Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The Sykes-Picot Treaty, negotiated and signed in secrecy and never revealed until the Bolsheviks threw open the czarist files, was a pure imperialist bargain of the old pattern. It did allow for an Arab federation of states within Turkey’s former dominions, but its terms, no matter how you stretch them, cannot be made to fit the pledge made to the Arabs. No promises having as yet been made to the Jews, their interests cannot be said to have been jeopardized. Sykes himself was not yet aware of the Zionists’ existence (though he knew all about the dealings with Hussein), and anyway, if there was one thing clear in the dark maze of the Sykes-Picot terms, it was that Palestine was reserved for “special treatment” and not promised to anybody. All around it the former dominions of the Turk were most explicitly and exactly divided up, separated into Red and Blue zones, A and B areas, apportioned with regard to different levels of influence for ports, railroads, cities, districts, vilayets; this place promised to that power in return for that place to another power if the third power should not take a third place, and in the event that—Enough. But Palestine alone is designated a “Brown” zone and its fate left vague. The exact wording of the Treaty was: “Palestine, with the Holy Places, is separated from Turkish territory and subjected to a special regime to be determined by agreement between Russia, France and Great Britain.”

  Exactly the same exception of Palestine was made in the terms of a bargain then being committed to paper between MacMahon and the Sherif of Mecca. Britain was “prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs,” stated the critical letter, dated October 24, 1915, within certain limits and boundaries previously agreed on. But one area within these limits was explicitly excluded: namely, “the portions of Syria lying to the West of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” This awkward phraseology simply means Palestine, a word that the experts could not use, because it always suffered from an unfortunate geographical inexactitude. In short, “the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was thus excluded from Sir Henry MacMahon’s pledge.” The authority here speaking was Winston Churchill when, as colonial secretary in 1922, he lopped off trans-Jordan from the rest of Palestine.

  No one, neither Feisal nor Lawrence nor Weizmann nor Sykes nor the Cabinet nor anyone else, thought of the promise to the Arabs as conflicting with the still inchoate plans for the Zionists, or even with the Balfour Declaration once it was issued. A huge bulk of territory was covered by the MacMahon promise to the Arabs, but not what Balfour used to call the “small notch”* that was Palestine proper. All the Arab claims of later years cannot conceal the fact that both the old Sherif Hussein and Feisal, the active leader, were cognizant of and acquiesced in the exclusion of Palestine from the area of their promised independence, whether or not they had any mental reservations. Even after the British intention to make room in Palestine for the Jews was made public they did not take exception. When the Zionist Commission headed by Weizmann came to Palestine in 1918, while the guns were still firing, it was greeted by an article in the Mecca paper, published under Sherif Hussein’s name, that exhorted the Arabs to welcome the Jews as brethren and to co-operate for the common welfare. Weizmann visited Feisal at his desert headquarters in Amman, and there under the stars, with the omnipresent Lawrence making the third of a remarkable trio, the basis for a common understanding was reached. Later, in Paris, it was put in the form of a written document, signed by Feisal and Weizmann, in which the Emir agreed to “the fullest guarantees for carrying into effect the British government’s [the Balfour] Declaration of November 2, 1917,” including “all necessary measures to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” Feisal moreover addressed a letter to the American Zionist delegates at the Peace Conference saying that the Arabs and Jews “are working together for a reformed and revived Near East,” that the Arabs wish the Jews “a most hearty welcome home,” that “there is room in Syria for us both,” and that “indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”

  Only later, after the Hashimite family failed to unify all the Arab lands and people, when they were pushed out of Syria and lost Arabia to Ibn Saud, did a new set of Arab leaders maintain that Britain’s pledge to the Jews had conflicted from the beginning with Britain’s pledge to the Arabs. Only then was the MacMahon correspondence unearthed and construed as a casus belli. By this time the British, caught in the high tide of appeasement, were themselves engaged in a double effort to repudiate the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the Mandate and to look righteous while doing it. Government spokesmen dug Sir Henry’s correspondence out of the files, shook off twenty years’ dust, and declared with pained surprise that, in view of this pledge, there might indeed be some doubt of the validity of the Mandate. Nothing is more hollow than the air of sanctimony worn to cover a mean act; but there still remained participants in the original transaction willing to restate the facts. Feisal, Sykes, Lawrence, and Balfour were all dead before 1935, but Ormsby-Gore, who had served in the Arab Bureau throughout the negotiations, made it clear in Parliament that “it was never in the mind of anyone on that staff, that Palestine west of the Jordan was in the area within which the British government then undertook to further the cause of Arab independence.”

  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 m
unitions, 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 cou
ld 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.