Jerusalem: The Biography

Even as Germany finally buckled, the lobbying had already started. On the day the armistice was signed, 11 November, Weizmann, who had an appointment arranged before this momentous development, found Lloyd George weeping in 10 Downing Street reading the Psalms. Lawrence canvassed officials in London to help the Arab cause. Faisal was in Paris to put his case to the French. But when the British and French clashed in Paris over the division of the East, Lloyd George protested that it was Britain that had conquered Jerusalem: ‘The other governments had only put a few nigger policemen to see we didn’t steal the Holy Sepulchre.’

THE VICTORS AND THE SPOILS

1919–20

WOODROW WILSON AT VERSAILLES

Meeting in London a few weeks later, Lloyd George and the French Premier Georges Clemenceau traded chips in the Middle East. In return for Syria, Clemenceau was accommodating:

CLEMENCEAU: ‘Tell me what you want.’

LLOYD GEORGE: ‘I want Mosul.’

CLEMENCEAU: ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’

LLOYD GEORGE: ‘Yes I want Jerusalem too!’

CLEMENCEAU: ‘You shall have it.’

In January 1919, Woodrow Wilson, the first US president ever to leave the Americas while in office, arrived in Versailles to settle the peace with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The protagonists of the Middle East came to lobby the victors, with Faisal, accompanied by Lawrence, striving to prevent French control of Syria; and Weizmann hoping to keep Britain in Palestine and win international recognition for the Balfour Declaration. The very presence of Lawrence, as Faisal’s adviser, wearing British uniform combined with Arab headdress, outraged the French. They tried to get him banned from the conference.

Wilson, that idealistic Virginian professor turned Democratic politician and now international arbiter, proclaimed that ‘every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interests and for the benefit of the populations concerned’. He refused to countenance an imperial carve-up of the Middle East. The three potentates soon came to resent each other. Wilson regarded Lloyd George as ‘slippery’. The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau, squeezed between the self-righteous Wilson and the land-grabbing Lloyd George, complained, ‘I find myself between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte.’ The playful Welshman and the buttoned-up American got on best: Lloyd George admired the latter’s idealism – providing Britain got what he wanted. In a wood-panelled room in Paris, lined with books, these Olympians would shape the world, a prospect that amused the cynical Balfour as he superciliously watched ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men carving up continents’.

Clemenceau’s ambitions were as shameless as those of Lloyd George. When Clemenceau agreed to meet Lawrence, he justified his claim to Syria by explaining that the French had ruled Palestine in the Crusades: ‘Yes,’ answered Lawrence, ‘but the Crusades failed.’ Besides, the Crusaders never took Damascus, Clemenceau’s primary target and the heart of Arab national aspirations. The French still hoped to share Jerusalem under Sykes–Picot, but the British now rejected that entire treaty.

The US president, son of a Presbyterian minister, had endorsed the Balfour Declaration: ‘To think that I, the son of the manse,’ said Wilson, ‘should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.’ He was influenced by both Protestant Hebraism and his adviser, Louis Brandeis, a Jew from Kentucky who had been nominated by Wilson to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, known as ‘the People’s Lawyer’, was an incorruptible paragon of American scholarship and public service but in 1914, only 15,000 of 3 million American Jews were members of his US Zionist Federation. By 1917, hundreds of thousands of American Jews had become involved; evangelical Christians were lobbying for Zionism; and ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, who had visited the Holy City with his parents as a boy, was backing ‘a Zionist State around Jerusalem’.

Nonetheless Wilson faced a painful contradiction between Zionism and the self-determination of the Arabs. The British had at one point suggested an American mandate – a new word to describe something between a protectorate and a province. Wilson actually considered the possibility. But, faced with the Anglo-French grab for Palestine and Syria, he despatched an American commission to investigate Arab aspirations. The King–Crane Commission, led by a Chicago valve-manufacturer and the president of Oberlin College, reported back that most Palestinian and Syrian Arabs wished to live in Faisal’s Kingdom of Greater Syria – under American protection. But these findings proved irrelevant when Wilson failed to restrain his imperialist allies. It still took two years for the new League of Nations to confirm that the British got Palestine and the French, Syria – which Lawrence called ‘the mandate swindle’.