Page 232 - Life of Gertrude Bell

212 GERTRUDE BELL
final contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often
been able to say to Dr Weizmann in the past. We feel that the
Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, have suffered similar oppression
at the hands of powers stronger than themselves ... We Arabs,
especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy
on the Zionist movement... We will wish the Jews a hearty
welcome here ... People less informed and less responsible than
our leaders and yours ignoring the need for co-operation of the
Arabs and Zionists, have been trying to exploit the local difficul­
ties that must necessarily arise in Palestine in the early stages of
our movements ... Faisal.’
It was but one remarkable event in very strange and indetermin­
ate proceedings. The representatives of the Allied Powers eventu­
ally decided to postpone decisions on matters of self-determination
and appointed an International Commission instead. Wilson
had returned to an Iraq which was dangerously disturbed and
which had no adequate means to deal with large-scale violence.
He held his job reluctantly, having insisted from the moment he
took over that he was there in an ‘acting’ capacity only until Sir
Percy could leave Tehran and resume his authority. Cox on the
other hand was not too keen to return and in August 1919 wrote
to Wilson: ‘As I have told you the only reason which would tempt
me back to Mespot would be the prospect of handing the job
over to you.’
Gertrude made a leisurely way back accompanied by her maid
Marie Delaere who had waited for her at Sloane Street and
Rounton during the war years. She called on Clayton and Milne
Cheetham, then in charge of the virtually defunct Arab Bureau.
She also had another meeting with Meinertzhagen who had re­
turned to Cairo from Paris, though Allenby was shortly to give
him marching orders. Faisal—already called by his supporters
‘King of Syria’— was at that moment in London. The Syrian
question was still in the melting pot and France took up an in­
creasingly equivocal position. All the pretenders to power in the
Arab lands passed to and fro and Gertrude met many of them as
she and Clayton made a tour of the Levant and Palestine. They
talked to Storrs, Governor of Jerusalem after Allenby’s occupation
in direct succession to Pontius Pilate. And they met innumerable
refugees, Galicians, Jews, Arabs, Iraqis, Turkish deserters. Perhaps
the most important of these homeless wanderers from the point of
view of post-war Iraq was the omnipresent Sayid Talib, finally re-