Why Did Chaim Weizmann Wear a Keffiyeh?
Who was given the keffiyeh of Emir Faisal, who was destined to rule the promised vast Arab empire?
Year: Approximately 1970. Location: Bethlehem. Occasion: A gesture of peace.
The first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state was signed even before Israel was officially a state. In the spring of 1918, amidst the turmoil of World War I, an extraordinary summit meeting took place among the scorching sands of the hills beyond the Jordan River. Present at this meeting were Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionist delegation visiting the Land of Israel, and Emir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein bin Ali, who was slated to rule a grand Arab state the British promised to establish on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Faisal was in high spirits. If he were to govern a land stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, why not grant the Jews a small tract on the edge of his empire? Thus, a peace agreement was signed between them, stating: "All necessary measures will be taken to encourage large-scale Jewish immigration and settle the Jews on their land."
Weizmann, unaccustomed to the scorching desert climate, received a distinguished keffiyeh from his host, which he also appears wearing in a famous photograph of that meeting. The results of this meeting are well known: the Palestinians strongly rejected it. Faisal himself later disavowed it, claiming the British did not fulfill their part of the agreement. Soon after, the agreement was sidelined and joined a long list of half-baked accords that appear like comets in the skies of the conflict and vanish as swiftly as they come.
But what about the keffiyeh? It turns out this artifact somehow ended up in the hands of Abd al-Fatah Darwish, head of the Bani Hasan locality which controlled the area of Malha-Beit Jala-Bethlehem south of Jerusalem. He received it from his father with instructions to give it in the future to whoever contributed to greater understanding and friendship between peoples.
Fifty years later, in the 1970s, Abd al-Fatah Darwish presented this same keffiyeh as a gift to Israel Defense Forces officer Colonel Itzik Segev, who served as the governor of Bethlehem. According to Darwish, Segev fulfilled the condition his father had set.
