1919–20

WOODROW WILSON AT VERSAILLES

Meeting in London a few weeks later, Lloyd George and the French Premier Georges Clemenceau traded chips in the Middle East. In return for Syria, Clemenceau was accommodating:

CLEMENCEAU: ‘Tell me what you want.’

LLOYD GEORGE: ‘I want Mosul.’

CLEMENCEAU: ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’

LLOYD GEORGE: ‘Yes I want Jerusalem too!’

CLEMENCEAU: ‘You shall have it.’

In January 1919, Woodrow Wilson, the first US president ever to leave the Americas while in office, arrived in Versailles to settle the peace with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The protagonists of the Middle East came to lobby the victors, with Faisal, accompanied by Lawrence, striving to prevent French control of Syria; and Weizmann hoping to keep Britain in Palestine and win international recognition for the Balfour Declaration. The very presence of Lawrence, as Faisal’s adviser, wearing British uniform combined with Arab headdress, outraged the French. They tried to get him banned from the conference.

Wilson, that idealistic Virginian professor turned Democratic politician and now international arbiter, proclaimed that ‘every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interests and for the benefit of the populations concerned’. He refused to countenance an imperial carve-up of the Middle East. The three potentates soon came to resent each other. Wilson regarded Lloyd George as ‘slippery’. The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau, squeezed between the self-righteous Wilson and the land-grabbing Lloyd George, complained, ‘I find myself between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte.’ The playful Welshman and the buttoned-up American got on best: Lloyd George admired the latter’s idealism – providing Britain got what he wanted. In a wood-panelled room in Paris, lined with books, these Olympians would shape the world, a prospect that amused the cynical Balfour as he superciliously watched ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men carving up continents’.

Clemenceau’s ambitions were as shameless as those of Lloyd George. When Clemenceau agreed to meet Lawrence, he justified his claim to Syria by explaining that the French had ruled Palestine in the Crusades: ‘Yes,’ answered Lawrence, ‘but the Crusades failed.’ Besides, the Crusaders never took Damascus, Clemenceau’s primary target and the heart of Arab national aspirations. The French still hoped to share Jerusalem under Sykes–Picot, but the British now rejected that entire treaty.

The US president, son of a Presbyterian minister, had endorsed the Balfour Declaration: ‘To think that I, the son of the manse,’ said Wilson, ‘should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.’ He was influenced by both Protestant Hebraism and his adviser, Louis Brandeis, a Jew from Kentucky who had been nominated by Wilson to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, known as ‘the People’s Lawyer’, was an incorruptible paragon of American scholarship and public service but in 1914, only 15,000 of 3 million American Jews were members of his US Zionist Federation. By 1917, hundreds of thousands of American Jews had become involved; evangelical Christians were lobbying for Zionism; and ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, who had visited the Holy City with his parents as a boy, was backing ‘a Zionist State around Jerusalem’.

Nonetheless Wilson faced a painful contradiction between Zionism and the self-determination of the Arabs. The British had at one point suggested an American mandate – a new word to describe something between a protectorate and a province. Wilson actually considered the possibility. But, faced with the Anglo-French grab for Palestine and Syria, he despatched an American commission to investigate Arab aspirations. The King–Crane Commission, led by a Chicago valve-manufacturer and the president of Oberlin College, reported back that most Palestinian and Syrian Arabs wished to live in Faisal’s Kingdom of Greater Syria – under American protection. But these findings proved irrelevant when Wilson failed to restrain his imperialist allies. It still took two years for the new League of Nations to confirm that the British got Palestine and the French, Syria – which Lawrence called ‘the mandate swindle’.

On 8 March 1920, Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria (including Lebanon and Palestine) and appointed Jerusalem’s Said al-Husseini as his foreign minister, while the mufti’s brother Amin had for a short time served in the royal court. The excitement generated by the creation of this new kingdom emboldened the Palestinian Arabs to stand up to the Zionist threat. Weizmann warned that there could be trouble. Jabotinsky and the former Russian revolutionary Pinkhas Rutenberg,^* created a Jewish self-defence force, 600 strong. But Storrs ignored the alarm bells.

STORRS: THE NABI MUSA RIOTS – FIRST SHOTS

On the morning of Sunday 20 April 1920, in a city tense with Jewish and Christian pilgrims, 60,000 Arabs gathered for the Nabi Musa festival, led by the Husseinis. The diarist Wasif Jawhariyyeh watched them singing songs in protest against the Balfour Declaration. The mufti’s younger brother, Haj Amin al-Husseini, incited the crowds, holding up a picture of Faisal: ‘This is your King!’ The mob shouted, ‘Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs!’ and poured into the Old City. An old Jew was beaten with sticks.

Suddenly, recalled Khalil Sakakini, ‘the furore turned into madness’. Many drew daggers and clubs, crying, ‘The religion of Muhammad was founded by the sword!’ The city, observed Jawhariyyeh, ‘became a battlefield’. The crowd chanted ‘Slaughter the Jews!’ Both Sakakini and Wasif hated violence but were starting to loathe not just the Zionists but the British too.

Storrs came out of the morning service in the Anglican Church to find Jerusalem out of control. He rushed to his headquarters in the Austrian Hospice, feeling as though someone ‘had thrust a sword into my heart’. Storrs had only 188 policemen in Jerusalem. As the riot intensified in the course of the next day, the Jews feared they would be wiped out. Weizmann burst into Storrs’ office to demand help; Jabotinsky and Rutenberg grabbed their pistols and mustered 200 men at police headquarters in the Russian Compound. When Storrs banned this, Jabotinsky patrolled outside the Old City, exchanging shots with Arab gunmen – that was the day the shooting really started. In the Old City, some streets of the Jewish Quarter were under siege, and Arab intruders gang-raped some Jewish girls. Meanwhile the British were trying to police the Holy Fire ceremony but when a Syriac moved a Coptic chair ‘all hell broke loose’, and the doors of the Church caught fire in the brawl. As a British official left the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a little Arab girl fell from a nearby window, hit by a stray bullet.

One of Jabotinsky’s recruits, Nehemia Rubitzov, and a colleague covered their pistols with medical white coats and entered the Old City in an ambulance to organize the defence. Rubitzov, Ukrainian-born, had been recruited by Ben-Gurion into the Jewish Legion, changing his name to Rabin. Now, as he calmed the terrified Jews, he encountered and rescued ‘Red Rosa’ Cohen, a spirited ex-Bolshevik newly arrived from Russia: they fell in love and married. ‘I was born in Jerusalem’ said their son, Yitzhak Rabin, who as Israeli chief of staff many years later would capture Jerusalem.¹⁵

HERBERT SAMUEL: ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE

By the time the riots ebbed, five Jews and four Arabs were dead, 216 Jews and 23 Arabs wounded. Thirty-nine Jews and 161 Arabs were tried for their part in what came to be known as the Nabi Musa riots. Storrs ordered raids on Weizmann’s and Jabotinsky’s homes: Jabotinsky was found guilty of possessing guns and sentenced to fifteen years. Young Amin Husseini – ‘the chief fomenter’ of the riots, in Storrs’ words – was sentenced to ten years, but escaped from Jerusalem. Storrs sacked Mayor Musa Kazem Husseini, though the British naively blamed Jewish Bolsheviks from Russia for the violence.

The liberal Weizmann and socialist Ben-Gurion continued to hope for a gradually evolving homeland and a modus vivendi with the Arabs. Ben-Gurion refused to recognize Arab nationalism: he wanted Arab and Jewish workers to share ‘a life of harmony and friendship’, but sometimes he exclaimed, ‘There’s no solution! We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want it to be theirs.’ The Zionists now started to reorganize their old Hashomer – the Watchmen – into a more efficient militia, Haganah – the Defence.

Each act of violence fed the extremists on both sides. Jabotinsky absolutely recognized that Arab nationalism was as real as Zionism. He argued implacably that the Jewish state, which he believed should encompass both banks of the Jordan, would be violently opposed and could be defended only with an ‘iron wall’. In the mid-twenties, Jabotinsky split off to form the Union of Zionist-Revisionists with a youth movement, Betar, that wore uniforms and held parades. He wanted to create a new sort of activist Jew, no longer dependent on the genteel lobbying of Weizmann. Jabotinsky was adamant that his Jewish commonwealth would be built with ‘absolute equality’ between the two peoples and without any displacement of the Arabs. When Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, Jabotinsky mocked the cult of Il Duce – ‘the most absurd of all English words – leader. Buffaloes follow a leader. Civilised men have no “leaders”.’ Yet Weizmann called Jabotinsky ‘Fascistic’ and Ben-Gurion nicknamed him ‘Il Duce’.

King Faisal, the hope of the Arab nationalists – was doomed by French determination to possess Syria. The French forcibly expelled the king and smashed his ragtag army, completing the collapse of Lawrence’s plans. The end of Greater Syria and the riots helped form a Palestinian national identity.^*

On 24 April 1920, at the San Remo Conference, Lloyd George accepted the Mandate to rule Palestine, based on the Balfour Declaration, and appointed Sir Herbert Samuel as the first high commissioner. He arrived at the station in Jerusalem on 30 June, resplendent in a white uniform, pith helmet with feathers, and a sword, to the boom of a seventeen-gun salute. Samuel may have been Jewish and a Zionist but he was no dreamer: Lloyd George found him ‘dry and cold’. A journalist thought he was ‘as free from passion as an oyster’ and one of his officials noted he was ‘stiffish – never seems able to forget his office’. When the military governor handed over control of Palestine, Samuel managed one of his few recorded jokes, signing a chit that read ‘Received from Major-General Sir Louis J Bols KCB, One Palestine, complete.’ He then added ‘E and O [Errors and Omissions] excepted’, but there would be many of both.

Initially Samuel’s calm tact soothed Palestine after the shock of Nabi Musa. Setting up Government House in the Augusta Victoria on the Mount of Olives, he released Jabotinsky, pardoned Amin Husseini, temporarily limited Jewish immigration and reassured the Arabs. British interests were no longer the same as they had been in 1917. Curzon, now foreign secretary, was opposed to full-blown support for Zionism and watered down Balfour’s promises. There would be a Jewish home but no state then or later. Weizmann felt betrayed but the Arabs regarded even this as disastrous. By 1921, a total of 18,500 Jews had arrived in Palestine. During the next eight years, Samuel allowed in another 70,000.¹⁶

In the spring of 1921, Samuel’s boss Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, arrived in Jerusalem accompanied by his adviser Lawrence of Arabia.

CHURCHILL CREATES THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST: LAWRENCE’S SHERIFIAN SOLUTION

‘I liked Winston so much,’ said Lawrence afterwards, ‘and have such respect for him.’ Churchill had already enjoyed a career of swashbuckling adventure, bumptious self-promotion and irrepressible success. Now in his late forties, the colonial secretary was confronted with the punishing cost in blood and treasure of garrisoning a new empire: Iraq was already in the grip of a bloody insurgency against British rule. Churchill therefore called a conference in Cairo to hand over a certain amount of power to Arab rulers under British influence. Lawrence proposed granting a new kingdom of Iraq to Faisal.

On 12 March 1920, Churchill convened his Arab experts in the Semiramis Hotel while a pair of Somalian lion cubs played around their feet. Churchill enjoyed the luxury, having no wish to experience ‘thankless deserts’, but Lawrence hated it. ‘We lived in a marble bronze hotel,’ he wrote. ‘Very expensive, and luxurious – horrible place. Makes me Bolshevik. Everybody in the Middle East is here. Day after tomorrow, we go to Jerusalem. We’re a very happy family: agreed upon everything important’ – in other words, Churchill had accepted the ‘Sherifian solution’: Lawrence finally saw some honour restored in the wake of the broken British promises to the sherif and his sons.

The old sherif, King Hussein of Hejaz, was no match for the Wahabi warriors led by the Saudi chieftain Ibn Saud.^* When his son Abdullah tried to repel the Saudis with 1,350 fighters, they were routed: Abdullah had to flee through the back of his tent in his underwear, surviving ‘by a miracle’. They had planned that Faisal would rule Syria-Palestine and Abdullah would be king of Iraq. Now that Faisal was getting Iraq, this left nothing for Abdullah.

While Churchill’s conference was proceeding in Cairo, Abdullah, led thirty officers and 200 Bedouin into today’s Jordan – technically part of the British Mandate – to seize his own meagre fiefdom – even though Lord Curzon thought he was ‘much too big a cock for so small a dunghill’. The news of this escapade presented Churchill with a fait accompli. Lawrence advised Churchill to back Abdullah. Churchill despatched Lawrence to invite the prince to meet him in Jerusalem.

At midnight on 23 March, Churchill and his wife Clementine set off for Jerusalem by train, and were greeted at Gaza by enthusiastic crowds crying ‘Cheers for the minister’ and ‘Down with Jews! Cut their throats!’ Churchill, understanding nothing, waved back with oblivious bonhomie.

In Jerusalem he stayed with Samuel at the Augusta Victoria Fortress where he met four times with ‘the moderate and friendly’ Abdullah, hopeful occupier of Transjordan, escorted by Lawrence. Abdullah, who hoped for a Hashemite empire, thought the best way for Jews and Arabs to live together would be in one kingdom under him with Syria added later. Churchill offered him Transjordan provided he recognized French Syria and British Palestine. Abdullah reluctantly agreed, whereupon Churchill created a new country: ‘Amir Abdullah is in Transjordania,’ he remembered, ‘where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.’ The mission of Lawrence, who had finally shepherded Faisal and Abdullah to two thrones, was complete.^*

The Palestinian Arabs petitioned Churchill, alleging, in the tradition of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that ‘the Jew is a Jew the world over’, that ‘Jews have been among the most active advocates of destruction in many lands’ and the Zionists wanted to ‘control the world’. Churchill received the Jerusalemites under the ex-mayor, Musa Kazim al-Husseini, but insisted ‘it’s manifestly right that Jews should have a National Home, a great event in the world’s destiny’.

Churchill’s father^† had imbued him with an admiration for Jews and he saw Zionism as just outcome after two millennia of suffering. During the Red scare after Lenin created Soviet Russia, he believed that the Zionist Jew was ‘the antidote’ to ‘the foul baboonery of Bolshevism’ which was ‘a Jewish movement’ led by a diabolical bogeyman called the ‘International Jew’.

Churchill loved Jerusalem, where, he declared, opening the British Military Cemetery on Mount Scopus, ‘lies the dust of the Caliphs and Crusaders and Maccabees!’ He was drawn to the Temple Mount, which he visited whenever possible, begrudging every moment away from it. Before he returned to England, he was still holding court on the Mount of Olives when the mufti of Jerusalem died unexpectedly. Storrs had already sacked the Husseini mayor so it seemed rash to upset the family further by also taking away the post of mufti. Besides, the British were attracted to the ascendancy of the Families who resembled their own gentry. Samuel and Storrs therefore arranged that the mayor and the mufti should each be chosen from the two pre-eminent Families: their feud would make them the Montagues and Capulets of Jerusalem.¹⁷