A Peace to End all Peace (56 page)

Arab partisans of Feisal in Palestine and Iraq now ranged themselves among Britain’s enemies—which raised the question of why Britain was maintaining a presence in the Middle East. The British public had been told that one of Britain’s goals was to support Feisal’s Arab movement. But if Feisal’s Arabs had become Britain’s enemies, why should she continue to support them? Moreover, Feisal’s supporters jeopardized Britain’s relations with France—among other places, in British-held Palestine east of the Jordan river. Their activities seemed likely to goad France into an invasion of Transjordan, which would plunge Britain into an unwanted and dangerous international conflict. Relations between Britain and France were fragile enough as it was—especially in regard to Palestine, a land that France had coveted for herself—and the British feared that Feisal’s partisans east of the Jordan might provide the French colonialist group with an excuse for sending troops across the border.

At about the same time that it ordered the invasion, conquest, and occupation of Syria, the French government inaugurated a diplomatic and propaganda campaign designed to prevent neighboring Palestine from becoming “a Zionist state.”
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Since Britain was sponsoring Zionism in Palestine, the campaign took on an anti-British hue; but the French government was even more opposed to a Jewish than to a British Palestine, and feared that France’s commercial and clerical interests in the Holy Land might be endangered by British-sponsored Zionism.

The language used by the Quai d’Orsay expressed refined, and that used in the press expressed crude, anti-Semitism.
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But in June 1920—when the two European allies, Britain and France, entered into detailed negotiations to draw a frontier between Palestine and Syria-Lebanon (“Palestine” and “Syria” were both vague terms, and it was unclear at the time where one ended and the other started)—the hard stance taken by French negotiators expressed French self-interest. For the French pictured the frontier as between France and Britain in the Levant, and took an uncompromising position, urged on by a colonialist group that bitterly accused France’s leaders of having abandoned too many of her claims and interests in Asia. The new chairman of the Commission of Foreign Affairs of the Chamber of Deputies, who also served as president of one of the principal French colonialist societies, the Comité de l’Orient, was as ready as was the popular press to brand compromise as treasonable. At stake in the negotiation of Palestine’s frontiers were the valuable headwaters of the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers—which the French successfully insisted on obtaining for Syria-Lebanon.

The Oeuvre des Ecoles d’Orient, which represented French Catholic missionaries in the Middle East, pictured the Jewish National Home as “merely a means for the English to undermine our position.”
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It also claimed to discern a Jewish world conspiracy behind both Zionism and Bolshevism “seeking by all means at its disposal the destruction of the Christian world.”
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Robert de Caix, who managed France’s political interests in Syria, agreed, claiming that “The revolutionary and prophetic spirit which is so often found among Jews has turned to Bolshevism” among the Zionists who were arriving in Palestine from eastern Europe.
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Thus the French saw their position in Syria and Lebanon as being threatened by a movement that they believed to be at once British, Jewish, Zionist, and Bolshevik. According to the president of the Oeuvre des Ecoles d’Orient, it was not merely French national interests but also religious sensibilities that required action to be taken against the Protestant and Jewish positions in Palestine. “It is inadmissible,” he said, “that the ‘Country of Christ’ should become the prey of Jewry and of Anglo-Saxon heresy. It must remain the inviolable inheritance of France and the Church. It would be a national infamy and an irreparable crime not to remove this sacred land from the brutal rapacity of our allies.”
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At the time, the French government financed an anti-British political club called the Literary Society which had branches in Jerusalem and other Palestinian towns. However, in 1920, the immediate French threat to British interests was posed in the large, and largely unpopulated, area east of the Jordan called Transjordan, that was to form roughly 75 percent of the territory included in the British Mandate for Palestine. In terms of tribal life and structure, Transjordan was akin to Arabia; in historical terms, much of it was part of the land of the Bible, and it had also once formed part of the Roman province of Arabia. Since the autumn of 1918, when Allenby drove out the Turks, it had been essentially ungoverned, for the British military authorities had left it under Feisal’s ineffective Damascus administration. This turned out to have been (from Britain’s point of view) a mistake, for when the French supplanted Feisal and his ministers as rulers of Damascus, they put themselves in a position to claim this area as Feisal’s successors.

Transjordan was a disordered area of tribal conflict. The British feared that the lawlessness of the area might be seized upon by the French as an excuse for occupying it to bring order and civilization. Arab enemies of French rule in Syria—claiming they were fighting to bring Feisal back to Damascus—had gathered and might mount raids from Transjordan against French Syria; and these could be used by the French as justification for mounting an invasion in retaliation.

The British administration, centered in western Palestine, proposed to send in British troops, but there were none to be had, for London opposed the venture; all that London would authorize was the sending in of a handful of civil administrators.
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A British officer serving in Transjordan, C. D. Brunton, reported to his superiors that people were saying the British would withdraw from the country and that “no one seems satisfied with our occupation.”
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Captain Brunton predicted that it would take little to throw the country into complete anarchy. He explained that

His immediate concern was that a representative of Feisal’s Hashemite family was raising passions against the French. On 9 September 1920 Brunton reported that the Hashemite representative had proclaimed a Holy War against the French in Syria, had recruited volunteers, and had released criminals from jail in the town of Amman to join his movement.
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Two days later, in a calmer mood, he was able to report that the Hashemite representative had secured, in all, only fifty volunteers.
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But Brunton remained unhappy about the British government’s approach to governing Transjordan: “The idea of controlling a country partially inhabited by predatory savages by giving it Home Rule and a few British advisers may sound attractive as an experiment,” he wrote, but in practice it was not working.
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Since Britain did not maintain an army in Transjordan, she could not defend the territory if France were to invade it. To retain Transjordan for herself, Britain would therefore have to avoid provoking a French invasion. Arab raids on French positions in Syria—if launched from Transjordan—could provoke such an invasion, and therefore had to be stopped. The policy of F. R. Somerset, a British official in Transjordan, was to stop the Arab tribes from launching raids against French Syria by playing off one tribe against another.

Somerset’s policy, if successful, would deprive France of a reason—or an excuse—for invading undefended Transjordan. But what if France were to attack the British trusteeship—not merely of Transjordan, but of the rest of Palestine as well—by other means: by politics, propaganda, and subversion rather than armed invasion? As of 1920, Arab nationalists hated France; but what if France should turn them around and persuade them to hate Britain instead? Somerset feared that France might launch a propaganda crusade for a Greater Syria, to include Transjordan and western Palestine, on an anti-Zionist platform
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that would be popular with Arabs everywhere in Palestine. France might promise the Arabs that if she were allowed to take Palestine (including Transjordan) away from Britain, she would put a stop to Zionism—and Arabs might rally behind France on the basis of such a program. Somerset’s view, which was shared by a large section of British officialdom, was that Zionists were compromising the British cause, as well as their own, by making their ultimate intentions public. “It is the Jews and not us that everyone is against,” he wrote. “If the Jews would keep their silly mouths shut they could buy up the whole country.”
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T. E. Lawrence took rather a different view: “He trusted that in four or five years, under the influence of a just policy, the opposition to Zionism would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.”
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But, for the moment, Arab opposition to Zionism was loud and lively, and was disturbing the peace of British-held Palestine.

In 1917–18, when General Allenby took Palestine away from the Turks, he established a British military administration for the country. Ever since then, throughout the military administration, there had run a strong streak of resentment at having been burdened by London with an unpopular and difficult-to-achieve policy: the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine pursuant to the Balfour Declaration. From the beginning, Gilbert Clayton, as chief political officer to General Allenby, and Ronald Storrs, as governor of Jerusalem, had avoided giving any sign that they proposed to support that policy. Both men privately professed to believe in Zionism, though Clayton in particular seemed to define it in its narrowest possible sense: the fostering of an expanded Jewish community in Palestine that could serve as a cultural and sentimental center for Jews throughout the world, but within a British administered, multinational Palestine that would not become a Jewish state. Other British officers serving in Palestine were unsympathetic to Zionism even in this limited sense, and sided with the Arabs, who opposed it altogether. As they saw it, London’s policy of Zionism might have been expressly designed to stir up trouble, and must have been devised by far-off officials who did not have to live with and deal with local conditions.

To Zionist leaders, on the other hand, it appeared that the wavering stance or downright hostility of the British administration hampered their effort to secure Arab acceptance of the Balfour Declaration. They claimed that, had the Arab population of the country been made to feel that the Balfour Declaration was the unalterable policy of the British government and inevitably would be carried into effect, Arabs would have acquiesced—and might even have become receptive to its benefits. Dr Weizmann and his colleagues in the Zionist leadership stressed their desire to cooperate with the Arab communities; emphasized that the new Jewish immigrants would not be taking anything away from the existing inhabitants, but would buy, colonize, and cultivate land not then being used; and repeated that Jewish colonization would bring substantial economic benefits to the whole country, and indeed to the whole Arab Middle East.

Among the Arabic-speaking communities of Palestine, there was considerable disagreement on most issues, and perhaps even on Zionism. This was shown in February 1919, at a congress convened by the anti-Zionist Moslem-Christian Society. A majority of the thirty active politicians who attended the congress were able to paper over their differences by agreeing on a program calling for an Arab federation headed by Feisal and centered on Syria. There was some feeling, however, in favor of creating a separate Palestine, some pro-British feeling, some pro-French feeling, and enough discord so that five of the thirty delegates did not sign a resolution opposing Zionism. Much volatility in political views was demonstrated by the delegates and their colleagues during the course of the next couple of years, as those who had called for Feisal to become king turned against him, pro-British and anti-British factions changed sides, and the proponents of Greater Syria were forced, by the French conquest of Damascus, to restrict the focus of their views to the territory about to be embraced within Britain’s Palestine Mandate.

Arab politics within Palestine were formed by the rivalry between the great urban families. Throughout the British occupation, the most conspicuous rivalry was that between the Jerusalem families of al-Husseini and al-Nashashibi. Al-Nashashibi family politics moved from anti-British to pro-British and pro-conciliation in 1920; and in the years immediately thereafter the Zionist leadership believed that it had arrived at a basis for mutual cooperation with the al-Nashashibi that might lead to Arab-Jewish harmony. The al-Husseini, however, who moved at the same time from supporters to opponents of the British, found themselves favored in the competition to lead the Arab communities of the area by the sympathy shown by the British local administration to the anti-Zionist cause. If even British officers argued that the Arabs should make no concessions, how could pro-conciliation Arab leaders persuade their followers that concessions had to be made?

Violence broke out late in 1919 when Bedouin tribes attacked Jewish settlements in the Upper Galilee, in the no-man’s land between the British and French military administrations. Early in 1920, marauding Arabs entered the Zionist settlements and, in the ensuing gun-fighting, several settlers were killed, including the Russian-Jewish war hero, Captain Joseph Trumpeldor.

Thereafter rumors were rife of violence to come in Jerusalem that spring. In response Vladimir Jabotinsky—the Russian-Jewish journalist who had organized the Jewish regiment in Allenby’s army—secured the agreement of other Zionist leaders to allow him to form a self-defense group, to be composed largely of veterans like himself of the Jewish Legion in the British army. Jabotinsky informed the British governor of Jerusalem that he was forming such a group; asked that his group be, in effect, deputized; and requested the British administration to issue arms to him. When the British refused, he bought arms from an Armenian gunrunner in the Old City.

The violence predicted for Jerusalem broke out on 4 April 1920. During the Moslem springtime festival of the Prophet Moses, fiery orators roused Arab mobs to what became three days of rioting against Jews, of whom some were killed and hundreds wounded.
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No casualties were suffered in New Jerusalem, however, which was patrolled by Jabotinsky’s forces. All of the casualties were suffered in the Old City of Jerusalem, which British army units prevented Jabotinsky’s forces from entering.

Adding an especially ominous tinge to the bloodletting in the Old City was the cry of the rioting mobs that “The Government is with us!”
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That the mobs were not unjustified in their cry became evident when the British military authorities meted out punishment. Only a few rioters were punished by serious court sentences; but Jabotinsky and his colleagues were swiftly brought before a closed court martial, charged with distributing arms to the self-defense group, and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor in the fortress-prison of Acre.
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These decisions caused an outcry that led the British government to order a court of inquiry into how the military were conducting the administration of Palestine.

The government’s court of inquiry held hearings in Jerusalem, at which military officials claimed that Jews were at fault, saying they had provoked the Moslems, while Jewish witnesses charged that the British military government had encouraged the rioters. Richard Meinertzhagen, the head of Military Intelligence in Cairo, had been sent out to Palestine to report on whether London’s pro-Zionist policy was being carried out, and when he testified in court that the Jewish witnesses were correct, the government was shocked into accepting the truth of their testimony.
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Meinertzhagen confided in his diary that “I am not sure that the world is not still too selfish to appreciate the worth of the merits of Zionist aims. The world is certainly too anti-semitic and too suspicious of jewish brains and money. In any case I find myself alone out here, among gentiles, in upholding Zionism…And that is the irony of the whole situation, for I am also imbued with antisemitic feelings…”
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Suspecting that his fellow officers might have moved from sentiments to actions, he spied on them while he was in Palestine. Later, he reported to General Allenby that he had planted an agent within the military administration, and had learned that the British colonel who served as chief of staff of the administration was conspiring with the Arab Mufti of Jerusalem to foment new anti-Jewish riots.
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Within weeks after the government had held its court of inquiry, London disbanded the military administration of Palestine and installed a civilian administration in its place. Lloyd George appointed Herbert Samuel to be its head, as the new High Commissioner. Samuel, a Jew and a leading Liberal, had been the first member of the British government—in 1914, when the war against Turkey began—to have proposed the creation of a British-sponsored Jewish homeland in Palestine. His appointment showed that the Prime Minister was unwavering in his Palestine policy; yet the violence which the military administration had encouraged caused others in London to have second thoughts about support for a Jewish homeland. Even Winston Churchill, who had been an enthusiastic pro-Zionist all his life, wrote, on 13 June 1920, to Lloyd George that “Palestine is costing us 6 millions a year to hold. The Zionist movement will cause continued friction with the Arabs. The French…are opposed to the Zionist movement & will try to cushion the Arabs off on us as the real enemy. The Palestine venture…will never yield any profit of a material kind.”
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These doubts were intensified by spectacular uprisings in Iraq at about the same time, that drained Britain’s resources, and which—coming after the riots in Egypt, the war in Afghanistan, the religious war in Arabia, the nationalist rebellion in Turkey, and the troubles with French Syria—suggested to many Englishmen that Britain should withdraw from the Middle East entirely.