Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [275]
Even in 1919, the British in Palestine were finding themselves caught between Zionists and Arabs. The Zionists complained, with some truth, that the military authorities were at best insensitive, at worst anti-Semitic. Jabotinsky, from the Jewish Legion, said that the British could deal with the Arabs, “just the same old ‘natives’ whom the Englishman has ruled and led for centuries, nothing new, no problems.” The Zionists were a different matter: “a problem from top to toe, a problem bristling with difficulties in every way—small in numbers, yet somehow strong and influential, ignorant of English, yet imbued with European culture, claiming complicated claims.”24 (Jabotinsky’s own contribution to the problems was to organize an underground army.)
The British, of course, had created their own dilemma by making promises during the war that they could not now fulfill. On the one hand they had supported a Jewish homeland on land largely inhabited by Arabs, and on the other they had encouraged the Arabs to revolt against their Ottoman rulers with the promise of Arab independence. When the Arabs pointed out that Palestine had not been exempted from the land to come under Arab rule, the British accused them of ingratitude. “I hope,” noted Balfour, “remembering all that, they will not begrudge that small notch, for it is no more geographically, whatever it may be historically—that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it.”25
The Arabs did begrudge it, particularly the Palestinian Arabs. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the arrival of the Zionist commission in 1918, the waving of the blue and white Zionist flag throughout Palestine, the tactless demand of a Zionist conference in Jaffa that the name of the area immediately be changed to Eretz Israel (“the Land of Israel”), all worried them exceedingly. Curzon had warned about this: “If we were supposed to have identified ourselves with the Jews, and the whole Arab force backed by Feisal on the other side were thrown into the scale against us, that would produce complications.”26 Complications there were to be.
In an attempt to avoid the consequences of their own actions, the British encouraged the Zionists and Arab nationalists to come to terms. When Weizmann visited Palestine in 1918, the Foreign Office urged him to remember that “it is most important that everything should be done to . . . allay Arab suspicions regarding the true aims of Zionism.” When Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, gave a dinner party for the Zionist visitors and local notables, Weizmann made a gracious speech: “There was room for both to work side by side; let his hearers beware of treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power—rather let both progress together until they were ready for joint autonomy.” That summer, Weizmann and Feisal met in Feisal’s camp near the Gulf of Aqaba. The meeting was amiable, even friendly, and Weizmann put on Arab headdress for a photograph of the two of them. Both agreed that they did not trust the French. Feisal appeared well disposed toward a Zionist presence in Palestine but warned that he had to be careful of Arab opinion. He could not, in any case, make a definite commitment without consulting his father. Weizmann left with the impression that Feisal did not place much value on Palestine: “He is contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn’t even regard as Arabs!” 27
Later in the year, after the war had ended, they met again, this time in London. Again all went well. Weizmann assured Feisal that the Zionists could use their influence to get American support for the Arabs, and Feisal in return indicated that he did not foresee any trouble over Palestine. “It was curious there should be any friction between Jews and