The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (32 page)

All the delegates were pleased to see the family’s patriarch, the revered Ismail Bey, whose aristocratic presence imparted dignity to the gathering and gave the family a certain influence over the proceedings. The British, too, respected Ismail and acknowledged his fine record by putting him in charge of education in Jerusalem, and he repaid them by adopting a pro-British posture. His attendance at the conference was not wholehearted, and he disapproved of many of the young men’s actions. While he did not voice his true opinions at the conference, many of the delegates were aware that he disliked the idea of Greater Syria and was hoping to see the creation of an Arab Palestine. Nor did he support aggressive action against Zionism. Having entertained Chaim Weizmann at his house, Ismail believed it was possible to come to an understanding with the Zionist movement, though he did not dare say so in public.
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Despite Ismail’s attendance, the family had yet to reach a dominant position in the political arena. The Husaynis were conspicuously absent from the petition sent by the conference to the Paris Peace Conference, though they undoubtedly helped to formulate it. The petition read:

We, inhabitants of all Palestine, consisting of the Arab districts of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre, Muslims and Christians alike, have met and chosen our representatives at the conference in Jerusalem … Before any discussion takes place on the problem of Palestine, we wish to express our strong protest against the promise given to the Zionists to establish a national home in our native land and to migrate to this country and settle in it.
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The petition’s authors went on to note that they represented the absolute majority of the people of Palestine.

The Husaynis took no part in other decisions of the conference. At the end of the discussions, the conference resolved to send two delegations to promote the Palestinian cause in world opinion: one to Paris and another to Damascus. There were no Husaynis in the more important of the two, the delegation to Paris; in any event, the occupying authorities stopped it from leaving. But even the lesser mission to Damascus did not include any of the Husaynis. Mufti Kamil and Mayor Musa Kazim were puzzled by their younger relatives’ frustration that
no member of their family was elected to a representative post. How significant were places in such delegations compared with an ancient honor like that of
mufti
or the influential post of mayor? Time would show that al-Hajj Amin was right: a new era had begun, and the game had new rules.

It was not the military governor’s decision to prevent the Palestinians from presenting their case before the international peace conference that excluded any significant development in this direction. It was a change in American posture that froze any genuine attempts to reconsider Palestine’s fate. Had it been up to the American delegation, all the nations and groupings formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire would have been invited to address the conference and express their wishes. But the ailing Democratic US President Wilson was unable to contend with the colonial powers because the Republican-dominated US Congress was eager to resume America’s prewar isolationism. Thus the two aging colonial empires of Britain and France, whose time would come before long, were left free to carve up the defeated Ottoman Empire. Their governments had no intention of allowing local representatives to appear before the conference and present agendas different from those decided upon in London and Paris. It was none of the local people’s business, said British Prime Minister Lloyd George; Georges Clemenceau, who was even less attentive to such wishes from below, readily agreed. The two powers had divided the region between them as far back as May 1916, before anyone knew the outcome of the war. Now that they were in power, they certainly had no intention of letting anyone else have their say. Zionism, however, being the colonialists’ ally, was allowed to appear and make its case before the world.

Nevertheless, there were some in the British Colonial Office and Parliament who viewed the emerging Arab national movement favorably, as a process that might benefit Britain. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee provided them with a metahistorical theory to justify British support for Arab nationalism, which he considered to be a new and youthful phenomenon, rather than for Jewry, which he argued would disappear from history like the colonial empire. But on the whole, support for the Arabs was neither metaphysical, as proposed by Toynbee, nor romantic,
à la
Lawrence of Arabia, but a pragmatic commitment to the interests of the British Empire. In Egypt in 1919, the British refusal to permit local Arab views to be heard by the international forum produced a national revolution and resulted in the creation of the Wafd (‘New Delegation’) Party – named after
the group of Egyptian representatives whom the British barred from traveling to Versailles, as they did in Palestine. The term became synonymous with concepts like ‘homeland’, ‘people’ and ‘nation’. The Wafd was the dominant party in Egypt until Nasser came to power. It fought against the British presence in Egypt and laid the groundwork for the independent state of Egypt, which would influence the entire Arab world.

Barred from sending a delegation, the Palestinians used the old method of bombarding the participants at the conference with petitions and protests, each town and city sending its own. They had no other choice, given that the Zionists had a very respectable representation at Versailles, led by the skilled diplomat Chaim Weizmann. The brief appearance of King Faysal of Syria in Versailles provided some balance, but only the Americans were moved by such minor spokesmen on the conference floor. The leaders of the old colonial delegations scarcely noticed them and did not give much thought to non-imperial arguments.

Not everyone despaired when the Palestinian delegation was barred from leaving; nor was everyone content with sending petitions. In March 1919, directly after the first Palestinian Congress, the Muslim-Christian Association and the Arab Club decided to act. The dynamic al-Hajj Amin inspired their initiative. He had heard from his brother the
mufti
that the governor of Jerusalem was due to go to Egypt at the end of the month and that before leaving he would advise the Palestinians to hold a protest demonstration against the Zionists. Kamil and Musa Kazim spread a rumor that Storrs had asked that the demonstration be held in his absence, so that he would not be blamed if things got out of hand. Al-Hajj Amin convened the members of his club to discuss the matter and deplored the fact that ‘since the Balfour Declaration there has not been a single demonstration against Zionism’.

But not everyone was ready to take such a risk. Al-Hajj Amin’s former teacher Khalil al-Sakakini and his cousin Yaqub Faraj poured cold water on the eager young leader and persuaded him that Storrs was playing a dangerous game and could not be counted on to support them if they were charged with organizing a demonstration that turned violent. Sakakini noted in his diary that nobody liked Storrs: because of his close association with the Husaynis, he listened to no one else. This seems somewhat unjust, since at this time Sakakini was in the Husayni camp, but perhaps he was uneasy about the close friendship
between Mufti Kamil and the British governor. Sakakini preferred the personality and the interests of Storrs’s deputy, Waters-Taylor, and suspected that if there were a demonstration, the governor would blame his deputy and have him dismissed.
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The eyes of the world were on the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles near Paris. On 18 January 1919, representatives of the ten victorious powers, led by US President Woodrow Wilson, met there to explore ways to avoid another catastrophe like the one that had ravaged Europe, in which 8 million soldiers and some 25 million civilians had lost their lives. But behind the humane concern for peace lurked the old ambitions of the European powers to help themselves to great chunks of the defeated Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires. The future of the Middle East was, naturally, among the secondary issues that lay before the conference – the primary ones were the future of Germany, Poland and the Balkans, as well as the economic and military arrangements for running the new world projected by President Wilson. Since Russia quit the war and was caught up in civil strife, Britain and France remained the dominant parties with interests in the Middle Eastern territories of the erstwhile Ottoman Empire. This time the American president demanded that, in contrast to the Sykes–Picot Pact, the future agreement should have international backing; moreover, he wanted to hear the demands of nations in the region or their representatives.

The Zionist movement had prepared well for the dramatic diplomatic show. Its leadership, headed by Chaim Weizmann, had not been carried away with optimism as had the American Zionists, who believed that all the problems would now be resolved and the ‘return’ of the Jews to their ancient homeland was assured. Weizmann and his associations were pleased by the encouraging developments since the Balfour Declaration but considered the Paris Peace Conference to be the beginning of the struggle rather than its conclusion. The first step was to send a Zionist committee to Jerusalem to accelerate the construction of a ‘national home’. But here they ran into the cautious Governor Storrs, whom they regarded as anti-Zionist because he opposed some of their more far-reaching proposals. They had to content themselves with establishing a foothold while getting ready for the peace conference.

Sir Herbert Samuel – later the first British High Commissioner in Mandatory Palestine – chaired an advisory committee to help the Zionist leadership prepare for the conference. Together they crafted a
demand for the Balfour Declaration to be implemented in every possible way by the British military, and later civil, authority in Palestine. The text of the demand was presented to the conference on 23 February 1919. The Palestinians’ demand had been sent to the conference a few days earlier, but no Palestinian Arab was called upon to present their case, and it is not known if anyone at Versailles even read the document. However, Nahum Sokolov, spokesman of the Zionist leadership, was allowed to address the Council of Ten, and it is known that Lord Balfour, Britain’s representative on the council, listened most attentively, as did the other council members.

Sokolov outlined the historical reasons for the Jewish demand and stressed that there was no solution to the problems of the Jews of Europe other than the Zionist one. Weizmann later noted that Sokolov had spoken ‘as if the suffering of two thousand years of exile rested on his shoulders’. One doubts that this was what impressed Balfour; it was more the option of Britain avoiding the mass immigration of poor Eastern European Jews that delighted him. Balfour himself spoke after Sokolov and suggested that the Jews’ economic distress could be resolved only in the framework of a ‘national home’ in Palestine. They were not the only Jewish spokesmen to address the conference. They were followed by Menahem Ussishkin and André Spire, who upheld the same ideas.

Only one person, a French Jew by name of Sylvain Lévi, was allowed to present an anti-Zionist Jewish position. Lévi’s statement put a crimp in the impressive Zionist presentation, but the American foreign secretary broke the rules and gave Chaim Weizmann the floor for the second time to make a resounding conclusion to a most effective Zionist public relations campaign. At this time, Weizmann also persuaded King Faysal of Syria to express some support for Zionism, arguing that this would enable the Jews to use their influence with the Americans and others to pressure the British government to keep its promise to the Hashemites. Faysal soon abandoned his recognition of the Balfour Declaration and his brief cooperation with Weizmann, but his support was sufficient to weaken the Palestinian position in the peace conference even further.

Thus not a single Palestinian representative appeared before this very important international conference, both because of internal dissent and British obstruction. The Husaynis, though still the leading political force in the country, were denied both a place on the international stage and the experience that comes with it. As the struggle continued
to rage not only on the ground but also in diplomatic arenas, this inexperience would undermine their effectiveness. Weizmann was able to pilot the Zionist vessel through the rocks of high-level international politics, while the young Husaynis struggled through internal disputes.

Fortunately for the Palestinians, when the Americans realized that they could not persuade their European allies to let the nations of the Middle East present their cases, they decided to send a mission to the region. Once discussions in Jerusalem ended, the Palestinians heard that an American team would tour Greater Syria to investigate the wishes of its inhabitants. (It was first proposed that the mission include British and French experts, but again London and Paris took no interest in the matter.) President Wilson himself appointed the team’s leaders: Dr Henry King was President of Oberlin College, and Charles Crane was a trustee at Roberts College in Istanbul (later Boğaziçi University) and a businessman well-connected with many of the regional leaders.

News of the forthcoming visit caused a flurry in Damascus. Amir Faysal, who still governed on behalf of the Allies but was determined to become King of Greater Syria, hoped to convince the visitors that the populations of Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Palestine all wished to be united under his rule. He therefore urged all the secret national associations that had proliferated under Ottoman rule in Damascus and other cities to unite into a single party, the Arab Independence Party (Istiqlal), which would take part in parliamentary elections and call for the unity and independence of Greater Syria, if necessary under the overlordship of a mandatory power.
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The idea of a mandate was present before the Paris Peace Conference was convened. Several American experts introduced it to President Wilson as the best compromise between independence for the Arab nations, as demanded by their leaders, and colonial rule, as requested by Britain and France. The mandate would be granted by the League of Nations – the supranational organization conceived by Wilson as the principal bulwark against another world war and as means to settle international disputes – for a limited period, during which the mandatory power would guide the state it administered towards full independence. Upon hearing about it for the first time during his visit to Versailles, Faysal found the idea of a mandate acceptable, but only if it were American or British. Under no circumstances would he agree to a French mandate, although according to the terms of the Sykes-Picot Pact, Syria and Lebanon were designated France’s sphere of influence.
It was this impasse that eventually led to the removal of the Hijazi amir from Damascus and destroyed the prospect of a Greater Syria.
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