The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

by Jonathan Schneer

  The announcement of war on August 4, 1914, fell upon Herbert Samuel like a thunderclap, as it did upon Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow and Lucien Wolf. For these men, as for so many, it had profound impact upon their lives, which now would intersect in unforeseen ways. At this moment of supreme crisis, prime ministers and monarchs and generals occupied center stage. But the proto-Zionist Herbert Samuel, the folks-mensch Chaim Weizmann, the subtle diplomat Nahum Sokolow, and the anti-Zionist Lucien Wolf—the Jewish protagonists in the struggle for and against the Balfour Declaration—were waiting in the wings.

  CHAPTER 9

  Weizmann’s First Steps

  THE DECLARATIONS OF WAR in late July and early August 1914 burst upon an unprepared world like a volley of gunshots at a summer garden party. They sliced through illusions, ripping up the pretty picture of great powers at peace and taking their ease. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28; Germany declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France on August 3. Britain declared war upon Germany on August 4. Initial shock quickly gave way to martial ardor, however, and then to apprehension for loved ones serving in rapidly deploying armies all over Europe. British Jews had additional worries. They feared for their coreligionists in Russia, where anti-Semitism was scaling new heights, and in Habsburg Poland, which lay directly in the path of the tsar’s advancing forces.

  Then Turkey gave British Zionists a reason to hope. When the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the Central Powers in early November, they called into question the future of their own empire, which meant the future of Palestine as well. It took a moment for the implication to sink in. At first even the most sophisticated and best-informed British Zionists foresaw only additional calamities. “The fate of Palestine1 thus becomes dreadful and, moreover, uncertain,” Ahad Ha’am wrote to Weizmann. “Our colonies,2 our institutions—everything may now be swept away,” Weizmann lamented. But then dread gave way to a wild and surging anticipation. Assume that Britain won the war, against Turkey as well as against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Middle East would drop into the melting pot at last. And then perhaps5 the ingot of Palestine could be pried loose from the great slab of Turkey’s Middle Eastern empire.

  But should Zionists hope that Britain won the war? Zionism was a world movement—Jews lived everywhere, fought everywhere, on every front, against each other, for their respective countries of residence. The World Zionist Organization tried to insist that its various branches remain neutral, but this was impossible. Much as socialists from Germany, France, and Britain marched to the trenches (while singing the Internationale), so too Jews, even Zionists, loyally supported the wartime governments of the countries in which they lived. A typical example: Leopold Greenberg wrote on August 14 in The Jewish Chronicle, “England has been all she could be to the Jews; the Jews will be all they can to England.” Outside his office he put up a giant placard displaying the same words.

  For a British government minister such as Herbert Samuel, neutrality was obviously impossible. But the Ottoman attack on Russia in early November, like a flash of lightning, illumined a landscape that had been previously dark to him. “The moment Turkey3 entered the war the position was entirely changed,” he recalled. The prewar proto-Zionist, the self-described “first member of the Jewish community ever to sit in a British Cabinet” (Disraeli, born Jewish, had converted to Christianity at age twelve), emerged as the Zionist movement’s most effective and highly placed champion. He could and would combine his duties to Britain with his duties, as he now conceived them, to the Jewish people.

  He kept a record4 of his initial steps as a fully fledged, if as yet publicly undeclared, Zionist and reproduced the relevant passages verbatim in his memoirs. On November 9, 1914, only a week after Turkey entered the war, Samuel met with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in the grand building with the Italianate facade and six-story tower overlooking Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park. He was no unfamiliar Jew from Poland seeking audience with a distant and disdainful official. He was a member of the government. For once, a Zionist had entered the inner sanctum on equal terms to discuss the future of Palestine.

  He prepared carefully for the interview and came right to the point. “Perhaps,” he told Sir Edward, “the opportunity might arise for the fulfillment of the ancient aspiration of the Jewish people and the restoration [in Palestine] of a Jewish state.” He ticked off the reasons why Britain should support this “ancient aspiration.” Most important, “the geographical situation of Palestine and especially its proximity to Egypt would render its goodwill to England a matter of importance to the British Empire.” But almost equally significant in the present wartime circumstances, if Russia could be induced to back the Zionist policy, then Russian Jews would have some reason to support their government. That would benefit Russia’s ally Britain. For that matter, Samuel argued, a pro-Zionist policy would rally Jewish opinion throughout the world on behalf of the Allies.

  Britain should support establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, he added, for less self-interested reasons. Such a state would be good not merely for Britons but for everyone: “It might become the centre of a new culture. The Jewish brain is rather a remarkable thing, and under national auspices the state might become a fountain of enlightenment and a source of a great literature and art and development of science.” Obviously it would be good for the Jews themselves: “If they could see men of their own kin achieving great things it would have a profound influence on their outlook.” And this would benefit their Middle Eastern neighbors as well: “Raising their [the Jews’] character would add to their usefulness to the peoples among whom they lived.”

  How Grey would have responded only weeks before, when Britain was hoping to keep Turkey’s goodwill, can readily be imagined. With Turkey having chosen the wrong side in the great conflict, however, he could make only one response. Zionism, which would undermine Turkey in the Middle East if given free rein, finally had entered the realm of practical politics, from the British point of view—or at least had got its toe inside the door. So without actually committing himself to a specific policy, Grey smiled upon a proposal that his Foreign Office subordinates had rejected, politely but scornfully, just a few months before when put to them by Nahum Sokolow. “The idea had always had a strong sentimental attraction for him,” Samuel recalled him saying. “The historical appeal was very strong. He was quite favourable to the proposal and would be prepared to work for it if the opportunity arose.”

  Later that day Samuel broached the same subject with another colleague, chancellor of the exchequer David Lloyd George. The previous April, Lloyd George had described the president of the Local Government Board as “a greedy, ambitious6 and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race”; on November 9, however, when Samuel mentioned the “ancient aspiration” of Jews to establish a state in Palestine, Lloyd George replied that he was “very keen to see a Jewish state established there.” Thus encouraged, Samuel prepared a memorandum on the subject for circulation among the other cabinet ministers.

  It is worth noting here the parallel evolution of British interest in and sympathy for the rise of both Arab and Jewish nationalism. Before the war, when Sharif Hussein’s son Abdullah inquired about British support, he received polite but short shrift from Lord Kitchener and Sir Ronald Storrs in Cairo. At roughly the same time the Zionist Nahum Sokolow was leaving the Foreign Office in London equally empty-handed. But once the war was raging, and the Ottoman Empire was a declared enemy, Lord Kitchener discovered a coincidence of interest among Arabs and Britons after all. Simultaneously Grey and Lloyd George were expressing a newly avowed, but ostensibly long-held, concern for Zionist goals. Did Grey know that Kitchener had approached Abdullah? Perhaps. Did it occur to him that the Arab nationalism that Kitchener now encouraged and the Jewish nationalism that he himself supported were potentially contradictory? Probably not. Sharif Hussein and Herbert Samuel knew nothing of each other, but from now on their two movements would a
dvance in unsuspecting tandem.

  Meanwhile in London in the late summer and early fall of 1914, leading Jews were mobilizing for action. Israel Zangwill, head of the ITO, which sought a safe refuge for Jews anywhere that would take them, worried for the Austro-Polish Jews living in the path of the advancing Russian army, and for Russia’s own Jews subject to ever harsher repression. Using contacts gained from his ITO work, he lobbied high-placed contacts on their behalf. Leopold Greenberg, of The Jewish Chronicle, shared Zangwill’s fears, as well as Zangwill’s hope that the British government would pressure Russia to treat Jews less vilely. Unlike Zangwill, he also hoped to persuade Britain to help them if they wished to flee to Palestine. The old wire-puller managed a brief audience with several people at the Foreign Office. “Needless to say they7 have enough on their hands without our ‘tsuris,’” Greenberg reported somewhat ruefully. But he discerned in their reaction to him a shift in Britain’s Middle Eastern policy: “I think they want to see some settlement of our question.” This was before Turkey entered the war.

  Despite his earlier relative unimportance, Chaim Weizmann proved during this period to be a more effective champion of Zionism than Greenberg, Zangwill, or anyone else. That he should become the undisputed leader would not have been predicted, and was even counterintuitive. During 1914–18 he mastered the political Zionist approach, which as a practical Zionist he had once condemned. The folks-mensch learned to circulate comfortably in august social circles. If the search for British support took him down unanticipated paths, he would follow where they led.

  Unlike Greenberg and Zangwill, who looked to the government for immediate intervention on behalf of Austro-Polish and Russian Jews, Weizmann approached the situation from a strategic point of view. He shared their concern but held that only the Russians could solve the problem of Russian anti-Semitism. Therefore, as he wrote on September 8 (to a Russian Zionist friend in New York City), he would focus instead upon “the unification of Jewry,8 or such part of it as might present definite demands at a future peace conference.” The first demand, of course, would be a homeland for Jews in Palestine. Already he was thinking in terms of political rather than practical Zionism.

  He considered bringing together international Zionist notables to concert their demands for the peace conference but decided instead to focus on British Zionists. Then he decided that Zionism needed not so much to formulate demands as to produce a memorandum stating the Zionist position. For this he turned to the Manchester school, notably to Harry Sacher and to Sacher’s friend Leon Simon. Simon was a follower of Ahad Ha’am who earned his living as a civil servant (he would rise eventually to head the British Post Office) while serving as president of the University of London Zionist Organization. Quickly the three set to work. Their correspondence for the months of November and December 1914 refers often to progress and lack of progress on the document.

  Weizmann also reached out to former opponents, such as the old practicals Cowen and Greenberg. He contemplated approaching Israel Zangwill too, despite his loathing of the ITO program, but Greenberg warned Weizmann that Zangwill “will be difficult to9 get into line. He takes such ferocious views and then he sticks to them so ferociously.” Weizmann tried anyway, even offering Zangwill leadership of the movement that he himself was attempting to organize. Zangwill turned him down flat: “It would be a case of the blind leading the blind.” Moreover, “I should find it10 difficult to demand that the Jewish minority should rule over the Arab majority [in Palestine]; a free and equal constitution for both races is all that is in the British or the modern tradition.”

  For some months Weizmann unavailingly courted Zangwill, but he had bigger fish to fry. The most important Jewish family in Britain, indeed in the world, was the great banking dynasty, the House of Rothschild. Weizmann wanted the family’s support for his concert of Jews preparing to submit demands to an eventual peace conference. (When that project lapsed, he would seek it for Zionism more generally.) His prewar advocacy of a Hebrew university in Jerusalem had brought him into contact with Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris. In fact, he had visited the baron just as war was breaking out (and had managed to return to England only with difficulty). Weizmann also knew the baron’s son, James, a tall, elegant, monocle-wearing devotee of the racetrack, and owner of prizewinning horses, who in 1913, at age thirty-five, had married Dorothy (Dolly) Pinto, an Englishwoman or girl, really; she was just seventeen. With the outbreak of war, Baron James joined the French army, but Dorothy stayed in London.

  On November 7 and 8 Weizmann had two long sessions with Dorothy in lieu of meeting with her husband (who already was serving in the army) or with her father-in-law (who had traveled to Bordeaux). “I tried to learn11 from Madame James whether Jews like [the English] Lord [Nathan Mayer] Rothschild and his circle would be willing to take any action at present, but Madame James was not well informed on these points.” But Weizmann, who could exercise great fascination upon women (and men too), had touched a deep chord. Dorothy wrote to him less than two weeks later: “I have spoken to Mr. Charles Rothschild, not in any sort of way officially, but in the course of conversation he thoroughly approved of the idea [a Jewish Palestine] and in fact thought it would be the only possible future.” Charles was the second son of Nathan Rothschild and the younger brother of Walter Lionel Rothschild, who would become the Lord Rothschild to whom the Balfour Declaration would be addressed. Thus were woven the first strands of a great web.

  Dorothy, who was now playing the role of a political go-between for Weizmann, reported that she had also spoken with the Earl of Crewe, Asquith’s secretary of state for India. Crewe was related12 to the Rothschilds by marriage. According to Dorothy, he too believed that “our compatriots13 would not be unwelcome in Palestine … if by some chance it became British.” Crewe was very much aware of Kitchener’s recent approach to Sharif Hussein. On November 12—a few days after speaking with Dorothy Rothschild about the future of Palestine—he wrote to Lord Hardinge, the Indian viceroy: “Supposing that the Arabs14 took up arms against the Turks I think it would be our policy to recognize a new Khalif at Mecca … If this were done there appears to me to be a possibility for allowing Syria to be organized as an Arab state under the Khalif.” He then suggested that Europeans might indirectly control the new Arab state. But as we saw in Chapter 3, Kitchener never mentioned any such possibility to Sharif Hussein. In fact, quite the opposite; he had held out to him the prospect of Arab independence. Perfidious Albion aside, did Crewe believe that Palestinian Jews would live contentedly within a new Syrian kingdom under a newly appointed Arab caliph, even if indirectly protected by Europeans? Most probably he did not think about the potential for conflict between Jews and Arabs in Syria at all. This is an early sign of the incomprehension with which some important Britons initially pursued two mutually exclusive policies.

  Weizmann, knowing nothing of Kitchener’s plans for Arabia, was delighted with Dorothy Rothschild’s letter. “You don’t—I am sure15—expect me to acknowledge your very kind letter in ordinary conventional terms of thanks. The action you undertook and your intention to help on a just cause is in itself sufficient satisfaction and so much in harmony with the glorious Jewish traditions of the house to which you belong, that my trivial thanks would only be superfluous.” Then, unexpectedly, he told her that he had been present “in the cursed town of Kishinev during a Jewish massacre … we defended the Jewish quarter with revolvers in our hands … We ‘slept’ in the cemetery—the only ‘safe’ place and we saw 80 Jewish corpses brought in, mutilated dead.” Only he had not been in Kishinev during the pogrom but in Geneva. He was making it up, trying to impress a twenty-year-old girl.

  He saw Dorothy again three days later, this time with her husband, who was on leave from the French army. Baron James urged him “to try and influence16 members of the British government” and, further, to advocate to them more ambitious goals than practical Zionism had hitherto advanced. “One should ask for something which … tends towa
rds the formation of a Jewish State.” This remark only reinforced Weizmann’s developing approach, although he and his allies carefully avoided the word “state,” which they rightly deemed too controversial to introduce at the moment.

  Through Baron James and Dorothy Rothschild, Weizmann now came into contact with other members of the Rothschild family, most important the Hungarian-born Rozsika, wife of Charles Rothschild, to whom Dorothy had spoken about Palestine. Through Rozsika he would meet Charles and Charles’s older brother, Walter. Again the folks-mensch exercised an irresistible fascination upon the cream of British high society. Charles, Rozsika, and Walter would become important supporters. Eventually Rozsika outdid17 Dorothy as a political go-between, introducing Weizmann to many influential figures, including Robert Cecil, a cousin of Arthur Balfour and parliamentary under secretary of state for foreign affairs. Cecil reported to his superiors after his first meeting with Weizmann: “It is impossible18 to reproduce in writing the subdued enthusiasm with which Dr. Weizmann spoke, or the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude, which made one forget his rather repellant and even sordid exterior.” This, one suspects, is the authentic voice of the British establishment and a faithful recapitulation of its reaction to the Zionist leader during the early war years.