by John Ellis
As the summer of 1919 rolled to its end, a potentially disruptive report was issued detailing the findings of Charles Crane and Henry King. The two Americans had been commissioned by President Woodrow Wilson to travel the Middle East, study the situation, and report back. They were clear in their report “that the Arabs in Palestine were ‘emphatically against the Zionist program’ and recommended that the Peace Conference limit Jewish immigration and give up the idea of making Palestine a Jewish homeland.” Historian Margaret MacMillan wryly added, “Nobody paid the slightest attention.”[1]
While MacMillan’s wry observation is a little ahistorical, as I’ll show below, she ultimately wasn’t wrong. The die had already been cast for the Palestinians; it’s just that the die had yet to stop tumbling around in 1919.
Among the weights creating the imbalance in those die, Prince Feisal Hussein had signed his agreement with Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists at the start of the year; and powerful supporters of Zionism in both America and England were bending the Peace Conference to their will. The Balfour Declaration was slowly rising above the other treaties and agreements signed behind closed doors throughout the war, even amidst setbacks. The Zionists themselves didn’t sit idly by on the sideline, but let their immense presence and program be felt and heard throughout the conference.
While it’s true that the Allies were weighed down with what they viewed as larger, more pressing issues than Palestine and Zionism, Chaim Weizmann and company didn’t allow their objectives to stray too far from the collective minds of the men pulling the strings at the Peace Conference. The Zionists stayed busy lobbying the members, reminding them of the horrendous pogroms Jews had suffered and were still suffering under. They also pointed out the masses of Jewish immigrants pouring into Palestine, brought there by the promise of the Balfour Declaration. Greatly aiding their cause, and likely most importantly of all the variables influencing the debate, Louis Brandeis’ friend and protégé Felix Frankfurter traveled to Paris as part of President Wilson’s entourage. Frankfurter’s arrival may have been the vital lifeline the Zionist cause didn’t realize it needed. Frankfurter played the role of Zionist backstop as anti-Zionist opinions and policies began to grow in opposition. Even though President Wilson was personally committed to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, many of the “American Commissioners quickly agreed with the experts from the State Department and the Foreign Office that the Balfour Declaration had been a bad idea and should be ignored.”[2]
The aforementioned “King-Crane Commission of Inquiry” flatly stated, “We recommend … serious modification of the extreme Zionist Program for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State.”[3] Ironically, Wilson’s 14 Points, specifically his call for national self-determination, were working against the Zionists, too. The King-Crane commission was heavily weighted towards this Wilsonian ideal. Both King and Crane acknowledged, “The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor, but the actual facts of Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies … have driven them to the recommendation here made.”[4] In their report, they point out the obvious that the Zionist objective was actually at odds with the Balfour Declaration. The change of “the national home” to “a national home” in the final version of the Declaration under the influence of Edwin Montague was coming home to roost.
Weizmann and the Zionists viewed Palestine as the national home for Jews, regardless of the verbiage in the Balfour Declaration, and were working to turn that vision into a reality. However, Crane and King observed that the Zionist plan to recreate Palestine as the national home for Jews could not be “accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.”[5]
In black and white print, Crane and King laid bare the Zionist goal of the removal of a large mass of Palestinian peasants to make way for Jewish immigrants. Pointing out again that the Palestinians were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism, they wrote that supporting the Zionist would be a direct refutation of President Wilson’s call for self-determination, writing, “To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the [Wilsonian] principle just quoted, and the peoples’ rights.”[6] In their report, they made the observation that the implementation of the Zionist program would require many troops and much violence. They added that the use of force inevitably required by the Zionist program would be a gross violation of the Palestinians’ rights. All this led Crane and King to conclude, which I quote in full, “In view of these considerations, and with a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause, the Commissioners feel bound to recommend that only a greatly reduced Zionist program be attempted by the Peace Conference, and even that, only very gradually initiated. This would have to mean that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.”[7]
By the time of its release, though, the clearness of the King-Crane Commission’s findings and recommendations had already become muddied by the effective lobbying of the Zionists. Combined with the jockeying for position by the European powers for influence in the Middle East, the Zionist program was close to jumping out of the starting gate in a full sprint as the summer of 1919 closed. But getting to that starting gate had required some work.
While the Zionists faced an uphill climb at the start of 1919, they were well-equipped, led by Chaim Weizmann, to scale that mountain. It also helped that Felix Frankfurter was waiting in the wings, eager to use his influence, as well as the immense influence of his mentor Louis Brandeis, to help ensure the success of the Zionist cause.
On January 14, 1919, Chaim Weizmann managed to secure a private conference with the President. Joking that “the French and I speak a different language,”[8] Weizmann won over Wilson who was becoming increasingly frustrated at Clemenceau and France’s continued reversals of opinion and general obstinance.[9] A few weeks after Weizmann presented the Zionist cause to a sympathetic Wilson, Feisal and T.E. Lawrence[10] appealed to Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice. Relying on the promise made by Weizmann that “the Zionists would lend their assistance to developing the independent Arab state which presumably was about to be set up the Peace Conference,”[11] the stately Arabian prince lobbied the American Zionist. In a follow up to the meeting, in a letter addressed to Frankfurter, Feisal wrote:
“We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideal together. … We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. … We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movement complete one another. … Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”[12]
Won over by Feisal, Frankfurter reported back to Louis Brandeis. He explained to the leader (unofficial leader by 1919) of American Zionism that “the Arab question had ceased to exist as a difficulty to the realization of our program before the Peace Conference.”[13]
A month later, on February 27, Chaim Weizmann argued the Zionist cause before the Peace Conference’s Supreme Council. As Adelman explains, “His mission that afternoon was to persuade the Allied representatives that Fance and Europe had nothing to fear from the Zionist cause.”[14] In his speech, Weizmann pressed home the need for a national home for Jews, their historic right to Palestine, and the Zionists’ desire to protect the rights of the current inhabitants.[15]Afterwards, an ecstatic Weizmann wrote to his wife that the speech was “a marvelous moment, the most triumphant of my life!”[16]
All of Weizmann and the Zionists’ efforts may have proven in vain, though, if not for the call for help Felix Frankfurter sent to Louis Brandeis.
Brandeis is a singular figure in American history. Nicknamed the people’s attorney, his law career was so successful that he was able to devote much of his time and energy to pro-bono work and still accumulate millions of dollars.[17] And millions of dollars in the early 20th century amounts to tens of millions of dollars today. Brandeis was the consummate early 20th century progressive, taking on oversized corporations, making him a perfect choice for Woodrow Wilson to nominate as associate justice to the Supreme Court. Well, “perfect” minus the fact that he was a Jew, a negative for many Americans, and a fact that created a nasty subtext of anti-Semitism during his confirmation hearings. Even in the face of that anti-Semitism and pro-big business interests (often containing much overlap), Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1916. He also served as the official leader of the American Zionist movement and then as its de facto leader after he stepped down upon his entrance to the Supreme Court. In 1919, and into 1920, he relied on Felix Frankfurter (the 3rd Jew to serve on the Supreme Court) to be his eyes and ears in Paris. His biographer writes, “when the commissioners seemed to be wavering about Palestine, Brandeis contacted Wilson directly, reminding him that the United States had endorsed the Balfour Declaration.”[18]
As the son and grandson of Presbyterian preachers, Wilson had deep-seated sympathies for Zionism rooted in his evangelical theology. His passion to see the return of Jews to Palestine aroused, the President forwarded Brandeis’ letter to his Secretary of State Rober Lansing with the instructions that the American commissioners were to defend and promote the Balfour Declaration unequivocally. He commanded, “All the great powers are committed to the Balfour declaration and I agree with Mr. Justice Brandeis regarding it as a solemn promise which we can in no circumstances afford to break or alter.”[19]
Flatly contradicting the conclusion of Crane and King, whom he had personally appointed to study the issue, President Woodrow Wilson, upon the urging of Louis Brandeis, single-handedly saved the Zionist program. If Felix Frankfurter, the man who served as Brandeis’ eyes and ears, hadn’t accompanied the President to Paris, the voices warning against the Zionist program may have won out. Instead, the Commissioners at the Peace Conference entered the San Remo conference in 1920 largely committed to the Balfour Declaration and the Zionist project.
Bearing the name of the Italian resort town in which it was held in April 1920, the San Remo Conference was one of dozens of conferences held in the aftermath of World War I as extensions of the Paris Peace Conference while the Allied Supreme Council continued deliberating over the remaking of the world. In that puzzle of remaking the world “the negotiation of the peace settlement in the Middle East … was the last to be concluded.”[20] And that conclusion was supposed to have occurred on August 10, 1920, upon the signing of the Treaty of Sevres, a treaty that was intended to officially ratify between the Allied Powers and the Ottoman Empire the agreement reached in San Remo. But it didn’t.
The number of conferences, treaties, and agreements that happened in about an eight-year span (1915-1923) can be daunting and confusing. British Prime Minister Lloyd George attended thirty-three of those conferences, to provide an idea of how massive and complex the efforts were to remake the world. Frankly, that number also illustrates how hard it can be to keep track of the various conferences, treaties, and agreements that culminated in the remaking of the world, including the official establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine. My goal is to simplify the narrative thread in ways that returns to Palestine in short order, but I do need to briefly pull on a few threads to accomplish that. I believe it will be helpful if I work backwards; similar to how starting at the end of a maze and working in reverse is much easier than starting at the beginning. And that end officially (and finally) happened on July 24, 1923, in Lausanne Switzerland.
The Treaty of Lausanne was the result of the collapse of the Treaty of Sevres. Harsher on Turkey than the Treaty of Versailles was on the Germans, “the one-sided Treaty of Sevres … had partitioned Turkey, ceding much of its territory to Armenia, Greece, France, and Britain, with Italy receiving a large zone of influence in southern Anatolia.”[21] The Sultan’s complete acquiescence to the Allies infuriated the Turkish people and helped propel Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to success in the Turkish Civil War. This civil war bled into the areas supposedly under the control of the Allied victors. A still war-weary West no longer had the stomach for seeing their young men spill their blood on foreign soil. On September 18, 1922, “the Daily Mail came out with the headline ‘Stop This New War,’ reflecting the popular mood.”[22] With the Turkish Civil War threatening to drag the West back into war, the Western nations issued an invitation to the Turks to a peace conference in Lausanne. The initial invitation also included the Sultan’s exiled government. Flexing his power, Ataturk dressed down the Allies and let them know that “the Turkish Grand National Assembly was the only legitimate authority in Turkey; any other bodies would do well to refrain from causing confusion in the country’s policy.”[23] Ultimately, the Treaty of Lausanne established the modern nation of Turkey as independent, untouched by the mandate system that came out of the Paris Peace Conference.[24] But it also ratified the partitioning off of much of the Ottoman Empire and placed the various regions under the control of the mandate system, including Palestine.
Trying to keep within the spirit of Wilson’s call for self-determination, in principle the mandate system was supposed to differ from colonization. In practice, though, its bigoted motives and language helped ensure the oppression of the people groups covered by the mandate system.
On June 18, 1919, the Covenant for the League of Nations, written by the Paris Peace Conference and included in Part 1 of the Treaty of Versailles, was ratified. Article 22 of the Covenant established the mandate system. Its authors did their best to differentiate colonization from mandates, but the verbiage is paternalistic and racist. The first three paragraphs of Article 22 cast the people groups under the mandate with bigoted language as “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”[25] The solution was that “The best method … is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations.”[26] Circumventing the push for self-determination, Article 22 cast Western countries as the arbiters of how the “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves” should be governed, putting the decision in the hands of the League of Nations and not the people groups themselves. This is made explicit in the Article’s next to last paragraph that states, “The degree of authority, control, or administration to be exercised by the Mandatory shall, if not previously agreed upon by the Members of the League [of Nations], be explicitly defined in each case by the Council.”[27] This is the governing document behind the British Mandate of Palestine. But how did England gain control over Palestine in the face of competing interests?
Remember the Sykes-Picot Agreement? Well, in December 1918, on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference, British Prime Minister Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau reached a verbal agreement that slightly altered the previous agreement. Under Sykes-Picot, Palestine was to be governed by an international committee. The agreement between Lloyd George and Clemenceau changed that, giving all of Palestine to England.[28] Effectively, though, Britain had already established control over Palestine with General Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem on December 9. 1917. The British Mandate over Palestine began patronizingly, quickly devolved into violence, and ended traumatically a little over thirty years after Allenby had triumphantly entered Jerusalem, handing David Lloyd George his Christmas present for the English people. The Balfour Declaration opened the already occupied land to the immigration of Zionists determined to use England in the creation of a Jewish state. England didn’t always play nicely with the Zionists, though. The rising presence of foreigners in Palestine created a recipe for tension and violence.
[1] Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House Trade Paperback, 2003), 423.
[2] Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 528.
[3] Charles Crane and Henry King, “The American King-Crane Commission of Inquiry, 1919,” From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and Palestine Problem Until 1948 ed. Walid Khalidi (Washington, D.C.: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005), 214.
[4] Crane and King, From Haven to Conquest, 214.
[5] Crane and King, From Haven to Conquest, 215.
[6] Crane and King, From Haven to Conquest, 215-216.
[7] Crane and King, From Haven to Conquest, 217.
[8] Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Nashville, TN: Wiley, 2014), 99.
[9] In fairness, it should be noted that much of Wilson’s complaints about the French delegation were owed to the reality that Clemenceau was an accomplished diplomat and Wilson was over his skies when it came to diplomacy. Wilson never dropped his professorial attitude of authority to be obeyed. Clemenceau (and Lloyd George) used this to their advantage … as did Senator Henry Cabot Lodge when he torpedoed the United State’s involvement in Wilson’s beloved League of Nations.
[10] Yes, that Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia.
[11] McMillan, Paris 1919, 422.
[12] Feisal Hussein, “Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed 3/5/2024, Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence (March 1919) (jewishvirtuallibrary.org).
[13] Andelman, A Shattered Peace, 99.
[14] Andelman, A Shattered Peace, 101.
[15] Try as I might, I cannot find a text of this speech. Many of the secondary sources I have reference the speech and Weizman’s points, but none directly quote from it. And none of the sources I’ve found for primary sources – The Institute for Palestine Studies and the Jewish Virtual Library, for example – have it, for some reason. It seems odd to me that a speech as important as Chaim Weizmann’s before the Paris Peace Conference’s Supreme Council wouldn’t have been recorded for posterity’s sake and is difficult to find. I write all this to admit that I don’t actually know what Weizman said on Feb. 27, 1919. I only know his talking points. I mean, I have the contents of his letter to his wife about the speech, but not the speech itself. I find this odd (and unfortunate). In conclusion, I need a research assistant.
[16] Quoted by MacMillan, Paris 1919, 410.
[17] Since he did so much pro bono work, he didn’t want to shortchange the other partners in his firm. So, out of his own pocket, he would often pay the firm his own fees that he would’ve been owed if he had taken a paying client instead of pro bono work.
[18] Urofsky, Louis Brandeis, 529.
[19] Urofsky, Louis Brandeis, 529.
[20] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: A Holt Paperback, 1989), 403.
[21] Michael S. Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2.
[22] Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (New York: The Overlook Press, 1999), 352.
[23] Mango, Ataturk, 356.
[24] Shamefully, it also closed the book on any pursuit of justice for the victims of the Armenian genocide.
[25] “Covenant of the League of Nations,” First World War, accessed on 3/6/2024, First World War.com – Primary Documents – Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919-24.
[26] “Covenant of the League of Nations,” First World War, accessed on 3/6/2024, First World War.com – Primary Documents – Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919-24.
[27] “Covenant of the League of Nations,” First World War, accessed on 3/6/2024, First World War.com – Primary Documents – Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919-24.
[28] It also gave Mosul (modern day Iraq) to England, too.
Practically Known Theology 