| Faisal-weizmann Agreement |
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Weizmann first met Faisal in June 1918, during the British advance from the South against the Ottoman Empire in World War I . As leader of an impromptu "Zionist Commission", Weizmann traveled to southern Transjordan for the meeting. The intended purpose was to forge an agreement between Faisal and the Zionist Movement to support Jewish settlement in Palestine. The wishes of the Palestinian Arabs were to be ignored, and, indeed, both men seem to have held the Palestinian Arabs in considerable disdain. Weizmann had called them "treacherous", "arrogant", "uneducated", and "greedy" and had complained to the British that the system in Palestine did "not take into account the fact that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab". After his meeting with Faisal, Weizmann reported that Faisal was "contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn't even regard as Arabs". In preparation for the meeting, the British had written to Faisal that "we know that the Arabs despise, condemn and hate the Jews", but that the Jewish race is "universal, all-powerful and cannot be put down". Under such circumstances, the secret British communication contended, Faisal was well advised to cultivate the Zionist movement as a powerful ally rather than to oppose it. In the event, Weizmann and Faisal established an informal agreement under which Faisal would support dense Jewish settlement in Palestine while the Zionist movement would assist in the development of the vast Arab nation that Faisal hoped to establish. Weizmann and Faisal met again later in 1918 in London and soon afterwards at the Paris peace conference. On January 3, 1919, they signed the written agreement which is known by their names, see Paris Peace Conference, 1919 . Weizmann signed the agreement on behalf of the Zionist Organization, while Faisal signed on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz .
Faisal conditioned his acceptance on the fulfillment of British wartime promises to the Arabs, who had hoped for independence in a vast part of the Ottoman Empire . He appended to the typed document a hand-written statement: "Provided the Arabs obtain their independence as demanded in my Memorandum dated the 4th of January, 1919, to the Foreign Office of the Government of Great Britain, I shall concur in the above articles. But if the slightest modification or departure were to be made [regarding our demands , I shall not be then bound by a single word of the present Agreement which shall be deemed void and of no account or validity, and I shall not be answerable in any way whatsoever." The Faisal-Weizmann agreement survived only a few months. The outcome of the Peace Conference itself did not provide the vast Arab state that Faisal desired mainly because the British and French had struck their own secret Sykes-Picot Agreement Of 1916 dividing the Middle East between their own Spheres Of Influence , and soon Faisal began to express doubts about cooperation with the Zionist movement. Within a year he was calling on Britain to grant the Arabs of Palestine their political rights as part of his Syrian Kingdom. ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE DIPLOMACY AND TREATIES
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