proposal was to be made by King Abdullah, Faisal's brother, on the eve of the setting-up of the State of Israel.) But the Zionist leadership, which finally moved to Palestine early in 1918, was quite unprepared for any such idea. Not one of its members had the slightest knowledge of Arab nationalism. The idea of resisting British imperialism would have looked to them at the time ridiculous.

The second way, the one advocated by Lawrence and his friends, seemed more attractive. Contact with Faisal was maintained. The Arab prince, a desert chieftain rather bewildered by the wiles of world diplomacy, was quite sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine under his crown. In his tribal world, race meant a great deal, and the idea that the Jews were true members of the Semitic family played a major part in his thinking. In one of his messages, quite incredible today, he apologized for not being able to take part in a Zionist conference for purely technical reasons, adding that such conferences were important for furthering the understanding between "the two nations which are linked by ancient ties." In a letter to American-Jewish leader Felix Frankfurter early in 1919 he said:

We know that the Arabs and the Jews are racial relatives. . . . We shall do everything we can, as far as it depends on us, to assist in the acceptance of the Zionist proposals by the Peace Conference, and we shall welcome the Jews with all our hearts on their return home. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist, our movement is national and not imperialist, and in Syria there is a place for both of us. Indeed, I think that neither of us can achieve real success without the other.

Two months before this, the famous Weizmann-Faisal agreement was drawn up under the auspices of Lawrence. In its preamble, it recognized the "racial kinship and the ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people," and expressed the realization that "the surest

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