So the matter rested for the next three months, until mid-November 1917. By then it had become clear that the threatened Ottoman offensive in Mesopotamia would fail to materialize and that Ottoman forces were falling back on all other fronts. The Young Turks in Constantinople had good reason to revisit the possibility of a separate peace. So did the easterner Lloyd George. Despite the promises of his generals finally to smash a hole in the German line, no breakthrough on the Western Front had occurred, only continual murder on a breathtaking scale. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks had pledged to take Russia out of the war altogether. Britain seemed no closer to winning the war in November 1917 than she had in November 1916, or 1915, or 1914.
Sometime toward the end of the second week in November, Basil Zaharoff learned that Abdul Kerim was on the move again, headed for Switzerland. He wrote to Caillard: “I will be there20 to meet him.” This time Lloyd George empowered him to make the $2 million down payment. At this desperate juncture in the war, the prime minister would go far to bring the Turks to the negotiating table, farther by a great length than the Zionists would have wanted him to. Of course, he did not tell them.
PART V
Climax and Anticlimax
CHAPTER 22
The Ascendancy of Chaim Weizmann
THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT issued the Balfour Declaration in early November 1917. For the twelve months preceding that date, especially for the last six, the Zionists under Weizmann’s leadership moved steadily, almost implacably, toward their goal. Obstacles they brushed aside, or overbore, or undermined. Yet Zionist victory never was preordained. To contemporaries, everything seemed to be up in the air almost until the last moment. Furthermore, under certain circumstances even Zionist implacability would have availed them little.
Think back to the fruitless meeting between representatives of the Conjoint Committee and the Zionists at Lucien Wolf’s offices in 1915 and the correspondence that preceded and followed it, and to the “formula” Lucien Wolf then devised in hopes of stealing Zionist thunder but which the Foreign Office refused to endorse. Afterward contact between the two Jewish groups lapsed. Wolf’s assimilationists on the Conjoint Committee focused on preparing for the postwar settlement, at which they hoped British and French leaders would demand abolition of the cruel disabilities from which Jews in Russia and Romania continued to suffer. They pressed the Foreign Office to promise to make such demands at the appropriate moment. The Zionists, of course, pushed forward with their campaign for a Jewish homeland in Palestine under British auspices. To an outsider, it might have seemed that the two movements would continue along separate and parallel tracks.
In fact the two groups rode upon converging rails. When unavoidable collision came, Zionists would insist that Jews constituted a distinct nationality and must therefore receive distinct privileges while building their homeland in Palestine; against them the assimilationists would insist with equal resolve that Jews cherished a belief system in common and nothing more. As Liberals, the assimilationists held the thought of special privileges for their coreligionists in Palestine, or anywhere else, as anathema.
Another point of convergence made the smashup more complete when it finally occurred: Both groups sought the ear of the Foreign Office with equal determination. Increasingly this aspect of their competition resembled a turf war. But with regard to the future of Palestine, there could be only one victor.
Imagine two railway carriages, one containing British Zionists, the other British advocates of Jewish assimilation, rumbling down the tracks at increasing speed, flashing past signposts warning of an impending collision. One signpost had come into view during the summer of 1916, with publication of Zionism and the Jewish Future, edited by Harry Sacher. This book aimed to acquaint non-Zionists with the general history and aims of the movement. Unobjectionable enough, one would have thought, except that two essays in particular deeply offended the advocates of assimilation. The first, by Weizmann, argued bluntly that no matter what success and prominence a Jew who attempts to assimilate achieves, he “is felt by the outside1 world to be still something different, still an alien.” From this it followed that “the position of the emancipated Jew, though he does not realize it himself, is even more tragic than that of his oppressed brother.” In other words, unlike the British or French Jew, the Russian or Romanian or Polish Jew, miserable as he might be, at least knew where he stood. Then in a later chapter, Moses Gaster dismissed those who refused to acknowledge that Judaism was the “expression of the religious consciousness of the national life of the Jew.” He put his conclusion as bluntly as had Weizmann: “The claim to be Englishmen of the Jewish persuasion—that is, English by nationality and Jewish by faith—is an absolute self-delusion.”
Open attacks couched in contemptuous or even pitying terms—the Cousinhood and its “foreign secretary,” Lucien Wolf, were unaccustomed to such treatment. Worse than the tone, however, was the accusation of deluded incomprehension. Wolf understood Weizmann and Gaster to be threatening “the position of emancipated2 Jews as citizens of their native countries.” He and Claude Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, published essays of rebuttal in The Fortnightly Review for November 1916 and The Edinburgh Review for April 1917. “How can a man3 belong to two nations at once?” Montefiore asked rhetorically in his article, the first of the two to appear. No man could belong equally and simultaneously to two nations. One who tried to only opened himself to the charge of divided loyalties. “No wonder that all anti-Semites are enthusiastic Zionists,” Montefiore commented bitterly. Wolf dismissed Zionist claims with like decisiveness:
The Zionist wing4 of the [Jewish nationalist] movement was never tired of claiming that it expressed an unbroken national yearning of over 2,000 years … The Jews were always primarily a religious people and their national life in Palestine was a phase of their greater history as a church. The religion could live without it, and the exiled people soon lost their political yearning and merged their hopes of national restoration with the Messianic teachings of their prophets and sages. The restoration they prayed for was the fulfillment of a Divine Scheme of human redemption.
Wolf’s and Montefiore’s articles were only the most visible of a number of published replies to Sacher’s Zionist book by advocates of assimilation. The Zionists answered back in a further series of articles and pamphlets.
Both parties to the controversy considered themselves aggrieved. “So long as this5 [Zionist] view was put forward by obscure writers we took no notice,” Wolf wrote to a friend in France. When leading Zionists such as Gaster and Weizmann made their charges, however, then the chief advocates of assimilation must reply. Meanwhile Sokolow was charging in a letter to an American Zionist that “the ‘campaign’ was6 started by an article in The Fortnightly Review.”
For every advance made by the Zionists, Wolf sought a counterstroke. Weizmann had been courting Rothschilds, especially Walter, who in 1915 inherited the baronetcy from Nathan, his father, and with it leadership of the family and of British Jewry, although he was mainly interested in zoology, ornithology, and entomology and seems to have been something of an eccentric. Weizmann made of this unlikely figure a committed Zionist. “As my sister-in-law will7 have told you I am arranging for an interview with Mr. Balfour,” Walter Rothschild wrote to Weizmann in his large, scrawling, almost childish hand. “I fully realize the great importance of doing everything to further the Zionist cause with the Government in view of the persistant [sic] and purile [sic] opposition carried on by Lucien Wolff [sic] and the C[onjoint] C[ommittee].” Meanwhile Wolf was courting Walter’s uncle Leopold, who counseled moderation, not attack. Wolf found himself constrained to write placatingly to his Rothschild: “I am afraid you8 imagine that I am eager for the fray but I assure you this is not so … but I do feel most strongly and most earnestly that, in the highest interests of the Jewish community, we cannot leave the situation as it is … The foolish things published by the Zionists … have seriously compromised the situatio
n of the Jews all over the world.” But Leopold was ill and would soon pass away. So another signpost flashed by, this one warning that the advocates of assimilation were losing their grip on Britain’s most important Jewish family, while the Zionist grip was strengthening.
Weizmann, Wolf knew, had held meetings with mandarins including Balfour at the Foreign Office. Rumors probably reached him of Weizmann’s meetings with Prime Minister Lloyd George as well. This was a game two could play, he must have thought, not least since he had been playing it long before Chaim Weizmann arrived upon the British scene. On January 30, 1917, he managed his own interview with Balfour, ostensibly to register Conjoint Committee discontent with the government for refusing to promise to take up the Jewish question at a peace conference after the war. It represented a grave defeat for the Conjoint Committee, and Wolf protested Britain’s unwelcome decision to Balfour. But he took at least as much time to educate the foreign secretary on the relative strength of assimilationists and Zionists.
The Conjoint Committee, he explained to Balfour, was
the only body authorized to speak for the Jewish communities, not only of the United Kingdom, but of the British Empire. It represented 150 congregations, including all the chief synagogues, in addition to the Anglo-Jewish Association and its many branches, and a very considerable section of the foreign Jewish community established in this country who were represented by the delegates of certain of the East End Synagogues, and more especially of the Friendly Societies, which alone have a membership of about 40,000.
By contrast, Zionism “was only a part of the Jewish National Movement, which was largely inspired by the general struggle for Nationalist autonomy and independence in Eastern Europe.” Among West European Jews, including British Jews, Wolf insisted, “there was no specifically Jewish National Movement, and relatively very few Zionists.”
So far in the interview Wolf had emphasized the turf-war aspect of his struggle against Zionism. But then he stressed that it was a battle over principles as well, and he placed the assimilationists’ principles within Britain’s liberal tradition. “We should rejoice if the Zionists made Palestine the seat of a flourishing and reputable Jewish community,” he informed the foreign secretary. “We should have no objection if that Jewish community developed into a local Jewish nation and a Jewish state.” What they did object to was Zionist subversion, as they understood it, of the twin principles of emancipation and assimilation elsewhere, as well as to the “proposal to give to the Jews of Palestine privileges not shared by the rest of the population of that country.”
Balfour, as he took it all in, seemed to Wolf to be both patient and sympathetic. But perhaps, inadvertently, the foreign secretary revealed where his true sympathies lay. He strongly objected to anti-Semitism, Balfour told Wolf, but Jews “were exceedingly9 clever people who in spite of their oppression achieved a certain success which excited the jealousy and envy of the peoples among whom they lived.” Conceivably this observation anticipates the view he would publicly express later: that recognition of Jewish nationality and establishment of a Jewish national home would raise the status, and therefore alleviate the treatment, of Jews everywhere. Here then we may notice another signpost warning of the future smashup; if so Wolf did not perceive it.
Additional signposts appeared, and these Lucien Wolf saw well enough. His counterpart in Paris, Jacques Bigart of the Alliance Israélite, reported that Nahum Sokolow (present in that city on the European mission we have treated previously) had said that the British government largely approved the Zionist program already—and so did the French. Alarmed, Wolf immediately contacted the Foreign Office. “The Presidents of the10 Conjoint Committee are anxious to be informed, if possible, whether this statement is accurate,” he wrote. “I am to add that in the opinion of the Presidents … a great injustice would be done to the Anglo-Jewish community, and very serious mischief might result, if an agreement on the Palestine Question were concluded without their participation, more especially as the gentlemen with whom His Majesty’s Government have so far been in negotiation are all foreign Jews, having no quality to speak for the native Jews of the United Kingdom.” (Note that Wolf did not scruple to play the antiforeigner card. By now it had become a staple of the British anti-Zionist repertoire.) He received in reply a mollifying response11 from Sir Ronald Graham. Wolf pressed for further assurances, which Robert Cecil provided him at a face-to-face meeting on May 8. But Cecil also warned Wolf against publicly quarreling with the Zionists. It would be inconvenient for the Foreign Office and would do the Anglo-Jewish community no good.
Was Cecil’s warning a signpost too? Wolf remained uneasy. With the two presidents of the Conjoint Committee, David Lindo Alexander and Claude Montefiore, he plotted strategy. Montefiore thought he could approach Lord Milner of the War Cabinet, with whom he was personally acquainted. Wolf immediately endorsed12 this plan. Montefiore saw Milner on May 16. He argued the assimilationists’ case and urged the government to stick with the Conjoint Committee because its British-born members better represented Jewish interests than foreign-born Zionists such as Weizmann, Sokolow, and Gaster. Milner tried to reassure him. The Foreign Office would consult the Conjoint Committee before deciding upon its policy for Palestine. On the other hand, he acknowledged that “Mr. Lloyd George was impressed by and sympathetic to many of the ideas of the Zionists,” and he downplayed Conjoint Committee fears of the Zionist program: “Anti-Semitism and emancipation depended upon far other considerations than the erection of a small Jewish autonomous community in Palestine.” As to whether Britain13 would grant special privileges to Jews in Palestine if she proclaimed a British protectorate there, he would not be pinned down.
Montefiore left the meeting not reassured. “I would beg of you,”14 he reiterated to Milner the following day in a letter, “to trust your own fellow citizens who, at all events, are Englishmen through and through, and whose sons are serving in England’s armies, rather than foreigners who have no love for England, and who, if the fortunes of war went wrong, would throw her over in a trice and hurry over to Berlin to join the majority of their colleagues.” It was the chauvinist card yet again, but Milner did not mind. Montefiore “is an able, temperate15 and most honest man,” he wrote to Robert Cecil, “and when he begged me almost passionately to be very careful how we commit ourselves to Sokoloff or Weizmann I am sure that he does so from an honest conviction that they are not reliable guides.” But Milner too leaned toward the Zionists. Five months previously he had read Herbert Samuel’s Zionist memorandum and wrote to him: “Among the possible16 alternatives which you review, the one which you yourself favor certainly appears to me the most attractive.”
Three days later Wolf received a report of Chaim Weizmann’s most recent address to a Zionist conference in London. “I am entitled17 to state in this assembly,” Weizmann had announced, “that His Majesty’s Government is ready to support our plans.” This repetition of Sokolow’s claims in Paris reinforced Wolf’s conclusion that Zionism stood upon the verge of a great triumph. Only desperate measures could now rescue the position of the Conjoint Committee; the advocates of Jewish assimilation now must stake all or lose all.
On Tuesday, May 17, Wolf, Alexander, and Montefiore presided over a meeting of the Conjoint Committee to discuss the situation. The group decided “to issue a public18 statement of their attitude on the Zionist question.” They drew it up “there and then … and approved [it] with only two dissentients.” The statement hammered “the Zionist theory19 which regards all the Jewish communities of the world as constituting one homeless nationality, incapable of complete social and political identification with the nations among whom they dwell.” It condemned the Zionist proposal “to invest the Jewish settlers in Palestine with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population, these rights to be embodied in a Charter, and administered by a Jewish Chartered Company.” They further resolved to publish the statement not only in the Jewish press but in The T
imes. Those members of the Conjoint Committee, Wolf foremost among them, who claimed that the statement was couched in conciliatory language, were either fooling themselves or attempting to fool others.
Wolf left the meeting accompanied by Joseph H. Hertz, Britain’s chief rabbi, who had attended by special invitation and had cast one of the two dissenting votes. The two men stood outside the Regent’s Park tube station. As Wolf wrote afterward, Dr. Hertz reiterated “his regret at20 the action that had been resolved upon. He asked me whether anything could be done to stop it. I said … if Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Gaster could be induced to modify or otherwise explain away their published statements obviously there would be no longer any need for the action resolved upon.” Hertz reported that Wolf went further: “‘And you would render21 a great service to the community’ he told me, ‘if you could induce them to do so.’” Acting upon this advice (although Wolf denied that he ever gave it), the chief rabbi contacted Leopold Greenberg, editor of The Jewish Chronicle, “because he was the only man who could bring pressure to bear upon the Zionist leaders.” Alarmed, Greenberg got in touch with Wolf.
On Tuesday evening, May 22, the Zionist editor and the Jewish “foreign secretary” met for nearly three hours at Wolf’s home. Over the course22 of a wide-ranging discussion, Greenberg argued that the quarrel between Zionists and anti-Zionists concerned the Anglo-Jewish community primarily and should not be aired outside it. Wolf replied that Zionists had published outside the Jewish press and that the Conjoint Committee, in defending itself, reserved the right to publish where it would. In fact, Wolf and his colleagues had just decided to give their statement to The Times; it was published there on Thursday, May 24. But Alexander refused23 to publish the statement in The Jewish Chronicle without Montefiore’s explicit assent, and Wolf could not reach Montefiore on Wednesday the twenty-third, so it was too late for the statement to appear there since the Chronicle published on Fridays. That The Jewish Chronicle did not publish the statement, but The Times did, made a bad impression on the Jewish community as a whole and alienated Greenberg further, if that were possible. Nor can it have pleased Sir Robert Cecil, who had warned against a public dispute. That Wolf threw down the gauntlet anyway must be an index of his increasing alarm.
The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 40