A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  The High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, responded to the Arab attacks by temporarily suspending Jewish immigration into Palestine. Zionist leaders feared that by rewarding Arab violence, Samuel had guaranteed that it would be renewed and that the history of the British Mandate for Palestine would be a stormy one.

  Samuel’s administration was slow to restore order; on 10 August 1921 The Times reported that “Public security, particularly in the north, is for all practical purposes, non-existent. Raids take place almost daily from Transjordania…” The Times correspondent claimed that “neither Jews nor Arabs have any confidence in the authorities.” He added that “The older inhabitants say that public security was far better maintained under the Turks.”

  Although Arab riots seemed likely to recur, Zionist leaders continued to seek accommodation with the Arabs and to express confidence that most Arabs were in favor of peace and cooperation.*

  II

  As Churchill recognized, one of his greatest problems in quelling the Arab riots while going ahead with a pro-Zionist program was that the British forces upon whom he relied were unwilling to enforce his policy.

  The anti-Zionist case was easy for the British in Palestine to understand: Arabs had lived in the country for ages and did not want their life and landscape changed. British soldiers and officials worked every day among Arabs who told them so. Of course Jews lived in Palestine too, and their connection with the land was even more long-standing; but much of the case for Zionism, strong though it was, was not entirely tangible: it was partly historical, partly theoretical, and partly visionary (in the sense that it was only in the future that Jewish enterprise would bring a much higher standard of living to all the peoples of the country). The Zionist case was also based on the suffering of Jews in such places as Russia and Poland; but members of the British Palestine administration had never witnessed that suffering and were not necessarily aware of it.

  According to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant Zionist who had founded the Jewish Legion in Allenby’s army, the British military found Zionism to be a “fancy” theory, far-reaching and aiming to repair the world’s ills, and therefore unsound. According to Jabotinsky, such fancy schemes for improving the world ran counter to all the instincts of the average Englishman of the ruling classes.3

  Jabotinsky pointed out, too, that the administration was staffed by professional Arabists. These were people (he wrote) so attracted to the Arab world (as they conceived it to be) that they underwent the discipline of learning the Arab language and qualifying themselves for the Civil Service, and were willing to leave Britain to spend their professional lives in the Arab Middle East; and it was natural that they would not want to see the Arab character of Palestine changed.

  Jabotinsky touched on, but did not stress, what may have been the principal reason for British opposition to the Balfour Declaration policy: it caused trouble. It was unpopular with the Arabs who constituted the bulk of the population, while the job of the British colonial administration was to keep the population quiet and satisfied. British civil and military personnel in Palestine had reason to believe that they could have enjoyed an easy and peaceful tour of duty in a contented country, if it were not for London’s policy, adopted for reasons not readily grasped, that excited communal tension and violence and exposed the local British administration to difficulty and even danger.

  However disaffection in the British ranks led ironically to an increase in the difficulty and danger, by encouraging Arab resistance and intransigence at a time when London was not yet prepared to yield. A particular episode that was to have lasting consequences was the intervention of the Palestine administration in the selection of a new religious leader for the Moslem community.

  The episode began with the death, on 21 March 1921, of the Mufti of Jerusalem. A mufti was an official who expounded the Moslem religious laws, and the Mufti of Jerusalem was the chief such jurist in his province. The British administration—bestowing a title apparently of its own invention—also designated him as the Grand Mufti and as the leader of the Moslem community in Palestine.4 According to the Ottoman law, which the British incorporated into their own, the government was to select the new Grand Mufti from among three candidates nominated by a Moslem electoral college.

  Although he was not among the three candidates nominated, Amin al-Husseini, a political agitator in his mid-twenties who had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment (though later pardoned) for his leadership role in the 1920 riots, was named as the new Grand Mufti as a result of an intrigue by a violently anti-Zionist official named Ernest T. Richmond, a member of the British High Commissioner’s secretariat.

  Richmond was an architect who had served before the war in the Egyptian Public Works Administration and owed his job in Palestine to Ronald Storrs, a close friend with whom he shared a house for a time in Jerusalem. In the Palestine administration he served as a liaison with the Moslem community, acting (according to General Gilbert Clayton) “as to some extent the counterpart of the Zionist Organisation.”5 According to an official of the Colonial Office in London, Richmond was “a declared enemy of the Zionist policy” of the British government.6 He crusaded against that policy, and several years later—in 1924—wrote to the British High Commissioner in Palestine that in pursuing Zionism, the High Commissioner and his officials, the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office in London, and the Zionist Commission in Palestine “are dominated and inspired by a spirit which I can only regard as evil.”7

  When he secured the position of Grand Mufti and leader of the Palestinian Moslems for Amin al-Husseini in 1921, Richmond must have believed that he was striking a blow against Zionism. As time would show, he had struck a crueler, more destructive blow against Palestinian Arabs, whom the Grand Mufti was to lead into a bloody blind alley. An all-or-nothing adventurer, the Grand Mufti placed Arab lands and lives at risk by raising the stakes of the Arab-Jewish conflict such that one or another—Jews or Arabs—would be driven out or destroyed. Eventually the Grand Mufti’s road was to lead him to Nazi Germany and alliance with Adolph Hitler. While Amin al-Husseini did not control Arab Palestine—he had many rivals for leadership—his position as Grand Mufti gave him an advantage in the contest for the allegiance of the deeply divided Arab communities in Palestine.

  Whether Palestinian Moslems would have followed other leaders had the British administration used its power and influence in other ways can never be known; but to the extent that Richmond’s anti-Zionist initiative had an effect, it was not helpful to the Arab cause—or to that of Churchill and the British government in attempting to bring peace and progress to troubled Palestine.

  III

  Churchill approached the complex, emotion-laden and muddled question of Palestine with a simple, rational, and clear program. He believed in trying the Zionist experiment, and thought that it would benefit everyone. When he visited Palestine after the Cairo Conference, he told a Palestinian Arab delegation on 30 March 1921 that

  it is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national centre and a national home to be re-united and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine and we intend it to be so;…they shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.8

  Churchill had always shown sympathy for Jewish aspirations and for the plight of Jews persecuted by the czars. Like Balfour, he felt that the persecution of Jews in Russia and elsewhere had created a problem for the entire world, which the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine would solve.

  In Churchill’s view, there were three kinds of politically active Jews: those who participated in the political life of the country in which they lived; those who turned to the violent and subversive international creed of Bolshevism; and those who followed Dr Chaim Weizmann along the path of Zionism. For the majority of the world’
s Jews, who had grown up in countries such as Russia which refused them full and equal citizenship, the question (as he saw it) was whether they would become Bolsheviks or Zionists. An ardent patriot himself, he considered Jewish nationalism a healthy phenomenon that ought to be encouraged.

  If, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event will have occurred in this history of the world which would from every point of view be beneficial and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.9

  So Churchill had written—before taking office as Colonial Secretary—early in 1920.

  Churchill was not unmindful of the opposition to Zionism among Palestinian Arabs, but he believed that it could be overcome by a program that combined basic firmness with attractive inducements and compromises. As Colonial Minister, he attempted to appease Palestinian Arab sentiment by scaling down Britain’s support of Zionism. As indicated earlier, he decided that Zionism was to be tried first only in the quarter of Palestine that lay west of the Jordan river, and nothing was to be decided for the moment about extending it later into the other three-quarters of the country—Transjordan. Moreover, Churchill attempted to redefine the British commitment: he proposed to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine rather than attempt to make Palestine herself into a Jewish entity, and he claimed that that was what the language of the Balfour Declaration meant. (In a private conversation at Balfour’s house in the summer of 1921, both Balfour and the Prime Minister contradicted him and told Churchill that “by the Declaration they always meant an eventual Jewish State.”)10

  Churchill further attempted to allay Arab suspicions by demonstrating that their economic fears were groundless. Jewish immigrants, he argued repeatedly, would not seize Arab jobs or Arab land. On the contrary, he said, Jewish immigrants would create new jobs and new wealth that would benefit the whole community.

  In June 1921 Churchill told the House of Commons that “There really is nothing for the Arabs to be frightened about…No Jew will be brought in beyond the number who can be provided for by the expanding wealth and development of the resources of the country.”11 In August he repeated to an Arab delegation that had come to London that

  I have told you again and again that the Jews will not be allowed to come into the country except insofar as they build up the means for their livelihood…They cannot take any man’s lands. They cannot dispossess any man of his rights or his property…If they like to buy people’s land and people like to sell it to them, and if they like to develop and cultivate regions now barren and make them fertile, then they have the right…[to do so].12

  “There is room for all…,” he told them.13 “No one has harmed you…The Jews have a far more difficult task than you. You only have to enjoy your own possession; but they have to try to create out of the wilderness, out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they bring in.”14

  In the same statement he complained to the Arabs that it was not fair of them to refuse to negotiate: “it is not fair to come to a discussion thinking that one side has to give nothing and the other side has to give large and important concessions, and without any security that these concessions will be a means of peace.”

  IV

  Churchill had spent a lifetime immersed in the political culture of Europe, in which it was normal when putting forth a proposal to take account of the needs and desires of all interested parties, including adversaries. Thus when Kitchener, Clayton, and Storrs in 1914–15 contemplated excluding France from the postwar Arab Middle East, they noted that Britain would have to compensate France for doing so by seeing that she obtained territorial gains elsewhere in the world; and while this may not have been a realistic appreciation of what France would accept, it was a realistic recognition that if Britain made territorial gains France would insist on matching them.

  Similarly, in postwar Turkey, Kemal—a statesman with a European cast of mind—formulated territorial demands for Turkish nationalism not merely on the basis of his appreciation of what Turkey needed but also on his understanding of what Turkey’s neighbors could accept.

  This was the sort of statesmanship to which Churchill was accustomed; but he did not find it in the Palestinian Arab delegation in London, which did no more than repeat its demands. Palestine was and is an area of complex and competing claims, but the Arab delegation took account of no claims, fears, needs, or dreams other than its own. Unlike the Zionist leaders, who sought to compensate Arab nationalism by supporting Arab versus French claims to Syria, who envisaged areas of Arab autonomy within Palestine, and who planned economic and other benefits for Arabs who chose to live within the confines of the Jewish homeland, the Arab leaders made no effort to accommodate Jewish aspirations or to take account of Jewish needs.

  Dealing with Middle Easterners such as these was far more frustrating than had been imagined in wartime London when the prospect of administering the postwar Middle East was first raised. In Churchill’s eyes, the members of the Arab delegation were not doing what politicians are supposed to do: they were not aiming to reach an agreement—any agreement. Apparently unwilling to offer even 1 percent in order to get 99 percent, they offered no incentive to the other side to make concessions. Churchill remonstrated with the Arab leaders—to no effect.

  V

  The Arab delegation to London, which was headed by Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini,* president of the Arab Executive, apparently refused to understand what Churchill was saying. Members of the delegation would ask a question, and then when Churchill had answered it, would ask the same question again, as though they had not heard Churchill’s reply. Churchill showed signs of frustration and anger at this tactic, but continued to repeat his answers in the evident hope of finally making himself understood. It was in this spirit that he repeated that land was not being taken away from Arabs; that Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so.

  In the Middle East, things rarely were what they seemed to be, and the land issue in Palestine was a case in point. The Arab delegation to London did in fact understand what Churchill meant about Arabs wanting to sell land to Jews, for Musa Kazim Pasha, the president of the delegation, was himself one of those who had sold land to the Jewish settlers.15 So had other members of the Arab delegations that he brought with him to London in 1921–2 and in succeeding years.

  Prince Feisal and Dr Chaim Weizmann had agreed in 1918 that there was no scarcity of land in Palestine: the problem, rather, was that so much of it was controlled by a small group of Arab landowners and usurers.16 The great mass of the peasantry struggled to eke out a bare living from low-yielding, much-eroded, poorly irrigated plots, while large holdings of fertile lands were being accumulated by influential families of absentee landlords.

  The Zionist plan, as outlined by Weizmann to Feisal in 1918, was to avoid encroaching on land being worked by the Arab peasantry and instead to reclaim unused, uncultivated land, and by the use of scientific agricultural methods to restore its fertility. The large Arab landholders, however, turned out to be eager to sell the Jewish settlers their fertile lands, too—at very considerable profits.* Indeed Jewish purchasers bid land prices up so that, not untypically, an Arab family of Beirut sold plots of land in the Jezreel valley to Jewish settlers in 1921 at prices ranging from forty to eighty times the original purchase price.17 Far from being forced by Jews to sell, Arabs offered so much land to Jews that the only limiting factor on purchases became money: the Jewish settlers did not have enough money to buy all the land that Arabs offered to them.18

  Not merely non-Palestinian Arabs but the Palestinian Arab leadership class itself was deeply implicated in these land sales that it publicly denounced. Either personally or through their families, at least a quarter of the elected official leadership of the Arab Palestinian community sold land to Jewish settlers between 1920 and 1928.19

  T
he Zionist leadership may have been misled by such dealings into underestimating the depth of real local opposition to Jewish settlement. The British government, on the other hand, misjudged not merely the depth but also the nature of the Arab response: in treating the land issue as if it were valid rather than the fraud it was, Churchill and his colleagues either misunderstood or pretended to misunderstand the real basis of Arab opposition to Zionism. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement was rooted in emotion, in religion, in xenophobia, in the complex of feelings that tend to overcome people when newcomers flood in to change their neighborhood. The Arabs of Palestine were defending a threatened way of life. The Arab delegations that went to see Winston Churchill did not articulate this real basis for their objection to Zionism. Instead they argued that the country could not sustain more inhabitants; and Churchill took them at their word. He accepted their statement that they were objecting on economic grounds; and then he went ahead to prove that their economic fears were unjustified.

  VI

  In a decision that had lasting impact—and that showed that Arab economic fears were unjustified—Churchill in 1922 approved a concession for hydro-electric schemes in the Auja and Jordan river valleys to Pinhas Rutenberg, a Jewish engineer from Russia. This put into motion a far-reaching plan to provide power and irrigation that would make possible the reclamation of the land and its economic development along twentieth-century lines. It was the first giant step along the road toward proving the Zionist claim that Palestine could support a population of millions and not—as Arab spokesmen claimed—merely of hundreds of thousands.