CHAPTER FIVE

Responsibility for the Jewish National Home

In January 1921 Lloyd George appointed Churchill as Secretary of State for the Colonies, with special responsibility for Britain’s two Mandates, Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq). In both places, his main purpose, as Lloyd George explained to him, would be to reduce the cost of administering these distant and largely desert regions. First and foremost, Britain must find ways of cheaper administration. With regard to Palestine there was a second aim – no less important in the British Government’s eyes – to carry out the terms of the Balfour Declaration and facilitate the establishment of a Jewish National Home.

Britain had been awarded a Mandate for Palestine by the San Remo Conference of former wartime Allies in April 1920, whereupon the existing British military administration – for which Churchill had been responsible at the War Office – was replaced by a civil administration, headed by Sir Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner. It was Samuel who, in 1915, when a Cabinet Minister and a Jew, had urged his Cabinet colleagues to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine once Turkey had been defeated. He was proud of his Jewish heritage, but equally of his Britishness, and was determined to ensure that British interests were upheld in Palestine: for this reason, he was quick to criticise and even punish anything that he regarded as excessive in Zionist demands and actions.

To enable Churchill to focus on the Middle East, and on its twin needs of economy and political evolution, a Middle East Department was set up in the Colonial Office. Its civil service head was John Shuckburgh, who for twenty-one years had served in the India Office political department and was familiar with Muslim attitudes and aspirations. Churchill also asked Colonel T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, to be his Arab affairs adviser. Lawrence had been one of the British officers attached to the Arab Revolt against the Turks in 1917–18, helping Sherif Hussein of Mecca and his sons to drive the Turks from the Arabian peninsula. Hussein had then declared himself King of the Arab Countries.

On 11 January, a month before formally going to the Colonial Office, Churchill was in Paris, where he discussed his new Middle Eastern responsibilities with Alexandre Millerand, the French President, who criticised Britain’s support for a Jewish National Home. According to Churchill’s account, in a letter to Lloyd George, Lord Curzon – the Foreign Secretary – and two senior government officials, Millerand ‘instanced Zionism in Palestine as a cause of disturbing the Arab world,’ telling Churchill that ‘he feared that the Jews would be very high-handed when they got together there.’ Churchill defended British policy towards the Jews, telling Lloyd George, ‘I expatiated on the virtues and experience of Sir Herbert Samuel and pointed out how evenly he was holding the balance between Arabs and Jews and how effectively he was restraining his own people, as perhaps only a Jewish administrator could do.’1

Negotiations with the Arab leaders beyond Palestine were being carried out by T. E. Lawrence, who informed Churchill on 17 January that he had concluded an agreement with Hussein’s eldest son, Emir Feisal, under which, in return for Arab sovereignty in Baghdad, Amman and Damascus, Feisal ‘agreed to abandon all claims of his father to Palestine.’2

The Lawrence–Feisal agreement, with its Arab acceptance of the Jewish position in Palestine, was welcome news for Churchill. Since the French were installed in Damascus and were not to be dislodged, Churchill favoured a scheme whereby Feisal would accept the throne of Iraq, and his brother Abdullah the throne of Transjordan, in return for Western Palestine – from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan – becoming the location of the Jewish National Home, under British control.

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The first decision Churchill was called upon to make with regard to Palestine concerned the application, by Pinhas Rutenberg – a former Russian revolutionary who had been one of the defenders of the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks in 1917 – for a concession to harness the waters of the Jordan and Yarkon rivers for electrical power. The concession would give employment to eight hundred people, both Jews and Arabs. The proposal was put to Churchill on 23 February. He agreed on the following day.3 It was his first commitment to practical Zionist enterprise in Palestine, enabling the Jews to begin to plan for substantial urban and rural development.

In April 1921, Churchill prepared to set off from London for Cairo and Jerusalem. His object was to determine the nature of British rule in both the Palestine and Iraq Mandates. He had set aside four weeks for the task, which, in Palestine, would include visits to Jewish towns and villages. Before he left London, his three senior Middle East Department advisers, Lawrence, Shuckburgh, and Major Hubert Young – who like Lawrence had helped the Arab forces during the revolt against the Turks – informed him that there was no conflict between Britain’s wartime pledges to the Arabs and to the Jews. In 1915 the Arabs had been promised ‘British recognition and support for their independence’ in the Turkish districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo – each of which was mentioned in the promise – but which did not include Palestine or Jerusalem.4 Two years later Britain had promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, but with no mention of specific borders. If, therefore, the land east of the Jordan became an Arab State, and the land west of the Jordan up to the Mediterranean Sea became the area of the Jewish National Home, Britain’s two pledges would be fulfilled.

To ensure that Britain had not promised the same area to both the Jews and the Arabs, Churchill’s senior adviser at the Middle East Department, Sir John Shuckburgh, asked Sir Henry McMahon why neither Palestine nor Jerusalem had been specifically mentioned in his letters as part of the future Arab sovereignty. McMahon replied that his reasons for ‘restricting myself’ to specific mention of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo were ‘(1) that these were places to which the Arabs attached vital importance and (2) that there was no place I could think of at the time of sufficient importance for purposes of definition further south of the above.’ McMahon added, ‘It was as fully my intention to exclude Palestine as it was to exclude the more northern coastal tracts of Syria.’ The reason he had not mentioned the River Jordan as the most westerly limit of Arab control was that he thought it might be ‘desirable’ at some later stage of the negotiations to find ‘some suitable frontier line’ between the Jordan and the Hedjaz railway.5 This was the area that Weizmann and the Zionist leaders hoped to include within the Jewish National Home.

During 1 March the Political Committee of the Zionist Organisation met in London to discuss Churchill’s forthcoming visit. According to the minutes of the meeting, Weizmann was worried about the delay in ratifying the Palestine Mandate. ‘There were indications,’ he said, ‘that Mr Churchill might possibly desire certain changes in the Mandate. He was of a highly impressionable temperament and it was to be expected that the Arabs would organise an agitation to greet him on his arrival in the East.’ But, Weizmann added, Churchill had ‘a low opinion of the Arab generally.’6

Hoping to influence Churchill about the future boundaries of Palestine, Weizmann sent him a thousand-word appeal, asking him to extend the eastern boundary of Palestine across the Jordan river to the line of the Hedjaz Railway, or even beyond, deep into Transjordan. The British, Weizmann wrote, could provide ‘special safeguards for the Moslem interests in the Hedjaz Railway’ in such a way as to allow the whole of Transjordan to become a part of the Jewish National Home. ‘It is upon these fields, now that the rich plains to the north have been taken away from Palestine and given to France, that the success of the Jewish National Home must largely rest. Trans-Jordania has from the earliest time been an integral and vital part of Palestine.’

It was east of the Jordan, Weizmann added, that the Israelite tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh ‘first pitched their tents and pastured their flocks.’ Although ‘Eastern Palestine’ would never have the same religious or historic significance for the Jews as Palestine west of the Jordan, it might, he felt, ‘bulk larger in the economic future of the Jewish National Home.’

Weizmann elaborated his argument in lyrical terms. ‘The climate of Trans-Jordania is invigorating; the soil is rich; irrigation would be easy; and the hills are covered with forests. There Jewish settlement could proceed on a large scale without friction with the local population. The economic progress of Cis-Jordania itself is dependent upon the development of these Trans-Jordania plains, for they form the natural granary of all Palestine and without them Palestine can never become a self-sustaining, economic unit and a real National Home.’

In asserting the Zionist claim to the western, fertile areas of Transjordan, Weizmann raised the question of Arab national aspirations. It was clear, he told Churchill, that apart from ‘a small corridor’ along the Hedjaz Railway, there was ‘no concession north of Ma’an, short of Damascus, to which Arab nationalism, would attach any real or permanent value.’ The aspirations of Arab nationalism, Weizmann asserted, ‘centre around Damascus and Baghdad, and do not lie in Trans-Jordania.7

Weizmann did not ask for Transjordan alone to be included in the Palestine Mandate. He also pressed Churchill to take the southern boundary of Palestine down to the Gulf of Akaba, asking for this area as well as Transjordan as compensation for Britain’s agreement with France, which fixed the northern boundary in such a way as to ‘cut Palestine off’ from the Litani River, whose waters the Zionists had hoped to harness for electrical and industrial purposes. The area between Beersheba and the Gulf of Akaba, which Weizmann claimed as part of the area of the Jewish National Home, was ‘derelict, but potentially rich in resources essential to Palestine’s future,’ and ought not to be ‘allotted to Egypt.’ This area, known as the Negev, was largely waste and of ‘no value to any country but Palestine.’8

Churchill was not influenced by Weizmann’s arguments. He had already decided to separate Transjordan from Palestine. But he had also decided to allow the Negev to form part of the Palestine Mandate, and therefore to be open to eventual Jewish settlement.

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Churchill left London on the evening of 1 March, travelling by train to Marseille where he was joined by his wife Clementine, and then continuing by steamship to Egypt, which they reached on 9 March. The Cairo Conference began three days later. Among those present was Sir Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first High Commissioner to Palestine, and T. E. Lawrence. The first decision made on Palestine, on 17 March, was that Transjordan should be separated from Palestine, as proposed by the Middle East Department and supported by Churchill, thus enabling Britain to fulfil its wartime pledges to both the Arabs and the Jews. Weizmann’s territorial demands had been rejected, but the Jews would be able to settle the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, and from the upper Galilee to the Negev desert. This comprised the area of both Israel and the West Bank today.

While in Cairo, Churchill explained that the presence of an Arab ruler under British overall control east of the Jordan would enable Britain to prevent anti-Zionist agitation from the Arab side of the river. Lawrence shared this view, stressing that pressure could be brought on the proposed ruler in Amman, Emir Abdullah, ‘to check anti-Zionism.’ Lawrence also ‘trusted’ that after four or five years, ‘under the influence of a just policy,’ Arab opposition to Zionism ‘would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.’9

The presence of Lawrence of Arabia was of inestimable benefit to Churchill in his desire to help the Jews of Palestine. Lawrence, like Churchill, saw virtue in the Zionist enterprise. His friendship with the Arab leaders with whom he had fought during the Arab Revolt was paralleled by his understanding of Zionist aspirations, and his keenness to see the Zionists help the Arabs forward in Palestine – and elsewhere in the Middle East – to modernity and prosperity. Two years earlier Lawrence had brought Weizmann to a conference with Emir Feisal, held at the port of Akaba. Lawrence’s hope for this meeting was to ensure what he termed ‘the lines of Arab and Zionist policy converging in the not distant future.’10 On the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in November 1918, Lawrence had told a British Jewish newspaper: ‘Speaking entirely as a non-Jew, I look on the Jews as the natural importers of western leaven so necessary for countries of the Near East.’11

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