A Peace to End all Peace (68 page)

IV

Churchill had spent a lifetime immersed in the political culture of Europe, in which it was normal when putting forth a proposal to take account of the needs and desires of all interested parties, including adversaries. Thus when Kitchener, Clayton, and Storrs in 1914–15 contemplated excluding France from the postwar Arab Middle East, they noted that Britain would have to compensate France for doing so by seeing that she obtained territorial gains elsewhere in the world; and while this may not have been a realistic appreciation of what France would accept, it was a realistic recognition that if Britain made territorial gains France would insist on matching them.

Similarly, in postwar Turkey, Kemal—a statesman with a European cast of mind—formulated territorial demands for Turkish nationalism not merely on the basis of his appreciation of what Turkey needed but also on his understanding of what Turkey’s neighbors could accept.

This was the sort of statesmanship to which Churchill was accustomed; but he did not find it in the Palestinian Arab delegation in London, which did no more than repeat its demands. Palestine was and is an area of complex and competing claims, but the Arab delegation took account of no claims, fears, needs, or dreams other than its own. Unlike the Zionist leaders, who sought to compensate Arab nationalism by supporting Arab versus French claims to Syria, who envisaged areas of Arab autonomy within Palestine, and who planned economic and other benefits for Arabs who chose to live within the confines of the Jewish homeland, the Arab leaders made no effort to accommodate Jewish aspirations or to take account of Jewish needs.

Dealing with Middle Easterners such as these was far more frustrating than had been imagined in wartime London when the prospect of administering the postwar Middle East was first raised. In Churchill’s eyes, the members of the Arab delegation were not doing what politicians are supposed to do: they were not aiming to reach an agreement—any agreement. Apparently unwilling to offer even 1 percent in order to get 99 percent, they offered no incentive to the other side to make concessions. Churchill remonstrated with the Arab leaders—to no effect.

V

The Arab delegation to London, which was headed by Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini,
^*
president of the Arab Executive, apparently refused to understand what Churchill was saying. Members of the delegation would ask a question, and then when Churchill had answered it, would ask the same question again, as though they had not heard Churchill’s reply. Churchill showed signs of frustration and anger at this tactic, but continued to repeat his answers in the evident hope of finally making himself understood. It was in this spirit that he repeated that land was not being taken away from Arabs; that Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so.

In the Middle East, things rarely were what they seemed to be, and the land issue in Palestine was a case in point. The Arab delegation to London did in fact understand what Churchill meant about Arabs wanting to sell land to Jews, for Musa Kazim Pasha, the president of the delegation, was himself one of those who had sold land to the Jewish settlers.
¹⁵
So had other members of the Arab delegations that he brought with him to London in 1921–2 and in succeeding years.

Prince Feisal and Dr Chaim Weizmann had agreed in 1918 that there was no scarcity of land in Palestine: the problem, rather, was that so much of it was controlled by a small group of Arab landowners and usurers.
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The great mass of the peasantry struggled to eke out a bare living from low-yielding, much-eroded, poorly irrigated plots, while large holdings of fertile lands were being accumulated by influential families of absentee landlords.

The Zionist plan, as outlined by Weizmann to Feisal in 1918, was to avoid encroaching on land being worked by the Arab peasantry and instead to reclaim unused, uncultivated land, and by the use of scientific agricultural methods to restore its fertility. The large Arab landholders, however, turned out to be eager to sell the Jewish settlers their fertile lands, too—at very considerable profits.
^*
Indeed Jewish purchasers bid land prices up so that, not untypically, an Arab family of Beirut sold plots of land in the Jezreel valley to Jewish settlers in 1921 at prices ranging from forty to eighty times the original purchase price.
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Far from being forced by Jews to sell, Arabs offered so much land to Jews that the only limiting factor on purchases became money: the Jewish settlers did not have enough money to buy all the land that Arabs offered to them.
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Not merely non-Palestinian Arabs but the Palestinian Arab leadership class itself was deeply implicated in these land sales that it publicly denounced. Either personally or through their families, at least a quarter of the elected official leadership of the Arab Palestinian community sold land to Jewish settlers between 1920 and 1928.
¹⁹

The Zionist leadership may have been misled by such dealings into underestimating the depth of real local opposition to Jewish settlement. The British government, on the other hand, misjudged not merely the depth but also the nature of the Arab response: in treating the land issue as if it were valid rather than the fraud it was, Churchill and his colleagues either misunderstood or pretended to misunderstand the real basis of Arab opposition to Zionism. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement was rooted in emotion, in religion, in xenophobia, in the complex of feelings that tend to overcome people when newcomers flood in to change their neighborhood. The Arabs of Palestine were defending a threatened way of life. The Arab delegations that went to see Winston Churchill did not articulate this real basis for their objection to Zionism. Instead they argued that the country could not sustain more inhabitants; and Churchill took them at their word. He accepted their statement that they were objecting on economic grounds; and then he went ahead to prove that their economic fears were unjustified.

VI

In a decision that had lasting impact—and that showed that Arab economic fears were unjustified—Churchill in 1922 approved a concession for hydro-electric schemes in the Auja and Jordan river valleys to Pinhas Rutenberg, a Jewish engineer from Russia. This put into motion a far-reaching plan to provide power and irrigation that would make possible the reclamation of the land and its economic development along twentieth-century lines. It was the first giant step along the road toward proving the Zionist claim that Palestine could support a population of millions and not—as Arab spokesmen claimed—merely of hundreds of thousands.

Churchill was especially impressed by the fact that the scheme was put forward and financed on a noncommercial basis, and was moved to tell the House of Commons that only Zionists were willing to undertake such a project on such a basis.

Churchill continued to warn the Arabs—as he did from the very beginning—that they had better make the best of it because Britain was going to carry through on her commitments in any event. In the summer of 1921 he had told the recalcitrant Palestinian Arab delegation in London that “The British Government mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. I have told you so again and again. I told you so at Jerusalem. I told you so at the House of Commons the other day. I tell you so now. They mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. They do.”
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But, in Palestine, officers of the British administration encouraged Arab leaders to believe otherwise. Churchill gloomily estimated that 90 percent of the British army in Palestine was arrayed against the Balfour Declaration policy.
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On 29 October 1921 General W. N. Congreve, the commander of the British armies in Egypt and Palestine, sent a circular to all troops stating that, while “the Army officially is supposed to have no politics,” it did have sympathies, and “In the case of Palestine these sympathies are rather obviously with the Arabs, who have hitherto appeared to the disinterested observer to have been the victims of an unjust policy forced upon them by the British Government.” Pointing to Churchill’s much narrowed interpretation of the Balfour Declaration, Congreve expressed confidence that “The British Government would never give any support to the more grasping policy of the Zionist Extremist, which aims at the Establishment of a Jewish Palestine in which Arabs would be merely tolerated.”
²³
In passing the circular on to Churchill, John Shuckburgh noted “It is unfortunately the case that the army in Palestine is largely anti-Zionist and will probably remain so whatever may be said to it.”
²⁴

Shuckburgh’s deputy, Hubert Young, wrote a memorandum in the summer of 1921 that Churchill circulated to the Cabinet, advocating “the removal of all anti-Zionist civil officials, however highly placed.”
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This did not get at the problem of military officials, however; and even the presence of Sir Herbert Samuel and Wyndham Deedes at the head of the civil administration did not seem to affect the political orientation of officials lower down.

In the Jewish community, too, there were those who despaired of obtaining support from the British authorities. Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Jewish Legion, argued that Jews were going to have to protect themselves because the police and the army were not going to do the job. On 27 March 1922 the Near Eastern correspondent of
The Times
reported that “certain of the more extreme Zionists have committed the criminal error of smuggling arms into the country and forming a secret defence force called the ‘Hagana’.”

In turn, as time wore on, influential figures in Britain began to wonder whether their country could afford to continue occupying Palestine in support of a Zionist program that had come to seem so difficult of realization.
The Times
had been an enthusiastic backer of the Balfour Declaration policy, which it had termed (on 27 April 1920) “the only sound policy the Allies could adopt toward the Jewish people,” but its ardor waned as the difficulties multiplied. In the spring of 1922,
The Times
ran a six-part series of articles by Philip Graves, who had served in the Arab Bureau during the war, to explain Britain’s growing unpopularity in Palestine; and Graves blamed Palestine’s Jews for being rioted against rather more than he blamed the army for sympathizing with the rioters. He argued that the British army was war-weary. So, in fact, was the British public.

In the issue of 11 April 1922, in which the Graves series was concluded,
The Times
ran a leading article from the point of view of “the British taxpayer,” in which it recalled the value of the Zionist experiment in Palestine, but wondered whether Britain could afford to continue supporting it. “It is an interesting experiment, but the question is whether we have counted the cost.”

Thus the Colonial Secretary found that his government’s Palestine policy was being undermined in Britain herself, where it had formerly enjoyed wide support. On 21 June 1922 a motion was introduced in the House of Lords declaring that the Palestine Mandate (which embodied the policy of the Balfour Declaration) was unacceptable; it was carried by sixty votes to twenty-nine. The nonbinding House of Lords motion served to focus attention on the Colonial Office debate in the House of Commons, which took place on the evening of 4 July. Churchill was attacked by a number of speakers for attempting to carry the Balfour Declaration into effect. Many of those who attacked Churchill had formerly supported the Balfour Declaration, and he used their earlier statements against them with telling effect. Churchill read out a dozen statements supporting the Balfour Declaration that had been made at the time of its issuance. He told the House that he could prolong the list by reading out many more such statements. He told his opponents that, having supported the making of a national commitment, they had no right to turn around and attack him for endeavoring to fulfill that commitment.
²⁶

As he did on a number of other occasions, Churchill spoke warmly of the need for Britain to honor her pledges. He told the House that the Balfour Declaration had been issued “not only on the merits, though I think the merits are considerable,” but because it was believed at the time that Jewish support “would be a definite palpable advantage” in Britain’s struggle to win the war.
²⁷
He pointed out that he had not been a member of the War Cabinet at the time and had played no role in the deliberations from which the Balfour Declaration had emerged. However, like other Members of Parliament (he continued), he had loyally supported the policy of the War Cabinet and therefore accepted responsibility for fulfilling the commitments made by the War Cabinet on Britain’s behalf as those obligations came due.

Churchill’s speech ran the gamut of issues on which he had been challenged, including the Rutenberg concession, which had given rise to considerable opposition. He claimed that he had cut the cost of administering Palestine from eight million pounds in 1920 to four million in 1921 and to an estimated two million in 1922; and that as a result of the Rutenberg development program, it eventually would be possible for the British government to recoup these moneys that it had spent.
²⁸

Churchill’s speech was a brilliant success. The vote in favor of the government’s Palestine policy was 292 to 35 and Churchill cabled Deedes in Jerusalem that the vote in the Commons “has directly reversed House of Lords resolution.”
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Britain, in other words, would agree to accept the Palestine Mandate from the League of Nations.