That Sunday Walk in Jerusalem

The phrase "a Sunday walk in Jerusalem" has a special meaning in Zionist historiography.

It refers to a meeting, held subsequently to the famous Cairo Conference which had been chaired by Churchill as Colonial Secretary when the fate of the post-World War I Middle East as Britain viewed it was laid out, in Jerusalem some 10 days later.

Thanks to a recent article by Martin Gilbert, some more precise information is available.

The Cairo Conference was primarily oriented to fixing the future of Iraq. Forty advisors, premier among them the 'Arab Bureau' deliberated and the future of what was to be the 'Palestine Mandate' as a result of the Balfour Declaration, the Versailles Peace Conference, the San Remo Conference decisions and the appointing of Sir Herbert Samuel, culminating in the League of Nations decision in 1922, finalized in 1923.

The date of the operative action by Churchill to found a state where there had not been more previously, and, at the very least, had not been an Arab state ever, a state to be ruled by a Saudi Arabian and who was to shortly become a refugee from his own country, his father losing out to Ibn Saud assuring the Hashemite Huesseinis, the Sherafians, could never return, was March 29, 1921 it would seem.

Or, perhaps it was a Shabbat stroll, on March 28th?

...Since the French were already installed in Damascus, and were not willing to make way for Feisal or any Arab leader, Churchill proposed giving Feisal, instead of the throne of Syria, the throne of Iraq, and at the same time giving Feisal’s brother Abdullah the throne of Transjordan, that part of Britain’s Palestine Mandate lying to the east of the River Jordan. Installing an Arab ruler in Transjordan would enable Western Palestine—the area from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan, which now comprises both Israel and the West Bank—to become the location of the Jewish National Home under British control, in which, in Churchill’s words, the Jews were to go “of right, and not on sufferance.”11

Briefed by Lawrence at the March 17, 1921, Cairo Conference, Churchill explained to the senior officials gathered there that the presence of an Arab ruler under British control east of the Jordan would enable Britain to prevent anti-Zionist agitation from the Arab side of the river. In support of this view, Lawrence himself told the conference, as the secret minutes recorded: “He [Churchill] trusted that in four or five years, under the influence of a just policy,” Arab opposition to Zionism “would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.”12

Lawrence went on to explain to the conference that “it would be preferable to use Trans-Jordania as a safety valve, by appointing a ruler on whom we could bring pressure to bear, to check anti-Zionism.” The “ideal” ruler would be “a person who was not too powerful, and who was not an inhabitant of Trans-Jordania, but who relied upon His Majesty’s Government for the retention of his office.”13 That ruler, Lawrence believed, would best be Emir Abdullah, Feisal’s brother...

...On March 27, 1921, ten days after Lawrence’s suggestions in Cairo, Churchill sent him from Jerusalem to Transjordan to explain to Abdullah that his authority would end at the eastern bank of the River Jordan; that the Jews were to be established in the lands between the Mediterranean and the Jordan (“Western Palestine”); and that he, Abdullah, must curb all anti-Zionist activity and agitation among his followers.

The next day, in Jerusalem, Lawrence, Churchill, and Abdullah were photographed at British Government House: Churchill bundled up against the cold, Lawrence in a dark suit and tie, Abdullah in army uniform with Arab headdress. At their meeting that day, Abdullah agreed to limit the area of his control to Transjordan and to refrain from any action against the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine Mandate west of the Jordan.

11. British White Paper of June 1922, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 46.
12. Colonial Office Papers 935/1/1, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 51.

Gilbert also highlights the attitude of TE Lawrence vis-a-vis Zionism:

In an article entitled “The Changing East,” published in the influential Round Table magazine in 1920, Lawrence wrote of “the Jewish experiment” in Palestine that it was “a conscious effort, on the part of the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the ages, and return once more to the Orient from which they came.”6

Lawrence noted of the new Jewish immigrants: “The colonists will take back with them to the land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of all the knowledge and technique of Europe. They propose to settle down amongst the existing Arabic-speaking population of the country, a people of kindred origin, but far different social condition. They hope to adjust their mode of life to the climate of Palestine, and by the exercise of their skill and capital to make it as highly organized as a European state.”7

As Lawrence envisaged it in his Round Table article, this settlement would be done in a way that would be beneficial to the Arabs. “The success of their scheme,” he wrote of the Zionists, “will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power.”8

6. T.E. Lawrence, “The Changing East,” The Round Table, September 1920. Available at http://telawrence.net/telawrencenet/works/articles_essays/1920_changing_east.htm
7. Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
8. Lawrence, “The Changing East.”