History of the Jews (77 page)

When the First World War broke out, Jabotinsky was appointed a roving correspondent of a Moscow paper and travelled to the Middle East. The Turks were treating the Palestine Jews as potential traitors and their terrorism had reduced a population of over 85,000 to less than 60,000. In Alexandria there were 10,000 Jewish refugees, living in squalor but riven by internal disputes. The Ashkenazis and the Sephardis insisted on separate soup-kitchens. The students from the new Herzl Gymnasium in Tel Aviv would not co-operate at all unless spoken to in Hebrew. Jabotinsky, who is best described as a poetic
activist—rather like D’Annunzio—decided that an army was needed both to weld the Jews together and to raise them from their supine acceptance of ill-treatment. He found a fellow spirit in Joseph Trumpeldor (1880-1920), a one-armed conscript-hero of the Russo-Japanese war. Together these two determined men, against much official British resistance, succeeded in creating a specifically Jewish military contribution to the war: first the Zion Mule Corps, then three battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, the 38th (London East End), the 39th (American volunteers) and the 40th, recruited from the
Yishuv
itself.
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Jabotinsky served in the 38th battalion and led the crossing of the Jordan. But to his dismay and alarm, the Zionist authorities in Palestine showed no particular zeal to keep what had become the Jewish Legion in existence and the British promptly disbanded it. So he formed a covert self-defence organization which was to become the Haganah, embryo of a mighty army.
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Jabotinsky’s disquiet was prompted by the evident and growing hostility felt by the local Arabs to the Jewish national home project. The Zionists, led by Herzl himself, had tended all along to underestimate the Arabs. On his first visit to London, Herzl had believed Holman Hunt, who knew Palestine well, when he prophesied: ‘The Arabs are nothing more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. They don’t even have to be dispossessed, for they would render the Jews very useful services.’
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In fact the Arabs were developing a nationalist spirit just like the Jews. The chief difference was that they started to organize themselves two decades later. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, was part of the European nationalist movement, which was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The Arabs, by contrast, were part of the Afro-Asian nationalism of the twentieth century. Their nationalist movement began, effectively, in 1911 when a secret body called Al-Fatah, the Young Arabs, was started in Paris. It was modelled on the Young Turks, and like them was strongly anti-Zionist from the start. After the war the French, who—as we have seen—hated the British mandate from the start and, behind the scenes, fought it inch by inch during the Versailles negotiations, allowed Al-Fatah to set up its base in Damascus, as a centre of anti-British and anti-Zionist activity.
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A few Zionists had foreseen that to use Palestine to settle ‘the Jewish problem’ might, in turn, create ‘the Arab problem’. Ahad Ha’Am, who had visited Erez Israel, had written an article ‘The Truth from Palestine’, in 1891, six years before Herzl launched his movement. He issued a warning. It was a great mistake, he said, for Zionists to dismiss the Arabs as stupid savages who did not realize what was happening. In fact,

 

the Arab, like all semites, possesses a sharp intelligence and great cunning…. [The Arabs] see through our activity in the country and its purpose but they keep silent, since for the time being they do not fear any danger for their future. When however the life of our people in Palestine develops to the point when the indigenous people feel threatened, they will not easily give way any longer. How careful must we be in dealing with an alien people in whose midst we want to settle! How essential it is to practise kindness and esteem towards them!…If ever the Arab judges the action of his rivals to be oppression or the robbing of his rights, then even if he is silent and waits for his time, the rage will stay alive in his heart.
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This warning was largely ignored. The scale of the settlement pushed up the price of land, and Jewish settlers and agencies found the Arabs hard bargainers: ‘every dunam of land needed for our colonization work [had] to be bought in the open market’, complained Weizmann, ‘at fantastic prices which rose ever higher as our work developed. Every improvement we made raised the value of the remaining land in that particular area, and the Arab landowners lost no time in cashing in. We found we had to cover the soil of Palestine with Jewish gold.’
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Hence the Jews tended to see the Arabs as grasping proprietors—or, indeed, as simple labourers. They eased their consciences by the thought that in this, and many other ways, the Arabs were benefiting from Zionism. But as a rule they ignored them, as merely part of the human scenery. Ahad Ha’Am noted as late as 1920: ‘Since the beginning of the Palestinian colonization we have always considered the Arab people as non-existent.’

Arab nationalism at last became dynamic during the war, when Arab troops fought on both sides and were bid for by both sides. The Allies, for their part, issued during the war a lot of post-dated cheques to countless nationalities whose support they needed. When the peace came some of the cheques bounced and the Arabs, in particular, found they had been handed a stumer. Instead of the great Arab state, they got French protectorates in Syria and Lebanon, and British protectorates in Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. In the dealing and fighting that marked the ‘peace’, the only Arab clan to emerge triumphant were the Saudis in Arabia. The Emir Feisal, head of the Hashemites, whom Britain had backed, had to be content with Transjordan. He was well disposed towards Jewish settlement, believing it would raise Arab living standards. ‘We Arabs,’ he wrote to Felix Frankfurter, 3 March 1919, ‘especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement…. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.’
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But Feisal overestimated both the numbers and the courage of Arab
moderates prepared to work with the Jews. The British had in fact been warned during the war that if the rumours of the Jewish home proved true, they must expect trouble: ‘Politically’, wrote one of Sykes’ best Arab informants, ‘a Jewish state in Palestine will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.’
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The British establishment in charge, Allenby, General Bols, the Chief of Staff, and Sir Ronald Storrs, Governor of Jerusalem, knew this very well and tried to play down the national home idea. The Balfour Declaration, ran the order, ‘is to be treated as extremely confidential and is on no account for any kind of publication’. At one stage they even proposed that Feisal should be made King of Palestine.
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But the fact that the British authorities tried hard to calm the Arabs-and so were promptly accused of anti-Semitism by some of the Jews—made no difference. The post-war return of Jewish refugees from Egypt to Palestine, and the arrival of more, fleeing pogroms by the White Russians in the Ukraine, marked the point at which the Arabs, in Ha’Am’s words, began to feel threatened. Early in March 1920 there was a series of Arab attacks on Jewish settlements in the Galilee, during one of which Trumpeldor was killed; and they were followed by Arab riots in Jerusalem. Jabotinsky, bringing his self-defence force into action for the first time, was arrested, together with other members of the Haganah, tried by a military court and given fifteen years’ hard labour. Arab rioters were convicted and imprisoned too, among them Haji Amin al-Husaini, who fled the country and was sentenced to ten years
in absentia
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In the uproar that followed the riots, Lloyd George made a fatal error. Seeking to appease the Jews, who claimed that British troops had done little to protect Jewish lives and property, he sent out Samuel as high commissioner. The Jews rejoiced, claimed victory, and the moment Samuel arrived overwhelmed him with complaints and demands. Weizmann was furious. ‘Mr Samuel will be utterly disgusted,’ he wrote to Dr Edu at the Zionist office in Palestine, ‘and will turn his back on the Jewish community, just as the others did, and our best chance will have gone.’
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In fact that was not the real problem. Samuel did not mind Jewish importuning. What he minded was Arab accusations of unfairness because he was a Jew. Samuel always tried to have things both ways. He wanted to be a Jew without joining any Zionist organization. Now he wanted to promote a Jewish national home without offending the Arabs. The thing could not be done. It was inherent in the entire Zionist concept that the Palestine Arabs could not expect full rights within the main area of Jewish settlement. But the
Balfour Declaration specifically safeguarded the civil and religious rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ and Samuel took this to mean that the Arabs must have equal rights and opportunities. Indeed, he regarded this phrase as the axiom of his mission. ‘The Zionism that is practical’, he wrote, ‘is the Zionism that fulfils this essential condition.’
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Samuel believed he could square this particular circle. Not believing in Yahweh, his Bible was Lord Morley’s disastrous book,
On Compromise
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Hence as the Jews quickly discovered, he came not to appease but to lecture. Even before he arrived as high commissioner, he defined ‘the Arab problem’ as the ‘main consideration’. He criticized the Zionists for not having recognized ‘the force and value of the Arab nationalist movement’, which was ‘very real and no bluff’. If anyone had to be appeased, it was the Arabs: ‘The only alternative is a policy of coercion which is wrong in principle and likely to prove unsuccessful in practice.’ The Jews must make ‘considerable sacrifices’. ‘Unless there is very careful steering,’ he wrote to Weizmann, 10 August 1921, ‘it is upon the Arab rock that the Zionist ship may be wrecked.’ He told the Palestine Jewish leaders: ‘You yourselves are inviting a massacre which will come as long as you disregard the Arabs. You pass over them in silence…. You have done nothing to come to an understanding. You know only how to protest against the government…. Zionism has not yet done a thing to obtain the consent of the inhabitants, and without this consent immigration will not be possible.’
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In a way this was very good advice. The difficulty for the Zionists was that, in the troubled days of the early 1920s, they were finding it very difficult to sustain the effort of settlement at all and had little energy and resources for gestures towards the Arabs. In any case, while giving them such advice Samuel’s other actions ruled out the possibility of taking it. He believed in equivalence, in being even-handed. He did not grasp that, just as there was no place for equivalence as between a Jew and an anti-Semite, so you could not be even-handed between Jewish settlers and those Arabs who did not want them there at all. His first act was to amnesty the 1920 rioters. The object was to release Jabotinsky. But equivalence meant a pardon for the Arab extremists who had started the riots in the first place.

Then Samuel, in turn, made a fatal mistake. One difficulty the British experienced in dealing with the Arabs was that they had no official leader, King Feisal’s writ running no further than the Jordan. So they invented the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In March 1921 its existing holder, head of an important local family, died. His
younger brother was the notorious rioter Haji Amin al-Husaini, now pardoned and back on the political scene. The procedure for creating a new mufti was for a local electoral college of pious Arab Moslems to choose three candidates and for government to confirm one of them. Haji Amin, then in his mid-twenties, was qualified neither by age nor by learning for the post. He had been passionately anti-British ever since the Balfour Declaration. He had a violent, lifelong hatred for Jews. In addition to his ten-year sentence he was down on the police files as a dangerous agitator. The electoral college was mainly moderate and, not surprisingly, Haji Amin came bottom of the poll, getting only eight votes. A moderate and learned man, Sheikh Hisam al-Din, was chosen and Samuel was glad to confirm him. Then the al Husaini family and the nationalist extreme wing—those who had led the 1920 riots—began a vicious campaign of denigration. They plastered Jerusalem with posters attacking the electoral college: ‘The accursed tratiors, whom you all know, have combined with the Jews to have one of their party appointed mufti.’
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Unfortunately the British staff contained a former architect and assistant to Sir Ronald Storrs called Ernest T. Richmond, who acted as adviser to the high commissioner on Moslem affairs. He was a passionate anti-Zionist, whom the chief secretary, Sir Gilbert Claydon, termed ‘the counterpart of the Zionist organization’. ‘He is a declared enemy of the Zionist policy and almost as frankly declared an enemy of the Jewish policy of
HM
Government,’ ran a Colonial Office secret minute; ‘government…would gain very greatly by excluding from its secretariat so very partisan a figure as Mr Richmond.’
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It was Richmond who persuaded the moderate sheikh to stand down and then convinced Samuel that, in the light of the agitation, it would be a friendly gesture towards the Arabs to let Haji Amin become Grand Mufti. Samuel saw the young man on 11 April 1921 and accepted ‘assurances that the influence of his family and himself would be devoted to tranquillity’. Three weeks later there were riots in Jaffa and elsewhere in which forty-three Jews were murdered.
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This appointment to what was regarded as a minor post in an unimportant British protectorate turned into one of the most tragic and decisive errors of the century. It is not clear whether a Jewish-Arab agreement to work together in Palestine would have been feasible even under sensible Arab leadership. But it became absolutely impossible once Haji Amin became Grand Mufti. Samuel compounded his initial misjudgment by promoting the formation of a Supreme Moslem Council, which the mufti and his associates promptly captured and turned into a tyrannical instrument of terror.
Still worse, he encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to make contact with their neighbours and promote pan-Arabism. Hence the mufti was able to infect the pan-Arab movement with his violent anti-Zionism. He was a soft-spoken killer and organizer of killers. The great majority of his victims were fellow Arabs. His prime purpose was to silence moderation in Arab Palestine, and he succeeded completely. He became Britain’s outstanding opponent in the Middle East, and in due course he made common cause with the Nazis and strongly supported Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. But the principal victims of his unbalanced personality were the ordinary people of Arab Palestine. As the historian Elie Kedourie has well observed, ‘It was the Husainis who directed the political strategy of the Palestinians until 1947 and they led them to utter ruin.’
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