On March 16, 1915, in response to his cousin’s memorandum, Montagu wrote a letter to Asquith. It was an attempt at demolition, a complete rejection not merely of the tactical considerations that Samuel had advanced as reasons for a British protectorate in Palestine but also of their underlying premise of eventual Jewish autonomy there.
“Palestine in itself offers little or no attraction to Great Britain from a strategical or material point of view,” Montagu charged. Its possession by Britain would facilitate the defense neither of Egypt nor of the Suez Canal. Moreover it was “incomparably a poorer possession than, let us say, Mesopotamia.” Nor would Jews find great fulfillment working the land there, whatever Zionists like his cousin might say: “I cannot see any Jews I know tending olive trees or herding sheep.”
What Montagu objected to at the most basic level, however, was the Zionist assumption that Palestine was the homeland of a distinct Jewish people: “There is no Jewish race now as a homogenous whole. It is quite obvious that the Jews in Great Britain are as remote from the Jews in Morocco or the black Jews in Cochin as the Christian Englishman is from the moor or the Hindoo.” A Jewish homeland in Palestine would be composed of “a polyglot, many-colored, heterogeneous collection of people of different civilizations and different ordinances and different traditions.” Unless conditions were completely insupportable where they lived now, the Jews of the world would be better off to stay put and assimilate—as he had done.
If they did not, Montagu argued, and instead moved in great numbers to Palestine and established a homeland there, they would become unwelcome everywhere else. “Their only claim to the hospitality of Russia, Bulgaria, France, Spain, is that they have no alternative home, no State of their own, and they want to be and are patriotic citizens working for the good of the countries in which they live … When it is known that Palestine is the Jewish State which is really their home then I can foresee a world movement to get them away at any cost.” And he closed with a heartfelt plea: “If only our peoples would … take their place as non-conformists [members of a religious sect not belonging to the Church of England], then Zionism would obviously die and Jews might find their way to esteem.”
Asquith read this impassioned document and smiled. He thought it “racy,” he wrote to Venetia Stanley. He seems not to have shown it to any of his colleagues, but the conflict between Montagu and Samuel served its historical purpose, mirroring the competition between Wolf and Weizmann, and between assimilationists and Zionists more generally. At this stage the assimilationists still had the advantage, but Samuel had performed a great service for Zionism: His memorandum, and its rejection by his own cousin, demonstrated conclusively to cabinet ministers that the British Jewish community had split. The Conjoint Committee no longer voiced the views of a monolithic bloc, if ever it had done. And that Samuel, their most prosaic associate, had been the one to articulate the Zionist position may have gone some way to persuading them that Zionism had entered the realm of practical politics after all.
About a month later, on April 14, 1915, the first formal meeting20 between the Zionist leadership and the Conjoint Committee convened. Five months had elapsed21 since Sacher’s initial approach to Wolf, testifying to the maneuvering for position in which both sides had since engaged. Ironically, when the two groups finally did get together, neither Sacher nor Weizmann even attended; the latter because he could not take time away from his laboratory, the former perhaps because the Zionist veterans considered him too junior. But during the interval a pair of Zionists from the central office in Berlin had traveled to England: Yehiel Tschlenow, who would soon return to his native Russia, and Nahum Sokolow, whom we have met already. Three additional men22 represented the Zionists, including the haham Moses Gaster. The assimilationist contingent included Claude Montefiore and David Alexander, president and vice president respectively of the Conjoint Committee, and of course Lucien Wolf.
The first thing to become absolutely clear at the meeting was that the cultural Zionist program, to which Sacher had initially referred, no longer applied, if ever it truly had done. Tschlenow, in a long introductory speech, pointed out that at the peace conference following the war, even small nationalities such as Finns, Lithuanians, and Armenians would “put forward their demands, their wishes, their aspirations.” He then asked his anti-Zionist friends: “Shall the Jewish ‘people,’ the Jewish ‘nation,’ be silent?”
Note here that Wolf, in his written account of the meeting, placed the words “people” and “nation” in quotation marks. Those tiny vertical scratches signaled the profound chasm separating the two camps. Wolf believed that asserting that the Jews constituted a distinct nation would fatally undercut his argument that British Jews really were Jewish Britons. It would deny the possibility of genuine Jewish assimilation in Britain or anywhere else. It contradicted his liberal assumptions. He refused to make the required assertion.
Tschlenow further argued that Turkish entry into the war had upset all previous calculations. For if the Allies defeated the Ottomans, then “there is a good chance that Palestine may fall to England and that England may hand it over and give it to the Jews.” It was now or never: “If the Jews do not develop Palestine and make it populous and cultivated and civilized and flourishing, others will do so.” He envisioned a “big Jewish Commonwealth … 5,000,000 souls … or more … [as] in days of old.” To which Moses Gaster added, “The Zionists intended to go in and work for ‘the whole hog,’ Nothing less than a Commonwealth would satisfy them.”
So much for cultural Zionism! On what basis, then, might political Zionists and the Conjoint Committee find common ground? Tschlenow contended that the Zionist goal of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine and the Conjoint Committee’s desire to ameliorate conditions for Russian Jews were complementary, not antagonistic. Once the Jews possessed Palestine and could immigrate freely to that place, “there would be fewer Jews in Russia,” and a smaller Jewish community would be perceived as a lesser threat and therefore attract less persecution. Gaster added that “when the nations knew a Jew could go off to his own country they would persecute him less.” And Sokolow chimed in: “If Palestine was a British protectorate, and if England held it as a legally secured home for the Jews, England would be more interested in preventing the persecution of the Jews elsewhere and in obtaining rights for them.” But the Zionists insisted on the primacy of their own political program. Efforts to improve the Jewish lot, as noble and useful as they might be, “would and could never be the solution of the Jewish problem. That solution lay only in Zionism.”
Wolf and his colleagues seem to have been unsurprised by the jettisoning of the cultural program, which greatly reduced the possibility of meaningful cooperation between the two groups. They asked their guests two pertinent questions: “How would Palestine become a Jewish country?” and of equal importance: Would “special rights … be asked for the Jews” once they had entered into it?
The Zionists did not mince words in reply. Special rights would be asked for and would be necessary, Gaster explained, “till the Jews were so numerous, and in so large a minority, that they would predominate by weight of numbers.” As to how the Jews should enter Palestine, a Jewish Chartered Company with Britain’s backing “would take care that Jews should be the prevailing settlers.” Sokolow added that if Britain established some form of control over Palestine, “she would clearly and obviously take such necessary steps as to secure that the Jews should be the predominant people in Palestine [and] that it should be their country. The one point followed from the other.”
It was an uncompromising performance, albeit politely delivered. The Conjoint Committee promised to consider it and to respond. Within days Wolf wrote a fourteen-page encapsulation of his own optimistic liberal creed:
The whole tendency of the national life in Eastern Europe is necessarily towards a more enlightened and liberal policy … The present war, through the preponderance of Great Britain and France on the side of the Allies, must give a
great impulse to liberal reforms in Russia … Sooner or later the statesmanship of the countries concerned will, for their own protection, deal with [the Jewish problem] in the way in which it has been successfully dealt with in Western Europe and America … There is no solid ground to despair of eventual success.
Therefore, Wolf argued, the Conjoint Committee must reject the Zionist approach. Not even unrestricted Russian Jewish emigration to Palestine, he argued, would improve conditions for the majority who must stay behind; after all, the massive Russian Jewish migration to America had not done so. Moreover, far from improving things, the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would “at once relieve persecuting countries of much of their present incentive to pursue a policy of emancipation.” Like Edwin Montagu, Wolf believed that anti-Semitism would increase, not decrease, upon establishment of a Jewish commonwealth. The Zionist approach ran “counter to all experience and probabilities, and is essentially reactionary.”
So much for Zionist tactics; Wolf then dismissed the Zionists’ fundamental premise.
The idea of a Jewish nationality, the talk of a Jew “going home” to Palestine if he is not content with his lot in the land of his birth, strikes at the root of all claim to Jewish citizenship in lands where Jewish disabilities still exist. It is the assertion not merely of a double nationality … but of the perpetual alienage of Jews everywhere outside Palestine.
Thus political Zionism threatened to undermine even the most assimilated Jews. It threatened to make strangers of Jews like himself, and his colleagues on the Conjoint Committee, in the land of their birth, England.
Wolf went on to reject the Zionist claim to special privileges for Jews once they had arrived in Palestine. Britain, the likely future suzerain power in Palestine, specifically barred special privileges based upon religion. Moreover “nothing could be more detrimental to the struggle for Jewish liberties all over the world,” than for Jews to claim special privileges anywhere. “How could we continue to ask that the Russian Government shall make no distinction between … Jews and Christians?” he asked.
In sum, the Zionist scheme if implemented,
would not only aggravate the difficulties of unemancipated, and imperil the liberties of emancipated Jews all over the world, but in Palestine itself it would make for a Jewish state based on civil and religious disabilities of the most mediaeval kind, a state, consequently which could not endure and which would bring lasting reproach on Jews and Judaism. Indeed it could not be otherwise with a political nationality based on religious and racial tests, and no other Jewish nationality is possible.
The main lines of disagreement could hardly have been more clearly stated. The Zionists replied to Wolf on May 11, 1915; exactly one month later the Conjoint Committee wrote a rejoinder, ending with the pious hope “that the progress of events may lead to such an approximation of the views of the two parties as to render some useful scheme of cooperation yet possible.”
It would not happen. On the crucial issue of Jewish nationality, neither side budged. Consultations and discussions would continue, and memoranda would be written from both sides, but the gulf remained unbridgeable. Henceforth their competition for the ear of the government would grow increasingly fierce. And although Wolf began from the better-established and therefore more advantageous position, Weizmann was an absolute master of the political game.
CHAPTER 11
The Road Forks
A YEAR AND A HALF into the war, the British government and the Foreign Office faced a grim situation. On the Western Front, despite appalling sacrifices, the Allies had achieved only a bloody stalemate. In the east a war of comparatively rapid movement had produced equally indecisive results. To the south, Turkey had beaten Britain at Gallipoli; in Mesopotamia it had captured and interned thousands of British troops and officers at Kut. Meanwhile Serbia had fallen to the Austrians, and Italy’s belated entry into the conflict on the side of the Entente had done little to help, either in the southern theater or anywhere else.
Thus the view from Whitehall early in 1916: If defeat was not imminent, neither was victory; and the outcome of the war of attrition on the Western Front could not be predicted. The colossal forces in a death-grip across Europe and in Eurasia appeared to have canceled each other out. Only the addition of significant new forces on one side or the other seemed likely to tip the scale. Britain’s willingness, beginning early in 1916, to explore seriously some kind of arrangement with “world Jewry” or “Great Jewry” must be understood in this context. The British never believed that the Jews alone could alter the balance of the war, but they did come to believe that the Jews could help fund it; and perhaps more important, they could persuade mightier forces to weigh in or out or to stand firm. Many Britons in 1916, including policy makers, apparently believed in the existence of a monolithic and powerful Jewish factor in world affairs. But there was no such thing. The government’s wartime decision to appeal to the Jews was based upon a misconception.
A year and a half into the war, that misconception formed part of the worldview of Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice, the former British dragoman in Constantinople whom Grand Sharif Hussein had successfully courted in 1908 when he wanted British support for his candidacy to become emir of Mecca. Hussein had discerned in the British dragoman a likely ally: When it came to Ottoman politics, Fitzmaurice was an ultraconservative who shared the sharif’s admiration for Sultan Abdul Hamid II as well as his hatred of the Young Turks. Sharp-featured, with receding ginger hair, piercing eyes, and a full handlebar mustache, the dragoman possessed “an eagle mind and a personality of iron vigor,” according to T. E. Lawrence, who nevertheless did not like him. He exercised great influence (too much, and of the wrong kind, as Lawrence saw it) over a series of British ambassadors to the Ottoman government.
From his appointment to Constantinople as a junior consul in 1905 until his recall to London in February 1914 (by which time he had been promoted to chief dragoman in Constantinople and first secretary in the diplomatic service), Fitzmaurice did his best to pump life into the moribund Ottoman court and to sustain its cruel, corrupt, and capricious ruler. Aubrey Herbert, then an honorary attaché in Constantinople (along with Mark Sykes and George Lloyd), likened him to the chains of ivy that may sometimes hold up a great and ancient but rotten oak tree. And like certain other British diplomats, scholars, and journalists of the era, Fitzmaurice labored under the misperception that the Young Turks who had thrown out Sultan Abdul Hamid II and taken control of the empire were dominated by Jews and dömnes, or “crypto-Jews.”1 These Jewish puppeteers,2 according to this worldview, were part of a wider conspiracy to gain control of the Ottoman Empire in order to acquire Palestine for the world Zionist movement.
Fitzmaurice reenters our tale now because he was probably the first responsible British diplomat to suggest that Jewish power, both in Turkey and elsewhere, held the key to Entente victory in World War I. He imparted this piece of wisdom to Hugh James O’Bierne,3 CVO (Commander of the Victorian Order) and CB (Commander of the Order of Bath), an experienced, accomplished, and well-respected British diplomat who apparently saw no reason to doubt it. The two men came into contact4 in Sofia, to which Fitzmaurice had been sent in February 1915 to link up with dissident Turks who opposed their government’s alliance with Germany; O’Bierne arrived in July 1915 as part of a British team tasked with bribing Bulgaria to join the Entente. Fitzmaurice took part in this mission as well, but it proved unsuccessful because Britain could not offer Bulgaria what she wanted most—territory in Macedonia that had been occupied by Serbia during the Second Balkan War. Germany, on the other hand, could offer it; unlike Britain, she was Serbia’s enemy. After some hesitation5 the Bulgarian prime minister, Vasil Radoslavov, accepted Germany’s inducement to align with her in the war. Mere days later, just before Bulgaria declared war on Britain, O’Bierne and Fitzmaurice beat a hasty retreat. Back in London, the former dragoman took a position with the Intelligence Division at the Admiralty Office, while O’Bierne wen
t to work at the Foreign Office.
Late in 1915 or early in 1916, Fitzmaurice met Moses Gaster; possibly Herbert Samuel6 provided the introduction. At any rate the former dragoman learned something of the Zionist program from the haham of the British Sephardim and applied it to what he thought he knew about who really ruled Turkey. To put it baldly, Fitzmaurice put two and (something less than) two together and came up with five. He reasoned thus: The Allies should offer Palestine to the dömnes of Constantinople, in return for which they would withdraw their support from the Ottoman regime. This would result in the latter’s collapse. Allied victory would follow. Moreover, as Jews everywhere focused on returning to, and building up, their promised land, the shadowy, malign7 influence of world Zionism would fade. This was the insight Fitzmaurice shared with Hugh James O’Bierne at about the turn of the year 1915–16.
O’Bierne was primed to entertain the notion and even to appreciate it. Only a month earlier the Foreign Office had received a memorandum that likewise emphasized the power of Jews, in this case American rather than Turkish. Its author, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, was a prominent U.S. Zionist with English connections. Now he wished to warn the Foreign Office about German propaganda among the American Jewish community, which, he stressed, possessed significant political and financial power. Fortunately for the Allies, the professor said, this group held instinctive pro-British and pro-French views, but also, and for obvious reasons, strong anti-Russian ones. To win over American Jews, he recommended, among other measures, “a very veiled suggestion8 concerning nationalization in Palestine,” by which he must have meant some form of French or British control.
The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 21