A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Churchill was especially impressed by the fact that the scheme was put forward and financed on a noncommercial basis, and was moved to tell the House of Commons that only Zionists were willing to undertake such a project on such a basis.

  I am told that the Arabs would have done it for themselves. Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in the wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.20

  Churchill continued to warn the Arabs—as he did from the very beginning—that they had better make the best of it because Britain was going to carry through on her commitments in any event. In the summer of 1921 he had told the recalcitrant Palestinian Arab delegation in London that “The British Government mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. I have told you so again and again. I told you so at Jerusalem. I told you so at the House of Commons the other day. I tell you so now. They mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. They do.”21

  But, in Palestine, officers of the British administration encouraged Arab leaders to believe otherwise. Churchill gloomily estimated that 90 percent of the British army in Palestine was arrayed against the Balfour Declaration policy.22 On 29 October 1921 General W. N. Congreve, the commander of the British armies in Egypt and Palestine, sent a circular to all troops stating that, while “the Army officially is supposed to have no politics,” it did have sympathies, and “In the case of Palestine these sympathies are rather obviously with the Arabs, who have hitherto appeared to the disinterested observer to have been the victims of an unjust policy forced upon them by the British Government.” Pointing to Churchill’s much narrowed interpretation of the Balfour Declaration, Congreve expressed confidence that “The British Government would never give any support to the more grasping policy of the Zionist Extremist, which aims at the Establishment of a Jewish Palestine in which Arabs would be merely tolerated.”23 In passing the circular on to Churchill, John Shuckburgh noted “It is unfortunately the case that the army in Palestine is largely anti-Zionist and will probably remain so whatever may be said to it.”24

  Shuckburgh’s deputy, Hubert Young, wrote a memorandum in the summer of 1921 that Churchill circulated to the Cabinet, advocating “the removal of all anti-Zionist civil officials, however highly placed.”25 This did not get at the problem of military officials, however; and even the presence of Sir Herbert Samuel and Wyndham Deedes at the head of the civil administration did not seem to affect the political orientation of officials lower down.

  In the Jewish community, too, there were those who despaired of obtaining support from the British authorities. Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Jewish Legion, argued that Jews were going to have to protect themselves because the police and the army were not going to do the job. On 27 March 1922 the Near Eastern correspondent of The Times reported that “certain of the more extreme Zionists have committed the criminal error of smuggling arms into the country and forming a secret defence force called the ‘Hagana’.”

  In turn, as time wore on, influential figures in Britain began to wonder whether their country could afford to continue occupying Palestine in support of a Zionist program that had come to seem so difficult of realization. The Times had been an enthusiastic backer of the Balfour Declaration policy, which it had termed (on 27 April 1920) “the only sound policy the Allies could adopt toward the Jewish people,” but its ardor waned as the difficulties multiplied. In the spring of 1922, The Times ran a six-part series of articles by Philip Graves, who had served in the Arab Bureau during the war, to explain Britain’s growing unpopularity in Palestine; and Graves blamed Palestine’s Jews for being rioted against rather more than he blamed the army for sympathizing with the rioters. He argued that the British army was war-weary. So, in fact, was the British public.

  In the issue of 11 April 1922, in which the Graves series was concluded, The Times ran a leading article from the point of view of “the British taxpayer,” in which it recalled the value of the Zionist experiment in Palestine, but wondered whether Britain could afford to continue supporting it. “It is an interesting experiment, but the question is whether we have counted the cost.”

  Thus the Colonial Secretary found that his government’s Palestine policy was being undermined in Britain herself, where it had formerly enjoyed wide support. On 21 June 1922 a motion was introduced in the House of Lords declaring that the Palestine Mandate (which embodied the policy of the Balfour Declaration) was unacceptable; it was carried by sixty votes to twenty-nine. The nonbinding House of Lords motion served to focus attention on the Colonial Office debate in the House of Commons, which took place on the evening of 4 July. Churchill was attacked by a number of speakers for attempting to carry the Balfour Declaration into effect. Many of those who attacked Churchill had formerly supported the Balfour Declaration, and he used their earlier statements against them with telling effect. Churchill read out a dozen statements supporting the Balfour Declaration that had been made at the time of its issuance. He told the House that he could prolong the list by reading out many more such statements. He told his opponents that, having supported the making of a national commitment, they had no right to turn around and attack him for endeavoring to fulfill that commitment.26

  As he did on a number of other occasions, Churchill spoke warmly of the need for Britain to honor her pledges. He told the House that the Balfour Declaration had been issued “not only on the merits, though I think the merits are considerable,” but because it was believed at the time that Jewish support “would be a definite palpable advantage” in Britain’s struggle to win the war.27 He pointed out that he had not been a member of the War Cabinet at the time and had played no role in the deliberations from which the Balfour Declaration had emerged. However, like other Members of Parliament (he continued), he had loyally supported the policy of the War Cabinet and therefore accepted responsibility for fulfilling the commitments made by the War Cabinet on Britain’s behalf as those obligations came due.

  Churchill’s speech ran the gamut of issues on which he had been challenged, including the Rutenberg concession, which had given rise to considerable opposition. He claimed that he had cut the cost of administering Palestine from eight million pounds in 1920 to four million in 1921 and to an estimated two million in 1922; and that as a result of the Rutenberg development program, it eventually would be possible for the British government to recoup these moneys that it had spent.28

  Churchill’s speech was a brilliant success. The vote in favor of the government’s Palestine policy was 292 to 35 and Churchill cabled Deedes in Jerusalem that the vote in the Commons “has directly reversed House of Lords resolution.”29 Britain, in other words, would agree to accept the Palestine Mandate from the League of Nations.

  The Executive of the Palestine Arab Congress then sent a telegram to the Colonial Secretary rejecting the terms of the League of Nations Mandate and also rejecting the governmental White Paper in which Churchill had spelled out his government’s much-reduced scale of commitment to Zionism. With whatever reluctance, on behalf of the Zionist organization, Dr Chaim Weizmann accepted those much-reduced terms, hoping that they might provide a framework within which a Jewish majority might develop in Palestine and might then achieve self-government. Weizmann accepted the best terms he could get from Churchill, hoping that, with time, the terms could be improved; the Arab Executive refused to accept the best terms it could get from Churchill, hoping that, with time, it could dictate its own terms.

  On 22 July the League of Nations formally and finally approved the rewritten Palestine Mandate, directing Britain to carry the redefined Balfour Declaration policy into effect west of the Jordan river.

  VII

  Two influential Zionist leaders, David Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky, considered the significanc
e of the Arab opposition and British reactions to it and arrived (as they often did) at opposite conclusions.

  Ben-Gurion, a Polish-born leader of the Labor Zionist movement, had settled in Palestine as a farmer in 1906, at the age of twenty. Though a supporter of the Ottoman Empire at the outset of the First World War, he had eventually enlisted in the British army. He was a socialist who believed that only a willingness to work confers a right to occupy a country, and that Jews and Arabs had an equal right to live and work in Palestine. In his interpretation, the Arab riots of 1920 and 1921 were the acts of “wildmen” who had been misled by the British administration into believing that violence would pay.30 As a labor union leader, his declared policy was to organize the Arab workers, for he claimed that Arab and Jewish workers and farmers had interests in common—as against employers and landlords—and his object was to show Arabs that this was so. He envisaged a Palestine in which both the Arab and Jewish communities would enjoy autonomy.

  To Ben-Gurion the 1920 and 1921 riots showed that Zionists had not made clear enough to the Arabs that their religious and civil rights would never be infringed.31 As he so often did, he saw the solution in terms of educating and communicating. While he had foreseen from the beginning the possibility that Arabs might not agree to Jewish immigration and settlement, he did not dwell on that possibility or allow himself to believe it would actually occur. Some historians now believe that he was not entirely candid when he professed to believe in Arab-Jewish cooperation,32 but a more persuasive interpretation is that he was the sort of person who believes it does no good to think about what might go wrong; he was a “constructivist,” whose tendency was to believe that if you create and work, the future will take care of itself. He believed that the benefits of Jewish labor and creativity would flow to the Arabs of Palestine as well, and his policy continued to be cooperation both with the Arabs and the British administration.

  On the other hand, Jabotinsky, the Russian-born journalist who had founded Allenby’s Jewish Legion, believed that Arabs would never stand by peacefully and allow Jews to become a majority in Palestine; that an “iron wall” of military force would have to protect the Jewish settlers as they built their community into a majority; that the British had shown they could not be relied upon to provide that protection; and that Jews therefore would have to form their own army to protect themselves.33 It was an almost hopeless assessment, and Jabotinsky found himself in the minority in accepting it.

  It was a paradox that Ben-Gurion, who at the outset of the First World War had tried to create a Jewish army to fight for the Ottoman Empire, now relied upon the British government, while Jabotinsky, who had raised a Jewish regiment to fight for Britain, had lost that faith.

  In the years to come, Ben-Gurion was to emerge as the leader of the mainstream within the Zionist movement, while Jabotinsky led the opposition to the official Zionist leadership throughout the 1920s and then—in the late 1930s—seceded to found his own rival Zionist-Revisionist organization, denouncing Churchill’s decision in 1922 to remove Transjordan from the territory of the Jewish National Home and demanding the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. The schism persists to this day in the politics of the state of Israel, in which the Labor Party claims the heritage of Ben-Gurion and the Herut Party, that of Jabotinsky.

  What also persists in Israel, especially in Herut ranks, is the view that Jordan either is or should be an Arab Palestinian state: that Churchill’s separation of Transjordania (as it was then called) from the rest of the Palestine Mandate in 1922 was not legitimate.

  VIII

  The Arabic-speaking section of the Ottoman Empire had now been politically redesigned. The Turks no longer ruled it. In the east, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Jewish populations had been combined into a new Mesopotamian country named Iraq, under the rule of an Arabian prince; it looked like an independent country, but Britain regarded it as a British protectorate. Syria and a greatly enlarged Lebanon were ruled by France. A new Arab entity that was to become Jordan had been carved out of Palestine; and west of the Jordan river was a Palestine that was to contain a Jewish National Home. It was far from the restored Ottoman Empire Churchill had once espoused.

  Churchill had, however, achieved the principal objectives that he had set for himself in the Middle East when he became Colonial Secretary. His overriding goal had been to cut costs, and he had done so drastically. Moreover, he believed that he had created a system that could be operated economically in the future. His line of air bases stretching from Egypt to Iraq allowed him to keep the Middle Eastern countries under control with a minimum of expense.

  His other goal had been to demonstrate that Britain kept her pledges. He had not fully achieved this with respect to Zionism, but he had done so in regard to whatever might have been owing to the dynasty of King Hussein. T. E. Lawrence, formerly the government’s severest British critic on this score, judged that he had more than done so. At the end of 1922, referring back to the wartime correspondence between Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, then British High Commissioner in Egypt, concerning the frontiers of Arab independence, Lawrence wrote that “He (Churchill) executed the whole McMahon undertaking (called a treaty by some who have not seen it) for Palestine, for Transjordania and for Arabia. In Mesopotamia he went far beyond its provisions…I do not wish to make long explanations, but must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.”34

  But it was not the Arab affair that was Churchill’s principal concern in the Middle East, even though it was his principal responsibility. His main concern was for the Turkish-speaking remnant of the Ottoman Empire; Lloyd George’s policy in that area was—in Churchill’s view—dangerously wrong, and threatened to bring down in ruin the entire British position in the Middle East.

  59

  THE ALLIANCES COME APART

  I

  Churchill’s misgivings about Lloyd George’s Turkish policy went unheeded, for the Prime Minister, in the pride of his position, of his victories, of his record of having been proven right when all the experts around him had said he was wrong, did not pay due attention to the opinions of his colleagues. Lloyd George played a lone and lordly hand, without accommodating the diverse political groupings at home and abroad from whom his power stemmed.

  For years Lloyd George had been the star of a solar system of coalitions. As head of a parliamentary coalition of Conservatives and his own group of Liberals, he continued to command the support of a majority in the House of Commons, which sustained him in office as leader of a coalition Cabinet. As Prime Minister of Britain he also exercised leadership of a diverse coalition that included the empire and the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—a coalition that had joined the continental European Allies to oppose the Central Powers in the First World War. As of 1921, Lloyd George was the sole leader of the wartime alliance who still remained in office. It was in the still unsubdued domains of the Ottoman Empire that this system of coalitions started to come apart.

  Russia had been the first of the European Allies to withdraw from the wartime coalition—and then to fight against it. Even before the war ended the new Bolshevik regime had moved into conflict with Russia’s former Allies all along a southern tier in the Middle East and Central Asia.

  Conversely, the Soviet government moved into a working alliance with a wartime enemy, Turkey, in the years immediately following the armistices, collaborating both with Enver Pasha and with Mustapha Kemal. It supplied arms and money that helped Kemal continue his struggle against the Allies. In 1921 the Soviet governments of Russia and its satellite regimes entered into comprehensive agreements with Kemal’s Turkish regime, establishing a frontier and a working relationship between them.

  In 1921, too, Soviet Russia also moved into a working relationship with another of the former enemy states. Acting upon Enver Pasha’s suggestion, the leaders of the new German army entered into a secret partner
ship with the Soviet regime. The head of the army, Enver’s friend General von Seeckt, established “Special Branch R” in the War Ministry to administer the relationship, which encompassed war production, military training, and the development of new weaponry. German officers were permitted to study weapons forbidden to them by the victorious Allies—tanks and airplanes, in particular—on Russian soil.1 German industrial enterprises established factories in Russia to manufacture poison gas, explosive shells, and military aircraft. The German army established training academies for its tank commanders and fighter pilots on Soviet territory. At the same time, Soviet Russia sent officers to Germany to be schooled in the methods that had been developed by the feared and admired German General Staff. These clandestine arrangements were sanctioned by the German government in secret provisions of the Treaty of Rapallo* in 1922. It was symbolic of the new state of affairs that General Hans von Seeckt, who served in Constantinople as chief of staff of the Ottoman army at the end of the war, and who had served as head of the German army since 1919, was reporting to the Russian General Staff on the military situation in the Dardanelles in 1922. It was a measure of how far Russia had traveled since her 1914 war against Germany and Turkey; all three nations were now ranged together against Britain.

  II

  Italy was the next to change sides. As soon as the armistice was signed, she began to show sympathy for the plight of the Ottoman Empire, influenced perhaps by the tradition of comradeship between nationalist movements that stemmed from the teachings of the nineteenth-century Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, as well as a desire to preserve and expand the prewar Italian economic presence in Turkey. Count Carlo Sforza, who was appointed Italian High Commissioner in Constantinople at the end of 1918, was a practical statesman of wide and humane principles who immediately took the initiative in establishing a working relationship with Mustapha Kemal and in encouraging the Turks to resist the more extreme demands of the Allies. The Italians made no secret of this opposition within Allied councils to the peace terms proposed by Britain and France. In 1920, when the Sultan, forced by Britain and France, was on the verge of signing the Treaty of Sèvres, a high-ranking official of the British War Office reported that Italy was moving to support Kemal, who rejected the treaty. A month before the Treaty of Sèvres was signed, Lord Curzon reproached Count Sforza with the “unloyal attitude” of Italy in the Middle East.2