Weizmann privately rejected the purported racial bond with Arabs

Evidence

Weizmann was particularly sceptical. In his speech to an Arab audience in Jerusalem in April 1918, he did not make any reference to the Semitic or even a prospective partnership. He did say that Jews, Arabs and Armenians shared ‘the highest claim to a life of their own’. And he claimed that Zionists ‘watched with deepest sympathy and profound interest the struggle for freedom which the ancient Arab race was now waging’. But he did not speak of a racial bond. In his private correspondence, Weizmann referred to ‘Arabs and Syrians’ in the British Palestine administration as ‘enemies’, talked of Palestinian Arabs as ‘the local baystrucks [bastards]’ and told Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour that ‘there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 670

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Weizmann’s private disdain reconcile with his public Faisal meeting and the ‘political Semite’ performance? What was the strategic logic?
• XREF: Connects to literature on performative allyship and identity politics where public diplomacy contradicts private belief.