The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (63 page)

But first: Mouktar and Parodi continued their clandestine meetings. Britain continued to take them seriously. On February 6, 1918, before Balfour reminded Rumbold of the Foreign Office position with regard to Palestine and the Turkish flag, he telegrammed Parodi to inform Mouktar that if Talaat sent a Turkish representative to discuss peace terms, “my Government will
²¹
be ready to send negotiators of equal authority to meet him.” Whether in these prospective negotiations Britain would
have promised to let Turkey fly her flag over Palestine remains a moot point. Mouktar Bey returned to Constantinople at the end of March. Neither Rumbold nor Parodi heard from him again. Perhaps Talaat Pasha had concluded that a separate peace with Britain was not in Turkey’s interest after all.

But Turkey’s most serious effort to reach an understanding with Great Britain at this point in the war had not come from Talaat Pasha anyway. It had come from Enver.

“Abdul Kerim will
²²
arrive [in Geneva] next week and I will be there to meet him,” Basil Zaharoff wrote to Sir Vincent Caillard on November 18, 1917. This latest approach from the emissary of Enver Pasha did not take the arms dealer by surprise. Only two days
²³
previously he had returned to Paris from London, where he had spent more than a month at the request of Lloyd George. The two men met
²⁴
for breakfast shortly after November 6. (The precise date cannot be ascertained.) Still, some time before Rahmi Bey sent Charlton Giraud to Athens and Mouktar Bey to Switzerland, the prime minister predicted to Zaharoff that a new overture from Enver would also be forthcoming.

Zaharoff had kept two million American dollars of Britain’s money in one of his bank accounts. Lloyd George instructed him to pay it next time he saw Abdul Kerim. Risking this relatively small amount as an earnest of Britain’s good intentions would be worth it, said the prime minister. He also outlined what Britain’s attitude should be toward the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern possessions. Anticipating Milner’s position at the War Cabinet, he envisioned “Egyptian conditions”
²⁵
for most of them. It will be recalled that until 1914 Egypt remained nominally under Turkish rule, although in fact Britain exercised there what historians have called a “veiled protectorate.” Up until the war, then, the Turkish flag continued to fly in Egypt. Lloyd George saw “no difficulty” in allowing it to go on flying if that would ease Turkey toward a separate peace. This would have been about a week after publication of the Balfour Declaration.

Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader and chancellor of the exchequer, knew what Lloyd George contemplated. As chancellor he would be responsible for arranging the much larger payment to Enver, $10 million, that Abdul Kerim had mentioned to Zaharoff the previous July. There is no evidence that anyone else in the War Cabinet discussed or even knew about it. On the British side the only men involved, so far as the evidence shows, were the prime minister and chancellor, the prime minister’s
principal private secretary J. T. Davies, the intelligence officer Brewis, and Caillard and Zaharoff.

Zaharoff set out to meet Abdul Kerim. The two men arrived in Geneva almost simultaneously on about November 20. It quickly became apparent that the Turk was fishing, not prepared to negotiate serious matters, for with much regret and “using a very coarse
²⁶
expression,” he turned down the bribe that Zaharoff immediately offered. He could not accept it, he explained, because Enver had told him not to without consulting him first. So now he did. “The moment he gets a reply he will communicate with me,” reported the arms merchant in a letter to Caillard, “and I will pay into the Banque Suisse et Française and then your people will have to consult the experts as to the Turkish lines to be withdrawn so that I can meet Enver with a program.” Zaharoff returned to Paris and discovered the prime minister was in the city attending an Allied council. “I have just sat with your Chairman at breakfast for half an hour. Lloyd George ‘took written notes of my statement on which he paid me a great compliment … He is a lovely chappie.’”

The expected summons from Abdul Kerim to another meeting arrived less than a week later. Zaharoff needed to know what would be Britain’s negotiating position with regard to Constantinople, Armenia, and the Middle East, including Palestine, now that Russia was out of the war. “No time should be lost in seeing the Chairman” to ascertain the position, he exhorted Caillard. But he was not in too much of a hurry to remind his friend that he still wanted “chocolate,” as he called it—that is to say, an English title. “If the previous
²⁷
Chairman’s letter to me about ‘critical time’ and my present work merit recognition, I shall be proud, very proud.”

Lloyd George lay sick in bed with influenza. He could not see Caillard but wrote out for him directions for Zaharoff. They contained no reference to “chocolate,” and they represented the prime minister’s “‘personal opinion’”
²⁸
only, Caillard warned, “the special board [War Cabinet] not having been consulted … (but
you
know the weight the Chairman carries with his Board).”
Pace
Curzon, Sykes, Balfour, and the Foreign Office, the instructions regarding Palestine remained unchanged: “Mesopotamia and Palestine must be run on Egyptian lines; the flag, you observe, remains untouched.” This does seem to indicate again that 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office took opposite positions on the issue that Zionists would have found critical.

Zaharoff embarked upon his journeys once more. When he met Abdul Kerim in Switzerland for the fourth time on Wednesday, December 12, “I did not go one
²⁹
iota from your letter. He took notes as I repeated item per
item.” The Turk reported what was obvious already, that Enver was willing to talk and would accept the bribe. So this time Zaharoff really did pay into the Crédit Suisse et Française $500,000 for the envoy and $1,500,000 for his chief. The two men went to dinner. Imagine a first-class hotel dining room in neutral Switzerland at the height of World War I: bone china, silver cutlery, crystal goblets and snifters, dinner jackets, the hum of conversation in a variety of languages. Zaharoff made sure that the champagne and brandy flowed copiously. In this incongruous setting Abdul Kerim described conditions in Turkey and relations among the leaders of the Central Powers. He let his tongue wag. Enver and Talaat were at daggers drawn, he said, siding with his own boss and again introducing the possibility of poison: “I myself will give Talaat his coffee.” He was drunk and under tremendous pressure. He let his ugly side show. “He [Abdul Kerim] only had to lift a finger and I [Zaharoff] would be arrested as a spy conspiring in a neutral country against friendly belligerents at the instigation of the Allies,” Zaharoff reports him saying. “I laughed it out [but] it makes me think.”

Enver had instructed Zaharoff to meet him at Lucerne during January 25–31. “Send me
³⁰
full instructions,” Zaharoff told Caillard, “about the Turks withdrawing to a certain line and our paying a certain sum, and then withdrawing to another fixed line and our again paying and finally opening the Straits.” He then headed off to Monte Carlo to recover his health, for he suffered from a debilitating skin condition.

At 10 Downing Street on January 9 at three-thirty in the afternoon, Lloyd George’s secretary, Davies, handed to Caillard for transmission to Zaharoff the precise negotiating instructions that the arms merchant had requested. They read as follows:

The second paragraph remained as before.

A few days earlier Lloyd George had delivered a famous speech to a conference of the Labour Party in which he defined Britain’s war aims. With regard to Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, he said: “Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are in our judgment entitled to a recognition of their separate national conditions. What the exact form of that recognition … should be need not here be discussed.” Caillard flagged this immediately: “You did not mention
³³
that Mesopotamia, Palestine &c. would remain under the Turkish flag, although not under Turkish Administration. It would, I think, be effective if I instructed Zaharoff from you to confirm this.” Lloyd George provided the reassurances, and Caillard sent them on to Zaharoff: “Please explain
³⁴
to them [the Turks] that your previous communication concerning the retainment of their flag in those districts to be placed under the system of ‘conseils judiciaires’ (Egyptian model as a general illustration) has been confirmed … It is considered desirable you should do this, as the Chairman (consulted) agrees because that particular point about the flag was not mentioned in the Chairman’s speech.”

This exchange is important because it shows Lloyd George yet again contradicting the Foreign Office position that Balfour had cabled to Rumbold a few weeks earlier.

To make things as clear as possible in an extraordinarily murky situation: In late December 1917 Smuts instructed Dr. Parodi to tell Mouktar Bey, Talaat’s emissary, that part of a larger arrangement for peace between Britain and the Ottomans would include provision for Turkey to continue to fly her flag over Palestine. The Foreign Office warned against this course. Balfour sent a countermanding telegram to Rumbold also in December 1917 and reiterated its message in March 1918, and referred to it yet again in the letter to Beaverbrook in August 1918. In mid-January 1918, however, Lloyd George repeated the Smuts position to Zaharoff. He should tell Abdul Kerim and Enver Pasha that the Turkish flag
could
continue to fly over Palestine. As far as can be told, Balfour did not know about this. He sent no countermanding telegrams. Anyway, one doubts that a
British foreign secretary can ever countermand a prime minister. Really, we have come upon a mystifying thicket of contradictory orders and instructions. One thing, however, is clear: In July 1917 Weizmann and his colleagues had judged
any
discussion of peace with Turkey out of bounds. Had they known that Lloyd George proposed to accept any form of Ottoman suzerainty in Palestine, they would have deemed it a gross betrayal. So would have the Arabs.

Zaharoff embarked upon an extraordinary journey from Monte Carlo to Geneva on January 23, 1918. His skin remained bad, and a personal physician accompanied him. He rented an entire saloon car of the train for the price of twenty-four first-class tickets. Upon crossing into Italy, however, soldiers invaded the carriage, driving him and his doctor into the corridor. They stole his food and cutlery and then his money. “We were four days
³⁵
and four nights getting to the Swiss frontier, hardly any food except sometimes soldiers’ rations, no bed, no wash, etc. etc., and useless complaining to officers.” When they reached the border, Swiss authorities searched him: “(I had not a single paper with me, and had learnt my instructions from your Chairman by heart).” They forced him and the doctor to strip naked and took their clothing into another room to examine. Then they noticed Zaharoff’s skin condition. A quarantine doctor sent him to bed in a local hospital: “God, what a bed, what a place!”

Zaharoff deduced that the Swiss border authorities had recognized his name and were stalling while awaiting instructions from their superiors. When eventually they allowed him to continue his journey, he noticed that Swiss detectives were following him.

More extraordinary than the journey were the meetings that followed. Zaharoff arrived in Geneva on January 27, two days late. Abdul Kerim greeted him with the news that Enver was on his way from Lucerne. The three would meet next day. When Enver arrived, however, he refused to meet Zaharoff face-to-face, “claiming that all his movements were being always watched by the inquisitive Swiss; that A.K. was badly suspected of intriguing with me [Zaharoff], that the Swiss were more Niémtze (German) than the Germans.” As a result, “I did not see E. but A.K. kept going backwards and forwards as a sort of telephone.” Is it possible that either Zaharoff or Abdul Kerim lied about Enver’s presence? Probably not: Zaharoff was too experienced to be fooled by Abdul Kerim; Lloyd George was too experienced to be fooled by Zaharoff. The prime minister never renounced the arms merchant; in fact, he saw to it that he received his “chocolate” after the war. It seems that Enver had come to Geneva to speak, however indirectly, with the representative of Lloyd George.

So: Abdul Kerim shuttled back and forth, whether between hotels or even possibly between rooms in the same hotel, we do not know. It quickly became apparent that the news he carried was disappointing for Britain. At the last moment Enver had developed cold feet. He would pay back most of his share of the bribe, five million French francs, into Zaharoff’s Paris account. When the arms dealer arrived home, he found that the payment had been made. Abdul Kerim, however, did not return his share. He feared to contradict his chief, but to Zaharoff he said “he would not part with one piaster; he had honestly done his share, and if E. was now backing out, through fear, it was not his fault.”