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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Weizmann made one of his most important contacts without Rozsika’s help, at a social event in Manchester, to which his wife dragged him early in November 1914. At that tea party someone introduced him to a Mr. Scott. Weizmann did not recognize the editor of Britain’s most famous Liberal newspaper, The Manchester Guardian. “I saw before me19 a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, advanced in years, but very alert and attentive. He was inquisitive about my origin and work.” Weizmann told him, “I am a Jew and if you want to talk to me about that, Mr. Scott, I am at your disposal.”

  It was the beginning of an extraordinary partnership. They did talk, at the party and then more seriously at Scott’s Manchester Guardian offices, or (accounts vary) possibly at his home, The Firs, a large house surrounded by extensive gardens and noble trees. Weizmann opened his heart to the older man, a complete stranger. Perhaps he sensed political affinities based upon common liberal values; possibly he had a shrewd intimation that more than mere sympathy would be forthcoming. Or conceivably, Weizmann sensed something even deeper in Scott’s reaction to him, for the elderly editor would soon take almost a paternal interest in the younger man.

  Scott, for his part, found Weizmann “extraordinarily interesting, a rare combination of idealism and the severely practical which are the two essentials of statesmanship.” He was struck particularly by Weizmann’s “perfectly clear conception of Jewish nationalism, an intense and burning sense of the Jew as Jew, just as strong, perhaps more so, as that of the German as German or the Englishman as Englishman, and secondly arising out of that and necessary for its satisfaction and development, his demand for a country, a homeland which for him and for anyone sharing his view of Jewish nationality can be no other than the ancient home of his race.” But for Scott as for Grey and Lloyd George (who spoke with Herbert Samuel at roughly the same time), it was the Ottoman entry into World War I that spelled the difference between mere sympathy and active support. He asked Weizmann for a memorandum encapsulating the Zionist position. This was the document upon which Weizmann and Harry Sacher and Leon Simon worked in November and December and that came to overshadow Weizmann’s initial preparations for a future peace conference.

  As their second interview came to an end, Scott said to Weizmann: “I would like to do20 something for you.” He knew most of the British government, he said, and would like Weizmann to meet Herbert Samuel, president of the Local Government Board. “For God’s sake, Mr. Scott, let’s have nothing to do with this man,” expostulated Weizmann, assuming that a member of the Cousinhood would oppose Zionism tooth and nail.

  So Scott contacted Lloyd George first and asked him to meet the extraordinary Zionist from Manchester. Lloyd George agreed—as he told Scott, he just had been talking about Zionism with Herbert Samuel. Perhaps Dr. Weizmann would meet the two of them together. (“Alas,” sighed Weizmann when he heard of it, still unaware of Samuel’s Zionist epiphany.) Lloyd George suggested a date; then he had to postpone. He suggested a second date and had to postpone again, but this time he indicated that Weizmann should meet at any rate with his colleague. Meanwhile Weizmann frenziedly exhorted Sacher and Simon to polish the memorandum so that he could present it at the meeting. But it does not appear to have been ready on the afternoon of December 9, when Weizmann took the four-fifteen train from Manchester to London. He spent the night at the home of Ahad Ha’am in Haverstock Hill and met the president of the Local Government Board in his Whitehall office the next morning.

  Weizmann expected little from Herbert Samuel. He explained to him the Zionist position—for the first time, as he probably thought. Samuel listened patiently, then floored his visitor. “Since Turkey had entered21 the war, he [Samuel] had given the problem much … consideration … Realization of the Zionist dream [now] was possible … Big things would have to be done in Palestine … The Jews would have to build Railways, harbours, a University, a network of schools, etc.” Flabbergasted, Weizmann told Samuel, “If I were a religious Jew I should have thought the Messianic times22 were near.” Shortly after the meeting he repeated this formulation in a letter to his wife: “Messianic times have really come … He told me that his programme is more ambitious than mine.” In great excitement he returned to Haverstock Hill, where he and Ahad Ha’am went over the details of the meeting again and again. “I have just remembered23 another of Samuel’s remarks which I have not passed on to you,” he wrote to his friend three days later. “He said: We would rebuild the Temple, as a symbol of Jewish unity.” Weizmann wrote delightedly to Scott, who had made the eye-opening meeting possible, that Samuel “feels the responsibility24 lying on him, as a British Cabinet Minister and [as] a Jew.” Indeed, he reported, Samuel had expressed a desire to meet additional Zionists. Weizmann would be happy to make introductions. An important meeting of minds had taken place, and an important relationship had been established.

  Weizmann was on fire. He had lassoed for Zionism important members of the Rothschild family and the influential editor of The Manchester Guardian; and he had made contact with the president of the Local Government Board, a political insider. Yet he had his eye on even bigger game, a former prime minister now serving not merely as Conservative member of Parliament for the City of London but also, at Asquith’s invitation, as a member of the War Council. He had met Arthur James Balfour eight years ago in Manchester, briefly during the general election of 1905–06, and again shortly thereafter for a more extended discussion of Zionism. Now he asked a mutual friend to request for him a third audience.

  It was a shrewd request. So far Weizmann’s most important political contacts belonged to the Liberal Party. It seemed only common sense to approach the Conservatives as well, not least since, as Ahad Ha’am warned, “it is very possible25 that after the war there will be a Conservative Government with Balfour at its head.” Moreover, Conservatives did not share the anti-imperialist scruples of certain Liberals, such as Grey. They would not object to Britain expanding her empire by adding Palestine.

  A. J. Balfour looms large in the history of Zionism; for the Declaration that bears his name, for his role in events leading up to its release, and for his sympathetic attitude afterward. Yet he seems an odd protagonist, scion as he was of the aristocratic Cecil political dynasty, which began in the sixteenth century with Lord Burghley, the adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and extended down the years to Balfour’s uncle, the third Marquess of Salisbury, who had served as Conservative prime minister after Disraeli. The line had continued to the present generation, with Balfour himself as its most eminent representative among a stable of successful relatives who served in Parliament, the Foreign Office, and the diplomatic corps.

  Balfour’s manner betrayed his background. He indulged (it was not affectation) a sort of aristocratic indolence and imperturbability. Tall and willowy, he rarely stood straight, but leaned against a wall. In the House of Commons he slouched low in his seat, boots on the railing before him. His spoken interventions in Commons were so graceful that, even when he criticized or directly attacked his opponents, they almost appreciated the attention. In fact there was steel beneath the creamy surface. When he was Irish home secretary under his uncle, Lord Salisbury, his appearance initially earned the ridicule of Home Rulers, who called him “Daddy Long Legs” and “Niminy Piminy.” Then when he defended policemen found guilty of willfully murdering three tenants at Mitchelstown during a rent strike, they learned to call him “Bloody Balfour.” Eventually “Daddy Long Legs” confounded them even more completely by climbing to the top of the greasy pole, replacing his uncle, who resigned as prime minister in 1902.

  Critics accused him of laziness because he could not be bothered to read blue books. They accused him of dilettantism because politics was only one of his myriad interests. He belonged to the Royal Society, to the British Academy, and to the Society for Psychical Research. He wrote thoughtful works of philosophy attempting to reconcile Darwinism and religion. Acute, subtle, detached, and profoundly conservative, he was no democrat; he believe
d in a representative Parliament for the British and their kin but for few others. “Even in the West,”26 he once pointed out to cabinet ministers, “Parliamentary institutions have rarely been a great success, except amongst the English-speaking peoples.” He shared the attitudes of his time and class with regard to the various races of the world. “They have been different27 and unequal since history began,” he once said, and “different and unequal they are destined to remain.” He supported British imperialism because it was, he thought, good for Britain and good for the world. In short he was not, on the face of it, a likely ally for the much-despised Jews. Yet he wrote to Weizmann’s friend: “I have the liveliest28 and also the most pleasant recollections of my conversation with Dr. Weizmann in 1906 … I shall be happy to see him.”

  The darkly bearded Zionist, intense and foreign, met the tall, languid aristocrat in the latter’s splendid London residence, 12 Carlton Gardens, just across St. James’s Park from the Foreign Office, on December 12. Only two days had passed since Weizmann’s meeting with Herbert Samuel; he had not returned to Manchester but had spent the time with Ahad Ha’am, likely preparing for the coming audience. Afterward he crowed with delight: “Balfour remembered29 everything we discussed eight years ago.” Weizmann brought him up-to-date on Zionist achievements since 1906 and lamented that the war had interrupted progress. No doubt with the prospective defeat of Turkey in mind, Balfour replied: “You may get your things done much quicker after the war.”

  But Weizmann was not, at present, asking Balfour to help him get specific things done. His more subtle and difficult task was to explain to a skeptical, patrician philosopher-cum-politician the tragedy of anti-Semitism and how to overcome it. He hoped not to ask for favors, but to educate and to convert. The two men spoke of the Jews in Germany. They had contributed much to German greatness, Weizmann pointed out, “as other Jews have to the greatness of France and England, at the expense of the whole Jewish people whose sufferings increase in proportion to ‘the withdrawal’ from that people of the creative element which are absorbed into the surrounding communities—those same communities later reproaching us for this absorption, and reacting with anti-Semitism.” He cannot have expressed himself as drily as in his memoir, however. For Balfour listened intently and was deeply moved—“to tears,” Weizmann reported in near disbelief to Ahad Ha’am, “and he took me by the hand and said I had illuminated for him the road followed by a great suffering nation.”

  Balfour had immediately grasped the essential difference between Weizmann and other Jews he had met. Claude Montefiore had once asked Balfour to intercede on behalf of Romanian Jews. “What a great difference30 there is between you and him,” he told Weizmann. “For you are not asking for anything … you demand, and people have to listen to you because you are a statesman of a morally strong state.” He added that he “regretted having known only Jews of one type.” As the meeting drew to a close and he led his guest to the door, he said to him: “Mind you come again to see me, I am deeply moved and interested, it is not a dream, it is a great cause and I understand it.”

  After that almost anything would have seemed anticlimactic, but Weizmann continued his political work at the same fever pitch. He met again with Herbert Samuel, this time with their mutual acquaintance, the haham Moses Gaster, present as well. They discussed the memorandum that Samuel was preparing for the cabinet. He traveled to Paris and conferred once more with Baron Edmond de Rothschild. On January 15, 1915, he met at last with Lloyd George, Herbert Samuel being present as well. Scott coached him for this meeting:

  You probably will find31 that he will take the lead in the conversation and put questions to you which will give you plenty of openings … he will want to discuss with you … the present strength of the Jewish element in Palestine and the possibility of its rapid expansion; its relation to the local Arab population which so greatly outnumbers it; the potential value of Palestine as a “buffer” state and the means of evading for ourselves an undesirable extension of military responsibility; the best way of allaying Catholic and “Orthodox” jealousy in regard to the custody of the Holy Places.

  Weizmann approached the meeting, which took place at 11 Downing Street, with great nervousness. As Scott had predicted, the future prime minister bombarded him with questions: “I answered32 as best I could.” He must have answered very well indeed. With Lloyd George, as with almost everyone else during this extraordinary period, Weizmann worked his magic: The chancellor too would become a firm supporter.

  Less than two weeks later Herbert Samuel forwarded his memorandum, now amended in light of Weizmann’s suggestions, to Grey and Asquith for approval before submitting it to the cabinet as a whole. He no longer advocated a Jewish state in Palestine but rather the territory’s annexation to the British Empire.

  It is hoped33 that under British rule facilities would be given to Jewish organizations to purchase land, to found colonies, to establish educational and religious institutions, and to cooperate in the economic development of the country, and that Jewish immigration, carefully regulated, would be given preference, so that 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 might justify.

  And he concluded:

  The Jewish brain is a physiological product not to be despised. For fifteen centuries the race produced in Palestine a constant succession of great men—statesmen and prophets, judges and soldiers. If a body be again given in which its soul can lodge, it may again enrich the world. Till full scope is granted, as Macaulay said in the House of Commons, “let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, no heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees.”

  The prime minister’s response was lukewarm. Asquith, either in Liberal anti-imperialist mode or in veiled anti-Semitic mode, confessed to his confidante Venetia Stanley: “I am not attracted34 by this proposed addition to our responsibilities, but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s [Disraeli’s] favourite maxim that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.” But the prime minister did not forbid the preparation of a less lyrical memorandum for the cabinet to consider. Samuel got back to work. Six weeks later the British government duly convened to discuss the future of Palestine as a British Jewish nationalist envisioned it. Thus was a watershed crossed.

  During the first months of World War I British Zionism, led primarily by Chaim Weizmann but with Herbert Samuel playing a crucial role and the titular leaders of the EZF very much overshadowed, moved purposefully to establish influence among the men who determined British foreign policy. It was a brash and successful program that Weizmann conducted, its success all the more extraordinary for largely being planned and executed by a man born not in Britain but in Russia.

  Some British Jews, if they had known of Weizmann’s activities, would not have approved. Most of the Cousinhood and its auxiliaries, the Board of Jewish Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association and their Conjoint Committee, held very different ideas about how to solve the “Jewish problem.” When Weizmann first realized the desirability of Jewish unity, he had approached not only Israel Zangwill of the ITO and his former political Zionist opponents Greenberg and Cowen, but the Conjoint Committee as well, in the person of Lucien Wolf. Perhaps this gesture was somewhat pro forma, as it had been with Zangwill. Perhaps, however, Weizmann genuinely expected to work his magic on this representative of assimilated British Jewry. If so, then he was doomed to disappointment. Lucien Wolf and his colleagues regarded Zionism with distaste. They deemed Weizmann an interloper. They had their own wartime program for British Jewry, and it was not his. A significant struggle, a competition for the ear of the British government, was about to commence.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Assimilationists

  AT THE OUTSET OF WORLD WAR I, British Jews who believed in assimilation had very different preoccupatio
ns from Zionists. Enjoying full legal and civic equality, they understood themselves to be the beneficiaries of many decades of toil and tears and hard political organizing. Now a mood created by the war seemed to call their hard-earned gains into question. The war stoked nationalist passions, giving scope to xenophobes and anti-Semites who usually inhabited the fringes and dark corners of national life. In 1914, when British Zionists began to anticipate the prospective carve-up of the Ottoman Empire, these other British Jews, the vast majority, were more likely to focus on a prospective carve-up much closer to home—in fact, right at home. British chauvinists and bigots were manifestly gaining an audience, and the Jews had become their target. Rights that had been won over decades, these Jews feared, could be lost in months.

  They had grounds for their concern. With the war only three weeks old, two policemen appeared at the door of Lucien Wolf’s London home. Despite his prominency someone had denounced him to the authorities, presumably as a pro-German, perhaps as an undocumented alien or likely spy, possibly simply because he was Jewish. Wolf happened to be ill in bed that day. “They threatened to remain1 outside my door until they saw me,” he reported a few days later, “and said to my housekeeper that they would not be ‘pleasant for me before my neighbors.’” Wolf rose from his sickbed to invite them inside, but they behaved in a “cruelly aggressive” manner and with “exceptional hostility.” They demanded to know his nationality. “They not only catechized me in a very peremptory tone, but insisted on having documentary proof of all my replies.” Wolf, born in Britain, thought of himself quite rightly as a patriotic Englishman.