Expediency

After leading the whirlwind Arab camelry to victory over the Turks in the World War, the late Lieut. Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence refused decorations and money, reputedly as a protest against Britain's weaseling on territorial promises made to buy the Arabs for the Allies. This tragic-hero role lost some of its poignancy last week with the publication of a chapter previously omitted, on the advice of George Bernard Shaw, from Lawrence's confessional, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This chapter reveals that the Colonel knew all along that the Arabs would be double-crossed.

Colonel Lawrence confessed: "It was evident that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives for such stuff. But I salved myself with the hope that by leading these Arabs madly in a final victory I would establish them with arms in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel a fair settlement of their claims."

Last week as Colonel Lawrence had hoped, the British Government did bow to expediency, belatedly fulfilled part of her Wartime pledges to the Arabs. The Government's new Palestine plan acknowledges the claims of Arab Nationalism by limiting Jewish immigration and planning the establishment in ten years of an independent Arab-controlled Palestine.

During the War Britain was also anxious to win the loyalty, brains and financial support of her Jewry, and part of the price she paid was the promise of a Jewish national home in Palestine, then as now preponderantly populated by Arabs.* But as of last week it was more expedient to welsh on the Jews, who are on the run in many parts of the world, than to welsh on the Arabs. Arab friendship in a Mediterranean war of the sort Signor Mussolini has been bellowing about would be of great value to Britain. Nevertheless, there were still plenty of members of Parliament who rose to decry the Palestine plan. Elder Statesman David Lloyd George, head of the War Cabinet that made the Jewish Homeland pledge, called the Government's policy an attempt "to crawl out of their share of a definite bargain." Labor and many normal Government supporters seconded Winston Churchill's attack on this "act of repudiation." Alarmed, the Government sent a "three-line whip" to Conservatives, ordering them to support the Palestine plan as a confidence measure, and managed to squeeze a 268-to-179 victory (normal Government majority: 413).

Choicest anti-Government epithets came from Colonel Josiah C. Wedgwood of Newcastle-under-Lyme, the great potter's great-great-great-grandson. Colonel Wedgwood, "last of the great individualists," is a igth-Century fighting liberal, so independent that he would not even join the Independent Labor Party. Highlights of his long Parliamentary career include opposition to entrance into the World War and the rallying of a Parliamentary faction to support King Edward VIII in the Wallis Warfield Simpson crisis (". . . an insult to the United States"). Colonel Wedgwood's big heart, like that of his ancestor who backed the American Rebels of 1776, burns for all oppressed peoples, including Spaniards, Czechs and Jews, but he abhors spinelessness. The fighting Colonel last week lit into the Government, but he also lit into the Palestine Jews for "continually whining," urged them to blow up a few bridges and pipelines as protest.

* Legend: The War Office reportedly negotiated the promise in return for the TNT formula of Jewish Chemist Chaim Weizmann, longtime Zionist leader.

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