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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Herbert thought his mission complete. He packed his bag and prepared to leave for Paris. Twenty minutes before his train arrived, perhaps even as he stood on the station platform, someone slipped a memorandum in French into his hands. It contained the dissident Turks’ proposals for a separate peace. “I do not think25 that it is acceptable,” Herbert wrote in his diary, “but I think that it would form a basis.”

  He arrived in Paris on the morning of July 25, two days after Weizmann. Lloyd George and Balfour were in the city, as we know. The latter sent for him. Herbert records: “I told him what happened. He was interested and excited … In the evening I had an hour with L[loyd] G[eorge] and Hankey. He sipped his tea and listened while we sat on a balcony and the crowd cheered in the Place de la Concorde … I read him my memorandum.” What he did not know, but what would have cheered him had he known, was that the day before the prime minister and the foreign secretary had received confirmation of his general message from another Military Intelligence officer stationed in Berne. The latter had held a secret meeting with Dr. Noureddin too. He reported: “Talaat now convinced26 that Russian revival, failure of submarine warfare, and American intervention have destroyed all hope of satisfactory settlement for Turkey and … wishes to … make terms with England.” Such information would not have cheered Dr. Weizmann, but they withheld it from him too.

  In London three days later Herbert had an hour at the Foreign Office with Balfour again, accompanied this time by Lord Hardinge and Robert Cecil. On August 3 MacDonagh told him that the War Cabinet “had seen my memorandum and agreed to it.” At this stage Herbert might have been excused for thinking that a compromise peace between Britain and the Ottoman Empire was within reach. But he would have been mistaken. The same forces that had defeated Pickthall and Pilling and Morgenthau had already mobilized against him. Whether Aubrey Herbert’s attempt to facilitate a separate peace with Turkey would meet finally with his government’s approval remained an open question.

  The Foreign Office received conflicting information on the readiness of the Turks to negotiate. While some, as we have seen, thought the Ottomans were prepared to talk, powerful forces in London argued with equal force that they were not. Among the most authoritative was Lord Nathaniel Curzon, the only member of the War Cabinet with personal experience of the Middle East. Early in May, as reports about Turkish readiness to negotiate were turning from a trickle to a stream, and as pressure to explore the option was building in the Foreign Office, he argued that the advocates of peace were pursuing a chimera. Turkey “now knows that she27 will retain Constantinople … Her Government is in the hands of a powerful triumvirate whose hold [on power] … has, on the whole, been strengthened by the War. The Entente has at present nothing in the way of inducement to offer.” British restoration to the Ottomans of Mesopotamia, including Baghdad, might open the door to negotiations, Curzon conceded, but such concessions “we are not prepared to consider.”

  Other Middle East experts from within the Foreign Office reached similar conclusions. On the eve of Herbert’s journey to Switzerland, Balfour asked two of them to assess his chances of success. The first did not28 think much of those chances. The German army dominated the Turkish government, he argued, and a coup remained unlikely so long as they did so. Moreover no Turkish government, not even one formed by the conspirators who so unrealistically wished to overthrow the present CUP regime, would accept dismemberment of their empire, which England and France still intended. The second expert, Sir Lewis Mallet, former ambassador in Constantinople, made similar points. The CUP still believed it could win the war. It had lost Baghdad, but it had beaten the British at Kut and Gallipoli and Gaza. That the new Russian government had renounced Constantinople only added to their confidence. “It is not impossible,”29 Mallet darkly hinted, “that there may be some connection between the Jewish wire-pullers at Constantinople and the Jewish element at Petrograd.” At any rate, the Turks would not be ready to make peace until their self-belief had been knocked out of them.

  Into this debate like an avenging angel swept Sir Mark Sykes, just returned from the Middle East on June 14. He judged the opponents of the separate peace bloodless; he thought the first Foreign Office memo opposing the separate peace tepid and the second based upon “insufficient material.” He despised Lord Curzon, whom he had nicknamed “Alabaster.” If the faction within the government and Foreign Office who favored the peace were to be defeated, he would have to intervene. He wrote to Gilbert Clayton back in Cairo: “On my arrival I found30 that the Foreign Office had been carefully destroying everything I had done in the past 2 years.” It had been “stimulating anti-Entente feeling and pushing separate negotiations with Turkey ideas. Indeed I just arrived in the nick of time.” He consulted with Weizmann, who already had protested the Morgenthau and Herbert missions. “Luckily Zionism held good,” Sykes wrote to Clayton. He gathered himself. Weizmann went off to Gibraltar and Herbert to Switzerland. Each returned at the end of July thinking he had succeeded. Sykes knew better: Weizmann’s would be a Pyrrhic victory unless Herbert’s triumph could be turned into a defeat.

  So he let loose, composing two powerful blasts against pursuing negotiations with an emissary from Talaat in Switzerland. His friend Herbert’s mission had been misconceived from the start. “The visit of a31 (to the Turks) notorious Turcophil M.P. to Turkish Agents in Switzerland will certainly be interpreted by the C.U.P. as a proof … that … the English and their Western Allies believe they cannot win the war.” Rather than bring peace closer, Herbert had inadvertently delayed it. In any event, the men with whom Herbert proposed that Britain should parley did not carry sufficient weight. “Hakki Bey, the ex-master of the Turkish mint, is a well intentioned Liberal who had to flee Turkey for participation in an anti-C.U.P. combination. To negotiate with him or such members of the so-called ‘opposition’ is futile or worse. They are not of the caliber to cope with Talaat Pasha and his Jacobin clique.”

  Others in the Foreign Office either did not think, or did not care, about how the colonized peoples of the Ottoman Empire would react to Britain making a compromise peace with their colonial masters. The new, anti-imperialist Sykes cared very much. “Before entering on pourparlers,” he warned in the same scorching memorandum, “it would seem imperative to consult not only France, Italy, America &c, but also the King of Hejaz, representative Armenians and nationalist (i.e.) Zionist Jews, to whom we and the other Entente Powers have obligations and whose fate is bound up with the principle of nationality, the antidote to Prussian military domination.” This intriguing man’s political evolution was nearly complete. In early 1916 he had put his name to one of the most infamous imperialist deals of the twentieth century; by mid-1917 he had become the advocate of subject peoples whom he wanted his country to champion, albeit with profit for itself.

  In a second equally coruscating composition, Sykes shifted ground, arguing that the anti-CUP Liberals with whom Aubrey Herbert had met were actually CUP cats’ paws. Perhaps the Ottoman government did desire a separate peace: How else explain why its puppets in Britain, “pacifists … financiers … Indian and Egyptian Moslem seditionists and their sympathizers such as Pickthall … [as well as] Semitic anti-Zionists who are undisguised pro-Turco-Germans,” were pushing for one? The government that pulled their strings believed the peoples of Europe were exhausted by the war, that a peace conference would soon end it, and that “it will be useful to get Turkey’s situation fixed and settled as advantageously as possible before the conference begins.”

  How did the CUP want to fix things? It desired “to come out of this war with an assured political and strategic position from which it can henceforth pursue its world policy,” the main lines of which were:

  Pan-Turanianism, reinforced by

  Political control over the Muslim world.

  A firm grip on the control levers of international finance.

  Close cooperation with the various revolutionary movements in Europe and the United States, such as
syndicalism, Leninism, and cognate forces.

  If Britain must negotiate with the Ottomans, she should do so only with the knowledge of her wartime allies and without employing any trickery. More important, she “should stand out for Arab independence [and] … a real guarantee of Armenian liberation,” his new diplomatic raison d’être. Oddly, he did not refer to Palestine in this paper. Perhaps he assumed that “Arab independence” meant Palestinian independence too, and that the Zionists would benefit from that.

  After reading Sykes’s second memorandum, two more Foreign Office mandarins weighed in. One wrote: “I find myself in32 close agreement with what Sir Mark Sykes says.” The other, Sir Ronald Graham, Herbert’s cousin, backtracked on his support for the separate peace: “If the present Turkish overtures are genuine—as to which I have grave doubts—we must encourage them to the extent (but no further) of hearing what the Turks have to offer … It must throughout be borne in mind that any terms under which Turkey would emerge with a semblance of having proved victorious—in Moslem eyes—must lay up endless trouble for us in the future.” With Sykes at full throttle, the tide at the Foreign Office seemed to be turning. A few days later, when Herbert had an audience with General Jan Smuts, this most recent addition to the War Cabinet told him that his memoranda “were not sufficient,33 that an entire restatement of the case was required.” Herbert demurred. He could read the tea leaves.

  The British government divided at the highest level over whether to send representatives to Switzerland to meet emissaries from Talaat Pasha to discuss a separate peace. How it might have resolved that internal argument must remain a matter of speculation, however, for developments beyond Britain’s control now intruded. In Petrograd Alexander Kerensky still hoped to win the war, but by ordering, contrary to all logic and evidence, that his troops take the offensive once again, he precipitated the final collapse of the Russian army and his own downfall. General Brusilov’s weary, famished, disillusioned soldiers gave it up near Lemberg in Galicia, just as Sykes and the other officials were composing their memoranda. This defeat had the effect of instilling new confidence among Turks. While London divided over Aubrey Herbert’s proposals, Constantinople began to plot an autumn campaign to recapture Arabia, without worrying that the Russians would attack from behind. Parodi, his ear to the ground as always, reported to Rumbold, who wired to London: “Talaat has no intention34 of seriously considering separate peace with the Entente … he will await result of Mesopotamian campaign in early autumn.”

  Near the end of August, Herbert called on Lord Hardinge at the Foreign Office, hoping against hope for news from his Turkish contacts. “I told him,”35 Hardinge records, “that as far as I knew nothing had occurred.” “The man who was Greenmantle,” as his biographer called him, had not been able to jump-start negotiations about a separate peace with Turkey after all.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Zaharoff Gambit

  THE IDEA OF A SEPARATE PEACE with the Ottoman Empire remained very much alive in the mind of the man who mattered most in Great Britain at this time, Prime Minister David Lloyd George. His chosen instrument was not Aubrey Herbert, however, despite the latter’s pedigree and connections; indeed, to the eye of a Welsh shoemaker’s nephew such as Lloyd George, perhaps those attributes appeared to be drawbacks. He chose instead for this most delicate of diplomatic tasks a self-made man like himself, a subtler, more ruthless figure than Aubrey Herbert, and one who was much more experienced in intrigue: namely, the infamous arms dealer and prototypical “merchant of death,” Basil Zaharoff. In a story chock-full of fabulous characters, this gentleman may be the most fabulous of all, although he certainly was not the most admirable.

  Zacharias Basileios Zaharoff was born an Ottoman subject in 1849, but he lied about that as about most things. To some he said he was Romanian, to others that he was Greek, or Polish, or Russian. He told Lord Bertie of Thame that he had graduated from Oxford. In fact, as a boy he worked in the streets of Constantinople, touting for brothels and starting fires for a share of the salvage that firemen gained when they extinguished a blaze. A bigamist who changed his name more than once, probably a swindler and embezzler, certainly a risk-taker who had on more than one occasion packed his bags and left town as quickly as possible, he lived his early adult years on the shady side in England, Belgium, the United States, and Cyprus. In Greece in 1877 he discovered his true métier, when he began selling armaments for the Anglo-Swedish firm of Nordenfelt. Immediately his fortunes improved. He sold a submarine to Greece and two more to her traditional enemy, Turkey, and then one to Turkey’s other great enemy, Russia. (The craft were unsafe and never used.) He sold weapons to Russia’s enemy, Japan, to Germany, to France, and to Spain. Unlike the submarines, these weapons were used, and to deadly effect. The years before 1914 were a golden age for salesmen of weapons and munitions, and Zaharoff proved adept, not least because he well understood how to suborn and corrupt. A brilliant linguist, he could practice his talents in most European languages.

  He was more than a successful purveyor of weapons, however. When, as chief salesman for Nordenfelt, he came up against the American Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, he quickly recognized the superior product. Maxim realized just as quickly who was the superior salesman. The marriage of convenience that resulted strengthened Zaharoff’s hand. Already wealthy, he collected enormous commissions after the merger and purchased shares in the business that now had a double-barreled name. By the time British Vickers Steel Company purchased Nordenfelt-Maxim in 1897, Zaharoff was one of its owners. For Vickers he became “general Representative for business abroad.” With some of the proceeds of the sale of his old firm, he bought shares in the new one and wound up sitting on its board of directors. Vickers built armaments works across Europe. Zaharoff played a leading role in their development and oversight.

  He branched out, founding banks and purchasing newspapers or shares in them. He even lent money to the Monte Carlo casino. He lived opulently in Paris, where he dined off gold plate, which according to some reports was sold later to King Farouk of Egypt. He bought a château in the French countryside. In 1908 he took out French citizenship and sought to establish his bona-fides. He founded a home for retired French seamen. In 1909 he donated £28,000 to the Sorbonne to establish a chair in aviation. Such acts brought him membership in the French Legion of Honor, of which eventually he was made a commander.

  The street urchin of Constantinople had climbed to a great height. His profession put him in touch with European leaders, ministers of defense, generals, even royalty, some of whom became his friends. He knew the “tiger” of French politics, the future wartime prime minister, Georges Clemenceau. In Britain he established friendly relations with T. P. O’Connor, the Irish nationalist MP and journalist, and with Baron Murray of Elibank, a member of the prewar and wartime Liberal government. Rumor has it that he became acquainted with Lloyd George during this period. Rumor compounded says the latter once had an affair with Zaharoff’s first, abandoned wife. At any rate the arms merchant began to dabble in politics—to facilitate his business dealings, no doubt, but also, it would appear, to satisfy his ego. On one occasion he arranged for the throne of Portugal to be offered to Prince Christopher of Greece.

  Eventually the Greek connection provided him with an introduction to the man atop the greasy pole in Britain. When the war commenced, Greek king Constantine resolutely pursued a policy of neutrality. His prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, pursued with equal resolution a pro-Entente policy. The French and British supported the latter; the Germans supported the former, hoping he would drop neutrality for an alliance with them. Both sides viewed Greece as a prize to be won. By 1915 it had become a happy hunting ground for men with cloaks and daggers, as well as money and guns. It was more dangerous than Switzerland, whose neutrality never came into question; divisions in Greece nearly precipitated a civil war and French invasion. This situation might have been designed for Basil Zaharoff, “evil and imposing,”1 with hi
s “beaky face … hooded eye … wrinkled neck … [and] the full body” of a vulture. He would fund the Allied propaganda effort in Greece; he would subsidize his “dear friend” Venizelos. “All that is needed2 is to buy the germanophile papers, also 45 Deputies and one Frontier Commissioner. Last month I bought out and out with my own money the most rabid anti-Venezelist paper.” He pressed the British and French governments to provide additional funds for additional suborning. They did so, and Zaharoff knew where to spend it. The results were that Constantine abdicated, and Greece joined the Entente powers. Prime Minister Asquith wrote to Zaharoff: “I beg,3 on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, to tender to you their sincere gratitude for the most valuable service which, at a critical time, you have rendered to the cause of the Allies.”

  For direct communication with the British government, Zaharoff employed Sir Vincent Caillard, financial director of Vickers. On April 19, 1916, at roughly the same time when Marmaduke Pickthall was responding to the overture from Dr. Felix Valyi in Switzerland, Zaharoff was writing to Caillard: “Mon cher Ami,4 the following if well managed may become historical.”

  “The following” was a feeler he had received three weeks previously from Abdul Kerim Bey, formerly cosecretary of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, later Turkish minister to Greece and ambassador to Vienna. “In Nordenfelt’s time I paid him many a thousand Liras,” Zaharoff fondly remembered. Abdul Kerim had “heard that I was playing an important part in Eastern politics.” The two met in Marseilles, the Turk traveling there with a false passport, “but said he, anything I may tell you ‘comes from me alone, because I have neither an official nor a semi-official mission,’ and this he repeated twenty times during our interview.” Zaharoff described their ensuing discussion: