Nevertheless, by the time he entered the Colonial Office he was committed to it. The more he pondered the issue, the more his enthusiasm for a Jewish homeland grew, and he reaffirmed the declaration at a time when a majority of the British officials in the Middle East were urging that it be repudiated. Lieutenant General Sir Walter Congreve, commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in the Middle East, typically predicted that the Arabs would not return to tranquillity until their “aspirations are attended to,” which “means Zionist aspirations being greatly curbed.” He continued: “As long as we persist in our Zionist policy we have got to maintain our present forces in Palestine to enforce a policy hateful to the great majority—a majority which means to fight & to continue to fight and has right on its side.” Walter Smart, a senior civil servant in Egypt, wrote bitterly of “Anglo-French bargaining about other peoples’ property, the deliberate bribing of international Jewry at the expense of the Arabs who were already our allies in the field, the immature political juggleries of amateur Oriental experts, the stultification of Arab independence and unity… all the immorality and incompetence inevitable in the stress of a great war.”62
Churchill decided to sail out to the eastern Mediterranean on the French steamship Sphinx and see for himself, taking with him Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, and Archie Sinclair, now Winston’s private secretary. The Arabs could not have chosen a more passionate spokesman than Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” who spoke fluent Arabic, had led them against the Turks, had suffered several grave wounds, and, after surviving capture and torture, had emerged as a shining figure. His shyness was legendary. Privately Winston wondered about that. Lawrence, he said wryly, “has a way of backing into the limelight.” But including him in the delegation was a brilliant political stroke. Outraged by the betrayal at San Remo, he had begun writing his great Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the leitmotiv of which would be British shame. When George V had received him at a royal audience and attempted to award him the DSO and a Companionship in the Order of the Bath, Lawrence had politely refused the decorations, leaving the shocked monarch, in the King’s own words, “holding the box in my hand.” If this man of honor supported a Middle Eastern settlement, the shiekhs of Araby would hesitate to reject it.63
The Sphinx would stop at Marseilles to pick up Clementine, who had been visiting friends in France. From the Hotel Bristol in Beaulieu she wrote Winston: “I am thrilled by the idea & so so longing to see you.” Replying, he told her to pack the proper clothing for sight-seeing trips and tennis—“Do not forget your racquet.” In a second letter he wrote: “We shall have a beautiful cabin together. If only it is not rough—then I shall hide in any old dog hole far from yr sight…. If it is fine, it will be lovely & I shall write & paint & we will talk over all our affairs.” His mother, now living in Berkeley Square, dropped him “a line to wish you bon voyage—& a speedy return—Give my love to Clemmie…. I will look after the children & give you news of them. They are great darlings & do you both great credit!”64
Meanwhile, Weizmann had told the Political Committee of the Zionist Organization that he was worried about Churchill’s mission. The new colonial secretary was “of a highly impressionable temperament,” he said, and he expected the Arabs to “organize an agitation to greet him on his arrival in the East.” On March 1, Winston’s last day in London before the six-day voyage, Weizmann sent him a long letter, demanding that the Jewish state’s eastern boundary be extended east of the Jordan River to include all of Transjordan (now Jordan). Transjordan, he wrote, “has from the earliest time been an integral and vital part of Palestine.” Here the tribes of Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben “first pitched their tents and pastured their flocks.” The climate was “invigorating,” the soil “rich,” irrigation would be “easy,” and the hills were “covered with forests.” There “Jewish settlement could proceed on a large scale without friction with the local population.” How friction with the Arab inhabitants could be avoided he did not say. Nor was that all. Weizmann also wanted Palestine’s southern frontier pushed southward. Churchill was noncommittal. He favored including the triangular wedge of the Negev Desert in the Palestine Mandate, but not the east bank of the Jordan. Two days later, when the ship paused at Marseilles, a newspaperman came aboard and asked him the purpose of his trip. He replied disingenuously: “I am endeavouring to realise French and British unity in the East. My journey to Egypt and Asia Minor is proof of this. We must at any price coordinate our actions to the extent of uniting them. It is by those means only that we shall be able to arrive at lasting quiet, and diminish the enormous expenditure we are both making.” Privately he was more entertaining. He told his party: “What the horn is to the rhinoceros, what the sting is to the wasp, the Mohammedan faith is to the Arabs—a faculty of offense or defense.”65
As Weizmann had predicted, Churchill’s arrival in Cairo was a tumultuous event. A few weeks earlier he had publicly described Egypt as part of the British Empire, and newspapers here had carried the story. El Azhar University students were staging a one-day protest strike. Thousands of spectators, many carrying rocks, awaited his appearance in Station Square. The bridge leading into Shubra Road was packed to capacity. “Various notables,” the Palestine Weekly reported, “waited patiently in the station, which had been cleared of all unauthorised persons, and Bristol Fighters and huge Handley Pages circled overhead. The train steamed in to the station half an hour late and amid intense excitement disgorged five boxes and other baggage.” But where was Churchill, the great Satan? Prudently, he and his party had detrained at the suburban terminal of Shubra, whence they had motored unseen and undisturbed to their destination. The newspaper noted that “a disorderly rabble gathered outside Shepheard’s crying ‘Down with Churchill!’ but they were dispersed speedily and without casualty.” Being students, they had picked the wrong hotel. He was staying at the Semiramis.66
The Semiramis, another newspaper reported, was “a scene of feverish bustle,” as high commissioners, generals, governors, and civil servants checked in from the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Palestine, and British Somaliland. His Marseilles interview to the contrary, Winston’s real purpose in Cairo was, not the knitting together of Allied unity, frayed though it had become, but the choosing of two kings, protégés of the British, to rule over Iraq and Transjordan. As Lawrence later wrote frankly, he and Winston had already reviewed the aspirants “over dinner at the Ship Restaurant in Whitehall.” The two likeliest candidates were Husein’s sons, emir Faisal and emir Abdullah. On March 12, 1921, the Cairo conference opened at the Mena House. “Practically all the experts and authorities on the Middle East were summoned,” Churchill wrote afterward, a singular description of a meeting at which, of the thirty-eight participants, thirty-six were British. Lawrence suggested that Faisal be crowned head of Iraq, “not only,” the minutes read, “because of his personal knowledge and friendship for the individual, but also on the ground that in order to counteract the claims of rival candidates and to pull together the scattered elements of a backward and half-civilized country, it was essential that the first ruler should be an active and inspiring personality.” His motion, with Churchill’s approval, carried without dissent. Abdullah, in Lawrence’s opinion, was “lazy and by no means dominating,” but though unfit to rule Iraq he would be permitted to reign over Transjordan under the watchful eye of a British high commissioner. Churchill announced his intention to appoint Abdullah in Palestine, and in later years he would say: “The Emir Abdullah is in Transjordania, where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.” Zionism’s hopes were honored; Sir Herbert Samuel, the Empire’s high commissioner in Palestine, was instructed to foster a Jewish homeland. It was all very insular—Faisal and Abdullah would send their sons to public schools in England—and it was also rather medieval. Churchill enjoyed this feudal role immensely. And Lawrence was delighted. He continued to hold other politicians in contempt, but in the Seven Pillars he would write enthusiastically of Winston’s acco
mplishments, concluding that, as a result of them, “I must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.” When at long last the book was published he sent an inscribed copy to “Winston Churchill, who made a happy ending to this show…. And eleven years after we set our hands to making an honest settlement, all our work still stands; the countries have gone forward, our interests having been saved, and nobody having been killed, either on one side or the other. To have planned for eleven years is statesmanship. I ought to have given you two copies of this work!” James Morris wrote: “The routes to India were safe as never before, the oil wells of Iran and the Persian Gulf, the Abadan refinery, all were securely in British possession.”67
Other matters lay before the conference, notably the occupation of Iraq by British troops. Churchill decided to withdraw them, and, in a grand if absurd gesture, declared that the entire country—116,600 square miles—would be defended by the emaciated RAF, thereby saving the Exchequer £25,000,000 a year. Then he left the details to subordinates in Mena House and departed to enjoy leisure outside. The Egyptian climate is at its most pleasant in March, and he sprawled happily beneath its sun. He knew he was unpopular with the Egyptians—many vehicles carried stickers reading “à bas Churchill”—“but,” as Jessie Crosland, the wife of a civil servant, recalled a half-century later, “he didn’t care. He took his easel out and sat in the road painting—he also talked so loudly in the street that the generals got quite nervous.” Cordons of police held back furious mobs who had come to stone him. Carried to and fro in an armored car, he painted the Sphinx and the Pyramids while Clementine admired them, and he even held a one-man show of his canvases. On an expedition in the desert he was careening forward on a loping camel when his saddle slipped, dashing him off. Several colorfully dressed bedouins galloped up and offered one of their horses, but he rose, dusted himself off, and growled: “I started on a camel and I shall finish on a camel.” An Englishwoman who attended the conference remembers: “When things were boring in the hotel everyone would cheer up when Winston came in, followed by an Arab carrying a pail and a bottle of wine.” On their last day in Egypt, Winston and Clementine were driven to a Nile dam, which he painted. Returning, they crashed into another car. Churchill, a journalist observed, was “far more concerned about the safety of his painting than about himself.” According to the Egyptian Gazette, no one was hurt. Indeed, at a farewell ball given by Lord Allenby, the country’s high commissioner, Clemmie was reported to have danced until “close on midnight.”68
Churchill and a friend in Egypt with T. E. Lawrence (right)
Her husband had left the dance floor earlier in the evening, when Sir Herbert Samuel arrived from Jerusalem. The Palestine Weekly noted that “Mr Churchill at once went upstairs with him and was seen no more.” The discussion of the river Jordan, its banks, and its people, had begun. At midnight on March 23, Winston, Clementine, Sir Herbert, and Lawrence boarded a train in Cairo Station for their first Palestinian stop, Gaza. There, early the following morning, they confronted a mob of 150,000 Arabs, whose “chief cry,” according to a British officer, “over which they waxed quite frenzied, was: ‘Down with the Jews! Cut their throats!’ ” This, incredibly, was unexpected. Winston’s Arabists had assured him that there was no incongruity in England’s separate pledges to the Jews and to the Arabs. Even Lawrence had believed that Palestinian hostility to Zionism had been overrated and could easily be contained; he had endorsed Abdullah, despite his reservations about him, because he thought Abdullah could persuade his people to accept a Jewish homeland. But when he heard the shouting crowds at Gaza and successive stops, he realized his error. Churchill, misunderstanding their fervor, thought they were acclaiming him and waved back cheerfully. Lawrence then translated their chants, and Winston muttered that he was at least grateful they weren’t stoning him. Actually, they were plotting violence, but against the Jews, not him. Abdullah’s appeals for calm were ignored. So was a government ban on all demonstrations during Churchill’s tour. In Haifa ten Jews and five policemen were wounded by missiles and knives, and two innocent bystanders, a young boy and a Moslem woman, were killed. The Executive Committee of the Haifa Congress of Palestinian Arabs, calling on Winston, handed him a twelve-thousand-word statement denouncing the Balfour declaration and the concept of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Jews, they said, had been scattered over the earth for thousands of years, “and have become nationals of the various nations amongst whom they settled. They have no separate political or lingual existence…. Hebrew is a dead language.” If there was such a thing as Jewish power and a Jewish nation, what was the status “of those high Jewish officials who are serving England to-day? Are they Jewish nationals or English nationals?… It is obvious they cannot be both at the same time.”69
This was debatable, but reasonable—very different from the throngs that screamed “Palestine for the Arabs! Down with the Zionists!”—and Churchill was attentive. But then they made a mistake. They threatened him. “If England does not take up the cause of the Arabs,” they declared, “other Powers will…. If she does not listen, then perhaps Russia will take up their call some day, or perhaps even Germany.” Now his temper rose. As Lawrence wrote a friend, “The man’s as brave as six, as good-humored, shrewd, self-confident & considerate as a statesman can be: & several times I’ve seen him chuck the statesmanlike course & do the honest thing instead.” The political response to such an overture would be equivocation. Winston bluntly told them that it had been Englishmen, not Palestinian Arabs, who had overthrown their Turkish oppressors: “The position of Great Britain in Palestine is one of trust, but it is also one of right.” Nearby, he reminded them, more than two thousand British soldiers were buried, “and there are many other graveyards, some even larger, scattered about in this land.” To fulfill that trust, “and for the high purposes we have in view, supreme sacrifices were made by all these soldiers of the British Empire, who gave up their lives and blood.”70
Whatever his previous doubts about the justice of creating a Zionist state, they were gone now. He knew that it would be expensive. He said: “In Africa the population is docile and the country fruitful; in Mesopotamia the country is arid and the population ferocious. A little money goes a long way in Africa and a lot of money goes a very little way in Arabia.” But he believed the price must be paid. At the same time, however, he urged the Jews to be realistic. After trying to speak at the Mosque of Omar, where he was shouted down by Arabs, he visited the Hebrew University, still under construction, to plant a symbolic tree. “Personally,” he told his audience, “my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism.” He believed “that the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine will be a blessing to… Great Britain.” Then he reminded them that when the British promised to support Zionism, they also “assured the non-Jewish inhabitants that they should not suffer in consequence. Every step you take should therefore be also for the moral and material benefit of all Palestinians.” He said: “I am now going to plant a tree, and I hope that in its shadow peace and prosperity may return once more to Palestine.”71
It will surprise no one who has lived in the Middle East that the tree broke as it was handed to him, that there was no backup, and that they had to settle for a scrawny palm which wouldn’t even grow in that soil. Harry Sacher, an English Zionist who was practicing law in Palestine, wrote a friend that “Churchill spoke very plainly in reaffirming the Balfour Declaration, both to the Jews and the Arabs. But he also told the Jews that they must do their bit, and he enlarged upon the pressures on the [British] taxpayer, and the anti-Zionist critics in Parliament. The Arabs are angry, and there was a bit of trouble in Haifa, where a crowd was dispersed by force, perhaps too much force. I am not happy about the Arab position.” He wondered “whether the British Government may not finish by dropping the whole thing and clearing out—for financial reasons. I really don’t know whether England today can afford such a luxury as a foreign policy, with or without manda
tes.”72
Back in England the House discovered that Winston’s commitment to the Palestine problem was absolute. At times it seemed a thankless task. Some English Zionists regarded the creation of Transjordan as a betrayal of Balfour’s pledge; one of them, Richard Meinertzhagen, wrote a friend that he had confronted Winston and “told him it was grossly unfair to the Jews, that it was another promise broken and that it was a most dishonest act, that the Balfour Declaration was being torn up by degrees and that the official policy of H.M.G. to establish a Home for the Jews in Biblical Palestine was being sabotaged; that I found the Middle East Department whose business it was to implement the Mandate almost one hundred per cent hebraphobe and could not the duration of Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan be of a temporary nature, say for seven years…. Churchill listened and said he saw the force of my argument and would consider the question. He thought it was too late to alter but a time limit to Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan might work.”73 It wouldn’t have worked, and he must have known that, but on this very delicate issue he had to listen to all sides and, however great the strain, exercise an uncharacteristic restraint.