PARIS 1919 (74 page)

In his time as minister of munitions during the war, Lloyd George liked to say that he had incurred a particular debt to Weizmann. Britain had been running desperately short of acetone, essential for making explosives. By chance, Weizmann was working on a process for producing it on a large scale. In a grand gesture he made it available to the British for the duration of the war without payment. When Lloyd George asked Weizmann to accept an honor from the king, the answer was “There is nothing I want for myself.” When Lloyd George pressed him, Weizmann asked for support for the Zionist cause. “That,” claimed Lloyd George in his memoirs, “was the fount and origin of the famous declaration about the National Home for the Jews in Palestine.” (The French had yet another theory; that Lloyd George had a mistress who was the wife of a prominent Jewish businessman.)
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Weizmann and his acetone made a wonderful story but British statesmen, for all their sentiment, would not do anything against Britain's interests. By 1917, these appeared to be converging with Zionist goals. Weizmann wanted a Jewish Palestine and, as he pointed out, it would need protection for some years to come. He did not trust the French and was cool toward the Americans. Britain was not only powerful, but just and fair; in addition, “the fact that England is a biblical nation accounts for the spiritual affinity between them and the Jews.” With Jewish immigration, Palestine would become “an Asiatic Belgium” and an important strategic asset for the British empire. “Palestine is a natural continuation of Egypt and the barrier separating the Suez Canal from . . . the Black Sea.”
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That argument made sense to Lloyd George, to the War Office, and to at least some in the Foreign Office. So much the better if it removed Palestine from the French, who had been promised it under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that wartime arrangement among the Allies to divide up the Arab Middle East. From 1917, with Lloyd George's encouragement, Sykes met privately with Weizmann and other Zionists. The final, and perhaps most important, factor in swinging British support behind the Zionists was to make propaganda among Jews, particularly in the United States, which had not yet come into the war, and in Russia, where Jews for obvious reasons were lukewarm toward their own government. When alarming rumors reached London that Germany was thinking of making a public declaration in favor of Zionism, the British government moved with speed.

Curzon, who unlike most of his colleagues had actually been to Palestine, thought the Zionist dream absurd. “I cannot conceive a worse bondage,” he said, “to which to relegate an advanced and intellectual community.” He also asked an awkward question: “What is to become of the people of the country?” A much more passionate argument came from Montagu, the highly strung secretary of state for India, who thought Zionism a “mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” He himself was a Jew by faith but an Englishman by nationality. Was he now to be told that his true loyalty lay in Palestine? And what would that mean for the rights of Jews as citizens of other countries? The cabinet discounted these objections and by the end of October 1917 it had agreed on a formula. Sykes rushed out of the meeting waving a piece of paper: “Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!” Balfour announced British policy in a brief letter to Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew: “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the attainment of this object.” The words had been chosen with great care. “National home,” as the British government insisted repeatedly, did not mean a state. Weizmann and other Zionist leaders were equally careful. There was no intention, they said, of creating a Jewish state right away. It might be different, of course, in some distant future, when more Jews had emigrated to Palestine. Few people were convinced, and perhaps it was not expected that they would be. The day after the declaration was made public,
The Times'
s headline read, “Palestine for the Jews. Official Sympathy.” From the start, Jews and non-Jews alike, politicians, diplomats and journalists, talked in terms of a Jewish state.
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In the next months, as British forces moved north from Egypt to capture Jerusalem and then the whole of Palestine, what everyone called the Jewish Legion—units of the Royal Fusiliers that had been specially recruited among Jews—went with them. (Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant, abrasive and extremist Russian journalist who had brought the Jewish Legion into existence, marched in its ranks as a second lieutenant.)

When Allenby set up his military administration in Palestine, his first proclamation and all official documents were translated into Hebrew as well as Arabic. In the summer of 1918, with the approval of the British government, the Zionists purchased an estate on a hill in Jerusalem and, in the presence of a crowd that included Allenby and all the senior Allied commanders, Weizmann laid the foundation stones for the Hebrew University. In 1918, too, the British government authorized the dispatch to Palestine of a Zionist commission, headed by Weizmann. Although its instructions were vague—it was to act as a link with the British military administration as well as organizing the local Jews—the commission took on the character of official representative of the Jewish community in Palestine. Moreover, it acted, as British officers sometimes complained, like a government in the making.
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Weizmann himself moved cautiously. He easily resisted pressure from a minority of radicals, including Jabotinsky, who demanded an immediate Jewish state. He maneuvered to ensure that the British or the Americans, not the French, who were too imperialistic and too Catholic, became the mandatory power for Palestine. His task was complicated by divisions and rivalries within Zionism. In an echo of the Peace Conference itself, the Americans in the Zionist movement challenged the dominance of the Europeans. The American Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference complained that Weizmann was dictatorial and undemocratic, his draft memorandum on Palestine “too meagre.” They demanded a “Jewish Commonwealth,” even a “Jewish state,” with a Jewish governor and Jews throughout the administration and a Jewish majority on the executive and legislative councils. Weizmann found the Americans legalistic and politically naïve. “I urge again, our demands not to be a matter of a formula of the Peace Conference, but to be insistently and tirelessly pursued from day to day and from month to month.” He got his way partly by threatening, yet again, to resign, partly because the British government made it quite clear that it would not take on the mandate under such conditions. At that stage the Americans were not prepared to challenge him openly. As Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice, pointed out: “He has a sway over English public men and over English permanent officials who will continue to govern England when Lloyd George and Balfour will be no more—such as no other Jew in England or on the continent has or can easily acquire.”
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Most of the leading Zionists went to Paris for the conference. Weizmann kept up his customary rounds of interviews with the powerful and influential. House, as usual, was sympathetic, Wilson gave him forty minutes and Balfour assured him that Palestine would be given generous borders. The French were less forthcoming. “I speak French fluently,” Weizmann told Wilson, “but the French and I speak a different language.” Weizmann was careful not to talk of a future Jewish state or a Jewish majority in Palestine. On one occasion, though, he used a phrase that came back to haunt the Zionists: that Palestine should “be as Jewish as England was English.”
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When the Zionist mission appeared before the Supreme Council on February 27, Weizmann was not the only speaker. No American Zionist spoke, partly because their chief spokesman had not arrived from London, but several Europeans did. The Polish writer Nahum Sokolow reminded his listeners of the dreadful plight of the Jews of Eastern Europe: “The hour of deliverance of his unhappy people had struck.” Weizmann, who stood watching him, later recalled, “I could see Sokolow's face and without being sentimental, it was as if two thousand years of Jewish suffering rested on his shoulders.” Menachem Ussishkin, a forceful Russian Jew, spoke in Hebrew, the ancient language which was now coming to life again. The final speakers—André Spire, a poet and leading figure in French Zionism, and Sylvain Lévy, a distinguished scholar—had been added to the delegation at the insistence of the French government and over the strenuous objections of Weizmann and his colleagues. What they feared happened: where the Zionist mission claimed to speak for the vast majority of Jews, Spire and Lévy showed a more complicated picture. They pointed out, quite correctly, that only a minority of French Jews were Zionists. They themselves were proud to be French (as Lévy said, “Jewish in sentiment, but French above all”). They requested that France's ancient rights in Palestine, which included acting as protector for Catholics, be maintained and suggested that France, as a Mediterranean nation and a great force for civilization in the world, would be the most suitable nation to take on the mandate.
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French Foreign Ministry officials looked on approvingly. (Lévy, said Weizmann contemptuously, looked as if he had been hypnotized.) The French had supported the idea of a Jewish homeland during the war, mainly for propaganda reasons, but there was no need in peacetime to give up French claims in Palestine, claims that, as colonialists never tired of pointing out, went back to the Crusades. French officials attached to the military occupation in Palestine were conspicuously devout. The British had no idea, Picot told Ronald Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, of the rejoicing in France when the Holy City had been taken from the Turks. Storrs replied briskly: “Think what it must have been for us who took it.” Before the Zionist mission presented its case to the Supreme Council, a senior official informed Spire, “we are anxious for a French Zionist to make a statement favourable to Zionism, but you should try to make it clear that France must have Palestine.”
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Lévy did even better, at least from the French point of view. Speaking at considerable length, he said firmly that he was not a Zionist at all. He pointed to the problems that would be caused if all the Jews in Eastern Europe, who Weizmann claimed were simply waiting for the signal to move to Palestine, actually did so. The country was not yet capable of supporting a large population. (In fact, although he would not have admitted it publicly, Weizmann shared this concern.) Lévy also raised a serious question: Was a Jewish home the right thing for Jews? “It seemed to him shocking that the Jews, as soon as their rights of equality were about to be recognised in all countries of the world, should already seek to obtain exceptional privileges for themselves in Palestine.” How could Jews around the world, as some Zionist leaders had suggested, share in the government of Palestine? “It would be dangerous to create a precedent whereby certain people who already possessed the rights of citizenship in one country would be called upon to govern and to exercise other rights of citizenship in a new country.” Jews already came under suspicion; “as a Frenchman of Jewish origin, he feared the results.” The argument was the same as Montagu had made in his attack on the Balfour Declaration. “A shameful spectacle,” Weizmann had said of Montagu and now he turned on Lévy, hissing “Je ne vous connais plus. Vous êtes un traître.” (“I no longer know you. You are a traitor.”)
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No decision was made on Palestine that day, or for months to come, and it barely came up at subsequent meetings of the Peace Conference. As so often happened in Paris, an issue that was to cause increasing trouble over the years was scarcely considered at all. “The Palestinians are very bitter over the Balfour Declaration,” reported an American intelligence officer in 1917. “They are convinced that the Zionist leaders wish and intend to create a distinctly Jewish community and they believe that if Zionism proves to be a success, their country will be lost to them even though their religious and political rights be protected.” The Balfour Declaration had promised such protection for what it called “the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” a curious formulation when Palestinian Arabs, most of them Muslim but including some Christians, made up about four fifths of a population of some 700,000. It also reflected a tendency on the part of both the world's statesmen and Zionist leaders to see Palestine as somehow empty. “If the Zionists do not go there,” said Sykes firmly, “some one will, nature abhors a vacuum.” A British Zionist is supposed to have coined the phrase “The land without people—for the people without land.”
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Even those who recognized that there were Arabs living in Palestine tended to view them through the spectacles of Western imperialism. The Zionist settlers who arrived there before the war were frequently surprised at how “Oriental” and primitive their new land was. They and their leaders talked hopefully, for many of them were progressive and liberal, of how their presence would tug the Arabs out of their tradition-bound lives and help them to move forward. Herzl assured a member of a prominent Arab family that prosperity would grow throughout Palestine. “If one looks at the matter from this point of view, and it is the correct view, one inevitably becomes a friend of Zionism.” There would be no need for Arabs to think of self-government. Yet even before 1914, there were signs that nationalism and a corresponding unease at the Zionist presence were starting to stir among the Palestinian Arabs. Weizmann, who when he talked about the Palestinians sometimes sounded like a British district officer in India, at first discounted this: “The Arabs, who are superficially clever and quickwitted, worship one thing, and one thing only— power and success.” The innocence, and the incomprehension, were breathtaking—and dangerous.
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