Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel
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Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel
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| ISBN-13: | 9780863563867 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Saqi Books |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2019 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
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Chapter 3
THE BRITISH ADOPTION OF ZIONISM, 1914-1917
Overview
After August 1914, in the new context of a world in turmoil, Zionism’s fortunes and prospects were unexpectedly and improbably transformed. Though not immediately, World War One changed everything. In an age of empire, this was at heart a war between empires. At its end, the victorious empires shared out the territories of those they had defeated. In particular, the British formally acquired Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. By that time, in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, they had declared their support for Zionism. This represented an astonishing, unanticipated, turn in British policy, brought about by the war. In December 1916, political crisis in Britain brought to power David Lloyd George, already drawn to Zionism. At just this time, Palestine – to which he was emotionally attached – looked as though it could be prised from the Turks. Given the worrying wartime context elsewhere, of stalemate on land and crisis at sea, it now appeared to make sense to issue an appeal for help to ‘world Jewry’. Lloyd George and many of those around him believed that Jews in America and in Russia, especially, were highly influential and that they would support the Zionist plan for a Jewish National Home. They would welcome Balfour’s promise that the British would ‘facilitate’ this project; they would do everything possible to keep America and Russia committed to the war on Britain’s side; and they would thus enable Britain both to secure victory and to support Zionism in Palestine. In the event, as a wartime cri de coeur, the Declaration failed. Based on fantasy, it proved fruitless. Its issue did not change the course of the war. However, Lloyd George remained committed to it; and its retention, afterwards, would change the course of Jewish and Middle Eastern history. BRITAIN AND PALESTINE It is of more than passing interest that, during the premiership of Asquith, the British did not seek to acquire Palestine. It was certainly not the government’s priority. Palestine was a land of relative insignificance which could be dealt with once the war was over. If we review four relevant documents of this period, 1914-1916, we see that under Asquith the prevalent official British view was that Palestine was a region of limited strategic value; and that, assuming the war was won, the British could then conclude with the French acceptable arrangements for this and all the lands of the Ottoman Empire. First, a caution. We must beware hindsight and too narrow a focus. Before and during World War One, Palestine was not the defined, separate, entity that appeared first on the post-war map, then imprinted itself on the minds of later generations and, most importantly, foreshadowed the state of Israel. For the Ottomans, it was a remote region of limited importance. For Zionists, this was a once Promised Land from which the Jews had been exiled. But for the Arabs it was a part of Greater Syria and an integral part of the extensive Arab world which Europeans termed the Middle or Near East. Far from being a distinct territory, Palestine had long been, in the laconic words of a reflective British Arabist in 1946, ‘a somewhat arid prolongation of Syria’. When, in 1920, the Arabs declared their leader, Feisal, King of Syria, there was a general Arab assumption that this territory included Palestine. It was only when the French deposed Feisal, to take control of Syria, that Arab nationalists from the south focussed their attention on, now British, Palestine. In other words, it was to be a fateful post-war decision, and a break with continuity, for the British and the French not to cultivate a united Arab world but instead to divide that world and seize the pieces they each wanted. ‘Palestine was chipped out of Syria’. Nevill Barbour emphasises the ‘bitterness’ caused, even in the hearts of ‘moderate’ Palestinian Arabs, when they ‘found themselves, for the first time in history, a distinct political unit, cut off from the rest of Syria’. But this lay in the future. During the war, and before Asquith’s fall, there were indications that the British would be content afterwards with both Arab unity and a considerable degree of Arab independence. — Early evidence of British strategic thinking and war aims came in January 1915, shortly after the Ottoman Empire entered the war. The British Cabinet considered a memorandum entitled ‘The Future of Palestine’ forward by one of their number, Herbert Samuel. Samuel was the only Jew in this Cabinet: indeed, he was the first Jew to serve at this highest level of British government. He was also a Zionist, and his paper was a heartfelt appeal to his colleagues for Britain to acquire Palestine as a homeland for the Jews. Samuel was nothing if not direct. ‘A feeling is spreading’, he insisted, ‘that now, at last, some advance may be made towards the restoration of the Jews to the land to which they are attached by ties almost as ancient as history itself’. This required ‘the annexation of the country to the British Empire’. Then ‘in course of time, the Jewish people, grown into a majority and settled in the land, may be conceded such degree of self-government as the conditions of that day may justify’. Samuel appreciated that he had to convince his colleagues that such a vision was in line with, and would further, British interests. He struggled, however. His five ‘arguments’ contained more wishful thinking than sound strategic calculation. He blithely maintained, for example, in wishful thinking to which many of his colleagues in London would fall prey, that British administration would bring so many benefits that the present inhabitants of Palestine would ‘not merely acquiesce, but rejoice, in the change’. In addition, according to Samuel, possession of Palestine would raise Britain’s prestige – ‘would add lustre even to the British crown’ – and win for England ‘the lasting gratitude of the Jews throughout the world’. More prosaically, Samuel argued that in a post-war settlement it would be wiser for Britain to seek ‘compensations’ in the Ottoman lands of Mesopotamia and Palestine than in Germany’s African possessions, for fear of arousing ‘intense bitterness among the German people’. Bitterness among Arabs was of no comparable concern. As for imperial strategy, Samuel had just one argument: that his proposal would help to secure the Suez Canal (though he somewhat undermined his case by acknowledging that ‘Palestine in British hands’ would itself be open to attack). Samuel ended as he had begun, with a fervent appeal to support ‘the Jewish race’. Palestine might be able to ‘hold’ in time up to 4 million of the world’s 12 million Jews and ‘the character of the individual Jew, wherever he might be, would be ennobled’. ‘The Jewish brain’, he concluded, with a flush of racial pride, ‘is a physiological product not to be despised’. Unfortunately for Samuel and his cause, the Prime Minister was not interested. Asquith did not support Zionist ambitions. He dismissed his ministerial colleague’s advocacy as a frenzied (‘dithyrambic’) outburst; and ‘despatched Samuel’s memorandum to the wastepaper basket’. Zionism would have to wait. It was significant that there was at least one zealous Zionist at the heart of public affairs, and a triumph of sorts that Zionist goals were being discussed in Cabinet and were thereby reaching a wider circle of British decision-makers. But Asquith’s government saw no strategic value in Palestine - so no gain from its acquisition - and was unmoved by Zionism. This episode illustrated that something important would have to change– in the course of the war and/or the course of British politics – for Zionism to receive the endorsement it needed. — The indication, in the story of Samuel’s paper, that ‘Palestine in British hands’ had no priority at this time in the strategic thinking of this imperial power, was emphatically confirmed a few months later in the Report of the de Bunsen Committee of Imperial Defence: Asiatic Turkey, published in late June 1915. On 8 April 1915, Asquith asked an interdepartmental committee to determine what British policy should be towards the Ottoman Empire. In particular, what should be British strategic priorities in the aftermath of war (and victory)? Chaired by Sir Maurice de Bunsen, the committee published its report less than three months later. It is full of interest, but one assessment above all catches the eye. In a concluding paragraph it says: ‘Still less do the Committee desire to offer suggestions about the future destiny of Palestine’. The committee’s analysis was to have considerable influence on subsequent British policy-making, albeit in matters other than the future of Palestine. With the security of, and access to, India always at the back of their minds, the committee was in no doubt that the major British concern, regarding the territories of the Ottoman Empire, was Mesopotamia. Moreover, ‘mankind as a whole’ would benefit from Britain’s development of Mesopotamia, in which the British would bring back into cultivation 12 million acres of fertile soil; meanwhile, ‘we could develop oil fields’. The acquisition of Baghdad would ‘guard the chain of oil-wells along the Turco-Persian frontier’. Relating to this, ‘one of the cardinal principles of British policy in the Middle East’ is ‘our special and supreme position in the Persian Gulf’. No mention of Palestine here. Nonetheless, more was probably required to keep British interests safe: a ‘back door into Mesopotamia from the Eastern Mediterranean’. Conceding that the French had a lasting interest in the best port of that coast, Alexandretta, they recommended as second-best Haifa, which was ‘capable of development into a sufficiently good port, and of connection by railway with Mesopotamia’. So the committee imagined securing for Britain the lands contained in a cartographical triangle ‘whose base is from Aqaba to the Persian Gulf, and whose sides run from Acre on the west, and Basra on the east, to Mosul at the apex’. This was the marginal importance of (one part of) Palestine: that one of its ports should be developed, so as to provide secondary support for British interests elsewhere, in Mesopotamia. Early in the report, Britain’s nine ‘desiderata’ are enumerated. Number One is ‘final recognition and consolidation of our position in the Persian Gulf’. The last, number Nine, is ‘a settlement of the question of Palestine and the Holy Places of Christendom’. To underline Palestine’s minor significance, this item is one of three ‘which may, for the moment, be set aside’, to be dealt with later ‘in concert with other Powers’. We notice that insofar as there was British interest in Palestine, it was religious and also historic. This history was not only ancient but recent. With disputes over the Holy Places, especially Jerusalem, among the causes of the Crimean War, these sites again needed international deliberation. However, the committee concluded that ‘His Majesty’s Government should be prepared to make no claim themselves to the possession of the Holy Places, and to leave their future to be decided as a separate question, in discussion with those who stand for the national and religious interests involved’. The report is revealing about Britain’s attitude to France, the most important ‘other Power’ referred to here. When it was written, in the middle of 1915, Britain and France were allies, committed to standing side by side against Germany in a conflict for which neither end nor outcome was in sight. There is little sense that France, with whom the entente cordiale was quite recent, might (again) become a threatening imperial rival. The committee ruled out a successful bid by France for sole control of the Holy Places, since ‘the world-wide interests affected by the destiny of the Holy Land will not allow this’. Britain acknowledged that France would claim a ‘liberally defined Syria’, but there was no reason to fear serious French ambition in Palestine. We may add that no threat was anticipated from Russia, either (in Palestine, as distinct from Mesopotamia). Reading this report, we seek in vain any endorsement of Herbert Samuel’s argument, above, that Palestine was needed for the protection of the Suez Canal. Rather, we may infer that there was such confidence in British Egypt’s capacity to provide all the security the canal needed, as it had for 30 years, that there was no need to waste words on the issue. In ‘The Future of Palestine’, Samuel did not specify a threat to Britain’s strategic position, but we may assume that he had France uppermost in mind. But the Committee of Imperial Defence had few such concerns. It was bound to speculate about a future war in the area against France (and Russia). But to imagine was not to anticipate. Rather, the assumption was that European countries would recognise each other’s imperial spheres of interest in the region and agree compromises. In particular, it was asserted in this report that any difficulty in securing a deal with France ‘should not prove insuperable’. Indeed, the Sykes-Picot agreement was negotiated just a year later. In short, in 1915 the Committee for Imperial Defence did not see ‘Palestine’ as a priority. Haifa would be an asset; the Holy Places would need attention. But the acquisition of the whole territory was not regarded as being in Britain’s strategic interest. There is more to this report than is generally acknowledged. Writers on the period tend not to go far beyond quoting from the solitary, late, paragraph devoted to Palestine: ‘It will be idle for HMG to claim the retention of Palestine in their sphere’. However, we need to acknowledge also the thinking and the calculations behind this conclusion. A product of its age, the report was certainly cynical. The casual discussion of ‘partition’ and ‘annexation’ is striking. But its authors were thorough, and they looked carefully at the long-term implications of each of the strategic options they considered. The Balfour Declaration, issued two years later, was by contrast romantic in its vision and naïve in its neglect of consequences. — ‘Oceans of ink’ have been spilled on the subject of another British documentary relic of 1915, the first full year of World War One. The McMahon letter, 24 October, 1915, was part of a lengthy correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, and Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, whose Hashemite clan claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed. It was the first of three separate agreements which the British concluded, for the post-war partition of Ottoman Arab lands, between 1915 and 1917. ‘One of the challenges of British post-war diplomacy’, comments Eugene Rogan with a degree of understatement, ‘was to find a way to square what were, in many ways, contradictory promises’. Different parties have, unsurprisingly, accorded the McMahon letter different levels of significance. This controversy will continue. We consider it here for the light it sheds on, first, Britain’s relationship with the Arabs at this stage of the war; secondly, the status of Palestine at this time; and, thirdly, on Arab rejection of the Balfour Declaration which was to follow two years later. McMahon wrote: ‘I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurances… Great Britain is prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sharif of Mecca… I am convinced that this declaration will assure you beyond all possible doubt of the sympathy of Great Britain towards the aspirations of her traditional friends, the Arabs, and will result in a firm and lasting alliance, the immediate result of which will be the expulsion of the Turks from Arab countries and the freeing of the Arab peoples from the Turkish yoke.’ There was a political deal here. Recognition of an independent Arab Kingdom, under Hussein, would be in return for the Hashemites leading an Arab revolt, with British support, against Ottoman rule. How extensive would this kingdom be? Hussein had earlier asked for all of Greater Syria as well as Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula. In reply, the exceptions which McMahon stipulated, elsewhere in the same letter, were: Cilicia (the southern coast of Turkish Asia Minor); the area of Syria west of the towns of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo (sought by the French); and Baghdad and Basra (which the British wanted for themselves). Palestine was not another exception: Britain would substantially recognise Arab independence across a region defined by the Sharif. Palestine was not mentioned at all; it fell within Hussein’s boundaries. It is worth emphasising that, according to this British pronouncement of late 1915, Palestine was not to be detached from Syria. It lay south of the specified Syrian towns, not west. As Joseph Jeffries, political correspondent for the Daily Mail, was to observe, in 1939: ‘There was no mention of its exclusion. We gave our word that on its soil the Arabs should be free of all foreign control save such as they chose of their own free will’. He added: ‘For this reason, today, more than twenty years after this Anglo-Arab treaty was concluded, the treaty remains of momentous importance to Palestine’. Jeffries exaggerated: this was not, strictly, an Anglo-Arab treaty. But it was an official, written, wartime pledge. It preceded the Balfour Declaration by two years. Later, after the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, and the Ottoman defeat, Arabs expected it to be honoured. In the end, the question whether or not Palestine was, or was to be, included is academic: the British reneged on the whole promise. — The Sykes-Picot agreement, the following year, retains a reputation – for secret imperialist double-dealing and cynical manipulation of subject peoples and their resources – which may exceed what it deserves. Our special interest lies in what it says, or does not say, about (British) imperial interest in Palestine at that time, two years into the war. It was agreed on 16 May 1916. However, being a war-time understanding between the British and French imperial governments, about the possible partition of Ottoman territories, it was not published until the Bolsheviks exposed the text, along with other ‘secret treaties’, on coming to power in Russia in November 1917. The agreement was to share out the Ottoman territories, apart from a Turkish Turkey (Anatolia) and an Arab Arabia (to include Mecca and Medina). The negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, drew ‘a line in the sand’ from the coast of the eastern Mediterranean to the north-western frontier of Persia (Iran). In place of Ottoman rule, there would be ‘protected’ Arab states, both north and south of the line. These would be subject to, respectively, French and British influence (financial, economic, political). Moreover, as illustrated on an accompanying coloured map of the region, within each sphere there were to be special zones, for ‘direct administration or control’: a blue zone in the north (including Alexandretta, the north-east Mediterranean port, and Damascus) for France; and a red zone in the south (the north-western shores of the Persian Gulf and extending north through Basra to Baghdad) for Britain. The signatories agreed that no changes in these arrangements should be made by one party without the prior consent of the other - and that Russian consent, too, would be sought for the whole. That was the partition plan. In the light of the de Bunsen committee’s findings, which in general it closely resembles, two details catch the eye. First is the allocation of Mosul to the northern, French, sphere. Elizabeth Monroe’s explanation is that Lord Kitchener ‘wanted France to have Mosul province for the classic Indian army reason that nowhere must Britain run the risk of sharing an Asian frontier with Russia’. In fact, Mosul itself had not been mentioned by name in de Bunsen’s list of nine priorities. It was regarded in that report as of secondary importance, the army valuing its ‘good hill stations for white troops’, while its native Kurds afforded ‘excellent material for recruits’. As in the de Bunsen report, Palestine is not mentioned by name at any point. Rather (much of) what became the post-war mandated territory is shown, and referred to, as merely ‘the brown area’. This, it was agreed by Sykes and Picot, would come under ‘international administration’, the form of which would be decided later after consultation with Russia, other allies, and the Sharif of Mecca. This outcome may reflect an unwritten assumption: that what mattered in ‘the brown area’, which included Jerusalem, was authority relating to the Holy Places. However, there was one special case: it was agreed that ‘Great Britain be accorded’ Haifa, the sole location in Palestine which the de Bunsen committee had focussed on. Haifa, along with neighbouring Acre, was to be an addition to the British red zone: a British enclave, that is, which lay within France’s blue zone. This was a nice case of inter-empire accommodation. Haifa, the agreement spelled out, would serve as the Mediterranean terminus for Britain’s railway link eastwards to Baghdad in distant Mesopotamia. In trying to assess the significance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, in view of Britain’s subsequent policy towards Palestine, just a year or so later, three aspects are of interest. First, there is confirmation that Palestine as a territory had, in general, a very low priority. In not taking this negotiating opportunity to push for its inclusion in the British sphere – let alone ‘the red zone’ – Sykes was expressing the consistent, considered, view of Asquith’s government. Palestine was not a strategic priority for British imperial interests. Haifa was the exception, as ‘the back door’ to Britain’s primary region of interest, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. Secondly, this agreement was merely one more illustration of government’s thinking, while war was raging (and would continue to rage for two more years). While profound imperial strategic interests were constant, the context remained in flux; similarly, international agreements such as this would, as the context changed and once victory was won, be subject to review and adaptation. Thirdly, here was evidence, in no way surprising, that the British and French governments could talk to each other about the future of the Middle East in a businesslike manner, recognising the interests of each other. There was nothing naïve about these dealings. As the de Bunsen report had put it, the previous year: ‘It is of course obvious that British desiderata in Asiatic Turkey are circumscribed by those of other Powers, and that any attempt to formulate them must as far as possible be made to fit in with the known or understood aspirations of those who are our Allies today, but may be our competitors tomorrow’. There would be rivalry, certainly; but hard-nosed compromise would remain both desirable and achievable. There is no sense in 1915 or 1916 that the French might pose a threat to British interests, in the region generally or to Suez in particular, after the war. James Barr comments that the Sykes-Picot arrangement over Palestine was ‘a compromise, which neither power liked’. Though something of a tautology, this is surely the point: neither party fully obtained what it wanted, yet they could find a compromise. Lastly, we note insistence on the need for secrecy regarding these dealings with the French: the terms had to be kept ‘from knowledge of Arab leaders’. — The question remains: why Palestine? Or rather, why did British policy suddenly change from indifference towards Palestine, to a determination to acquire it? Asquith’s British imperial government repeatedly demonstrated that Palestine was not a strategic priority: in rejecting Herbert Samuel’s paper; in accepting the recommendations of de Bunsen’s committee on imperial defence; in accepting implicitly Palestine’s allocation to a post-war Arab state, in the McMahon letter; and in negotiating the Sykes-Picot agreement with France. Yet the conventional view remains that the British felt an overriding strategic need for Palestine, relating to the defence of Suez and more. To be sure, Winston Churchill, guided by Zionism, had written in 1908 that ‘a strong, free Jewish state astride the bridge between Europe and Africa, flanking the land roads to the East, would be … an immense advantage to the British Empire’. Zionism moreover would offer a convenient propaganda device by which the British could disguise a fundamentally imperialist purpose. According to James Barr, ‘by publicly supporting Zionist aspirations to make Palestine a Jewish state, they could secure the exposed east flank of the Suez Canal while dodging accusations that they were land-grabbing’. And Jonathan Schneer writes: ‘Of course … for imperial-economic-strategic reasons, Britain meant to keep the primary governing role in Palestine for herself’. Much of this is questionable: there are grounds for challenging the easy assumption that continues to be made. It is true that the British had taken control over Egypt in 1882 in order to safeguard the canal as a critical stretch of the sea-route to India. As a consequence, they had fallen out with France. A period of vexatious colonial rivalry ensued, and in 1898 the two powers came close to open warfare over Fashoda, on the Upper Nile (Egypt’s life-line). Egypt straddled the Suez Canal, but the canal’s eastern bank was exposed: the Ottomans were no threat, but the French, in pursuit of their own Greater Syria, might be. However, a surer guide to Anglo-French relations during and after World War One is the entente cordiale which in 1904 marked the resolution of outstanding imperial rivalries between the powers. This understanding expressed the shared view that on balance the British and the French had more to gain as allies than as foes, especially in view of the threat to each from Germany. Their fighting side by side against a common enemy from 1914 was therefore no abnormal, unexpected, alignment; it had been anticipated and prepared for (and was the restoration of a previous alliance against a common foe, Russia, in the Crimean War). In the event, Clemenceau’s post-war fears of Germany did far more to bring the French and British together, than Near Eastern rivalry did to separate them. Meanwhile, Asquith’s government had had no appetite for Palestine. And it accepted France as a power with whom it could do business: for the foreseeable future, in war and peace, in the Middle East and elsewhere. France was certainly not perceived as a danger serious enough to overcome Britain’s reluctance to take on still more imperial responsibilities. In the sobering words of the de Bunsen Report, ‘Our Empire is wide enough already, and our task is to consolidate the possessions we already have’. Palestine was not a strategic priority. Not, that is, before the change of Prime Minister in December 1916. In December 1916, a major domestic political crisis in Britain removed Henry Asquith, Prime Minister at the outbreak of the war, and brought David Lloyd George to power as his successor. By late 1916, Asquith was coming under increasing pressure. In the last years of peace, he had achieved much – in social welfare, for example – but he was failing now as a war leader. He had survived the ‘shell shortage’ crisis, but he continued to lack vigour and enterprise in pursuit of victory. Towards the end of 1916, with the slaughter on the Somme fresh in everyone’s mind, a cross-party triumvirate of leading politicians – Lloyd George, Asquith’s Liberal War Minister; Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Unionists; and Bonar Law, leader of the Conservatives - urged the irresolute Prime Minister to institute, beneath him, an elite war cabinet, consisting of themselves. This pressure, along with considerable support in the press for a change of national leadership, induced Asquith to step aside. On 6 December 1916, Lloyd George – by chance already an enthusiastic Zionist, though this had nothing at all to do with his rise to power - replaced him as Prime Minister. Quite coincidentally, there was a tipping of the military balance in one, remote, theatre of war. By early 1917, there were no signs of the war’s end. Where Britain and France faced Germany on the Western Front, there was stalemate. There were indications that the Germans would win the war at sea. But the Ottoman Turks had become vulnerable. In January 1915, an Ottoman army had invaded Sinai, though it was held before threatening Suez. For much of that year, the focus of the Middle Eastern Front turned to the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, where an ambitious strategic action by British and ANZAC forces ended in defeat and withdrawal. ‘The Turk’ was underestimated at this time - along with ‘the African’, and ‘the Arab’. There followed in 1916 the surrender of British forces to the Ottomans in Kut, south of Baghdad; and a sustained contest for Sinai. But then the military situation improved. A contributory factor was the Arab revolt. In June 1916, encouraged by the British, the Arabs rose against the Turks. This revolt, supported by T. E. Lawrence, pressurised the Ottomans and gave Britain the advantage. At the year’s end, British and again ANZAC forces at last had victories to report. In December 1916, the British secured El Arish. This was the one theatre of operations where British armies were actually advancing. In January 1917, they completed the recapture of Sinai. This opened up Palestine. Lloyd George’s coming to power at just this time was to have profound and long-term consequences for the Near East. In the middle of the war, the government of a Prime Minister indifferent to both Palestine and Zionism was replaced by another, committed to both. The coincidental reversal of British military fortunes was such that, within days of taking office, Lloyd George was able to give ‘new impulse’ to plans for an advance from Egypt. Asked by his Chief Whip ‘What about Palestine?’ the Prime Minister replied, ‘Oh! We must grab that’. In June, Lloyd George told Allenby to take Jerusalem by Christmas. He did, in the month following the Balfour Declaration. BRITAIN AND ZIONISM: THE BALFOUR DECLARATION, 1917 The promise was conveyed in a letter – dated 2 November 1917 and signed by Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary - to Lord Rothschild, prominent among British Jews and honorary president of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. A single sentence of 67 words, it was published in The Times a week later, on 9 November: “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”. In these words, the British gave an endorsement of the Zionist project for Palestine which would have been scarcely imaginable before the war or indeed in the earlier years of the war. It is to be explained by individual responses to changing circumstances. It is a tale not of inevitability or necessity but of coincidence and contingency. To make sense of this extraordinary British policy initiative, we must try to uncover what Lloyd George, Balfour and other key decision-makers thought, wanted, or hoped. Impersonal forces shape history; so, too, in times of flux, do the private motives and public decisions of individuals. In 1917 the general military situation remained bleak. Promising progress in the Middle East was exceptional. The Ottomans might appear vulnerable, but the Germans held firm in northern France on the Western Front and had the advantage, potentially decisive, in the war at sea. The situation called for imaginative, if not desperate, measures. Lloyd George had to win the war. Weizmann persuaded the new Prime Minister that an appeal to the Jews of America and Russia, based on the offer of a homeland in Palestine, would help to achieve this primary goal. And so the Balfour Declaration was made. The previous year, in March 1916, Lord Grey had believed that ‘the Jewish forces in America, the East and elsewhere’ were ‘largely, if not preponderantly, hostile to us’. In particular, 2 or 3 million Jews in the USA had no wish to fight alongside anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia. But in March 1917 the Tsar abdicated, and in April, the USA declared war on Germany. Weizmann saw his opportunity. He advised the Allies to declare outright support for Zionism. Weizmann told the British that the Jews in both Russia and the USA ‘were absolutely crucial to their respective countries remaining in the world war’. According to him, in Russia, the Jews would persuade the Provisional Government to keep fighting Germany, and prevent the Russian grain trade from being diverted to hungry Germans. In America, they would support President Wilson and vanquish continuing opposition to full involvement in Europe’s war. Under considerable pressure to break the stalemate against Germany and to secure victory, British policy makers were susceptible to Zionism. They surrendered to its blandishments and, however improbably, they offered Palestine as a homeland in the future, in return for present help. Only 18 months after Grey’s sombre assessment, Balfour, who succeeded him as Foreign Secretary, addressed the Cabinet meeting of 31 October 1917, at which the declaration was at last approved. He assured his ministerial colleagues that ‘the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as indeed all over the world, now appear to be favourable to Zionism’. The reality was very different from the picture that Weizmann so skilfully painted. For Jonathan Schneer, the power of ‘international Jewry’ was ‘a notable exaggeration, if not an outright fantasy’. For Michael Stanislawski, the Jews in the United States had ‘virtually no political influence’; and in Russia ‘absolutely no influence’. The accompanying supposition was that this ‘international Jewry’ leaned towards Zionism. However, by 1914, of three million Jews in America, just 12,000 were enrolled as members of Zionist societies. More would have sympathised, especially perhaps when the United States entered the war in March 1917, but American Zionism could be regarded as ‘little more than a sect’. Avi Shlaim concludes that ‘Britain’s belief in the mystical power of ‘the Jews’ overrode reality, yet it was on the basis of such spurious considerations that Britain took the momentous decision to sponsor the Zionist cause’. In fact, ‘the Jews were helpless, with nothing to offer’. The main point here, however, is not whether world Jewry could, or did, win the war for Britain (it could not, and did not) but that the Balfour Declaration was made, in a time of crisis, as a loosely-worded, no-cost – and short-term - appeal for help. What lay behind its issue? We look now at the roles of (the) two key players, Lloyd George and Wiezmann; at Balfour himself, and ‘nimbyism’; at the memorandum written by Cabinet member Edwin Montagu; at Christian Zionism and its influence on Imperial strategy; and then more closely at the at the text itself. David Lloyd George David Lloyd George has been described as ‘a master of improvised speech and of improvised policies’. It is very difficult to know what any people think, or thought; and it is notoriously difficult in the case of politicians, who do not always say or write what they believe to be true. But the effort should be made here. Lloyd George was not only the man who authorised the sending of Balfour’s letter but also, and more importantly, the Prime Minister, after the war, who insisted that, rather than shelving it, the Declaration should be included in full in the terms of Britain’s League of Nations mandate for Palestine. His leadership at this time shows how individuals in power can, if the conjunction of events allows, make decisions that change the course of history. Among Lloyd George’s primary interests at this time were Palestine, the Jews and Zionism. C.P. Scott, editor of The Manchester Guardian, wrote in his diary of Lloyd George: ‘Palestine was to him the one really interesting part of the war’. The contrast with Asquith could hardly have been greater. And the Prime Minister had told Scott that Britain ‘could take care of the Holy Places better than anyone else’. Realism and romanticism are inter-woven in Lloyd George’s memoirs. Palestine was cherished as ‘a historic and a sacred land, throbbing from Dan to Beersheba with immortal traditions’. For him, Palestine was essentially Jerusalem and the Holy Places. A. J. P. Taylor suspected that both Lloyd George and Balfour ‘took their knowledge of Palestine from the Bible … which happened to be out of date’. As for the Jews, ‘this race of wanderers sought a national hearth and a refuge for the children of Israel’ wrote Lloyd George, ‘in the country which the splendour of their spiritual genius has made for ever glorious’. Lloyd George first became aware of the Zionist movement during the time of the El Arish and British East Africa offers. Years later, after the Ottomans declared war, he told his colleague Herbert Samuel that ‘he was keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine’. He met Weizmann for the first time over a working breakfast with Samuel in January 1915. Weizmann ‘appealed to my deep reverence for the great men of his race who were the authors of the sublime literature upon which I was brought up’. Lloyd George was Samuel’s sole supporter in the Cabinet when it considered Samuel’s paper at that time. In March 1917, Weizmann met Lloyd George (by now Prime Minister) again, along with Balfour; and Weizmann ‘gained the impression that the statesmen who really mattered were unshaken in their support for a British protectorate over Palestine’. His impression was sound. As Lloyd George put it, later: ‘during the summer of 1917, with my zealous assent as Prime Minister, Mr Balfour entered into negotiations with Lord Rothschild on the subject of the Zionist aims’. Florid and overblown as some of Lloyd George’s sentiments strike us, we may infer a strong emotional commitment to biblical Palestine and a genuine fascination with the Jews, their spokesman, their history and their prospects. He appears to have relished lending support to a deserving, oppressed, people (albeit somehow, simultaneously, a people of intangible global agency). Evidence of Lloyd George’s enduring sympathy for the Jews and support for Zionism comes from the House of Commons in 1930 – many years after he lost office - in the wake of severe disturbances in Palestine the previous year. The Passfield White Paper of 1930 drew attention not only to general Arab concerns about levels of (authorised) Jewish immigration into Palestine, but also to their specific concern that illegal immigration was continuing, unchecked. Lloyd George scoffed. ‘This White Paper is a one-sided document. It is biased. Its whole drift is hostile to the mandate. It breathes distrust and even antagonism of the Jewish activities…. You have only got to look at one or two things with which they are dealing. Take immigration. There is criticism of the Jews because some of them went there temporarily and remained, attracted by the country’. There were the immediate practical concerns, too: the exigencies of war, and the need for help, in 1917. In his memoirs, Lloyd George urges his readers to remember that ‘the issue of the war was still very much in doubt’. The Allies had two strategic goals in 1917: to enforce the blockade of the Central Powers, and to speed up the war preparations of the USA. In this context, of the need to sway world opinion, an appeal to the Jews seemed reasonable, and worth trying. Lloyd George thus writes of ‘the decision to come to terms with Jewry’. The timing of the declaration ‘was determined by considerations of war policy’. ‘It was part of our propagandist strategy for mobilising every opinion and force throughout the world which would weaken the enemy and improve the Allied chances’. Lloyd George also had security concerns, especially regarding his war-time allies, the French. He was among those who believed that a Zionist Palestine would help to secure the Suez Canal’s eastern approaches (a belief not widely shared in the military, as we shall see). Yet there are hints, too, of a somewhat different calculation. The Cabinet Secretary, Maurice Hankey, was to write that ‘the new Prime Minister wanted assets to bargain with, against those of the enemy’. Among these ‘obtainables’ - including German East Africa, for example - was Palestine. Seeking such ‘assets’ justified, for Lloyd George, ‘the side-shows’ of the war. In this testimony, Palestine might serve only as a post-war bargaining chip. But other indications of Lloyd George’s motivations tend to rule out this type of reckoning, the more so because after the war Britain would be competing with France. Drawn to the romance of Zionism, Lloyd George was happy also to exploit it. It offered an agency and a cloak. As James Barr put it, when Lloyd George decided to launch the invasion of Palestine ‘he was well aware that such a move would certainly spark accusations of imperialism’. So ‘he decided that support for the stateless Zionists’ aspirations was a good way to thwart French ambitions in the Middle East and silence [President Woodrow] Wilson simultaneously’. It is likely that two strategic calculations lay behind Lloyd George’s adoption of (and post-war commitment to) Jewish ‘national self-determination’: it would disguise his passion for Palestine and, in his hands, Britain’s ongoing commitment to colonisation east of Suez; and it would help to cover the costs. Lloyd George was fiercely anti-French. He confided to C.P. Scott that a French Palestine ‘was not to be thought of’ and that he was altogether opposed to a condominium. Tom Segev, who finds little evidence of any other strategic thinking behind the Prime Minister’s obsession with Palestine, concedes that ‘the British entered Palestine to defeat the Turks; they stayed there to keep it from the French’. Lloyd George’s antipathy to France appears to have been irrational, and not based on reasoned strategic calculation at all. His erstwhile colleague, Asquith, offered his own explanation, writing that that ‘Lloyd George thinks it would be an outrage to let the Christian Holy Places … pass into the hands of Agnostic, Atheist France’. We might add that the Welsh non-Conformist’s ‘suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church’ – arguably accounting for his lack of sympathy with Irish nationalism – would have led Lloyd George in a similar direction. It seems that religious prejudice mattered at least as much as political calculation. The French, moreover, had declared their own interest in Zionism. On 4 June 1917, Jules Cambon of the French Foreign Ministry wrote to the Zionist activist Nahum Sokolow. From a British perspective, the letter grew in menace as it proceeded. ‘It would be a deed of justice and of reparation’, wrote Cambon, ‘to assist, by the protection of the Allied powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago’. He continued, ‘The French Government … cannot but feel sympathy for your cause’. Not only the French: there was a belief in London that, by September 1917, ‘the German government were making very serious efforts to capture the Zionist movement’. It was ‘considerations’ such as these which ‘impelled the British Government towards making a contract with Jewry’. A contemporary Greek tragedy throws further light on Lloyd George’s modus operandi. Less than 18 months later, Britain’s victorious Prime Minister attended the Peace Conference at Versailles. Once again he was to be moved by prejudice and by the charisma of a great advocate. On this occasion, it was the ‘energetic, persuasive, indefatigable’ Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos. His Greek cause was in a number of respects comparable with that of Chaim Weizmann’s Zionism. He too sought - in the name of history, civilisation and justice - to serve his people by re-creating something of the glory of the ancient world. Venizelos insisted on a Greater Greece, in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and at the expense of the Turks. The ‘very strange country’ which he proposed would incorporate Thrace (between the Aegean and Black Seas) and a huge piece of Asia Minor including Izmir. Margaret Macmillan notes, regarding Venizelos, that – as with Weizmann - ‘only a few wondered whether his influence over the peacemakers was a good thing’. Lloyd George was not one of the few. Capable, it has been said, of ‘massive misjudgements of people’, he sprang to the side of Venizelos. For him, too, the Greeks were a nation of the modern, western, world; they would civilise the backward Turks; Greece had served British interests in the war; this was an issue of national self-determination; and Greece could be a partner, to keep the eastern Mediterranean safe in British interests. Like Weizmann, Venizelos knew how to compromise and seem reasonable, so he did not insist on Constantinople, or Cyprus. But these were details. ‘Greece was golden; Turkey was shrouded in darker memories’. There is a further parallel with Zionism, regarding legacy. The Greek leader’s performance was captivating – but it also endangered the Greeks and threatened peace in the Middle East. Venezilos lit a fuse that caused not only the immediate Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 but also enduring hostility between Greeks and Turks. No more than in Palestine did Lloyd George foresee such conflict and disorder. Lloyd George’s personal commitment to Zionism in Palestine was a necessary condition for the Balfour Declaration, whereas Asquith had had little time for Palestine and none for Zionism. Lloyd George was a mercurial, impulsive, intuitive leader: passionate, articulate and persuasive. He did not act in 1917 out of studious analysis of British interests and post-war imperial strategy; nor even (as Joseph Chamberlain had done in 1903) out of sympathy on hearing of persecuted Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, devoted to an imagined Palestine and a notion of resurrecting something of a splendid past, Lloyd George fell easily under the spell of Weizmann and succumbed to the Zionist dream. We may infer that, broadly, his heart and his head moved him in in a single direction. Lloyd George wanted Palestine, and he wanted a Jewish homeland there. Though war-time improvisation, Balfour’s Declaration was no passing whim. There were months of gestation before his pledge was formulated, approved and published. There was enough belief here to help account for Lloyd George’s retention of the Declaration after the war. Nonetheless, his responses to both Weizmann and Venizelos - to the cause of the Jewish homeland, and to the cause of Greater Greece - look less like cool statesmanship than caprice. Improvising policy for an immediate goal, such as insisting on the use of convoys in 1917 to protect British shipping in the Atlantic, was one thing – and in this case helped to win the war. Improvising policy for the long term, such as uncritical support for Zionism – which from November 1917 did nothing to help win the war - was another. Chaim Weizmann Chaim Weizmann’s greatest contribution to Zionism was ‘his extraordinary ability to win over the key figures’. Weizmann was the most influential Zionist spokesman after Herzl. Ben-Gurion was later to write to him: ‘I know you are the champion of the Jewish people, not because you have been elected … but because you were born for it’. According to Lloyd George, ‘the fact that Britain at last opened her eyes to the opportunity afforded to the Allies to rally this powerful people to their side was attributable to the insistence, the assiduity and the fervour of one of the greatest Hebrews of all time, Dr Chaim Weizmann’. Like his friend Ahad Ha’am, though unlike Herzl, Weizmann believed that Zionism should focus not on diplomacy but on promoting popular Jewish migration and settlement. And yet it was he, more than any other Zionist leader, who won the Great Power endorsement Herzl had advocated but failed to win. So impressed was Lloyd George by Weizmann’s personality that he prophesied to Herbert Samuel, ‘When you and I are forgotten, this man will have a monument to him in Palestine’. In 1892, Weizmann had left Russia for Germany to study. He moved to England in 1904 and became a lecturer in chemistry at Manchester University(soon after which he had an encounter with Arthur Balfour, recounted below). He became a leader among British Zionists, visiting Palestine for the first time in 1907. He adopted British citizenship in 1910. At the outbreak of the war, the War Office invited British scientists to report all discoveries likely to be of military value. Weizmann’s expertise lay in a fermentation process which could produce large quantities of acetone (essential in the manufacture of cordite, the propellant used by British forces). The Admiralty promoted its large-scale manufacture. Weizmann’s process was a huge success; and Weizmann made the process available to the British for the duration of the war - without payment. Circumstances brought Weizmann to London. There, partly through his contribution to the British war effort, he earned the confidence of British leaders. Weizmann took full advantage of his connections and engaged in more than two years of lobbying. He tirelessly confronted British Jewish opposition while at the same time courting the Cabinet, the Foreign Office and Lord Rothschild. ‘By the fall of 1917, Weizmann could turn the key to most doors in Whitehall’. Developments fell ‘neatly into place’, adds Norman Rose, ‘for as the pace of his scientific work slackened toward the beginning of 1917, the rate of his political activity quickened, as the general political climate turned in the Zionists’ favour’. Professional expertise converged with political ambition and opportunism. Weizmann had extraordinary charisma; he was able to win over even the sceptic. While happy to exploit the pre-existing Christian Zionist sensibilities of many men in British public life at this time, he also adopted a view of British strategic interests which would enhance Zionism’s appeal to them. Ilan Pappe has recently written that ‘the bottom line of all the research hitherto conducted on the Declaration is that various decision makers in Britain saw the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as coinciding with British strategic interests in the area’. Weizmann played on this. In 1911, long before the outbreak of war, he had written: ‘Palestine is a natural continuation of Egypt and the barrier separating the Suez Canal from Constantinople…. It will be the Asiatic Belgium, especially if it is developed by the Jews.’ At the start of the war, Britain appeared to be the only belligerent power in Europe that might one day be persuaded, if the circumstances were right, to adopt the Zionist cause. By now a British subject himself, Weizmann argued that the movement should hope for an Allied victory. Soon after Turkey entered the war, he told C. P. Scott (whom he had won over the previous year) that Jewish settlement in Palestine ‘would develop the country, bring back civilisation to it, and form a very effective guard of the Suez Canal’. This, as we know, fell on Asquith’s deaf ears; but it would be different when Lloyd George replaced him. Jonathan Schneer invites us to ponder how differently events might have unfolded, if the Palestinians had possessed in London, during these critical years, an advocate for Arab nationalism who was as skilful and eloquent as Chaim Weizmann. Such an advocate would have struggled to overcome prevailing racial prejudice – the ‘Arab’, his role in history and level of development could not stand alongside the ‘Jew’, and his – but the absence of any such figure was a considerable weakness from which the Arab Palestinian cause suffered during the inter-war mandate years, too. Arthur Balfour and Nimbyism Arthur Balfour once admitted, ‘I can remember every argument, repeat all the pros and cons, and even make quite a good speech on the subject. But the conclusion, the decision, is a perfect blank in my mind.’ Balfour rarely seemed to take himself or anything else seriously. In this light, any attempt to identify his thinking and personal motivation has to be conjectural and inconclusive. But we may learn something valuable about the British elite’s complex attitudes to Judaism and to Zionism. Balfour was Foreign Secretary in 1917 and signatory to the historic letter to Lord Rothschild. Jonathan Schneer writes that Weizmann’s argument ‘worked upon the minds of anti- and philo-Semites alike, among the British governing elite’, desperate as they were for any advantage in the war-time struggle’. The case of Balfour suggests that one individual could hold both positive and negative feelings toward the Jews. Balfour met Weizmann almost a decade before Lloyd George did: an unexpected encounter early in 1906. Brought up on the Old Testament, Balfour had long had a sympathetic interest in the history of the Jews. His niece wrote later: ‘I remember in childhood imbibing from him the idea that Christian religion and civilisation owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid’. He had been baffled by the Zionists’ rejection of land for settlement in British East Africa. During the general election of January/February 1906, Balfour, then Prime Minister, fought to retain his northern seat, in Manchester. While he was campaigning, his agent (himself Jewish) suggested a meeting with the 32 year-old Weizmann, who was then a lecturer in the Chemistry department at Manchester University. Balfour asked to see him; and ‘in the midst of the election turmoil an interview was arranged’. The result was an ‘unusual sympathy … almost at first sight’ between these two ‘singularly magnetic personalities’. Weizmann had a profound effect on Balfour. They became friends. Margaret Macmillan writes that it was ‘a strange friendship – the intense, committed Jew from the Pale, and the charming, worldly Englishman who had drifted through life with such ease – but for Weizmann and Zionism it was crucial’. ‘The more he thought about Zionism, the more his respect for it, and his belief in its importance, grew. Indeed, Balfour later claimed to have personally adopted it. On leaving the USA in mid-summer 1917 - having met the American Zionist leader, Justice Louis Brandeis, and been assured by him that ‘there would be active sympathy there’ for Zionism – he proclaimed ‘I am a Zionist’. And yet as Prime Minister, Balfour had presided over the passage of the Aliens Act, in August 1905 (to come into effect on 1 January 1906). This followed the recent ‘invasion’ (Balfour’s description) of Britain, especially the East End of London, by tens of thousands of East European Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Public opinion and the press had demanded an end to the immigration. Balfour’s legislation – though it referred to ‘aliens’ - targeted these Jews. It was condemned by Jewish critics in Britain as an act of anti-Semitism. It was clear that Jews were no more welcome in Britain, where they sought refuge, than in the Russia from which they fled. Nonetheless, the two initiatives of Balfour, in 1905 and 1917, while seemingly contradictory, may have been complementary. Balfour’s ideas about Jews ‘were rooted in the Old Testament brand of Christianity on which he was raised’. There is no reason to doubt his sympathetic awareness, since childhood, of the plight of contemporary Jewry. But his overriding and consistent view (confirmed in both acts) was that the Jews should not find a home in England. ‘We have a right’, he insisted, ‘to keep out everybody who does not add to the strength of the community’. It was not advantageous if ‘an immense body of persons who, however patriotic, able and industrious … remained a people apart’. In 1906, the focus was negative, on not admitting Jews to Britain; in 1917 it was positive, on admitting them to Palestine. Also ‘positive’, in this sense, had been the offer, by Balfour’s own government in 1903, of British East Africa - albeit another refuge far away from Britain’s own shores. At the heart of Balfour’s personal beliefs and public acts – as for so many policy-makers of his time and later - was nimbyism. Weizmann was not reluctant to play the nimbyist anti-Semitic card. At the Paris Peace Conference ‘he appealed to the self-interest of the powers’. Millions of Jews were trying to leave the former Russian and Austrian Empires: where could they go? For Balfour and perhaps Lloyd George and others, altruism and self-interest pointed in the same direction: Palestine (where Arab nimbyism was not to be indulged). Nimbyism at the heart of the Balfour Declaration is further illustrated by Leo Amery, a secretary to the imperial war Cabinet who was largely responsible for drafting the final British text. In a contemporary letter to Sir Edward Carson, he wrote: ‘An anti-Semitism which is based partly on the fear of being swamped by hordes of undesirable aliens from Russia … will be much diminished when the hordes in question have got another outlet’. Among those in Balfour’s circle, the British negotiator of the Sykes-Picot agreement comes across as an anti-Semitic pro-Zionist. Mark Sykes is described by his grandson as having had views on the Jews which were ‘the anti-Semitic opinions of a man of his time and class’. The young Mark’s anti-Semitism could be quite venomous. When travelling by boat to the Boer War, he described the majority of passengers on board as ‘Jews of the most repulsive type; in fact it is for these beasts that we are fighting. They jabber about the mines all day long; I hope they will be made to pay. I would extort the last farthing from the most jingo loyal Jew in the British Empire before I’d fine a traitorous gentile’. However, World War One was a different affair. Sykes talked to Herbert Samuel, who showed him his 1915 paper, ‘The Future of Palestine’. He was impressed. Now, we are told, Sykes ‘realised that the Jews were dangerous only if they were alienated, in which scenario, because their power and influence were world-wide, they might do damage to the Allied cause’. There were no indications here of sudden compassion for Jews having to flee persecution and pogroms in Eastern Europe. Sykes’ support of Zionism seems to have owed nothing to sympathy, but everything to calculation founded on racialist generalisation. Prevalent in British government circles, as noted earlier, was ‘a rather pathetic belief in the international omnipotence of Jews’. Winston Churchill was another who held it. He wrote an article in February 1920 which began by asserting that a ‘world-wide conspiracy’ or ‘sinister confederacy’ of ‘international Jews’ was seeking to destroy European civilisation (though it ended with praise for Zionism as ‘a new ideal’ that was simple, true and attainable). Such a powerful global community had to be appeased. If it wanted a national homeland, Britain must offer one. This groundless assumption may itself be an indication of anti-Semitism - yet it was one with which Weizmann was happy to confront Sykes and others in Lloyd George’s government. A fusion of interests had been recognised by Herzl. He had written in 1896, that ‘the governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want…. If we only begin to carry out the plans, anti-Semitism would stop at once and for ever’. Such beliefs lay behind his dealings with the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian Minister of the Interior, von Plehve. And we can see it at work, too, in Balfour’s cordial first meeting with Weizmann. A plausible conclusion is that behind the Balfour Declaration, issued at a critical war-time moment in 1917, lay a congruence of Zionism with British, casually anti-Semitic, nimbyism. The Montagu Memorandum Edwin Montagu wrote, shortly before the issue of the Balfour Declaration, ‘the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic’. He was reported to have been close to tears in the Cabinet. It is of singular interest and significance that the most passionate opposition in the British Government to the issue of Balfour’s historic letter was that of its only Jewish member. Montagu, Minster of Munitions in 1916, was from July 1917 Secretary of State for India. He believed whole-heartedly in assimilation. His own achievements and position strengthened the case of innumerable Jews in Britain, and elsewhere, that assimilation into a gentile society was not only possible but far preferable to emigration to an undeveloped notional Jewish national home. Anxiety looms at the start of the Montagu Memorandum, August 1917. British support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine ‘will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country of the world’. He marshalls four arguments in support of this deep concern. First, a designated Jewish homeland would confirm the gentile prejudice that all Jews were restless aliens. It would mean that Jews would be regarded as foreigners, everywhere else. ‘When the Jew has a national home’, he adds, ‘surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of our rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased’. Other countries would find an outlet for their anti-Semitism by seeking to export their own Jews. ‘Palestine will become the world’s ghetto’. This is at the heart of Montagu’s claim that the Balfour Declaration would be anti-Semitic. Whatever its provenance - the real or imagined motivations of its creators - it would have an anti-Semitic effect. Assimilation, achieved by so many like him, would be undermined. Secondly, ‘I assert that there is no Jewish nation’. Moreover, through their service to the country, Jews in Britain have earned the right to be regarded not as British Jews but as Jewish Britons. Assimilation is working. Thirdly, in a Palestine dedicated to the so called Jewish nation, Muslims and Christians – from now on regarded as foreigners in the land of their birth - would have to leave, in order to make way for innumerable Jewish immigrants (though ‘there are three times as many Jews in the world as could possibly get into Palestine, if you drove out all the population that remains there now’). Fourthly, Palestine is special not just for Jews but for Muslims and Christians. ‘I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in’. Montagu’s conclusion is forceful. Zionism ‘has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed’; ‘it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government’; ‘I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest’. Weizmann is not mentioned in the memorandum, but Montagu took the opportunity a little later to tell Lloyd George: ‘You are being misled by a foreigner, a dreamer and an idealist who sweeps aside all practical difficulties’. To no avail. His heartfelt (and prophetic) arguments were almost wholly ignored. And Weizmann was allowed to wait outside when the Cabinet held the meeting, on 31 October 1917, at which the decision to issue the declaration was made. Lloyd George was later to refer somewhat patronisingly to Montagu’s stinging memorandum and its author. ‘There were one or two who were not so favourably inclined to the policy. One in particular doubted the wisdom from the Jewish point of view: that was Edwin Montagu’. But where lay wisdom? A fascinating exchange with Balfour suggests that the Secretary of State for India was a shrewder judge of the import of the Declaration than its author, the Foreign Secretary. Montagu declared, ‘Let us not for Heaven’s sake tell the Muslim what he ought to think; let us recognise what they do think’ - to which Balfour replied, ‘I am quite unable to see why Heaven or any other Power should object to our telling the Muslim what he ought to think’. Montagu was almost wholly ignored. Michael Cohen writes that the concluding (albeit unenforceable) provision for safeguarding the rights of the non-Jewish communities was ‘clearly a sop to Montagu and the non-Zionist Jews in Britain’. But for the most part, and in its essence, Montagu’s last minute appeal was side-lined. ‘Poor Edwin Montagu!’, comments Jonathan Schneer. But this is unwarranted condescension. There was nothing pitiable about this prominent man and courageous advocate. He took the matter personally and felt that the Zionists were trying to push assimilated British Jews back inside the ghetto. It seems in retrospect that in many respects he was right in what he wrote. In the British government, Montagu was not quite a solitary critic of the Balfour Declaration. Lord Curzon, Leader of the House of Lords and former Viceroy of India, was also dismissive of the Zionist proposal and sympathetic towards the native Arabs. Curzon insisted at a Cabinet meeting in October 1917 that Zionism was no more than ‘sentimental idealism’. As for the Arabs, ‘what is to become of the people of the country?’, he asked. They ‘and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1500 years and they own the soil’. He added, with foresight, ‘they will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigration or to act as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter’. We may surmise that the perspectives of both Montagu and Curzon were shaped in part by their experience of India and its huge Muslim population. More telling than Curzon’s support was the weight of anti-Zionist feeling among British Jews – that is, Jewish Britons – other than Montagu. Thus, for example, two leaders of the Board of Deputies wrote a letter to The Times in May 1917 ‘reiterating their opposition to any theory of the Jews as a homeless nationality’. They warned against giving Jewish settlers in Palestine special rights and feared ‘the most bitter of feuds with their Arab neighbours’. In the light of this letter, and Montagu’s memorandum, and the indifference shown towards Zionism at this time by the overwhelming majority of Jews globally, the fundamental claims of the Zionists - that the Jews were a nation and in need of a national homeland - looked fragile. But they were good enough for Balfour. Christian Zionism and Imperial Strategy ‘Then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations…. And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it’. Deuteronomy 33: (3, 5) Lloyd George and Balfour were the main individual decision-makers in 1917, but they operated in a cultural context. They knew their Old Testaments. Weizmann observed that ‘the fact that England is a biblical nation accounts for the spiritual affinity between them and the Jews’. Christian Zionism and its implications for British Imperial Strategy were important factors leading to British commitment to both Palestine and the Jewish Zionist project. During the Victorian era ‘a real pre-Zionist current’ developed in English literary and Protestant circles. Christian Zionists were philo-Semitic, to the extent that they recognised that a return of Jews to the Holy Land accorded with Biblical prophecy. Such a return was a step towards the conversion of the Jews and the Second Coming of Christ. As early as 1839, Lord Shaftesbury was advocating a Jewish national home in Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital (under Ottoman Turkish rule but British protection). In George Eliot’s last completed novel, Daniel Deronda, 1876, the eponymous hero discovers his Jewishness in adulthood and is inspired to seek a new life in Palestine. In this broad cultural current, Lloyd George and many others of his generation – and in his war-time and post-war administrations – were immersed. The fall of Asquith brought about a change in personnel at the highest level of Britain’s government and civil service which resulted in ‘an unprecedentedly pro-Zionist constellation’. The prejudices and inclinations of a number of key individuals – inside and outside the small war-time Cabinet, and in top administrative positions – coalesced, to have a profound influence on policy and events. Lloyd George had adopted Zionism, and he gathered round him men of a similar outlook: for example, Alfred Milner and Jan Smuts in the war Cabinet. Smuts, like other Boers, had been brought up on the Old Testament and always believed that “Israel will return to its land”. Smuts had led the Boers in their war against the British, when Milner had been Britain’s High Commissioner in South Africa. A dozen years later, Zionism was something they could agree on. Lloyd George once told Weizmann that ‘he knew the map of the Holy Land better than he did that of France’. For Balfour, too, ‘the Bible was a living reality’. In addition, Morris identifies three vigorous, opinionated and powerful assistant secretaries in the war Cabinet – Mark Sykes, William Ormsby-Gore, and Leo Amery - each of whom ‘rapidly became converts to Zionism’. In the Foreign Office too, under Balfour, there was Lord Robert Cecil, ‘a sound friend of Zionism and an idealist to the end’. In short, as Lloyd George put it in his Memoirs, ‘men like Mr Balfour, Lord Milner, Lord Robert Cecil and myself were in whole-hearted sympathy with the Zionist ideals’. Critics of Zionism have highlighted the significance. Edward Said observed that ‘on one important issue there was complete agreement between Gentile and Jewish versions of Zionism’: their view that the Holy Land was essentially empty of inhabitants. Ilan Pappe argues that a Christian-Jewish alliance turned ‘the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine’ into a project of settlement, ‘at the expense of the native people of Palestine’. Laura Robson, too, has highlighted the significance of English Christian evangelical opinion which ‘tended to be strongly pro-Zionist’ and to favour a return of the Jews to Palestine. Consequently, Arab Christian opposition to the Balfour Declaration and their nationalist appeals to the British Government were ‘doomed from the start’. British officials came to regard Arab Christians not as co-religionist potential allies but as a dangerous force. We note again the hybrid nature of Zionism: a political movement based on an avowedly secular ideology could be enthusiastically endorsed by an influential strand of British public opinion on religious grounds. Pappe writes that ‘for both Christians and Jews … the colonisation of Palestine was an act of return and redemption’. The combination of Jewish and Christian impulses could serve British imperial interests. There would be a ‘European’ outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘civilising’ the indigenous Arabs. This would secure in the Near East not only a potential economic asset (if it attracted international Jewish capital) but also an immediate strategic asset as Eastern protector of the Suez Canal. In the event, Christian Zionism appears to have been a more powerful influence than strategic calculation. Weizmann acknowledged that he would not have succeeded had he based his arguments on British self-interest alone. A comment made by Balfour himself, a decade later, is telling. In a Cabinet meeting on 5 March, 1928 - influenced no doubt by all that had happened since his Declaration - he began by observing that Palestine ‘lies at the very place where the Power responsible for the security of the Suez Canal would wish to place it’, and that a mandated territory ‘must add strength to the Empire’. Nevertheless, he went on, ‘this was not a consideration which influenced most British Zionists in 1917. It certainly did not influence me’. Balanced and considered, this judgement by the author of the Declaration represents a convincing disavowal of the strategic argument as the prime motivation in Britain’s claim to Palestine. As one British official of the time put it, ‘Palestine for most of us was an emotion rather than a reality’. Balfour, Lloyd George and the other decision-makers were, for complex reasons, committed to Zionism; its instrumental value as a cloak for the extension of the British Empire in a strategically sensitive region of the Middle East was recognised but, it seems, secondary. Philo-Semitism pointed the same way as anti-Semitism. ‘The return’ which would be in line with Biblical prophecy would also help to solve a perceived Jewish Problem by concentrating in one – distant - place all Jews who had not fully assimilated in their adopted lands. The Declaration: the Text The Balfour Declaration has had such historic significance – albeit beyond the imaginations of its makers in November 1917 - that its text merits revision. “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”. Essentially, the Declaration envisaged an act of post-war colonialism in a territory which would exchange one imperial master for another which was committed to its settlement by a third party. Though in a number of respects ambiguous, it was very carefully drafted. Labelled Balfour’s, the Declaration was in fact a co-production – in provenance and wording – of leading Zionists and moving forces in the British government. According to Joseph Jeffries, a Zionist programme had been produced as early as October 1916 as a basis for discussion with Whitehall. Following the entry of the USA into the war in April 1917, this seems to have strongly influenced a statement of war aims in the Middle East, issued ‘under the auspices’ of the British Government and directed towards the Jews of America. The statement proposed the recognition of Palestine as the Jewish national home, into which there would be full and free rights of immigration for Jews of all countries. Meanwhile a meeting had taken place in London in February 1917, attended by Sykes (by now Secretary to the war Cabinet) and Samuel, with leading Zionists and Lord Rothschild. This has been described as ‘the first full-dress conference’ that led to November. Then in April 1917, Cecil (in charge at the Foreign Office, in Balfour’s temporary absence) told Weizmann that ‘it would strengthen the British position’ if the Zionists would ask for a British Palestine. The two already knew each other: after meeting Weizmann in 1915, Cecil had become, in his own words, ‘a Zionist by passionate conviction’. There followed a remarkable speech by Weizmann, on 20 May, addressed to the English Zionist Federation. He said that ‘while a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine is our final ideal … the way to achieve it lies through a series of intermediate stages’. Then, foreshadowing the Balfour Declaration by six months, he continued: ‘I hope … that the fair country of Palestine will be protected by such a mighty and just power as Great Britain…. I am entitled to say that His Majesty’s Government is ready to support our plans’. Jeffries concludes that everything ‘had been privately arranged’ – already, in the middle of 1917. In June and July, with Weizmann abroad, the text of a letter in support of Zionism, for the British Government to issue, was carefully drafted by other leading Zionists. Prominent among them was the Polish writer and diplomat Nahun Sokolow, who shared leadership of the Zionist movement with Weizmann after 1917. Balfour’s Declaration was issued only ‘after prolonged deliberations, painstaking drafting and redrafting’. Eventually, Rothschild submitted a final draft to the Cabinet in early August; after further tinkering, Balfour placed his notice in The Times. In adapting the draft proffered by the Zionists in July, British officials softened the wording. Two ‘critical amendments’ are identified by Michael Cohen. First, recognising ‘Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people’ became ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Secondly, while the Zionist draft saw as essential ‘the grant of internal autonomy to the Jewish nationality’, the Declaration promised respect for ‘the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’. No borders for this new Palestine were defined. The British did not explain ‘views with favour’, or specify what form ‘their best endeavours’ would take. Avi Shlaim deplores the ‘opaqueness, ambiguity and, worst of all, internal contradictions’ of the Balfour Declaration. However, two points of substance were clear: that ‘homeland’ meant ‘state’; and that no equivalent homeland was envisaged for people – predominantly Muslim Arabs - already living in Palestine. Margaret Macmillan relates that, at Versailles, ‘from the start, Jews and non-Jews alike, politicians, diplomats and journalists, talked in terms of a Jewish state’. Benny Morris has written that ‘”national home” was clearly a euphemism for “commonwealth” or “state”’. Norman Rose acknowledges as much, too. ‘There can be no doubt what was in the minds of its architects. All envisaged, in the fullness of time, the emergence of a Jewish state’. It is no surprise to have this interpretation confirmed by Zionists of the time. Thus, when Ben-Gurion asked Weizmann, ‘Why didn’t you demand a Jewish state in Palestine?’, Weizmann replied: ‘We didn’t demand one because they wouldn’t have given us one. We asked only for conditions which would allow us to build a Jewish state in the future. It is simply a matter of tactics’. More remarkable is evidence confirming that this was indeed what the British envisaged. So, for example, Balfour told a Jewish audience, three months later, ‘my personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state. It is up to them now’. Similarly, in July 1921, at a meeting in Balfour’s home, he and Lloyd George told Weizmann that the Balfour Declaration ‘had always meant the eventual creation of a Jewish state’. The second point is the assigning of the Arab population to a secondary role. This is implicit in the very concession to the Zionists of a homeland/state; and it can be inferred from the omission of political rights where the guarantee of ‘civil’ and ‘religious’ rights is made. Over and above this, the Declaration makes no mention of the Arabs by name. Though a great majority of the residents of the territory, they were merely subsumed in the expression ‘non-Jewish communities’. The naming of Jews alone, and reference to others only in subsidiary relation to them, was confirmation of prevailing notions of the racial and social hierarchy to be expected. ‘The Arab’ might be ‘noble’, for a few such as Kitchener. But Balfour himself articulated the far more widespread British (and Zionist) view when, in 1919, he declared: ‘Zionism … is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’. We may speculate as to why the British, having laboured so long over it, issued a text which was so ‘opaque’ and ‘ambiguous’. It seems likely that, first, the wording had to be (just) enough to win over the world’s Jews, without unduly alarming other Powers or indeed, at that time, the Arabs of the region to whom other promises had been made. Secondly, with the war not yet won – this was, after all, an instrument for winning it – the British may have wanted to keep their options open. Being as loosely worded as it was, it could do little harm. It could be revisited, if or when the war was won. — What are we to conclude? Because it did survive the war and its aftermath, the Balfour Declaration may rightly be described as ‘a turning point in the history of the Jewish people’, and even as ‘a world-changing development’. Chaim Weizmann saw it as ‘the Magna Carta of Jewish liberties’. Zionists were delighted, even if it was, in November 1917, only the end of the beginning. Ten years later Weizmann was still expressing his surprise at the turn of events. He said in December 1927, with genuine emotion - if nonchalance regarding the facts – ‘We Jews got the Balfour Declaration quite unexpectedly; or, in other words, we are the greatest war profiteers. We never dreamt of the Balfour Declaration; to be quite frank, it came to us overnight’. Zionists’ surprise and delight was matched by Arabs’ shock and dismay. Edward Said’s verdict is restrained but bitter. ‘The declaration was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, (c) in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory, and (d) it took the form of a promise about this same territory to another foreign group, so that this foreign group might, quite literally, make this territory a national home for the Jewish people’. Sympathetic to the Arabs, through close reporting of events at the time, Joseph Jeffries published his own assessment of the Balfour Declaration and its effects, in late 1938. 1. Its publication broke our pledged word to the Arab race. 2. Its object was to establish the Jews in a privileged position in Palestine without the assent of the population, as a prelude to the absorption of the latter, under plea of their co-operation, in a future Jewish state. 3. It was written in great part by those who were supposed only to have received it, and was deliberately worded so that the truth might be hidden by it, its guarantees to the Arabs be useless and its promises intangible. 4. It was ostensibly a recognition of Zionist aspirations to return to Palestine under the sanction of historic rights, but in reality it was the published clause of a private bargain by which war spoils were to be given in payment for war-help. Jeffries’ analysis was well grounded, like Said’s, and is largely unexceptionable. In his final overall verdict he did not hold back. The Declaration was ‘unlawful in issue, arbitrary in purpose, and deceitful in wording’. ‘The Balfour Declaration’, he added (writing shortly before the Munich Agreement), is the most discreditable document to which a British Government has set its hand within memory’. Of the Declaration, Avi Shlaim has observed that ‘there was no precedent for it in international law’. Moreover, ‘Great Britain had no moral right to promise national rights for a tiny Jewish minority in a predominantly Arab country’. Not legal, not just. But Balfour’s fateful letter is open to other charges: it embodied an irresolvable contradiction; it brought no advantage at the time; and it was linked to flawed assumptions about British imperial needs in the future. First, the contradiction. Lord Grey had been Asquith’s Liberal Foreign Secretary (that is, the Conservative Balfour’s predecessor). His comments are all the more withering for being couched in understatement. On 27 March 1923, he said: ‘I think we are placed in considerable difficulty by the Balfour Declaration…. It promised a Zionist home without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the population of Palestine. A Zionist home, my Lords, undoubtedly means or implies a Zionist Government … and as 93% of the population are Arabs, I do not see how you can establish other than an Arab Government without prejudice to their civil rights’. He went on to ask the Government to publish and review all ‘engagements relating to the matter which we entered into during the War’. Having been in post at the time of the McMahon correspondence with Sharif Hussein, he argued that ‘from the point of view of honour’ it should look fairly at each pledge ‘and the date at which it was given’. Secondly, the lack of advantage. As a wartime diplomatic ploy the Declaration failed. The Declaration ‘never served its most immediate purpose’. There was no gain in Russia which, from November 1917, was led by Bolsheviks committed to making a separate peace with Germany. In America, Jews were deeply divided over Zionism; and in any case President Wilson preferred planning for world peace, founded on principles and a League of Nations, to making any public singular commitment to the Zionist cause. In short, neither Russian nor American Jewry changed the course of the war. It was won by Britain and her Allies by other means. Thirdly, imperial security. The British did not need Palestine. The meticulous assessment of Palestine’s potential, under Asquith, proved sound. Palestine was to become a liability. The previous, relatively sanguine, official assessment regarding any post-war French challenge was justified at the war’s end. France had no capacity to compete with British interests in far off Egypt or Palestine. Exhausted by the conflict on the Western Front, France now looked to Britain for support in minimising the local threat from a resurgent Germany. All the hard-nosed calculation of the committee of Imperial Defence – and the realistic calculations of Sykes (and Picot) – made the Balfour Declaration which Lloyd George advocated (and his coterie approved), within a year of his taking office, appear an extraordinary piece of whim and wishful-thinking. Neither the acquisition of Palestine nor the endorsement of a Jewish National Home there served Britain. Monroe’s comment on the Balfour Declaration, in 1963, was that ‘measured by British interests alone, it was one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history’. What Balfour and Lloyd George approved in November 1917 would have been out of the question had their respective predecessors, Grey and Asquith still be in power. As Jonathan Schneer concludes, it ‘was the highly contingent product’ of a tortuous process ‘characterised as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy’. In the extraordinary context of mid-1917, Lloyd George and others made their decisions. Tom Segev concludes that the Balfour Declaration resulted from their ‘prejudice, faith and sleight of hand’. One might add: ignorance (of Palestine), susceptibility (towards Weizmann) and casuistry. As for the Arabs who would suffer the consequences, officially they were not even told. The only people who remained ignorant of the Declaration, Jeffries suggested, were the existing inhabitants of Palestine ‘who probably had not ten wireless-sets between them, nor any access to the newspapers’. Jeffries judged that General Allenby suppressed news of it: partly because an occupying army could not, legally, introduce a new political regime; and partly because the British Government, knowing that the Declaration was a betrayal of the Arabs, preferred to conceal it from them till their country was fully under British control. The Balfour Declaration was just one British ploy among many for winning the war (and possibly shaping the peace). It was an event which at the time ‘created a mere ripple of public interest’. Its failure as a diplomatic gesture to ‘world Jewry’ did no immediate harm. It might have been of only transient significance, as other war-time promises proved: it, too, could have been shed. But it was not. The lasting harm to British interests – including Britain’s reputation first among Arabs and later, ironically, among Jews too - arose after World War One, through its retention.
Table of Contents
MapsAcknowledgements
Timeline
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Birth and Emergence of Zionism, 1897-1914
Chapter 2: Zionism In 1914
Chapter 3: The British Adoption of Zionism, 1914-1917
Chapter 4: The British Commitment To Zionism In Palestine, 1918-1922
Chapter 5: Palestine In 1922
Chapter 6: Zionism And Britain In Palestine, 1922-1937
Postscript 1937-1947
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
'Gardner Thompson throws a cool light on a very hot topic ... This illuminating book is an essential primer on the historical roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict.' —Nicholas Rankin, author of Churchill's Wizards: the British Genius for Deception
'An excellent, well-researched and timely book.' —Nur Masalha, author of Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
'An illuminating account of both the emergence of Israel and of British policy during the three decades of the British Mandate in Palestine. It is a sobering and engrossing story of Britain's betrayal of the Palestinians from the Balfour Declaration to the present day.' —Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
'An incisive and thorough analysis Thompson methodically and convincingly describes how the British Empire allowed and assisted the colonisation of Palestine and in so doing planted the seeds for a conflict that still rages today.' —Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
'Thompson examines how the settler-colonial Zionist project in Palestine is intertwined with the designs of imperial Britain. That such an issue can still be disputed is testimony to the power of ideology: Legacy of Empire cuts through the noise to show what really happened.' —Gilbert Achcar, author of The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
'An eloquent account Thompson has brought an unbiased historian's eye to this inexplicable chapter of British and imperial history.'—Tim Llewellyn, The Balfour Project