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agreed to make him king. As a second prize, his older brother Abdullah, “a sensualist, idle, and very lazy,” would get the little state of Transjordan. Feisal was duly invited to visit Mesopotamia, where the stage management of Cox and Bell produced a stream of supplicants asking him to stay as their king. St. John Philby, who favored a republic and said so loudly, was sent packing. An election produced a vote of 96 percent in favor of Feisal. Bell designed his flag, his coronation and his kingship. “I shall have to set about getting proper ceremonial for Feisal’s court,” she sighed. On August 23, 1921, in the cool of the early morning, Feisal was crowned king of what was henceforth known as “the well-rooted country”: Iraq. “It was an amazing thing to see all Iraq, from North to South, gathered together,” reported Bell. “It is the first time it has happened in history.”66

Gertrude Bell remained close to Feisal at first but, as he grew in experience and confidence, he chafed under the stream of advice.67 He was proving generally to be less amenable than the British had hoped. He pushed for the independence of his new country, and in 1932 Iraq joined the League of Nations as an independent state. Feisal died the following year. His son, a cheerful playboy, died in a car crash in 1939. His successor, Feisal’s grandson, was killed in the coup of 1958 which made Iraq a republic. Hussein, Feisal’s father, who had hoped to found a great Hashemite dynasty to run the Arab world, lost first his reason and then his throne in the Hejaz in 1924, when Ibn Saud finally overran it and created the kingdom that still bears his name. The only Hashemite kingdom that still survives is Jordan, where Abdullah, much to everyone’s surprise, proved a very effective ruler. Abdullah’s great-grandson is now king.

T. E. Lawrence, never really happy again after the war in the desert, also died in a crash, in 1935, when he swerved on his motorcycle to avoid two boys. Gertrude Bell committed suicide in 1926. Arnold Wilson left public service to work for Anglo-Persian Oil. At the age of fifty-five he was killed in action as an air force gunner over Dunkirk. Picot, whose agreement with Sykes had caused such trouble between France and Britain, ended his career under a cloud. Replaced in Syria in 1920, he was shipped off to Bulgaria, where he caused a scandal by an open affair with a woman of dubious reputation. Another posting in Buenos Aires brought more scandal and stories of unpaid bills. He retired from the French diplomatic service in 1932 and disappeared from history.68

Britain and France paid a price for their role in the peace settlements in the Middle East. The French never completely pacified Syria, and it never paid for itself. The British pulled back in Iraq and Jordan as quickly as they could, but they found they were stuck with Palestine and an increasingly poisonous atmosphere between Arabs and Jews. The Arab world as a whole never forgot its betrayal and Arab hostility came to focus on the example of Western perfidy nearest at hand, the Zionist presence in Palestine. Arabs also remembered the brief hope of Arab unity at the end of the war. After 1945, those resentments and that hope continued to shape the Middle East.

28

Palestine

AT THE END of February 1919 a middle-aged British research chemist wrote to his wife from Paris: “Yesterday, the 27th February, at 3:30 p.m. at the Quai d’Orsay there took place an historic session.” It was, he told her, “a marvellous moment, the most triumphant of my life!” Chaim Weizmann had been at the Supreme Council with a deputation of fellow Zionists to make the case for a Jewish home in Palestine. That day in Paris he had spoken briefly, with his customary clarity and energy. He appealed to the self-interest of the powers: millions of Jews were trying to leave the former Russian and Austrian empires. Where could they go? “The Great Powers would naturally scrutinize every alien who claimed to enter their countries, and the Jew would be regarded as a typical wandering alien.” The obvious solution