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

by Jonathan Schneer

  But it did. As the war ground on, the number of its critics grew. They believed that secret diplomacy was one of the causes of the war, as well as imperialist rivalries. Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had poisoned relations between the two countries. The critics demanded “open covenants openly arrived at,” “no annexations” of territory, and much else besides. The fall of the tsar and the advent of the liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson when America joined the war in the spring of 1917 amplified their voices. In May Kerensky’s new government proclaimed that “Free Russia does not purpose to dominate other peoples or to take from them their national patrimony, or forcibly to occupy foreign territory.” Lloyd George’s government replied, “In this sentiment the British1 Government heartily concur.” But of course the Allies had negotiated covenants in secret and had planned imperialist annexations such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement envisioned. Given the growing strength of these critics, there would be hell to pay when Sykes-Picot came to light. And then it did; and then there was.

  On the evening of Thursday, April 12, 1917, C. P. Scott met a French journalist, Vicomte Robert de Caix, foreign editor and lead writer of the Parisian Le Journal des débats. De Caix, who advised the Quai d’Orsay on Middle Eastern affairs and would go on to help shape postwar French policy there, dropped a bomb; whether he did so intentionally we cannot know. He told Scott that when the war was finished, France would claim Syria down to Acre and Lake Tiberias and across to, and including, the area of the Hauran. That was territory that the Zionists hoped would become theirs under a British protectorate. The rest of Palestine, de Caix asserted, would be put under international control: “It is settled.”2

  It was pretty much what Sykes and Picot had agreed more than a year earlier, unknown to most. Scott thought the French claims grandiose but aspirational and therefore “disquieting” but not calamitous. The British government could nip French pretensions in the bud, he reasoned, by publicly stating its own plans for Palestine. The next day at The Manchester Guardian offices, he repeated to Harry Sacher what he had learned and what he hoped Britain would do. He warned Sacher not to trust the Foreign Office to perform as required, however, “because Balfour is weak as water and the officials are tired, indifferent and inefficient.” Sacher immediately put3 it in a letter to Weizmann. Two days later Scott wrote to Weizmann as well, repeating what de Caix had told him.

  Thus did the Zionists first glean something of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and experience their first unnerving trickle of doubt about British intentions. Scott went looking for more information in London and got some, on Friday, April 20, from Sir Alfred Milner of the War Cabinet. Scott reported to Weizmann that Milner “spoke resignedly4 about the international solution in Palestine as a whole, and said that ‘unfortunate commitments’ had been made a year ago—I gathered to the French.” Thus the War Cabinet minister sparked another glimmer of unease, evidence of some sort of Anglo-French carve-up of the Middle East.

  While Scott and Milner were dancing around that very subject, James Malcolm was arriving in London from Paris. He carried a diary of Sokolow’s activities that the Zionist had entrusted to him, and a glowing report based upon them that he had written. He brought them to Weizmann next day, but by now the Zionist leader had more than Sokolow’s discussions with Jules Cambon on his mind. He questioned Malcolm closely about French intentions in the Middle East, such as the latter had been able to glean, and whether Britain accepted them as part of some larger deal. What Malcolm told him did little to quiet his growing unease.

  Apparently the French5 are working very hard for a condominium and … the British have secured Haifa and Acre for themselves with the right of building a railway from Haifa which would join up the Baghdad railway. This information is practically official … What is not quite clear yet, and I was unable to clear it up, is whether the arrangement is binding or whether it is flexible, and whether there is a clear possibility of reopening the whole question.

  Even without details, the outline of the Anglo-French plan for Palestine was beginning to take shape in Weizmann’s mind, along with a dawning realization that the British government had been less than frank with him. Perhaps Sokolow, who must have discerned French intentions while in Paris, had been less than frank with him too—or perhaps he was planning to tell all when he returned to London. But Sokolow now was headed for Rome. Whom could Weizmann better question at this point than Herbert Samuel, the one (former) cabinet minister who was both Jewish and Zionist? On Tuesday, April 24, Weizmann tried to pin him down, but Samuel would not be pinned: “His answer was that6 he could not disclose to me the nature of the arrangement made because he was a member of the Cabinet at that time, but he could say this much, that the arrangement was not satisfactory from the British point of view. He sees no objection at all why this question should not be reopened, especially now when the British army is occupying Palestine.”

  So “an arrangement” with France did exist! Weizmann hurried from the morning meeting with Samuel to an afternoon meeting at the Foreign Office with Sir Ronald Graham, who, while in Egypt, had hoped to replace McMahon as high commissioner, but who had been posted back to London instead to serve as assistant under secretary of state. Graham confirmed the existence of an Anglo-French deal but little else. “He found this arrangement7 after he arrived from Egypt,” Weizmann reported to Scott. “He does not consider it satisfactory.” Graham thought Weizmann should speak to someone higher up the Foreign Office ladder, namely the acting foreign secretary, Lord Robert Cecil. (Balfour was in America.) He arranged for an interview.

  At five-thirty the next afternoon Weizmann went “to Bob Cecil in8 a fine rage,” or so William Ormsby-Gore, assistant secretary to the cabinet and Milner’s parliamentary private secretary, reported in a letter to Mark Sykes in Egypt. That would have been something to see, but one doubts that Weizmann was actually in a rage. (Perhaps he would have been if he had known that the man who had negotiated the agreement with France was Sykes.) But if Weizmann was too astute to jeopardize his cause with temper tantrums, he was sufficiently self-assured, and sufficiently at home by now in the Foreign Office, not to mince words. Cecil wrote in his report of the meeting: Weizmann “began by saying that9 he had been told that some kind of arrangement had been made between the British and French Governments, whereby Judea should be internationalized and the northern part of Palestine, Galilea, should be given to the French Government. He objected to both provisions.” He objected equally to a purely French administration. That would be tantamount to “a third destruction of the Temple.” When at last, without naming its authors, Cecil revealed the parts of the Sykes-Picot Agreement relevant to Palestine, Weizmann objected to them too. Only a British protectorate would suffice, he repeated, and he would rouse “the feelings of Zionist Jews throughout the world in favour of the solution which he desired.”

  The Zionists spent the next few days in intense debate. A letter from Sacher to Weizmann suggests their likely tenor: “We have been lied to10 and deceived all along and I shall never forgive the gentry … who have done it … the permanent officials and Cecil (Sir R[onald]. G[raham]. & M[ark]. S[ykes]. and the like) cannot be trusted.” In a second letter, Sacher warned Weizmann that “our affairs are at a11 crisis.” He prepared a document for discussion at the next meeting of the British Palestine Committee that he wanted amended if necessary but then endorsed and sent to the Foreign Office. (Cooler heads prevailed—it never was.) Sacher’s memorandum read in part:

  The representatives12 of the Jewish national movement have no desire to dwell upon the fact that during the whole course of their lengthy negotiations with His Majesty’s Government the existence of such an agreement [Sykes-Picot] was not only sedulously concealed from them but was positively denied, but it would be idle not to point out to His Majesty’s Government that this mode of dealing with them has made a most painful impression.

  But the Zionists were shrewd as well as
angry. “Leon [Simon] thinks that the British want to get away from the agreement with the French & to use us as a lever,” Sacher observed to Weizmann; this assessment was accurate. One thing was clear to them all. The revelation of British double-dealing reaffirmed the necessity, as Sacher put it, of obtaining from the British government “a written definite promise satisfactory to ourselves with regard to Palestine.”

  Think back to Weizmann’s assiduous and polished networking in the drawing rooms of London’s political high society, and to his most recent meetings with Lloyd George and Balfour at addresses even more august. Consider Sokolow’s discussions with French and Italian leaders, and with the pope. What were all these, if not instances of secret diplomacy? Certainly there had been no input from the Jewish masses. But the Zionist movement had been touched by the rising radical tide. At his meeting with Cecil, Weizmann promised to rally the Jews of the world on behalf of the British protectorate and warned that “the suggested division13 of Palestine would raise an outcry which will ring through from one end of the world to the other, as it is contrary to all the principles which have been proclaimed by the Allies since the beginning of the War, and which have lately been so strongly emphasized by America and Russia.”

  No doubt Zionists and their supporters would be outraged to learn of the arrangement’s provisions. Perhaps some of Zionism’s opponents would be outraged to learn of them too. If the outcry reached all the way to the Hejaz (where the Arab rebel army encamped) and all the way to the holy city of Mecca (seat of the new Arab kingdom), what would Grand Sharif Hussein and his sons make of it? More to the point, what would they make of the arrangements that Sir Mark Sykes and Monsieur Georges-Picot had made regarding the Arabs? In the event, however, they made the discovery on their own before Weizmann had time to raise the outcry.

  “Last night14 [May 24, 1917],” wrote Colonel Cyril Wilson, Britain’s “pilgrimage officer” in Jeddah and main liaison with King Hussein, “Feisal said he wanted to talk about his Father … The following are some rough notes I took.” We may imagine the English colonel in the port town where temperatures had recently scaled a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, sweltering in khaki, sweat dripping from his forehead, pen in hand, conjuring up Feisal’s monologue of the previous evening. “The Sharif first got to respect and like Great Britain about 22 years ago when he was at Stambul,” Wilson wrote. Hussein’s uncle, who happened to be grand sharif at the time, had cheated him of revenue due him from lands in Egypt, but when Hussein complained to Abdul Hamid II, the latter had done nothing. Hussein then “took an action in Cairo” against his uncle, even though this displeased the sultan. His uncle tried to bribe the Egyptian court, “but Justice prevailed and Hussein knew then that British methods were honest.”

  This initial appreciation grew into something stronger and larger; eventually it helped to shape Arab policies toward Britain and thus, perhaps, the modern world. Hussein had compared British colonial methods with the French and German, Feisal told Wilson. He had arrived at the same conclusion as the Zionists when they performed a similar exercise: British was better. On that steamy night in Jeddah, Feisal put it to Wilson this way: “He saw that India, with millions of people, was administered by comparatively very few British officials and decided that if ever Arabs could do anything, Great Britain, who never interfered with the peoples’ religion or freedom, was the best and only power to assist.”

  Hussein’s wartime letters contain one paean after another to Great Britain’s history of honorable conduct and integrity. When McMahon’s replacement, Sir Reginald Wingate, thought fit to remind the king of the Hejaz that “the British Government is the respecter of treaties, the espouser of Justice, and, in every case, a faithful ally,” Hussein replied, “I have to say15 that it was this world wide and true fame of Great Britain that encouraged me to assume the heavy responsibility of my present task.” Many years later, after bitter disappointment and near the end of a long life, Hussein was still repeating the same mantra: “The English, my son, are16 an honourable kind, in word and in deed, in fortune and in adversity. I say honourable. Only his Excellency, the estimable, energetic Luweed Jurj [Lloyd George] is something of an acrobat and a fox.”

  As we have seen, even before Lloyd George came to center stage, British officials had kept much from Hussein that honor should have compelled them to reveal. But then someone let something slip. Perhaps the guilty party belonged to the French mission under Colonel Brémond in Jeddah, or to the British contingent there; or perhaps someone in Cairo allowed his tongue to wag. At any rate someone said something, and Hussein learned about it and experienced that first trickle of doubt, just as Chaim Weizmann did in London after learning what Robert de Caix told C. P. Scott.

  And like Weizmann, Hussein would not rest until he knew what was up. Sometime in late March 1917 (just as Nahum Sokolow was preparing to set out for Paris) he dispatched a telegram to Wilson requesting a meeting to discuss various points including “another matter of minor importance, that is, the part of the country in the North-West which we were granted in our agreement.” Wilson immediately got into touch with Cairo, where with equal swiftness alarm bells began to sound. “The Sharif evidently17 intends to discuss the question of Syria, probably with special reference to the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo,” Brigadier General Gilbert Clayton warned in a memorandum circulated among high officials both in Cairo and London. Here the reader should recall that McMahon, in his correspondence with Hussein, had intentionally fudged paragraphs dealing with that part of Syria, because he thought France might wish to claim it at the end of the war. Perhaps willfully, Hussein had ignored their vagueness and had simply reasserted his own claim to the territory, including lands stretching south nearly all the way to Jaffa in Palestine. Now, apparently, he wished to revisit the subject.

  On the very day that Clayton composed his memorandum of warning, Lloyd George, Lord Curzon, and the cabinet secretary, Maurice Hankey, met at 10 Downing Street with Mark Sykes to go over his instructions for the forthcoming Middle Eastern trip with Picot. Unaware that King Hussein was becoming restless, the four reaffirmed “the signed agreement18 from which we could not depart,” as Curzon described it. In addition, “the Prime Minister suggested that Sir Mark Sykes ought not enter into any political pledges to the Arabs, and particularly none in regard to Palestine,” which earlier in the meeting he had said he hoped would become British. (On that part of the signed agreement, then, the British contemplated departing after all, since the Sykes-Picot Agreement had envisioned an international condominium there.) What this all meant was that when Sykes got to the Hejaz, he would have to reassure King Hussein about British and French intentions, without making any promises and knowing all the while that, against Hussein’s wishes, Britain had accepted French claims to the territory west of the four crucial towns and aimed at scooping up Palestine for herself.

  Meanwhile, and at almost precisely the same moment, the French government was giving its own instructions to François Georges-Picot: “What we want to do19 is to free a people for long past enslaved by the Turks, granting it such privileges as it is entitled to.” What seems a liberal sentiment on first reading appears ambiguous on the second: Precisely what “privileges” would the French be granting? Here is another ambiguity: “It is not a question of imposing foreign rulers upon them, but only of assisting them in the creation of national institutions capable of assuring to them a proper system of government.” What did the French deem “a proper system of government” for Arabs?

  Sykes and Picot arrived in Cairo toward the end of April. They held preliminary meetings with three Syrian delegates, including a personal representative of Hussein, Fuad al-Khatib, who served as his deputy foreign minister and who had been a founding member of the Ottoman Decentralization Party. Sykes walked his diplomatic tightrope. He and Picot argued that an Anglo-French presence in the Middle East would not threaten, but rather would buttress, Arab independence. They did not mention the disputed territ
ory on the Syrian coast, although by now they both doubtless knew of Hussein’s anxiety regarding it. One must assume that they did not specify the “privileges” to which Arabs would be entitled or the “proper system of government” for them.

  The Syrians signified their acceptance of some kind of French presence in Syria, but we do not know precisely what kind. With regard to Mesopotamia Sykes bluntly told them, “though I did not know20 what form of Government H.M.G. would establish there that there could be no doubt that H.M.G. would reserve for itself the right to maintain a permanent military occupation, and that the local government would have to be of kind sufficient to maintain law and order so that British commerce should not suffer.” He added in his cable to London: “I hope it won’t be concluded that the negotiations were easy or simple. The main difficulty was to maneuver the delegates into asking for what we were prepared to give them, without letting them know what precise geographical agreement had been come to.” But the three delegates were not the men who exercised genuine power. The real question was how Feisal, and above all King Hussein, would react when Sykes and Picot told them about the Tripartite Agreement, and more specifically how they would react to French plans for Syria, including the northern coastal portions.

  The king let it be known that he wished to speak with Sir Mark Sykes alone. He would come down from Mecca to Jeddah to meet him on May 2. Sykes would have talked matters over with the men of Cairo—Clayton, Storrs, Hogarth, his old friend George Lloyd, and perhaps the new high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate—and concluded, reluctantly, as Hogarth of the Arab Bureau, advised London: “The time has now arrived21 … when the general lines of the Anglo-French agreement regarding Syria must be explained to Hussein.” Hogarth thought a letter addressed to Hussein by King George, plus an increase in British subventions, would sweeten the pill.