Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [274]
Lévy did even better, at least from the French point of view. Speaking at considerable length, he said firmly that he was not a Zionist at all. He pointed to the problems that would be caused if all the Jews in Eastern Europe, who Weizmann claimed were simply waiting for the signal to move to Palestine, actually did so. The country was not yet capable of supporting a large population. (In fact, although he would not have admitted it publicly, Weizmann shared this concern.) Lévy also raised a serious question: Was a Jewish home the right thing for Jews? “It seemed to him shocking that the Jews, as soon as their rights of equality were about to be recognised in all countries of the world, should already seek to obtain exceptional privileges for themselves in Palestine.” How could Jews around the world, as some Zionist leaders had suggested, share in the government of Palestine? “It would be dangerous to create a precedent whereby certain people who already possessed the rights of citizenship in one country would be called upon to govern and to exercise other rights of citizenship in a new country.” Jews already came under suspicion; “as a Frenchman of Jewish origin, he feared the results.” The argument was the same as Montagu had made in his attack on the Balfour Declaration. “A shameful spectacle,” Weizmann had said of Montagu and now he turned on Lévy, hissing “Je ne vous connais plus. Vous êtes un traître.” (“I no longer know you. You are a traitor.”)21
No decision was made on Palestine that day, or for months to come, and it barely came up at subsequent meetings of the Peace Conference. As so often happened in Paris, an issue that was to cause increasing trouble over the years was scarcely considered at all. “The Palestinians are very bitter over the Balfour Declaration,” reported an American intelligence officer in 1917. “They are convinced that the Zionist leaders wish and intend to create a distinctly Jewish community and they believe that if Zionism proves to be a success, their country will be lost to them even though their religious and political rights be protected.” The Balfour Declaration had promised such protection for what it called “the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” a curious formulation when Palestinian Arabs, most of them Muslim but including some Christians, made up about four fifths of a population of some 700,000. It also reflected a tendency on the part of both the world’s statesmen and Zionist leaders to see Palestine as somehow empty. “If the Zionists do not go there,” said Sykes firmly, “some one will, nature abhors a vacuum.” A British Zionist is supposed to have coined the phrase “The land without people—for the people without land.”22
Even those who recognized that there were Arabs living in Palestine tended to view them through the spectacles of Western imperialism. The Zionist settlers who arrived there before the war were frequently surprised at how “Oriental” and primitive their new land was. They and their leaders talked hopefully, for many of them were progressive and liberal, of how their presence would tug the Arabs out of their tradition-bound lives and help them to move forward. Herzl assured a member of a prominent Arab family that prosperity would grow throughout Palestine. “If one looks at the matter from this point of view, and it is the correct view, one inevitably becomes a friend of Zionism.” There would be no need for Arabs to think of self-government. Yet even before 1914, there were signs that nationalism and a corresponding unease at the Zionist presence were starting to stir among the Palestinian Arabs. Weizmann, who when he talked about the Palestinians sometimes sounded like a British district officer