Part VII
While Arab leaders fomented attacks in Palestine against the Zionists, Shapira said other leaders went to London to protest the Balfour Declaration. On August 12, 1921, the Palestinian Arab Deputation, a delegation of Palestinian Arabs, met with the top officials in the British government to protest against the Balfour Declaration and issued the Colonial Office a memorandum listing their demands. Their first was to establish a National Government, accountable to a Parliament elected by those living in Palestine before World War I. Their second was for the British to renounce the idea of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, since this would endanger their survival as a nation. Their third goal was to end Jewish immigration until after a National Government was established. Their other demands included abolishing all laws enacted by the British and for Palestine to become part of the other Arab states in the region under “one confederated government.”
Three days after receiving the memorandum, Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary and cabinet minister responsible for Palestine, met with members of the delegation, historian Martin Gilbert notes. The Arabs vehemently protested against the Balfour Declaration, were disturbed that Jews were being employed in the British administration in Palestine, and angry that Hebrew was one of the three official languages sanctioned by the Mandatory authorities. Churchill responded that the Jews “are to be encouraged to go to Palestine and found there a home for themselves … in proportion as there is room, and there is good livelihood, provided of course they develop the resources of the country.”
Churchill was disappointed with the Delegation for not wanting to discuss the provision in the draft constitution that would have established “some permanent machinery” to preserve the rights and interests of the non-Jewish population.
The Arabs replied that increased tensions were warranted because “… immigrants dumped upon the country from different parts of the world are ignorant of the language, customs, and character of the Arabs, and enter Palestine by the might of England against the will of the people who are convinced that these have come to strangle them. Nature does not allow the creation of a spirit of co-operation between peoples so different, and it is not to be expected that the Arabs would bow to such a great injustice, or that the Zionists would so easily succeed in realising their dreams.”
In a cabinet memorandum in March 1928, Balfour stated that the British had a strategic and political interest in being in Palestine—to protect the security of the Suez Canal, “the jugular vein of the British Empire”—and guarantee access to the East. The British wanted to remain in Palestine and have a presence in Egypt, which it occupied in 1882, in order to thwart French designs in Syria and Lebanon and prevent them from moving south and establishing a “land bridge” to the oil fields in Iraq. Egypt was declared a British protectorate on December 18, 1914.
Arthur Ruppin, a German-Jewish lawyer and sociologist who had been sent by the Jewish Agency to Palestine in 1907 to evaluate the feasibility of Zionist settlement in the country, had serious reservations about the compatibility of the Arabs and Jews. Ruppin eventually became head of the newly created Palestine Zionist Organization. He wrote in his diary of December 31, 1924:
What continually worries me is the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine. Superficially, it has improved, inasmuch as there is no danger of pogroms, but the two peoples have become more estranged in their thinking. Neither has any understanding of the other, and yet I have no doubt whatsoever that Zionism will end in a catastrophe if we do not succeed in finding a common platform.
Resort to Force
By resorting to force, the Arabs had hoped to influence British policy “by making that policy impossible,” observed Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a former chief political officer in Palestine. The Arabs were determined to stop Jewish immigration, he asserts, and used the anti-Jewish riots in Jaffa of May 1, 1921 to “demonstrate the futility and unfairness” of the Zionist movement and its “inevitable” demise.
After the riots, Sir Herbert Samuel seemed “hypnotized by the danger, and everything was done to placate the Arab. Immigration was stopped, elective assemblies were discussed, whereas what the Arab wanted was a good sound punishment for breaking the peace and killing Jews.” This appeasement did not go unnoticed: “The Arab is fast learning that he can intimidate a British Administration. Samuel has not been able to stand up to the solid block of anti-Zionist feeling among his military advisers and civil subordinates.”
From a strictly legal perspective, Arab views on the Balfour Declaration were irrelevant, notes historian Isaiah Friedman, since the area was under Turkish rule, not Arab sovereignty. Palestine was not a separate administrative entity, and the Arabs were not a recognized body. William Ormsby-Gore, who during World War I served in Egypt and became an assistant secretary to the British Cabinet in 1917, found in Palestine and Syria a “kaleidoscope of races and creeds” with virtually no national traditions, history or sentiment.”
Historian Efraim Karsh adds that T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), the leading advocate of the pan-Arab cause, confirmed this assessment in 1915 when he wrote that in Syria: “There is no national feeling. Between town and town, village and village, family and family, creed and creed, exist intimate jealousies, sedulously fostered by the Turks to render spontaneous union impossible. The largest indigenous political entity in settled Syria is only the village under its sheikh, and in patriarchal Syria the tribe under its chief … All the constitution above them is the artificial bureaucracy of the Turk … By accident and time the Arabic language has gradually permeated the country, until it is now almost the only one in use; but this does not mean that Syria—any more than Egypt—is an Arabian country. On the sea coast there is little, if any, Arabic feeling or tradition; on the desert edge there is much.”
Friedman said Lord Robert Cecil, the under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, and an original backer of the Balfour Declaration, believed that no Arab state had any justification to criticize this policy. In acknowledging the right of Jews to their national homeland, this had been “part of the terms on which the Arab State was brought into existence, subject of course, to the rights of individual Arabs being fully protected.”
Lord Balfour reiterated this point, Friedman said, when he noted that it was the British who had created an independent kingdom, along the current western Saudi Arabian coast: “I hope they will remember that it is we who desire in Mesopotamia [Iraq] to prepare the way for the future of a self-governing, autonomous Arab State, and I hope that, remembering all that, they will not grudge that small notch—for it is no more than that geographically, whatever it may be historically—that small notch in what is now Arab territories being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it.”
After Chaim Weizmann heard anxiety about future relations with the Jews, he sought to allay any Arab apprehension. In a speech he delivered on December 9, 1917 in Manchester, England, he said: “It is now imperative, is it not logical, we who have suffered so much from physical force should try and reconstitute in Palestine an age of justice and right for everybody? It is strange indeed to hear the fear expressed that the Jew in Palestine might become an aggressor, that the Jew who has always been the victim, the Jew who has always fought the battle of freedom for others, should suddenly become an aggressor because he touches Palestinian soil.”
Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
