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By Root 971 0

the Americans in the Zionist movement challenged the dominance of the Europeans. The American Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference complained that Weizmann was dictatorial and undemocratic, his draft memorandum on Palestine “too meagre.” They demanded a “Jewish Commonwealth,” even a “Jewish state,” with a Jewish governor and Jews throughout the administration and a Jewish majority on the executive and legislative councils. Weizmann found the Americans legalistic and politically naïve. “I urge again, our demands not to be a matter of a formula of the Peace Conference, but to be insistently and tirelessly pursued from day to day and from month to month.” He got his way partly by threatening, yet again, to resign, partly because the British government made it quite clear that it would not take on the mandate under such conditions. At that stage the Americans were not prepared to challenge him openly. As Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice, pointed out: “He has a sway over English public men and over English permanent officials who will continue to govern England when Lloyd George and Balfour will be no more—such as no other Jew in England or on the continent has or can easily acquire.”17

Most of the leading Zionists went to Paris for the conference. Weizmann kept up his customary rounds of interviews with the powerful and influential. House, as usual, was sympathetic, Wilson gave him forty minutes and Balfour assured him that Palestine would be given generous borders. The French were less forthcoming. “I speak French fluently,” Weizmann told Wilson, “but the French and I speak a different language.” Weizmann was careful not to talk of a future Jewish state or a Jewish majority in Palestine. On one occasion, though, he used a phrase that came back to haunt the Zionists: that Palestine should “be as Jewish as England was English.” 18

When the Zionist mission appeared before the Supreme Council on February 27, Weizmann was not the only speaker. No American Zionist spoke, partly because their chief spokesman had not arrived from London, but several Europeans did. The Polish writer Nahum Sokolow reminded his listeners of the dreadful plight of the Jews of Eastern Europe: “The hour of deliverance of his unhappy people had struck.” Weizmann, who stood watching him, later recalled, “I could see Sokolow’s face and without being sentimental, it was as if two thousand years of Jewish suffering rested on his shoulders.” Menachem Ussishkin, a forceful Russian Jew, spoke in Hebrew, the ancient language which was now coming to life again. The final speakers—André Spire, a poet and leading figure in French Zionism, and Sylvain Lévy, a distinguished scholar—had been added to the delegation at the insistence of the French government and over the strenuous objections of Weizmann and his colleagues. What they feared happened: where the Zionist mission claimed to speak for the vast majority of Jews, Spire and Lévy showed a more complicated picture. They pointed out, quite correctly, that only a minority of French Jews were Zionists. They themselves were proud to be French (as Lévy said, “Jewish in sentiment, but French above all”). They requested that France’s ancient rights in Palestine, which included acting as protector for Catholics, be maintained and suggested that France, as a Mediterranean nation and a great force for civilization in the world, would be the most suitable nation to take on the mandate. 19

French Foreign Ministry officials looked on approvingly. (Lévy, said Weizmann contemptuously, looked as if he had been hypnotized.) The French had supported the idea of a Jewish homeland during the war, mainly for propaganda reasons, but there was no need in peacetime to give up French claims in Palestine, claims that, as colonialists never tired of pointing out, went back to the Crusades. French officials attached to the military occupation in Palestine were conspicuously devout. The British had no idea, Picot told Ronald Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, of the rejoicing in France when the Holy City had