Jerusalem. The Biography

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 shapethe 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’.
    On 8 March 1920, Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria (including Lebanon and Palestine) and appointed Jerusalem’s Said al-Husseini as his foreign minister, while the mufti’s brother Amin had for a short time served in the royal court. The excitement generated by the creation of this new kingdom emboldened the Palestinian Arabs to stand up to the Zionist threat. Weizmann warned that there could be trouble.Jabotinsky and the former Russian revolutionary Pinkhas Rutenberg, * created a Jewish self-defence force, 600 strong. But Storrs ignored the alarm bells.
    STORRS: THE NABI MUSA RIOTS – FIRST SHOTS
     
    On the morning of Sunday 20 April 1920, in a city tense with Jewish and Christian pilgrims, 60,000 Arabs gathered for the Nabi Musa festival, led by the Husseinis. The diarist Wasif Jawhariyyeh watched them singing songs in protest against the Balfour Declaration. The mufti’s younger brother, Haj Amin al-Husseini, incited the crowds, holding up a picture of Faisal: ‘This is your King!’ The mob shouted, ‘Palestine is our land, the Jews are our