not really need them. As he wrote to one, “You are as necessary as you ever were— but how necessary is that? How necessary are any of us to any of us?”
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He was clever, fascinated by ideas, and with a great ability to grasp the essence of an argument. He was also curiously, even alarmingly, detached. At the height of German submarine warfare, which threatened to strangle Britain economically, his only response to the daily list of sinkings was “It is very tiresome. These Germans are intolerable.” In cabinet meetings, Lloyd George said, Balfour would present a case persuasively and then, after a pause, the other side with equal eloquence, ending with a sigh: “But if you ask me what course I think we ought to take then I must say I feel perplexed.” Curzon, who knew him well, came to regard him as an evil and dangerous man:

His charm of manner, his extraordinary intellectual distinction, his seeming indifference to petty matters, his power of dialectic, his long and honourable career of public service, blinded all but those who knew him from the inside to the lamentable ignorance, indifference and levity of his regime. He never studied his papers, he never knew the facts, at the Cabinet he had seldom read the morning's Foreign Office telegrams, and he never looked ahead. He trusted to his unequalled powers of improvisation to take him through any trouble and enable him to leap lightly from one crisis to another.
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It is strange, therefore, that Balfour not only made a commitment to Zionism but that he persisted with it. One of his subordinates thought that he had never really cared about anything else. Was it his early religious upbringing that left him, as it did Lloyd George, with an intimate knowledge of Jewish history? His fascination with the intellectual abilities of Jews? He told Nicolson that Jews were “the most gifted race that mankind has seen since the Greeks of the fifth century.” Did he see in Zionism, as he once said, “guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition that made the unassimilated Jew a great conservative force in world politics”? In a conversation with House, Balfour remarked that “someone told him, and he was inclined to believe it, that nearly all Bolshevism and disturbances of a like nature, are directly traceable to the Jews of the world. They seem determined either to have what they want or to upset present civilization.” While he found anti-Semitism vulgar, even deplorable, he also grumbled to a close woman friend that he had spent a weekend with too many Jews: “I believe the Hebrews were in an actual majority—and though I have no prejudice against the race (quite the contrary) I began to understand the point of view of those who object to alien immigration.” As with so much about Balfour, the workings of his mind and heart remain a mystery. Shortly before he died, one of his favorite nieces heard him say that “on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.”
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Balfour met Weizmann for the first time in 1906: “It was from that talk with Weizmann that I saw that the Jewish form of patriotism was unique. Their love of their country refused to be satisfied by the Uganda scheme.” In 1914 the two met again and, according to Weizmann, Balfour said with evident emotion, “It is a great cause you are working for; I would like you to come again and again.”
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Balfour was not Weizmann's only conquest. Churchill, Sykes and C. P. Scott all became his supporters. Most important, so did Lloyd George.

Like Balfour, Lloyd George had grown up with the Bible. “I was taught far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land. I could tell you all the kings of Israel. But I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the kings of England, and not more of the kings of Wales.” And were not the Welsh and the Jews really quite alike: religious, gifted and with a love of learning? Lloyd George was thrilled when British forces captured Jerusalem, “something which generations of the chivalry of Europe failed to attain.” His geography of Central Europe may have been shaky but he knew the Holy Land. (Indeed, his sweeping statement that the British mandate of Palestine must run from “Dan to Beersheba” caused endless problems at the Peace Conference as the experts poured over biblical atlases to try to find out what he really meant.)
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