Authors: Barbara W. Tuchman
Palestine west of the Jordan was the Holy Land, and it would never have done at all to leave the Holy Land under Moslem rule. Moreover the French absolutely refused to consent to Arab rule in Syria. But the chief reason why Britain left Palestine out of the pledged area was that military necessity was making her moral duty clearer than ever: Britain must occupy the place herself.
“The insistent logic of the military situation on the banks of the Suez Canal” had made this conclusion inescapable. The words were those of the
Manchester Guardian’s
military correspondent, Herbert Sidebotham. On November 22, 1915 the
Guardian
, in an editorial written by Sidebotham, opened its campaign for the restoration of Israel in Palestine under a British protectorate. “There can be no satisfactory defense of Egypt or the Suez Canal so
long as Palestine is in the occupation of a hostile or probably hostile Power,” it stated. Arguing the case in terms of British self-interest, as Shaftesbury used to do while keeping his more pious motives to himself, the
Guardian
pointed out that in ancient times Egypt solved its defense problems through the existence of Judaea as a buffer state against the military empires of the north. “If Palestine were now a buffer state between Egypt and the North,” it concluded, “inhabited as it used to be by an intensely patriotic race … the problem of Egypt in this war would be a very light one. It is to this condition that we ought to work.… On the realization of this condition depends the whole future of the British Empire as a sea Empire.”
As a result of this editorial Sidebotham became acquainted with Weizmann, who urged him to expand the piece into a Memorandum for the Foreign Office. This Memorandum, presented early in 1916 to the Middle East Division of the Foreign Office, urged that the proposed buffer state be designed on an “ample plan … for if the second Jewish state should avoid the fate of the first, it should have room to breathe.” The strategic advantage should appeal to “a rational British egoism”; but Mr. Sidebotham could not avoid mentioning the historic grandeur of the opportunity that now offered itself of restoring the Jewish state under the British crown. During the next six months Sidebotham, co-operating with the Manchester Zionists and with C. P. Scott in the background, advising, encouraging, opening channels, continued to publicize the idea through the British Palestine Committee, which he organized, and through its weekly publication,
Palestine
.
Then, fortuitously, a totally extraneous factor intervened that was to make many things coalesce. Britain had used up her timber supply, from which wood alcohol was made, from which in turn was derived acetone, an essential element in the manufacture of cordite. In the midst of war the prospect of every gun’s going dead for lack of ammunition was not encouraging. Some method of producing
a synthetic acetone had to be invented, and fast. Lloyd George, as minister of munitions, was “casting about for a solution,” as he tells it, when he ran into C. P. Scott, “a friend in whose wisdom I had implicit faith.” On being told of the search for a resourceful chemist, Scott recommended “a very remarkable professor of chemistry at Manchester” whose name was Weizmann. To employ a foreigner at such a very sore spot was risky, and Scott was uncertain of the man’s birthplace—“somewhere near the Vistula,” he thought. But he was sure of the professor’s devotion to the Allies, because he knew that the one thing Weizmann cared about was Zionism, and he knew Weizmann to be convinced that only in an Allied victory was there hope for his people.
“I knew Mr. Scott to be one of the shrewdest judges of men I ever met …” says Lloyd George. “I took his word about Professor Weizmann and invited him to London to see me. I took to him at once … he was a very remarkable personality.” Weizmann, who had long been privately at work on a fermentation process from starch, was promptly engaged to solve the government’s difficulty. Within a “few weeks’ time” (according to Lloyd George) he was ready with the process, although the problem of large-scale production and conversion of factories to new methods occupied him constantly up to the end of the war.
The acetone incident was crucial not so much in eliciting Lloyd George’s promise of a reward for Dr. Weizmann’s services as in bringing Weizmann permanently to London and, guided by the “indefatigable Mr. Scott,” into contact with the makers of policy.
“Never in my life have I seen such a man as Dr. Weizmann,” said Field Marshal Allenby some years later in Jerusalem. “He has the ability to convert everyone to Zionism by his infectious enthusiasm.” In London in 1916–17 the hour had come, and by some unfathomable law of history the hour turns up the man. Weizmann’s acetone work was under the auspices of the admiralty, where Balfour
was now first lord. “You know,” Balfour began when they met again, as if unconscious of any interruption since their last meeting. “I was thinking of that conversation of ours and I believe that when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem.”
The last stage began when Lloyd George became premier and Balfour foreign secretary in December 1916. They “talked the whole matter over,” says Lloyd George, without saying more; but from then on official negotiations with the Zionists got under way. Months of furious maneuvering ensued over the claims of France in Syria, the objections of the Pope, the attitude of the United States, the effect on Russia, then swaying on the brink of revolution. The chiefest trouble was a raging controversy with the anti-Zionist English Jews, fueled in the Cabinet by the secretary for India, Edwin Montagu, and aired in the press by Alexander and Montefiore, president and secretary of the Jewish Board of Deputies. In those days the majority of respectable Jews still regarded Zionism as a mad delusion of “an army of beggars and cranks.” A re-created homeland seemed to them, not the fulfillment of a dream, but the undermining of their hard-won citizenship in Western countries. Non-Jews could never understand this attitude. They ascribed it, in the words of the
Times
, to an “imaginative nervousness.” On the other hand they recognized a familiar quantity in the nationalism of the Zionists, as in the nationalism of the Czechs or the Poles or the Arabs, with which they were quite accustomed to deal.
Those in the Cabinet, like Lord Curzon, who opposed the Balfour Declaration did so not because they sympathized with the anti-Zionist position, but because the Declaration committed Britain to an uncomfortable responsibility. Was not the country too far gone in decay to support a new population? Lord Curzon asked, and he warned against issuing a deliberately ambiguous statement that would allow the interpretation that a Jewish “state” was envisaged when it was questionable whether Britain was
fully prepared to sponsor a state. He urged the government not to support a cause so pregnant of unresolved problems. From the point of view of practical policy he was, of course, right, as the future proved. But he was overruled.
Largely, the men in power approved the project. Lord Cromer, who had once dashed Herzl’s hopes for El Arish, now astonished the Zionists by public approval of their goal in Palestine. Lord Milner, the Liberal imperialist who had succeeded to the War Office after the tragic loss of Kitchener, was one of the strongest advocates in the Cabinet. Lord Robert Cecil, whom Balfour brought in as his undersecretary, developed a personal enthusiasm for Zionism even warmer than that of his chief.
But the most dynamic of all was Mark Sykes, now strategically located as liaison officer for Middle Eastern affairs between the War Cabinet, the Foreign Office, and the War Office. In his scurrying to and fro among all the parties concerned with the Middle East he had discovered the Zionists, seen in them the engine that might turn the wheels of Middle Eastern revival, and therefore espoused their cause with all his characteristic energy and dash. He attended their meetings, laid out their strategy, arranged their appointments, told them whom to see and what to say. Up and down the corridors of Whitehall in Syke’s wake “There were Zionists and rumors of Zionists,” recalled Ronald Storrs, of his days in the War Office. Sykes would burst into his room bringing “a maximum of trouble and a maximum of delight”—exuberant or despondent according to the nature of some interview with Balfour or some change in the wording of the draft Declaration.
Whatever obstacle reared up to block the path—French claims or Vatican frowns or internal Zionist stresses—Sykes knew what wire to pull to clear the way. At any hour of the day or night any one of the Zionist leaders might be called by Sykes with a brain storm, a warning of some new antagonist, or a plan of new strategy. When Doctor Sokolow, representing the Continental Zionists, went on a mission
to Rome in April 1917 he found that Sykes had been there shortly before, enroute to the East; he found hotel rooms reserved for him by Sykes, instructions at the Embassy for him from Sykes, at the Italian Ministry messages from Sykes, and every day telegrams arriving from Arabia from Sykes.
In that spring personal enthusiasm, for whatever reasons or from whatever source, was not of course what decided the War Cabinet to issue a public statement of Britain’s intention to reopen Palestine to the Jews. Why did they do it? The motive was mixed; it differed with different individuals; and it has been endlessly disputed ever since.
They did it because they meant to take Palestine anyway for its strategic value; but they had to have a good moral case. The timing is important. When the Declaration was issued on November 2, Allenby’s army had already begun its advance into Palestine in October, had taken Beersheba on the 31st, and was at the gates of Jaffa. Jerusalem would be next and was in fact taken five weeks later, on December 8. The awful moment when a British army would enter the Holy City had suddenly become a reality. The Balfour Declaration was issued to dignify that approaching moment, not only in the eyes of the world, but especially in the eyes of the British themselves. And not only the moment, but also the future. For the British meant not only to take Palestine, but likewise, by one expedient or another, to hold it. “We should so order our policy,” wrote Mark Sykes in the middle of October to Lord Robert Cecil, “that, without in any way showing any desire to annex Palestine or to establish a Protectorate over it, when the time comes to choose a mandatory power for its control, by the consensus of opinion and desire of its inhabitants we shall be the most likely candidate.”
To proclaim that Britain would enter Palestine as trustee for its Old Testament proprietors would fulfill this purpose admirably and above all would quiet the British conscience in advance. The gesture, far from being insincere
or cynical, was essential to the British conscience. No advance in Britain’s imperial career was ever taken without a moral case, even if the pretext were only the murder of a missionary or a native’s insult to a representative of the Crown. How much more necessary was a good moral case when it came to the Holy Land, which of all places on earth had the most precious associations in men’s minds! The conquest of Palestine would be the most delicate and unusual of imperial acquisitions, as Allenby signified when he dismounted at the Damascus gate in order to enter the Holy City on foot. It could not simply be popped into the colonial bag like Zululand or Afghanistan. More than any other people the English need to feel the assurance of rectitude. “I will explain the English to you,” wrote Shaw at his most Irish. “His watchword is always duty.… He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude.… There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it, but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong.”
Or, to put it another way, as one of Chamberlain’s biographers did: “If the worst comes to the worst, England well to have a good case.” And the same idea, yet again, can no doubt rely upon her good right hand; but it is also expressed with proper dignity in the magisterial tones of Lord Cromer: “In the execution of Imperialist policy … it is not at all desirable to eliminate entirely those considerations which appeal to the imaginative, to the exclusion of the material, side of the national character.”
This was the purpose that the Balfour Declaration served: it provided the effective moral attitude, the good case. It appealed to the imaginative side of the national character. In short, it allowed Britain to acquire the Holy Land with a good conscience.
To be effective it had to be meant, and in 1917 it was meant. To regard it as half-hearted or as mere propaganda is to miss its significance entirely. The theory that it was issued to win the hearts of the Jews of the United States
and of Russia is a windy product of the thirties, when the British, having become increasingly uncomfortable under the burden of living up to the terms of the Mandate, were aching to be rid of the responsibilities they had undertaken toward the Jews. The impression was allowed to take hold that the Balfour Declaration was after all nothing but a propagandist gesture flung out haphazardly in wartime.
This story falls apart at a touch. How could a Declaration favoring Zionism be expected to influence favorably the very people who would regard it with most distaste? Lloyd George says specifically in his
Memoirs
that it was hoped to secure for the Allies both the sympathy of the Jews of Russia, who “wielded considerable influence in Bolshevik circles,” and “the aid of Jewish financial interests in the United States.” But both these groups regarded Zionism with the most profound aversion. A child is not wheedled into friendliness by offers of castor oil. Lloyd George has tried to pretend that it was candy, but this is a fairy tale.
*
To capitalist Jews in America as to Bolshevik Jews in Russia, Zionism was undeniably castor oil, not candy. The influential American Jews who were in any position to render aid, moral, financial, or other, shared, with one or two exceptions like Justice Brandeis, the anti-Zionist attitude of their fellows in England. The British
government was certainly well enough acquainted with this attitude not to be in any doubt about it. They had been dealing for quite a while already with the implacable opposition of Edwin Montagu inside the Cabinet and the public protests of prominent Jews outside in the columns of the
Times
. The proposed Declaration had been debated by the Cabinet comma by comma, intermittently through the whole of 1917, to the accompaniment of anti-Zionist anguish, privately pleaded and publicly voiced. It is hardly likely, under these circumstances, that the Cabinet expected to woo the “well-connected” assimilationist Jews to America or Germany or any Western country by pronouncing what these Jews regarded as a sentence of doom upon assimilation.