Gertrude Bell (58 page)

The French Foreign Minister, Stéphen Pichon, intending to trick Faisal into an indiscretion, asked what France had done to help him. Faisal adroitly steered clear of the trap, paying due credit to the French for aid while at the same time leaving the audience in no doubt as to its very limited extent. No one missed the point.

Lloyd George asked carefully constructed questions designed to demonstrate the large contribution the Arabs had made to the Allied victory, but President Wilson asked only if the Arabs would prefer to be part of one mandate or several. Faisal exhibited great restraint and diplomacy.
Lloyd George had advised him earlier, in London, that should he be asked whose mandate he would prefer, he should “hitch his chariot to the star of President Wilson”—America being the only nation capable of preventing Syria from coming under a French mandate. Faisal followed this advice to the letter, but was again to be disappointed when he and Lawrence visited Wilson afterwards. The American President was noncommittal, and would shortly pull America out of the negotiations altogether. When the American public lost interest in the Middle East—as it soon would—the Arab cause was lost.

If Gertrude was an increasingly intense figure, not suffering fools gladly, so was Lawrence. Both could be charming to those who interested them, whether desert tribesmen or Western statesmen, but could equally be brutally rude. Gertrude had recently frozen a lunch party in Baghdad by remarking in front of a colleague and his young English bride: “Why will promising young Englishmen marry such fools of women?” When a neighbour of Lawrence's at a dinner during the Peace Conference said nervously, “I'm afraid my conversation doesn't interest you much,” Lawrence replied that she was much mistaken: “It doesn't interest me at all.”

The leisurely pace of the Conference irked both Gertrude and Lawrence, and they decided to push on with their own agenda. With Chirol's help, they organized a dinner at the Paris house of the editor of
The Times
, Wickham Steed. The guests were a number of influential French journalists. All spoke French, Lawrence having spent much of his youth in Brittany. Gertrude wrote in a letter of 26 March 1919:

After dinner T.E.L. explained exactly the existing situations as between Faisal and his Syrians on the one hand and France on the other, and outlined the programme of a possible agreement without the delay which is the chief defect of the proposal for sending in a Commission. He did it quite admirably. His charm, simplicity and sincerity made a deep personal impression and convinced his listeners. The question now is whether it is not too late to convince the Quai d'Orsay and Clemenceau and that is what we are now discussing.

To her old Arab Bureau colleague Aubrey Herbert she wrote from Paris:

O my dear they are making such a horrible muddle of the Near East, I confidently anticipate that it will be much worse than it was before the war—except Mesopotamia which we may manage to hold up out of the general chaos. It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them.

She was, of course, enormously interested to meet Faisal, as the hero of the Revolt and the man who would be, one way or another, a future player in the Middle East. She had arrived too late to hear his speech, but she was introduced to him by Lawrence, and her sympathy deepened. Dressed in his habitual gold-embroidered white, carrying his ceremonial dagger, and with the air of command and the mystique she had expected, he was of the type of desert Arab to whom she had always been attracted. But he was far more: his warmth and humour, in contrast with the pensive expression of his slanted hazel eyes, took her by surprise. “Excuse me,” he had said with a smile, when a passing allusion had been made to the fight for the Holy Land, “but which one of us won the Crusading wars?” A veteran warrior of thirty-three years, experience and betrayal had accentuated his air of melancholy; never quite well, he was lined and drawn from driving himself, many times over, to the limits of his strength. Though his eyebrows and moustache were heavy and dark, his close-cropped beard was already touched with grey. Lawrence told her of Faisal's passion for Arabic poetry, and how he would listen to recitations of the odes for hours and hours. He spoke of his brilliance at chess, and of the mysterious frailty that sometimes caused him, after taking the lead in battle, to fall unconscious and have to be carried from the field.

Deeply impressed, hopeful that the French would not prevent Faisal from becoming King of Syria, Gertrude asked for an interview with him. She spent a couple of hours talking to him one morning as he was sitting for Augustus John, who had taken a studio in Paris to paint the most interesting of the delegates. Among her papers exists an untitled, undated record of two early interviews with Faisal, one of them in Paris:

In John's studio I told him that I believed that no power on earth would make France relinquish the Syrian Mandate. He had received this opinion with surprise and dismay. I had gone straight from this interview to lunch
with Mr. Balfour and after lunch when the other guests had left had related my conversation with Faisal and reiterated my conviction regarding the attitude of the French. Mr. Balfour . . . assure[d] me in a purely private capacity that he was in agreement with me. Thereupon I begged him to clear Faisal's mind of illusions . . . so that he might shape his course accordingly. Mr. Balfour thereupon summoned Ian Malcolm and said “Ian, will you make a note of what she says so that I may not forget to acquaint Lloyd George.” Ian producing an exquisite notebook from an impeccable pocket had made the desired entry—and I, feeling that Ian's notebook was the epitome of all culs de sac, had left Paris a day or two later.

Lord Arthur James Balfour, Lloyd George's languid Foreign Secretary, had issued a Declaration in November 1917 that the British government approved “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” As Gertrude, thinking of the Sykes-Picot treaty and all the trouble that had caused, wrote in a letter to Sir Gilbert Clayton, former head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo: “Mr. Balfour's Zionist pronouncement I regard with the deepest mistrust—if only people at home would not make pronouncements how much easier it would be for those on the spot!”

Contentious as the declaration would be, the wording had been watered down somewhat from the original proclamation that “Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.” When the first draft of the Declaration had been put to the Cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India—the man who had reprimanded Gertrude for having communicated her views to him over the head of A. T. Wilson—mounted a vehement opposition despite being Jewish himself, stating that Zionism was a “mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” Was his own loyalty, he demanded, to be to Palestine? And what would be the repercussions for the rights of Jews living in other countries? Many Jewish leaders in the West believed that to offer Palestine to the Jews would be a disservice to Jewry; moreover, the Jews already settled in Palestine anticipated, and dreaded, the trouble that Zionism was about to cause. In support of his argument, Montagu had read out to the Cabinet a strongly argued letter from Gertrude, whose persuasive words had resulted in the rephrasing of the document. She was angered by the tendency of the
Zionists and the statesmen at the Conference to talk as if Palestine was empty of people; and she could see that Arabs and Jews could not live peaceably side by side. As long ago as January 1918 she had written to Clayton:

Palestine for the Jews has always seemed to us to be an impossible proposition. I don't believe it can be carried out—personally I don't want it to be carried out, and I've said so on every possible occasion . . . to gratify Jewish sentiment you would have to override every conceivable political consideration, including the wishes of the large majority of the population.

It was not the first time that the Zionists' dream of a homeland would exclude any consideration for the people who already lived there. The first Zionist congress in 1897 had produced the plan to buy Uganda as a home for the Jews. Thirty years on, what about the rights of the existing community in Palestine? There were five hundred thousand Arabs there, four-fifths of the population. How was the protection promised by the Declaration to be delivered, if it became the home of the Jewish nation?

Half the Jews in the world lived in abject misery in the area called the Pale, now Belarus, the Ukraine, and eastern Poland. It was stifling in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, and desperately poor land at any time. The Russian government gave no protection to its seven million Jews, who were continually subjected to pogroms and murderous anti-Jewish riots. Some of them turned to revolution, like Trotsky, and hundreds of thousands left to begin new lives in America and Western Europe. At the start of the war, there were three million Jews in America and three hundred thousand in Britain, many of them refugees.

Nationalist ideas, which grew in popularity throughout the war, led in France, Germany, and Austria to a general suspicion of minorities, and particularly of their Jewish minorities. At the same time, Jews' longing for a nation of their own intensified. In Britain, the leading Zionist was Chaim Weizmann, a reader in biochemistry at Manchester University and a man of extraordinarily engaging personality. For him Palestine, the last Jewish kingdom to have been destroyed by the Romans, was the only place for a Jewish homeland. He wanted a land where a Jew could be “one hundred per cent a Jew,” not an assimilated Jew obliged to designate himself by another nationality. These he despised—and they included
individuals as prominent as Lord Rothschild and Edwin Montagu. Before the war Weizmann interviewed some two thousand people in an attempt to win them over to the cause. His conquests included Lord Robert Cecil, who helped him to convince Balfour. The Zionist dream struck a romantic chord in the Foreign Secretary, who believed that there should be a national home for “the most gifted race that mankind has seen since the Greeks of the 5th century.” Weizmann had also converted Mark Sykes, Lloyd George, and Churchill, Churchill's sympathies having already been enlisted by the support he was given in his first election by the prominent Jewish community of Manchester.

At the beginning of the war, when Balfour was First Lord of the Admiralty and Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions, Weizmann had created an almost indelible debt to himself. At a time when Britain was facing a hopeless shortage of explosives, he had invented a process for making acetone, essential for their manufacture. He presented it to the government without taking a penny for it throughout the war: he asked for nothing but the support of Britain for the Zionist cause, and it was a promise that could not be forgotten.

The Jewish Legion, volunteers within the Royal Fusiliers, fought bravely alongside Allenby in his advance on Damascus. When he set up his administration there, he duly made his pronouncements in both Hebrew and Arabic. A few months later, the Zionists bought an estate in Jerusalem and Weizmann laid there the foundation stone of the Hebrew University. When Weizmann arrived at the Paris Peace Conference, he made impassioned speeches and backed the British claim for the mandate over Palestine. Not surprisingly, when he and Faisal were introduced to each other, they discovered common ground: neither wanted the French mandate. Faisal, somewhat contemptuous of the Palestinians, whom he regarded as borderline Arabs, and much preoccupied with his own problems, agreed vaguely with Weizmann that there was “plenty of land to go around.” Faisal foresaw a beneficial future for the Palestinian Arabs in partnership with Jewish immigrants, who would be bringing their Western education and energy to a barren land. On 3 January 1919 they signed an agreement to encourage immigration in return for the Zionists' support for an independent Arab state.

After the Conference, a commission distinguished by its insignificance was sent by America to investigate the future of Palestine and canvass
public opinion in Syria. The two individuals carrying out the commission discovered, as Gertrude could already have told them, that there was deep opposition to the Zionist programme on the part of the Palestinian Arabs: they recommended that the notion of a Jewish homeland be abandoned. Gertrude was well aware that up to this time the Arabs in Palestine had not regarded themselves as a nation. “In one respect Palestine has reason to be grateful to the Balfour declaration: the country has found itself in opposing it. National self-consciousness has grown by leaps and bounds . . . The eager desire of education everywhere manifest has been induced by a jealous wish to be level with the Jews.”

Nobody paid any attention to the commissioners' findings; neither was there any chance of reading their report, as it was never published.

It was unfortunate that, while Weizmann had worked his charm at the Conference, the Palestinians had not attended. Instead, and for the first time, they rioted in Jerusalem against the proposal for Jewish settlement in Palestine. They sent Balfour a stream of letters and petitions, but these were all destroyed by his private secretary before he could read them. The truth was that nobody wanted to turn their minds to the problem. It was the opinion of those who did spare a thought for the Palestine question that, in the words of Lord Curzon, the area “will be a rankling thorn in the flesh of whoever is charged with its Mandate.” So it was for the High Commissioner of His Majesty's Government in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel. On his inauguration, Gertrude wrote even-handedly of the friction between the Jews and the Arabs: of the Zionists' tactlessness in the free expression of their hopes for the future of Palestine, and the Arabs' deep resentment of the economic and financial powers granted to the newly established Zionist Commission. This, a committee under Weizmann, had been appointed by the British to be resident in Jerusalem, where it would represent Jewish issues to the local British officials. “The roaring of responsible members of the Commission, as for instance the declaration that Palestine is to be as Jewish as America is American, will continue to echo behind the High Commissioner's dovelike notes, which they effectively drown,” Gertrude commented.