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T. E. Lawrence, Faisal
and Weizmann: The 1919
attempt to secure an Arab
Balfour declaration
a
A. L. Tibawi
a
Lecturer at the Institute of Education ,
University of London
Published online: 25 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: A. L. Tibawi (1969) T. E. Lawrence, Faisal and Weizmann:

The 1919 attempt to secure an Arab Balfour declaration, Journal of The Royal
Central Asian Society, 56:2, 156-163

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03068376908732070

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 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND
WEIZMANN: THE 1919 ATTEMPT TO
SECURE AN ARAB BALFOUR
DECLARATION
A. L. TIBAWI
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F EW, if any, writers on Lawrence seem to have paid much attention

to what he said in the preface of the first edition of Seven Pillars
of Wisdom. He stated frankly that the book was "self-regarding"
and "does not pretend to be impartial". He also made it clear that he
was not writing history with the relevant documents before him.
"Please", he begged the reader, "take it as a personal narrative pieced
out of memory."
These confessions, it seems to me, are sufficient warrant for dis-
counting much of the diligent search in Lawrence's "personal narrative"
for inaccuracies, inconsistencies and exaggerations as wasted effort.
Why look for such faults in the writing of an author who not only laid
no claim to accuracy, but also disarmed his critics in advance by
admitting that he was not immune from errors of fact and judgment?
The present contribution to the literature on Lawrence is a departure
from this well-trodden path. It seeks to bring to light an obscure aspect
of his role, not in the "Revolt in the Desert", but in the diplomatic
tangle of the fifteen months or so after the end of the First World War.
In particular it is concerned with the part he played in 1919 in what
may be described as a Zionist attempt to secure an Arab Balfour
Declaration. The new evidence is derived, not from Lawrence's much-
examined and published work, but principally from hitherto secret
Foreign Office papers now open for inspection at the Public Records
Office. F. O. 371 (Turkey). So far as I know, the present is the first
attempt to make use of these papers in this matter.

On December 1, 1917, Sir Mark Sykes, then in charge of the

Zionist question under orders from Lloyd George and Balfour, tele-
graphed to Colonel Gilbert Clayton, the chief political officer at the
British army headquarters in Cairo, suggesting ways of softening the
blow to their Arab allies of the British declaration a month earlier in
favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people. One suggestion was to tell the Sharif of Mecca and the
Syrians and Palestinians in Cairo that the Turks, with German prompt-
ing, might have issued a similar declaration. Another suggestion was
more sinister, and its general adoption was calculated to poison Anglo-
156
 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN 157
Arab relations for more than a generation: "Offer the Arabs autonomy
and then smash them by use of moral force or traditional [?hate of]
Turkish domination and the usual promotion of dissension."
Cairo replied on December 12 as follows: "In spite of all arguments"
the Sharif of Mecca refused to have anything to do with the political
aspirations of Jews (or Armenians). The final sentence in the reply
epitomizes the sad history of Palestine in the last fifty years. "The
Arabs of Palestine", it reads, "fear repetition of the story of Jacob and
Esau."
There is no evidence that the British Government took any serious
notice of this report of Arab reaction, four weeks after the issue of the
Balfour Declaration. There is, however, ample evidence of attempts to
persuade influential Arab leaders to accept it.
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In January 1918 Dr. D. G. Hogarth, an Oxford don then serving

as an intelligence officer, was sent with messages from the British
Government to the Sharif of Mecca, King Husain. The mission was
largely occasioned by the Bolshevik publication of the secret Sykes-
Picot agreement dividing up the Arab lands as British and French
spheres of influence and reserving Palestine for an international
administration. It was also occasioned by the stir made by the issue of
the Balfour Declaration.
Hogarth gave Husain to understand that international control in
Palestine was intended for the non-Muslim holy places. He said nothing
about sovereignty or government, but hastened to assure the Sharif that
the Muslim holy places would remain under exclusive Muslim control.
On the implications of the Balfour Declaration the Hogarth message
was more specific. The British Government favoured Jewish immigra-
tion into Palestine only "in so far as is compatible with the freedom of
the existing population, both economic and political".
That these messages failed to allay Husain's fears is seen from his
official letter two weeks later to Sir Reginald Wingate, the British High
Commissioner in Cairo, in which Husain expressed great anxiety about
the future of the Arabs and fears that his revolt against the Caliph-
Sultan would not be vindicated if it failed to achieve their independence.
This important letter cites one specific example: the reports circulated
by the Turks "amongst the Arabs in Palestine that our intention was
to put them under Jewish rule and let the Zionists rule them".
Nor was Hogarth the only British officer detailed to persuade the
Arabs to accept the Zionist policy of the British Government. Clayton,
who began by complaining that it was not easy to change the trend of
British propaganda from Arab to Zionist, tried nevertheless to make the
shift possible. In February 1918 he wrote to Sykes that he had urged
Lawrence to impress upon Faisal "the necessity of an entente with the
Zionists". If Lawrence did try at this stage he must have failed, as the
outcome of the next move shows.

It was owing to Sykes's initiative that the British military authorities

made arrangements for the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, to visit
Faisal's camp near Aqaba in June 1918. The visit proved to be no more
 158 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN
than a gesture, and its outcome was nil. To start with, there was a
formidable language difficulty. Weizmann spoke no Arabic, and Faisal
no English nor any other European language. Colonel Joyce, one of
Lawrence's associates, acted as an interpreter. But Weizmann, despite
his own ignorance of Arabic, says Joyce's Arabic was poor.
Weizmann's report of the encounter may be safely disregarded, as
being not disinterested. Almost all his reports of this nature contain
the same phrase—"fully approved or agreed"—no matter who the
person concerned. In the absence of a corresponding Arab report,
therefore, it is safer to accept the British one. The gist of it is that
Faisal as a soldier refused to enter into any political discussion; policy,
he said, was made in Mecca by his father. So on the best available
evidence Weizmann returned empty-handed.
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Two weeks later Wingate sent a despatch to Balfour in which he

mentioned, inter alia, vague proposals by Weizmann hinting at "financial
assistance", and "propaganda support" in Europe and America, to the
Arabs in return for a recognition of as yet undefined "Zionist aspira-
tions in Palestine". Wingate and those British and civil military persona-
lities in close touch with the Arabs knew already that it was a forlorn
hope. Hogarth himself came to the same conclusion, as is clear from a
letter he sent to the Foreign Office in which he said that "the British
undertaking to the Zionists will have to be imposed by main forte".
As a disciple of Hogarth, and in close touch with him, Lawrence
was not ignorant of the strength of Arab opposition to the British
Government's Zionist policy. Little is known about his attitude to
Zionism during the war except the negative evidence that he did not
act as interpreter between Faisal and Weizmann. After the end of the
war, and his return to London, however, he seems to have accepted the
general line of British policy. He was rather unobtrusively attached to
the Foreign Office, and on several occasions papers were actually
referred to him. Very seldom, however, did he mark any papers with
more than his initials; sometimes the papers were marked by another
hand, "seen by Col. Lawrence". This was the case with a report
dated November 17, 1918, sent from Cairo by Sykes. It mentions the
beginning of "considerable physical friction" between Arabs and
Zionist Jews following the publication of a series of articles in Palestine,
a British Zionist journal, which envisaged an independent Jewish
state with boundaries extending north to near Beirut and east beyond
the river Jordan almost to the Hijaz railway.
It is not recorded under what circumstances Lawrence was per-
suaded by Lord Robert Cecil, Balfour's right-hand man at the Foreign
Office and like him a convinced Zionist, to arrange for Weizmann to
meet Faisal within twenty-four hours after his first arrival in London.
Henceforth Lawrence was in a mysterious way Balfour's unofficial
adviser on the Arab-Zionist question.
Faisal's visit to London was for the purpose of preliminary talks with
the British Government before proceeding to the Peace Conference in
Paris as head of the Arab delegation. His brief was to seek the recogni-
tion of the independence of all Arab countries formerly parts of the
 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN 159
Ottoman Empire. His immediate objective, however, was the recogni-
tion of an independent Arab state in geographical Syria, which included
Palestine. Lawrence was at once attached, or he attached himself, to
Faisal as interpreter and guide.
Faisal's chances of achieving even his limited objective were slight
in view of British and French territorial ambitions, complicated on the
British side by the commitment to the Zionists. A few days before
Faisal's arrival, Lloyd George had struck a bargain with the French
Prime Minister whereby Palestine, hitherto reserved by the two powers
for an international regime and assumed by the Arabs to be included in
the areas where Britain was pledged to uphold Arab independence, fell
within the British sphere of influence.
The division of Greater Syria into two such spheres had thus become
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inevitable. From the Zionist point of view this was an important step
towards realizing their hopes under British protection. Hence the
efforts to secure some Arab recognition of the Zionist programme were
now redoubled. Through Lawrence, pressure was brought to bear on
Faisal to receive Weizmann. The British Government was persuaded
by men with Sykes's outlook that their Zionist policy needed only to
be clinched with an influential Arab leader such as Faisal, and that the
expressed opposition of the people most concerned, the overwhelming
Arab majority of the population, could be disregarded.
Lawrence acted as an interpreter between Faisal and Weizmann.
That he was now "interpreting" Faisal's and the Arabs' policy rather
than that of the British Government is, in the light of new evidence,
open to grave doubt. There is no Arabic record of Faisal's conversa-
tions, nor are there copies of his Arabic letters and telegrams, at this
particular moment. Those that do exist are all in English, and yet are
attributed to him. Careful scrutiny of their phraseology, tone and con-
tent reveal a spirit more akin to Whitehall and Oxford than to Mecca
or Damascus. It has until now been a secret that Lawrence had become
Balfour's protege. For it was Balfour who appointed Lawrence adviser
to the British delegation to the Peace Conference, contrary to the advice
of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office. So when Weizmann called
on Faisal, the interpreter was, to put it mildly, not opposed to the
Zionist programme.

Weizmann came armed with an "agreement" ready and typed in

English. It purported to be between "the Arab State" and "Palestine",
even though neither of them had at the time any juridical or political
existence. There is no doubt as to the author of the "agreement":
its articles enunciate all the Zionist aspirations regarding immigration
and acquisition of land, and the Balfour Declaration itself is carefully
mentioned. The Arabs figure in the document only as Muslims whose
holy places were to remain under their own control, and as peasant and
tenant farmers whose unspecified rights are guaranteed. There is no
mention at all of financial assistance, though technical advice on
economic development is promised to "the Arab state".
It is indeed singular that an "agreement" with an Arab leader who
 l6o T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN
knew no English should be in that language and should have no Arabic
original or translation. Faisal's understanding of its terms must there-
fore have been entirely dependent on Lawrence's oral explanation.
This must have been regarded as inadequate by Faisal, who despite his
desire to conciliate all minorities in Syria, including the Maronites and
the Jews, was careful that such conciliation should be within the frame-
work of Arab independence and sovereignty. He therefore wrote an
undated note in Arabic on the "agreement", which Lawrence, with
characteristic carelessness, gave back to Weizmann. Faisal's note reads
as follows:
If the Arabs attain their independence as we demanded in our memor-
andum dated 4 January 1919 addressed to the British Foreign Office I shall
approve of the articles contained in this [document]. If the slightest change
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or adjustment is made [in meeting the demands], I shall not be bound by a

single word in this contract (muqawalah) which will be null and void and
of no account and no validity, and I shall not be answerable in any way.
Lawrence also gave Weizmann on a slip of paper a rough, and indeed
—since it omitted the phrase "Arab independence"—misleading
translation. With the omission of a few words which he himself crossed
out, Lawrence's translation reads:
If the Arabs are established as I have asked in my manifesto addressed
to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs I will carry out what is
written in this agreement. If changes are made I am not answerable for
failing to carry out this agreement.
Weizmann saw the propaganda value of what was little more than
a rejected document. In his own hand he added to Lawrence's transla-
tion the words "of January 4" after the word "manifesto" and wrote on
top "Reservation by the Emir Faisal".
It is easy to guess why Weizmann was reluctant to inform the
Foreign Office, especially when by January 7 a copy of what was
described as "an agreement between the King of the Hijaz and the
Zionists" was in the hands of David Hunter Miller, one of the technical
advisers to the American delegation to the Peace Conference (who in
1924 published it in My Diary at the Conference of Paris).
The outcome of Weizmann's second encounter with Faisal, in
London, was thus no more successful than his first, near Aqaba. Yet on
both occasions Zionist propaganda made capital of the meeting and
circulated reports which were not, as we can now see more clearly than
ever, borne out by the facts.
The British friends of Zionism now became increasingly alarmed at
the extent and vehemence of Arab opposition in Palestine itself and in
Syria as a whole. In January 1919 Sykes himself was in Syria. From
Aleppo he telegraphed to Weizmann via Ormsby-Gore, another pro-
Zionist, at the Foreign Office, on the growth of anti-Zionist agitation
in Syria: "I have seen the Arab Committee and impressed upon them
that such a policy would be absolute ruin to their case, and told them
that if such policy continued I would withdraw help . . . and have no
more to do with the [Arab] movement."
 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN l6l
Sykes asked Ormsby-Gore to paraphrase this telegram and then
destroy the original, but the above text somehow survived in the files
of the Foreign Office. Two weeks later Sykes reported further as follows:
"Told the Arabs that Damascus cannot and must not busy itself with
Palestinian problems. . . . In their own interests they have to come to
an understanding with the Zionists. . . . Would not grant [sic] them
any support if they did not put a stop to the agitation."
The surprising revelation is that Lawrence, who had seen and
initialled Sykes's first telegram, should join the game himself. Through
the Foreign Office he had a telegram sent in the name of Faisal to
Sharif Nasr at Aleppo assuring him that things were "going well" and
adding the request to promote friendship with the Jews (and Armenians).
More specific was another telegram sent a few days later, also in the
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name of Faisal, to his brother and deputy in Damascus, which reads in

part:
Anti-Zionist articles in your Damascus papers. . . . Please explain to
Ali Rida [the military govenor of Syria] that the Zionist Committee is
helping us very much here in Paris, and that I am most anxious to retain
their goodwill. Do your best to control the press on this point.
These attempts to silence protests against the Zionist policy of the
British Government, coupled by determined efforts, in which Lawrence
played a prominent part, to seek Faisal's sanction of that policy, are
difficult to understand. Both moves are irreconcilable with the British
attitude to Faisal's credentials. They asked him to be armed with
authorization to speak in the name of the Syrians in the zone under his
administration but prevented him from seeking such authorization
from the people of Lebanon and Palestine. Furthermore, the British
Government was well aware that Husain's instructions were for Faisal
to ask for Arab independence in all Arab territories and that he was
given no authority to sign away Palestine or any other part of the Arab
homeland. Nor was the British Government ignorant of the formal
request submitted by the Palestine Arabs, Muslims and Christians, to
the Peace Conference asking for their own representatives to appear
before the international body. This request was not granted, although
a similar request from the Zionists—not themselves natives of Palestine
—was.

Lawrence's reference to "help" from the Zionist Commission in

Paris was, of course, nonsense. It can mean only that the Arabs and the
Zionists, for different reasons, were opposed to the provisions of the
Sykes-Picot agreement regarding an international regime for Palestine
as well as to the French ambition of including that country in their
sphere of influence in Syria.
It was now the turn of American Zionists to approach Faisal in
Paris, again through Lawrence, with vague references to American help
for the Arab cause. Faisal had not yet abandoned hope of an inde-
pendent Arab State embracing all parts of geographical Syria, with
adequate provision for minorities, including the Jews. Nor was he in
4
 162 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN
principle opposed to foreign advice, particularly if offered by Britain.
But he and his followers feared France, and began, in the face of an
ambiguous British policy, to pin some hopes on America.
At this juncture Felix Frankfurter, the American Zionist, is supposed
to have elicited from Faisal a letter of sympathy with Zionist aspirations.
The letter, unlike the Weizmann "agreement", is written in English.
How much Lawrence was responsible for it is now impossible to
determine. But even if we assume its authenticity—an assumption
which as we shall see is unjustified—-Lawrence as its "interpreter" was
clearly more in accord with the Zionist than with the Arab point of
view. It is difficult to imagine Faisal possessing such deep understanding
and "full" agreement with the Zionist programme.
Exactly ten years later, when the Shaw Commission investigated the
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1929 disturbance in Palestine, the Zionists submitted as evidence of

Arab approval of their programme not the Weizmann "agreement" but
the far less specific "letter" to Frankfurter. Now, one of the Palestine
Arab counsels before the commission was Faisal's private secretary at
the Peace Conference in 1919. He at once challenged the authenticity
of the letter and followed up the challenge by obtaining a telegraphic
repudiation of it from Faisal himself, then King of Iraq.
In June 1936, when the Arabs of Palestine were in armed revolt
against the British regime and its Zionist policy, and when both Faisal
and Lawrence were dead, Weizmann published the "agreement" in
The Times and the Palestine Post without Faisal's damaging Arabic
reservation but with a facsimile of Lawrence's rough translation thereof
(both shown here).
Writing at the time under a pen name I analysed these documents
in an essay which was published in Arabic in the Jaffa daily ad-Difa
(June 26, 1936) and in English in [the Jerusalem daily] The Palestine
Post (July 19, 1936). Later the same year I expanded the essay and
submitted it over my own name as evidence to the Palestine Royal
Commission. While pointing out historical and political flaws in the
documents I recognized the fact that Faisal was ready to accept a
Zionist programme under Arab sovereignty and in a Palestine that
formed part of a larger independent Arab state.
While in London in the autumn of 1919 Faisal was provoked by
unfounded Zionist allegations to make a public statement to the editor
of the Jewish Chronicle which was published in that journal as well as
in The Times on October 3. Faisal's interpreter on this occasion was not
Lawrence, but a Christian Arab whose English was impeccable.
Faisal said that he was agreeable to a regulated Jewish immigration
not exceeding fifteen hundred per annum, and that he would guarantee
to the Jews equal rights with the Arabs, autonomy in the conduct of
their community schools, free use of the Hebrew language and the
means of establishing "a Jewish cultural centre". He saw nothing in all
this inconsistent with Arab sovereignty and independence. "The Jews",
he said, "are our cousins, and we would willingly make them our
brothers."
Replying to Faisal's criticism of those Zionists who spoke of Palestine
 <**"'•' ^ f j - * * .
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Faisal's Arabic Note

(with several words spelled as in Turkish)

"o

Hi

% h%a*—<*•

(7/ MX. •>•*"

4 J" ttji

"ir
—•—-«.

Lawrence's Rough Translation

(with a caption and an interpolation in Weizmann's hand)

facing page 162

 T. E. LAWRENCE, FAISAL AND WEIZMANN 163
becoming Jewish as England was English, the editor of the journal
explained that the Jews imagined the Balfour Declaration meant
assistance by political, economic and cultural means to set up a Jewish
national home that "would ultimately become a Jewish state", and
asked Faisal to say frankly whether these aspirations clashed with
Arab ideas. Faisal replied:
To be sure they do . . . Palestine, Mesopotamia and Syria are insepar-
able, and although we cannot legislate for the future, still we Arabs cannot
yield Palestine as part of our kingdom. Indeed, we would fight to the last
ditch against Palestine being other than part of the kingdom and for the
supremacy of the Arabs in the land.
So shaken were the Zionists by this statement that they sent Herbert
Samuel to the Foreign Office, armed, let it be carefully noted, not with
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the so-called agreement but with the less precise Frankfurter "letter".
Samuel asked the Foreign Office to intervene with Faisal, since his
statement was in the Zionist submission calculated to cause alarm among
the Jews and increased intransigence among the Arabs. The request
was flatly refused by Curzon, who had been acting Foreign Secretary
since January 1919, and succeeded Balfour in that post on October 24.
Curzon's was the last word on the minute: "I certainly do not propose
to take a hand in this game".
Thus ended, in complete failure, the Zionist attempts to secure by
fair or unfair means an Arab endorsement of the Balfour Declaration.
In vain did they direct their most ingenious propaganda towards
Faisal. Vain, too, were the efforts of such men as Sykes and Lawrence
to intimidate and coax the Arabs into acquiescing in the Zionist policy
of the British Government.