As the sun set behind Manhattan’s sprouting new skyscrapers on 10 May 1929, a young American journalist walked up the gangplank of a liner bound for England. He was Vincent Sheean, born just before Christmas in 1899, whose career clambered through the turmoil and bloodshed of the years between the Great War and the Cold War. Sheean had seen some of the birth pains of the Soviet Union, and in China was acquainted with Soong Ching-ling, wife of Sun Yat-sen, the man who led the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911.
Sheean had a talent for making connections. When his ship docked in Britain, he headed to London, where he was already a satellite in the literary and artistic circle orbiting the Bloomsbury home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Bloomsbury’s rundown Georgian terraces and squares were at the centre of Sheean’s London life. In his remarkable memoir Personal History, which loosely inspired Foreign Correspondent, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1940 film, Sheean wrote that he “caroused in Gordon Square, worked in Gordon Square, was ill in Gordon Square and made love in Gordon Square”. As for Woolf and her friends, “they were intellectuals and I was not – nor did I want to be”. He spent weekends at Knole in Kent, the grand home of Virginia Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West.
Sheean was stopping over in London on his way to Jerusalem, the holy city that the wartime prime minister David Lloyd George had called a Christmas present for the British people, when imperial troops captured Palestine from the Turks in December 1917. By 1929, Britain was struggling to control the tension between Palestine’s Arabs and new Zionist immigrants from Europe and the US.
Sheean admired the Jewish people and their religion and wanted to know more about the Zionist movement to settle Palestine. In London he was disappointed when Arthur Balfour, the former prime minister and foreign secretary regarded by Sheean as the “benefactor” of the Zionist movement, was too ill to see him. Sheean wanted to interview him about Balfour’s letter to the Jewish community leader Walter Rothschild, a prominent Zionist, on 2 November 1917. It contained a promise that was a vital, and still controversial, milestone on the path to the birth of the Israeli state and the mass displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians, who fled or were forced from their homes in the 1948 war.
As 2024 closes, and Gaza and Israel sink further into war, around three quarters of the Palestinians in Gaza are descended from those original refugees. Palestinians believe they are still enveloped by the continuation of what they call the Nakba, their catastrophe that started in 1948. In the rubble of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are back in tents, just as they were in 1948, facing the extra-deadly peril of modern weapons in the hands of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) that even some of its allies believe is breaking the laws of war. Early in December the former defence minister and IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon said Israel was committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, with the aim of re-establishing Jewish settlements. In one small area, in the sand dunes and ruins between the city of Khan Yunis and the sea, around one million Palestinians have been forced to camp in dreadful, overcrowded, life-threatening conditions by Israeli strikes and mandatory deportations. The UN World Food Programme has voiced the fears of all the aid groups operating in Gaza, stating that many more lives are threatened by hunger, exposure to a winter that can be as cold and wet as any in Britain, and the risk of epidemics caused by the lack of sanitation and safe water.
It is a safe bet that, in those makeshift tents of plastic sheeting and scrap wood salvaged from bomb sites, there are Palestinians with strong opinions about the Balfour Declaration. Arthur Balfour gave it his name but Mark Sykes did much of the drafting. Sykes’s name is on another of the founding documents of the modern Middle East: the deal he made with the French lawyer François Georges-Picot to divide the Ottoman empire in the region between British and French influence.
Sykes and the diplomats produced a single sentence for Balfour to sign: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Vincent Sheean was undaunted by his failure to meet Balfour, or his other quarry, Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who became Israel’s first president in 1949. (One reason why Lloyd George and much of his cabinet had been open to the campaigning of Weizmann, a renowned scientist at the University of Manchester, was his contribution to Britain’s war effort; he had worked out a way to extract acetone, a vital ingredient in the explosive cordite, from maize.) The intrepid young foreign correspondent caught the boat train to Dover and on to Paris and Marseille, where he took ship for Port Said. In Egypt, the centre of Britain’s empire in the Middle East, he bought a second-class ticket on the Cairo Express to Jerusalem. These days a journalist can take a morning flight from London to Tel Aviv and report live from Jerusalem on the news at 6pm the same evening.
Sheean was short of money. He had a small advance from a Zionist group in the US, as well as introductions to new immigrants who were building the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine that became Israel. Sheean’s only non-Jewish contact came from his Bloomsbury connections. He carried a letter from EM Forster commending him to George Antonius, an Orthodox Christian born in the mountains outside Beirut. In 1929 Antonius was an imperial civil servant, one of a small group of officials trying to contain the growing violence. A decade later he published The Arab Awakening, the classic history of Arab nationalism. The book is still in print, a source of comfort or rage, depending on how the reader views the conflict.
Sheean took a room in the Austrian Hospice, the stately outpost of central Europe in Jerusalem’s Old City. It remains a place where journalists can fortify themselves against Jerusalem’s sporadic bursts of violence with schnitzel and cold Austrian beer. Antonius and his wife also lived in one of the hospice’s cool, high-ceilinged, stone-walled rooms. At first Sheean and Antonius avoided politics when they talked. But within days, as he walked the streets of Jerusalem, Sheean started to lose his sympathy for Zionism, and long conversations with Antonius shaped his views.
Before coming to Jerusalem, he admitted, “I knew nothing; but anybody could see, in half an hour, that here were the physical elements of a conflict.” Three weeks later, like all later generations of newly arrived foreign correspondents, he was still feeling overwhelmed by the detail and complexity of what he was seeing. But he could see the potential for violence in the tension between the rapid rise of Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1920s, and a growing fear among Palestinian Arabs that they were becoming a minority in their own country: “If my long experience in political journalism had taught me anything, it was that one people did not like being dominated or interfered with in its own home by another.”
[See also: Zionism’s long 20th century]
When he arrived, Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine were heading for one of the bloodiest summers of the long conflict. It is impossible to look at 1929 without seeing parallels with the terrible violence since 7 October 2023, when Hamas burst out of Gaza, killing around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, bringing down on Gaza and its people the “mighty vengeance” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu on the evening of that dreadful day. As I write, at least 44,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry, run by Hamas but considered reliable by many Western diplomats.
It is also impossible to read Sheean’s description of violence between Arabs and Jews in 1929 without seeing the roots of a conflict that still confounds and horrifies the world. When first I read Sheean’s writing on Jerusalem, that “the temperature rose throughout the first fortnight of August – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising”, I had a visceral sensation of the summer of 1929 reverberating across almost a century, through everything I have seen in the holy city since my first visit as a reporter in 1991. Sheean described “an intolerable atmosphere: Zionism and Arab nationalism, Jew and Arab, Balfour Declaration, hatred, accusation, recrimination.” Modernise a few of the categories, and his judgement will not surprise anyone who has been in Jerusalem during bad times.
In 1929 Sheean saw a series of confrontations at the Western Wall between Palestinian Arabs and Halutzim, Zionist pioneers, turning deadly during Tisha B’av, a religious holiday mourning the destruction of the first and second Jewish temples. In the fevered atmosphere of the time, the violence spread. In Hebron, Arabs massacred 67 religious Jews who were not part of the Zionist mainstream. Sheean wrote that “a more innocent and harmless group of people could not have been found in Palestine… the Jewish houses were rushed by the mob, and there was an hour of killing, stabbing, burning and looting”. One of the consequences of the massacre was more support among Jews for Zionism as the only way for them to survive and prosper.
Vincent Sheean’s memoir was published in 1935, the same year the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg race laws, stripping German Jews of civil rights and taking another stride towards the Holocaust. Sheean declares in his book that fighting anti-Semitism “was the duty of every civilised human being, but that duty could never be fulfilled by attempting to expropriate part of the Arab world”.
I can see plenty of parallels in Sheean’s account of the killing and political strife he saw in Palestine during the British Mandate with the killing and political strife I have reported on since 7 October 2023 and in the years leading up to it.
Of course, significant details have changed. Most importantly, the state of Israel exists today. While its enemies – including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran – would like to destroy it, Israel’s legitimacy, independence and sovereignty are recognised by a majority of countries and its existence supported by the world’s most powerful states. In 1929, a state for the Jews was still 19 years away.
But the past 14 months of war in Gaza have returned the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to the centre of the Middle Eastern storm. Since Sheean’s visit, nearly a century ago, no Palestinian or Israeli leader has succeeded in using force to settle the conflict, though many have tried. In the past three decades, no one has put forward a better idea than the two-state solution, establishing an independent Palestine alongside Israel. In the 1990s a real attempt to make the two-state solution work was tried and failed. I have not met anyone, Israeli, Palestinian or foreigner, who believes it can happen in 2025 either.
I have just returned from a conference in Rome organised by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies and Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A series of eminent and highly knowledgeable foreign ministers, diplomats, academics and others shared their worry, even despair, about the challenges facing the Middle East. They agreed that settling the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, after more than 100 years, is the best hope for the future. But with war still raging and extremists prospering, plus the looming uncertainties of Donald Trump’s second term, simply stopping the conflict from getting worse will be hard enough.
[See also: John Bew: The rise of machinepolitik]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024