A Peace to End all Peace (93 page)

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By sheltering and shielding Abdullah, Britain in effect partitioned the world of desert Arabians between the two contending royal houses, with the Jordanian frontier marking a dividing line. The only two countries whose names in 1988 still designate them as family property are the Kingdom of
Saudi
Arabia and the
Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan; the international border between them still divides the two Arabian royal houses.

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Opening the Twelfth Zionist Congress in the summer of 1921, Nahum Sokolow said that Jews “were determined to work in peace with the Arab nation.” Stressing the historical links between the two peoples, he argued that by cooperating they could “create a new life of the highest perfection for the people of the East” and that “Their interests were identical…” Dismissing the recent Arab riots as the work of a small group of criminals, he assured the Arab community that Jews “were not going to the Holy Land in a spirit of mastery. By industry and peace and modesty they would open up new sources of production which would be a blessing to themselves and to the whole East.”
²

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Not to be confused with his relative, the youthful Grand Mufti.

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For a variety of reasons, the economic yield on Palestinian agricultural landholdings had sunk to low levels during the First World War and just afterward, and the Arab propertied classes were enabled to maintain their level of income only because of the bonanza provided by Jews purchasing land at inflated prices. Jewish settlement was a boon to wealthy Arabs, whatever they said in public to the contrary, and their claim that Jews were forcing them to sell was fraudulent. The genuine grievance was that of the impoverished Arab peasantry. As socialists, the Jewish farmers were opposed to the exploitation of others and therefore did all their own work; when Jews bought Arab farms the Arab farm laborers therefore lost their jobs.

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An agreement between Russia and Germany on 16 April 1922, that provided for the building up of political and consular contacts between the two countries.

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Which is to say that markets in the region were to be fully open to American businessmen.

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The final accord, the so-called Red Line agreement, was not reached until 31 July 1928.

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In the immediate aftermath of the armistice, Marshal Foch had counted on moving the French boundary with Germany to the Rhine, so that natural frontiers would provide France with security. In the face of Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points, France had been obliged to surrender this claim in return for a treaty of guarantee by her principal Allies. The treaty never took effect; it was rejected by the U.S. Senate on 19 November 1919. Moreover, the likelihood that France in fact could look to the United States for future support began to dim.

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Since the beginning of the war the atrocities between the Moslem and Christian communities had escalated. When the Greek army first landed in Smyrna in 1919, soldiers butchered unarmed Turks. Arnold Toynbee reported that in visiting Greek villages that had been destroyed by the Turks, he noticed that the houses had been burned to the ground one by one, deliberately; it appeared that the Turks had savored the doing of it.
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King Constantine claimed that Greek corpses had been skinned by the other side.
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Toynbee charged that in the 1921 campaign the Greek army deliberately drove whole villages of Turkish civilians from their homes.
¹⁷

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The atrocities at Smyrna provided him with the background for “On the Quai at Smyrna,” one of the memorable stories in his first collection,
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
.

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The need for securing support from the Dominions arose from the change in their position that had come about after—and as a result of—the First World War. At the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa, Prime Minister Robert Borden of Canada, and Prime Minister William Hughes of Australia successfully asserted the claim of their Dominions to be seated as sovereign nations on a plane of equality with Britain and the other Allies. When, at that time, Britain offered France a treaty of guarantee, Smuts and South African Prime Minister Louis Botha had wrung from Lloyd George a concession that such a treaty would not be binding upon them. They wrote that, from then on, it would be theoretically possible for Britain to go to war while one or more Dominions remained neutral.
²⁸
In 1922 the theoretical possibility was put to the test.

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Lloyd George and the Coalition Conservatives fell from power because they had failed to pay attention to political sentiment amongst the Parliamentary rank and file. To make sure that on their side there would be no such failure again, the Conservatives thereafter established an organization of backbench Members of Parliament to make their views known to the leadership. It exists to this day, and is called the 1922 Committee.

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Some frontier questions remained unresolved. Turkey’s frontier with Syria, for example, was established only at the end of the 1930s.

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Which is not to deny that the Turks also played a role in the destruction of their empire, and that, in any event, there were forces within the Middle East making for change.