A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  II

  As soon as Lloyd George became Prime Minister, Leo Amery initiated a move that placed Palestine within the context of the future of the British Empire. At the end of 1916 Amery proposed creating an Imperial War Cabinet, and sent a note on the subject to Lord Milner, who arranged for Lloyd George to put the idea in motion.8

  The war had created a need for such a body: the empire had contributed so much manpower to the war effort that troops from outside Britain constituted a substantial part of the British armed forces. The Dominions alone contributed more than a million men to the armed forces, while the Indian Empire contributed at least a half million fighting men and hundreds of thousands of support troops. Yet Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Britain’s other partners in the fighting had never been consulted about whether to go to war. George V had declared war, and his governor-generals in his Dominions overseas had promulgated declarations on their behalf. Neither the parliaments nor the governments of the Dominions had been involved in those decisions. Amery’s proposal was to recognize, however belatedly, the importance of these partners by giving them representation in a central body in London dealing with the overall direction of the war.

  Amery was convinced, as were Lord Milner’s other friends, that the structure of the British Empire had to be changed fundamentally; and by the end of 1916, as the political situation in London became fluid, and party and other divisions were breaking down, much seemed possible that would not have seemed so before.

  Until the time of Disraeli, the creation of the empire had been a haphazard and, it was said, an absent-minded affair. Disraeli gave it glamor and focused attention on it. Coming afterward, Amery and his friends in the Milner circle, who had worked in concert with Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, were among the first conscious and systematic proponents of empire, while their associates Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan were among its deliberate glorifiers. Many among them advocated the creation of an empire-wide economic system, closed to outsiders by tariffs. Others, who recognized that various parts of the empire often appeared to occupy economic positions in conflict with one another, advocated closer political association. Lionel Curtis, a founder of their publication, the Round Table, claimed that the British Empire had no choice but federation or disintegration. He spoke for those in the Milner circle whose program was organic, political union of the empire, with an imperial parliament elected from the Dominions as well as from Britain, giving rise to an imperial Cabinet which would rule the empire as a whole. The program had been rejected at an imperial conference in 1911, but the breakdown of world political structures during the First World War seemed to offer a second chance.

  On 19 December 1916, acting on Amery’s suggestion, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that “We feel that the time has come when the Dominions ought to be more formally consulted” on the issues of war and peace.9 Accordingly, he convoked an Imperial War Conference, confusingly also called the Imperial War Cabinet, to meet in London three months later.

  Nobody was more suspicious of the government’s intentions than the delegate from South Africa, Jan Christian Smuts, a lawyer-turned-general who had fought against the British in the Boer War; he had no desire to be ruled from London. He arrived in London for the conference on 12 March 1917, and his suspicions were deepened when, the same day, he received an invitation to dine at Brooks’s with Lord Milner, his former adversary.

  When the conference opened, issue was joined at once and Smuts won a lasting victory. On 16 March 1917 he pushed through a resolution that postponed consideration of the details of how the British Empire should be reorganized until the end of the war, but committed the participants in advance to the proposition that the basis of the reorganization would be the independence of South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

  Lloyd George may have been less disappointed at this outcome than were his colleagues in Milner’s circle. The Prime Minister had purposes of his own, and saw ways in which Smuts, in particular, could serve them. Smuts was a superb administrator of the calibre of Milner, Amery, and Hankey, and could help them to run the war effort. As a successful general in his Boer War days and more recently in East Africa, and a representative of the Dominions, he could also help Lloyd George by throwing his weight against the British generals. Lloyd George prevailed upon Smuts to stay on in London and serve in the War Cabinet “on loan” from his own country’s Cabinet. Thus he served not only as a member of the British Cabinet, but also as the South African representative in the Imperial War Cabinet (or Imperial War Conference). He was the only Cabinet minister in modern British history to have no connection with either House of Parliament; and spent the rest of the war away from home, living in a hotel room at the Savoy.10

  “General Smuts had expressed very decided views as to the strategical importance of Palestine to the British Empire,” Lloyd George later wrote,11 and became immediately involved with the issue. Perhaps because it had been decided that the political links of the empire were not to be tightened, Smuts and Amery moved at the same time to cement the geographical links of the entities comprising the British system; and both men concentrated on the importance of Palestine. If broadly defined, and in conjunction with Mesopotamia, Palestine gave Britain the land road from Egypt to India and brought together the empires of Africa and Asia. The capture of German East Africa by Botha and Smuts had already created a continuous stretch of British-controlled territories between, on the one hand, Cape Town, the Atlantic Ocean port at the southern tip of Africa, and, on the other, Suez, which bridged the Mediterranean and the Red Sea at the continent’s northeastern tip. With the addition of Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Cape Town to Suez stretch could be linked up with the stretch of territory that ran through British-controlled Persia and the Indian Empire to Burma, Malaya, and the two great Dominions in the Pacific—Australia and New Zealand. As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they would form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.

  The Prime Minister, of course, saw it the same way. As he wrote later, “For the British Empire, the fight with Turkey had a special importance of its own…The Turkish Empire lay right across the track by land or water to our great possessions in the East—India, Burma, Malaya, Borneo, Hong Kong, and the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand.”12

  Amery, who was about to advise the Cabinet that continued Ottoman (and thus German) control of Palestine was a future danger to the British Empire, believed, with the Prime Minister, that Palestine ought to be invaded immediately—and that Smuts was the general to do it. For Smuts was not only a brilliantly successful general, but also shared their immediate strategic and broader geopolitical goals.

  On 15 March 1917, the day that Smuts won his victory at the Imperial Conference, Amery wrote to him that

  The one thing, however, that is essential if we are going to do a big thing quickly in the Palestine direction, is a more dashing general…If I were dictator, I should ask you to do it as the only leading soldier who had had experience of mobile warfare…and has not yet got trenches dug deep in his mind.13

  Lloyd George offered the command to Smuts, who hesitated and asked the advice of the South African Prime Minister, General Louis Botha. Smuts, who was in favor of accepting, reasoned that “Position on the other fronts most difficult and Palestine is only one where perhaps with great push it is possible to achieve considerable success.”14 After consultation, Botha and Smuts decided that the offer should be accepted if the campaign were to be mounted “on a large scale,” “a first class campaign in men and guns.”15

  Smuts then conferred with Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who made clear that he was not going to release the necessary troops and supplies from the western front, and dismissed the Middle East as a private obsession of the Prime Minister’s, and at best “only a sideshow.”16 Lloyd George had been in office only a few months and his posit
ion was tenuous; his authority over the military was limited; and his promise of full support, Smuts concluded, was not one that he would be able to keep. Thus Smuts turned down the offer of the Palestine command, feeling that the campaign in the East would be sabotaged by Robertson and his colleagues.

  Smuts continued, though, to take a keen interest in Palestine. He and Amery later went out together to the Middle East to study the situation and report; and both of them came back urging a strong Palestine offensive.

  As a Boer, steeped in the Bible, Smuts strongly supported the Zionist idea when it was raised in the Cabinet. As he later pointed out, the “people of South Africa and especially the older Dutch population has been brought up almost entirely on Jewish tradition. The Old Testament…has been the very marrow of Dutch culture here in South Africa.”17 Like Lloyd George, he had grown up believing that “the day will come when the words of the prophets will become true, and Israel will return to its own land,”18 and he fully agreed with Lloyd George that the Jewish homeland should be established in Palestine under British auspices. Whether or not he originated the idea, Smuts was responsible for finding the formula—acceptable to Woodrow Wilson—under which countries like Britain would assume responsibility for the administration of territories such as Palestine and Mesopotamia: they would govern pursuant to a “mandate” from the future League of Nations. The territories would be held in trust for their peoples—a formula designed to be compatible with American anti-imperialist notions.

  Amery put together the pieces of this new imperial vision at the end of 1918, when he wrote to Smuts that Britain’s hold on the Middle East should be permanent, and not terminate when the mandates did. Without spelling out the details, he wrote that even when Palestine, Mesopotamia, and an Arabian state became independent of British trusteeship, they should remain within the British imperial system. The British Empire of the future, as he saw it, would be like a smaller League of Nations; and other such mini leagues would emerge elsewhere in the world. Woodrow Wilson’s overall League of Nations would therefore have relatively few members: there would be one representative from the British system, and one from each of the several other sub-systems.19

  Thus Amery saw no incompatibility between a British Palestine and a Jewish Palestine. He also saw no reason why either British or Jewish aspirations should not be in harmony with Arab aspirations. Decades later, he wrote of the proponents of the Zionist dream in 1917–18 that “Most of us younger men who shared this hope were, like Mark Sykes, pro-Arab as well as pro-Zionist, and saw no essential incompatibility between the two ideals.”20

  34

  THE PROMISED LAND

  I

  As the eventful year 1917 ran its course, Britain’s Palestine policy continued to be shaped by many hands: Cabinet ministers at one level; bureaucrats, little known beyond official circles and little known today, at another.

  Within the powerful secretariat of the War Cabinet, the Middle East fell within the domain of Kitchener’s protégé Sir Mark Sykes, as it had done since shortly after the outset of the war. Maurice Hankey, his superior, held no strong views about the Middle East, and since the deaths of Kitchener and FitzGerald, Sykes had been acting without any real direction from above. He did not know that the new Prime Minister held decided views about a Middle Eastern settlement which were considerably different from his own; nor was he involved in the secret negotiations through Zaharoff in which the Prime Minister’s terms for peace in the Middle East were revealed.

  On his own, then, and unguided, Sykes continued to circle uncertainly around the question of Palestine. His instructions from Kitchener and FitzGerald had been to regard it as of no strategic importance to Britain, and those instructions had never been cancelled. Yet he had been made aware in the course of his negotiations with France and Russia in 1916 that the Holy Land held a passionate interest for many Jews whose support, Sykes felt, might be vital to the Allies. Yet Jewish opinion might be alienated by some of the arrangements for the postwar Middle East that he was negotiating with Britain’s allies and potential supporters. As he held discussions with Frenchmen and Russians, Armenians and Arabs, he was haunted by a fear—groundless, but real to him nonetheless—that each of his transactions risked running afoul of Jewish opposition.

  At the beginning of 1917 Sykes was engaged in a dialogue with James Malcolm, an Armenian businessman, about establishing an independent Armenian national state. They considered inviting Russia into the postwar Middle East as the protecting power for a united Armenia; but, as Sykes believed Jewish opinion to be violently anti-Russian, he suggested that something ought to be done in advance to disarm potential Jewish opposition to a scheme that allowed imperial Russia to expand. Sykes asked Malcolm to find out for him who the leaders of Zionism were so that he could approach them about this.

  Malcolm had met Leopold Greenberg, editor and co-owner of the Jewish Chronicle who, as it happened, had also served as Theodore Herzl’s British representative. Malcolm wrote to ask him who were the leaders of the Zionist organization, and passed on the information he received in reply to Sykes. Two names appeared to be of especial importance: Nahum Sokolow, an official of the international Zionist movement; and Dr Chaim Weizmann, an official of the British Zionist Federation, who was opposed to the decision of the Zionist movement to remain neutral in the world war.* Malcolm introduced himself to Weizmann and shortly afterward, on 28 January 1917, introduced Weizmann to Sykes.

  Weizmann—although he did not know that the Allies were already making plans for the postwar Middle East—wanted to secure a commitment from Britain about Palestine while the war was still in progress. As a chemist, he made a significant contribution to the war effort by donating to the government his discovery of a process to extract acetone from maize—acetone being a vital ingredient in the manufacture of explosives.** But, despite his war work and his increasing acquaintance with the circle of high-ranking officials who were directing the war effort, he did not know that Britain had an official whose brief was to negotiate the design of the postwar Middle East. Another British Zionist leader, Rabbi Gaster, knew Sykes—and knew that Sykes held that job—but, seeing Weizmann as a rival, jealously kept the information to himself. Thus Weizmann learned of Sykes only by accident—in early 1917 when Sykes mentioned his job to James de Rothschild in the course of a chance conversation about their respective horse-breeding stables. Rothschild passed on the information to Weizmann, and Weizmann was about to arrange to meet Sykes when James Malcolm arranged for Sykes to meet Weizmann.

  Each wanted to do what the other wanted done. Sykes wanted to find someone with whom he could negotiate an alliance between British and Zionist interests; and Weizmann wanted to be that person.

  Their first meetings were on an unofficial basis. From the start, Sykes, as he always did, tried to fit all Middle Eastern projects within the existing—but still secret—Sykes-Picot-Sazanov Agreement, of which Weizmann knew nothing. In the agreement, the Holy Places were to be placed under an international administration; so Sykes began by proposing that a Jewish entity in Palestine should be under joint Anglo-French rule (“condominium”)—though he could not reveal to Weizmann why he was making the proposal. Though Sykes did not realize it, he was out of step not only with the Zionist leaders but also with the Prime Minister. Lloyd George—like Weizmann and his colleagues—wanted Palestine to be British. C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian and Lloyd George’s confidant, advised Weizmann to take the matter up with the Prime Minister; but Weizmann decided to concentrate on changing Sykes’s mind rather than going over his head.1

  In London, on 7 February 1917, Sykes met with Weizmann and other British Zionists who told him that they were opposed to the condominium idea and wanted Palestine to be ruled by Britain. Sykes replied that all the other difficulties could be resolved (“the Arabs could be managed,” he said) but that rejection of the condominium approach brought them up against a problem for which he had no sure solution: France, he said, was
“the serious difficulty.”2 France, he explained, refused to recognize that concessions to Zionism might help win the war; and he confessed to the Zionist leaders that he could not understand French policy in this respect. “What was their motive?” he asked.3

  The next day, at his London residence at 9 Buckingham Gate, Sykes introduced the worldly Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow to François Georges Picot, who told Sokolow that, having seen the results of Jewish colonization in Palestine, he believed the program of Jewish settlement was feasible. Sokolow told Picot that Jews greatly admired France but “had long in mind the suzerainty of the British government.”4 Picot replied that the question of suzerainty was one for the Allies to decide among themselves. He said that he would do his best to make the Zionists’ aims known to his government, but that in his view there was no possibility of his government deciding to renounce its claim to Palestine. Indeed, he said, 95 percent of the French people wanted France to annex Palestine.5

  All concerned agreed to wait upon events, which were not slow in coming. Within two months the Czar was overthrown and the United States had entered the war. Sykes quickly saw the implications of both events for his arrangements with Picot. Millions of Jews lived within the Czarist Empire; their support, Sykes argued after the Russian Revolution in March, could help induce the new Russian government to remain in the war.6 At the same time, the American entry into the war strengthened his conviction that the European Allies would have to validate their claims to a position in the postwar Middle East by sponsorship of oppressed peoples, such as Jews, Arabs, and Armenians. On both counts he felt he had new arguments with which to persuade the French government to adopt a more sympathetic attitude toward Zionism.