Feisal arrived in Britain on December 10. It is not certain whether

Lawrence went to Paris to meet him, in uniform, or met him on the dock at Boulogne in his white robes, looking—according to Colonel Brй-mond—"like a choir boy” as he came down the gangplank of a British destroyer under gray skies. Since Brйmond’s job, as long as Feisal was on French soil, was to stick as close to him as a watchdog on behalf of the French, it seems likely Brйmond was correct.

Lawrence stayed with Feisal and his entourage at the Carlton Hotel in London, acting as Feisal’s interpreter, and dressed in a British officer’s khaki uniform, with an Arab headdress. Two days after Feisal arrived, he and Lawrence called on the foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, to whom Feisal expressed his determination to fight the French if they tried to take control of Syria—a threat that failed to shake Balfour’s majestic calm. Later in the day Feisal had a cordial meeting at the Carlton Hotel with Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had journeyed to Aqaba to meet with Feisal in June 1918. This time Lawrence was the interpreter, and he made sure to impress on Feisal the importance of good relationships with the Zionists, especially because of American public opinion. Feisal was very conscious of this. One of the formal dinner parties in his honor was given by Lord Rothschild; and the Jewish Chroniclecommented favorably on his meeting with Weizmann. During that meeting, Feisal had stressed his belief that there was plenty of land for Jewish settlement in Palestine, and Weizmann had said that the Jews would finance and carry out large-scale public works and agricultural improvement to the benefit of both peoples, and that as many as 4 million or 5 million Jews could settle there without encroaching on Arab land.

Lawrence and Feisal would be together in Britain for almost three weeks, during which time the government did its best to keep Feisal busy. The activities included a journey to Scotland to attend a number of “civic functions,” among them a formal visit on board the British battleship HMS Orion,where Feisal and Lawrence were photographed seated glumly on the deck, Feisal looking bored and dejected, and Lawrence, a tiny figure in British uniform beside him, appearing cold, and also furious at what must have seemed to him an irrelevant waste of time. The two of them are flanked and dwarfed by the ship’s captain and a rear-admiral smiling for the camera, the admiral apparently the only happy person in the group. Efforts to keep Feisal amused seem to have been no more successful in Britain than they had been in France, especially since it cannot have escaped his attention that he was being excluded from substantive discussions. The visit to Scotland was no doubt primarily intended to keep him out of London and away from the attention of journalists; this perhaps explains why he and Lawrence look more like the victims of a hijacking than honored guests.

Lawrence tried to present Feisal’s case by writing a long piece on Arab affairs for the Times,displaying, not for the first or last time, both his skill at dealing with newspaper editors and his skill at writing polemics. He gave a condensed but spirited account of the Arabs’ sacrifices and risks during the war; drew attention to the fact that Feisal, like himself,had had a price on his head; and listed the promises made to them by the British—but despite British sympathy for the Arabs, the article does not seem to have been successful. Feisal was later invited to an investiture at Buckingham Palace at which the king decorated him with the chain, ribbon, and star of a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, and at which Lawrence wore his white robes and headdress with a gold agal.Reading between the lines suggests that Lawrence’s presence at the palace in white robes caused a certain amount of fuss with the king’s military secretary beforehand; but the king, who by now must have been resigned to Lawrence’s ways, does not seem to have raised any objection himself, whatever he may have thought of a British officer appearing at court in Arab dress.*

On January 3 there was another meeting with Weizmann, and during its course, Feisal, Weizmann, and Lawrence drew up one of the most remarkable and controversial documents in the modern history of the Middle East. In some ways, it was the most important result of Feisal’s visit to Britain. Just as the Sykes-Picot agreement represents the great betrayal of the Arab Revolt, the agreement negotiated between Feisal and Weizmann on January 3, 1919, with Lawrence’s help, was the first attempt to define the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. It embodied many of Lawrence’s ideas on the subject, and it remains even today, for most Arabs, a blueprint of what they hoped would take place. It is perhaps one of the most interesting “might have beens” in modern Middle Eastern history.

It is not a lengthy document, and some of its nine articles are still being fought over today, both at the conference table and on the ground. Article I establishes that Palestine will be separated from the “Arab State,” by which Feisal, Weizmann, and Lawrence meant what is now Syria and Lebanon, and controlled with “the most cordial goodwill and understanding” by duly accredited agents of the Arab and Jewish territories—in other words, it already presupposes a partition of Palestine into two separate territories. Article III envisages drawing up a constitution. Article IV permits Jewish immigration “on a large scale, and as quickly as possible, to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil,” while preserving the existing rights of Arab peasants and tenant farmers, and “assisting them in their economic development.” Article V provides for absolute freedom of religion, and prohibits any “religious test” for “the exercise of civil or political rights.” Article VI guarantees that Muslim holy places will remain “under Mohammedan control.” Article VII provides that “the Zionist organization will use its best efforts” to provide the means for developing the natural resources and economic possibilities of Palestine. Article VIII—perhaps the key to the entire agreement—binds the two parties to act in “complete accord and harmony” at the coming peace conference: in short, to present a united front toward the British and the French.

The agreement can be summed up as proposing joint Jewish-Arab control over Palestine, with Britain playing a role as the guarantor and final arbiter of any disputes between the two parties, and with no limit on Jewish immigration. Feisal had already conceded that Palestine could contain 4 million to 5 million Jewish immigrants without harm to the rights of the Arab population. Since the population of Israel today is approximately 7.4 million, of which just over 1 million are Muslim, it is not so very far from what Feisal had in mind in 1919.

It is important to note that the agreement proposes neither an Arab nor a Jewish state, but rather a state under joint Arab-Jewish control, with absolute religious freedom for all, and that no limit is set on Jewish immigration. This would have produced an incalculably different history for both Palestinians and Zionists, as opposed to the ultimately doomed attempt of the British to rule Palestine under a “mandate,” from 1920 to 1948, and to set tight limits on Jewish immigration.

Feisal was already aware that the chances of putting this agreement into practice were rapidly diminishing, since when he signed it he added,in graceful Arabic script above his signature, a handwritten “reservation,” which Lawrence translated and wrote out in English, for attachment to the agreement: “If the Arabs are established as I have asked in my manifesto of Jan. 4th* 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 can not be answerable for failing to carry out this agreement. Feisal ibn Hussein.”