A Peace to End all Peace (40 page)

Clayton proved to be quite unwilling even to work with Picot and protested against carrying out an agreement—reached with the French during the Asquith government—whereby a joint Anglo-French administration would be introduced into the territories in the Middle East occupied during the war. Picot, acting as the French representative at Allenby’s headquarters, asserted that Sir Edward Grey had promised it to him; but Clayton wrote to Sykes that “If this is so, I have heard nothing of it, and I cannot protest too strongly against any such unworkable and mischievous arrangement.”
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In any event, General Allenby exercised his authority to postpone consideration of such matters until the military situation was deemed suitable by him, which, in effect, cancelled that particular agreement for the time being.

With respect to Arabs, Jews, and Armenians, Clayton expressed his views to Sykes more guardedly. In the week following the publication of the Balfour Declaration, an exuberant Sykes sent a cypher cable to an unenthusiastic Clayton informing him that the Zionist movement was prepared to work on behalf of Arabs and Armenians and that he, Sykes, was in process of forming a joint committee to unify the three groups.
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Chaim Weizmann would represent the Zionists; James Malcolm, the Armenians; and a Syrian Christian and an Arab Moslem would jointly represent the Arabs. It was important that more Arabs should join, added Sykes, for it would help Arabs everywhere.

A few weeks later Sykes cabled Clayton again, reporting that he had prevailed on the Zionist leadership to adopt a strong pro-Arab line.
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He asked Clayton to tell the Syrian Arab groups in Cairo that if the Turks and Germans captured Zionist support, it would be bad for them as well as everyone else whose hopes rode with the Allies. He thus implied that the Balfour Declaration was issued in the Arab as well as in the British interest. Shortly after cabling Clayton, Sykes sent a message to Picot, telling him that Arab interests were being amply safeguarded and that Jews in Palestine would pay scrupulous attention to Arab rights.
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Sykes also sent a letter to Clayton telling him that the Zionist and Armenian leaders were in complete accord and that it was important that Arab leaders should also join “the combine.”
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Pouring cold water, Clayton in reply cabled that “in spite of all arguments Mecca dislikes Jews and Armenians and wishes to have nothing to do with them, while Arabs of Syria and Palestine fear repetition of the story of Jacob and Esau. In any case an Arab-Jewish-Armenian combination is so foreign to any previous experience and to existing sentiment that we must proceed with great caution.”
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He added that it would not be feasible to send an Arab delegation to London to join the committee, as Sykes had asked, because the Arabs were too divided.

A few days later he wrote to Sykes in a more conciliatory vein that “I quite see your arguments regarding an Arab-Jew-Armenian combine and the advantages that would accrue if it could be brought off. We will try it, but it must be done very cautiously and, honestly, I see no great chance of any real success. It is an attempt to change in a few weeks the traditional sentiment of centuries.” Cautioning especially against the Jewish aspect of the combine, he added that “We have…to consider whether the situation demands out and out support of Zionism at the risk of alienating the Arabs at a critical moment.”
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The next day Clayton’s closest associate, the High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Reginald Wingate, wrote to Allenby that “Mark Sykes is a bit carried away with ‘the exuberance of his own verbosity’ in regard to Zionism and unless he goes a bit slower he may quite unintentionally upset the applecart. However Clayton has written him an excellent letter which, I hope, may have an anodyne effect.”
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Nonetheless Clayton held a meeting with Syrian representatives in Cairo, as Sykes had asked, and appears to have told them, as he had been instructed, that only if Jewish support for the Allied side were forthcoming would the Arab cause, which was bound up with that of the Allies, stand a chance of winning. He told them that Jews desired a home in Palestine but had no intention of creating a Jewish state there.
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The Syrian Arabs responded favorably, and an Arab Bureau report to Clayton quoted a spokesman for the Syrian committee as saying that its members “fully realized that their best and only policy was to co-operate with the Jews on the lines you suggested. He assured me that the Syrians quite understand the power and position of the Jews and that they now wish to disseminate propaganda to emphasize Syrian-Jewish fraternity and unity as regards Palestine.”
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Clayton reported to Sykes that he believed Jews and Arabs were in fact coming together. He also reported that he had instructed T. E. Lawrence, the British liaison officer with Feisal, to impress upon Feisal his need to form an entente with the Jews.
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In administering the liberated areas of Palestine, however, British officials made no attempt to take advantage of this favorable disposition. Although the Balfour Declaration was published in London a month before Allenby entered Jerusalem, the British military authorities refused to publish it in Jerusalem. Thus it did not enter into the policy of the provisional military administration established by Allenby under Ronald Storrs, who declined to raise potentially disturbing issues while the war was being fought. Cairo Intelligence told the Foreign Office that applications by Jews to proceed to settle in Palestine should be denied until the military situation was resolved and until an organization had been created to deal with the various problems that might be expected to arise.
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There was an evident tendency on the part of military administration officials to believe that officials at home in London did not appreciate the very real difficulty of reconciling Moslems in Palestine to the prospect of an increase in Jewish settlement in the country. They therefore gave the impression of being unwilling to carry the Balfour Declaration into effect. Some observers noted, too, a tendency to prefer Moslems, who were treated as “natives,” to Christians and Jews, whom it was more difficult to treat as such. William Ormsby-Gore, one of the three assistant secretaries of the War Cabinet, wrote to his colleague Mark Sykes from Tel Aviv in the summer of 1918 that the military occupation officers, drawn from service in Egypt and the Sudan, were persons “whose experience…does not make for a ready realisation of the very wide questions of world policy which affect Palestine. One can’t help noticing the ineradicable tendency of the Englishman who has lived in India or the Sudan to favour quite unconsciously the Moslem both against Christian and Jew.” He added that “The Arabs in Palestine are, I gather, showing their old tendency to corrupt methods and backsheesh and are endeavouring to ‘steal a march’ on the Jews.”
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Clayton forwarded the Orsmby-Gore letter to Sykes with a covering letter of his own, saying that he felt it was somewhat misleading. Clayton protested that he personally was in favor of Zionism.
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Apparently he had come around to the view that an agreement between Arabs and Jews could be worked out. He held no high opinion of the local Arabs and he wrote to Gertrude Bell, the author and traveler in the East who was serving in the British administration in Baghdad, that the “so-called Arabs of Palestine are not to be compared with the real Arab of the Desert or even of other civilised districts in Syria and Mesopotamia.”
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Ronald Storrs, who was appointed military governor of Jerusalem, wrote to Sykes in the summer of 1918 that non-Jewish elements in the population, having eventually to take “a lower place in the land which the others are in the end absolutely certain to possess, the transaction should be effected so far as possible with decency, gentleness, and tact, and that the outgoing garrison should be allowed something of the honours of War.” Urging a policy of going slowly, he wrote that “It will take months, possibly years, of patient work to show the Jews that we are not run by the Arabs, and the Arabs that we are not bought by the Jews.”
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In the same letter, Storrs wrote that “it is one thing to see clearly enough the probable future of this country, and another thing to fail to make allowances for the position of the weaker and probably disappearing element. The results of the changes will be more satisfactory and more lasting if they are brought about gradually with patience, and without violent expressions of illwill, leaving behind them an abiding rancour.”
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The question this raised for Sykes and his colleagues in London was whether this policy advocated by the man on the spot was better calculated to achieve, or to defeat, their objectives.

IV

In early 1918 Sykes and his colleagues at the Foreign Office took steps to carry their Palestine policy into effect. On 13 February the Foreign Office dispatched a cable to Sir Reginald Wingate at the Residency in Cairo to inform him that a Zionist Commission had been created and was being sent out to the Middle East. Composed of representatives from British and other Zionist movements, it was headed by Dr Chaim Weizmann and was to be placed in the charge of William Ormsby-Gore. Its object was to prepare the way to carry out the Balfour Declaration.
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Inaugurating the work of the Zionist Commission, Alan Dawnay, of Allenby’s staff, arranged for Weizmann to meet Prince Feisal, and wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel P. C. Joyce, the senior British officer with Feisal, that “From what I gathered of the Zionist aims, in rather a short conversation, I think there should be no difficulty in establishing a friendly relationship between them.”
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Weizmann was introduced to Prince Feisal and was enthusiastic about him. Of Feisal, Weizmann wrote to his wife that “He is the first real Arab nationalist I have met. He is a leader! He’s quite intelligent and a very honest man, handsome as a picture! He is not interested in Palestine, but on the other hand he wants Damascus and the whole of northern Syria…He is contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn’t even regard as Arabs!”
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This was in line with what Ormsby-Gore told a Zionist meeting in London some months later. According to a summary of his speech, he told the Zionist Political Committee that

Feisal’s senior British military adviser, Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, attended the Weizmann-Feisal meeting and reported his personal opinion that Feisal welcomed the prospect of Jewish cooperation and in fact regarded it as essential to the realization of Arab ambitions. Though Feisal was unable to express definite views without receiving authorization from his father, according to Joyce, he would accept a Jewish Palestine if doing so would influence the Allies to support his claim to Syria.
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The meeting went well, and paved the way for the public support of Zionism offered by Feisal at the Peace Conference the following year.

In Jerusalem, Weizmann found his Moslem audiences less receptive, though he assured them that Palestine was large enough to accommodate all its communities and that Jewish settlement would not be undertaken at the expense of Moslems or Christians. He was disquieted by the attitude of British administrative officials in Palestine: when Weizmann urged them to avow their government’s Balfour Declaration policy openly and to explain it to the Moslem community, Ronald Storrs and his colleagues refused.

In his comments to the Foreign Office, Storrs took issue with Weizmann’s contention that it was the business of the military administration to bring home to the Moslem population the seriousness of Britain’s pro-Zionist intentions. That had already been done, he said, by Balfour in London and by the world’s newspapers. What was needed was for the Zionist Commission to imagine itself in the position of non-Jewish inhabitants of the country and to recognize how very much reassurance they would need. “Palestine, up to now a Moslem country, has fallen into the hands of a Christian Power which on the eve of its conquest announces that a considerable portion of its land is to be handed over for colonisation purposes to a nowhere very popular people.” It was not lost on the urbane Ronald Storrs that he was governor of Jerusalem in line of succession from Pontius Pilate; and as such he washed his hands of an issue for which he did not hold himself responsible. He insisted to the Foreign Office, however, that he spoke “as a convinced Zionist.”
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Gilbert Clayton also advocated delay. His strategy, of which he gave an indication in early 1918, was not merely to postpone the Zionist issue but to link it to the issue of an Arab Syria, as Feisal also proposed to do. To the strongly pro-Zionist Leo Amery, Clayton explained that “the two most important points are not to make too much of a splash locally with Zionism until the Arabs have got a slice of cake themselves, i.e., Damascus, and to get the French to come out clearly…disavowing any ideas of Colonial annexation and emphasizing their adherence to the idea of Arab autonomy.”
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Neither Clayton nor Storrs addressed the question of whether, if they refused to admit in Jerusalem that their government had issued the Balfour Declaration in London, Arabs and Jews in Palestine would ever learn to trust the British any more than Moslems in Syria and Lebanon trusted the French. As it was, the Zionist leaders were given cause to worry that the Balfour Declaration policy proclaimed in London might be undermined in Palestine by Clayton, Storrs, and other officers on the spot.