threw in his lot with the British. With Britain victorious and the Balfour Declaration gained, the eminent scientist became the Grand Old Man of Zionism.
The leader emerging on the other side was Emir Faisal, one of the Hashemite princes who fought the Turks in the Arabian Desert. T. E. Lawrence, an agent of the Cairo Bureau which directed British imperial policy in the Middle East, tried to help Faisal become King of Syria.
Lawrence was fanatically anti-French. Creating an Arab kingdom in Syria, under a king friendly to the British, was not only a means of fulfilling Lawrence's pro-Arab dreams, but also a clever way of cheating the French out of the Middle Eastern dominion which was promised them in the Sykes-Picot pact.
But for the Arabs, who never loved and admired the rather dubious Lawrence quite as much as he thought they did, it was not a question of choosing between two imperial evils. They wanted Syria, all of it, to become an independent kingdom, including Palestine, which they called Southern Syria. When they convened a great national congress at Damascus, some of them thought that an agreement with the Zionists should be sought, in order to combine the efforts of both Arabs and Jews for the liberation of the Middle East.
At the same time, Lawrence was trying to combine Arab and Zionist influence for the benefit of exclusive British domination of the Middle East. A series of romantic meetings between Weizmann and Faisal was initiated with the idea of confronting the Peace Conference with the fait accompli of a Jewish-Arab agreement.
In theory, the Zionist leadership, at that time, could have allied Zionism to the Arab national movement. The mood was right, the Balfour Declaration could still have been interpreted by the Arabs in a different way. One outstanding Syrian leader officially offered the Zionists an autonomous Palestinian state federated with Syria under the Syrian crown. (Nearly thirty years later a very similar