CHAPTER 24
The Declaration at Last
IN THE SUMMER OF 1917, months of wrangling and politicking still separated British Zionists from their great goal, but they thought it finally lay within their grasp. Of Lawrence’s hair-raising adventures, of his specific attempts at lobbying General Allenby, George Lloyd, and other authorities in support of Arab independence, they knew nothing. Of King Hussein’s intentions for Syria and of his British supporters’ sympathies, they had some general knowledge. Of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, they had more than an inkling. They realized that with regard to Palestine they must “elicit [from the1 government] … some definite statement beyond the mere verbal assurances with which we have hitherto been contented”—or someone else might. In consultation with sympathetic officials such as Mark Sykes and Ronald Graham, Weizmann and Sokolow worked out a method of approach. They and their colleagues would compose a Zionist statement. When it was ready, Lord Rothschild would send it to the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour. The latter would present it to the War Cabinet for approval. When this body had sanctioned it, Balfour would inform Rothschild by letter. This would constitute a declaration of British support for Zionism, in fact a Balfour Declaration.
Then, as we know, Weizmann had to travel unexpectedly to Gibraltar to head off Henry Morgenthau, and subsequently to Paris to report to Lloyd George. While he was thus engaged, and while Lawrence and Feisal and Auda were trekking the desert wastes of Arabia blowing up tracks and trestles, the London Zionist Political Committee was meeting at the faux-Gothic, faux-Tudor, and long-since-demolished Imperial Hotel on Russell Square. There, in leafy Bloomsbury in July 1917, Sokolow, Sieff, Marks, Simon, Ahad Ha’am, occasionally Sacher (when on leave from Manchester), and several others discussed and argued and wrote their draft declarations.
Characteristically, Sacher thought Zionists should ask “for as much as2 possible.” “We must control3 the state machinery in Palestine. If we don’t, the Arabs will. Give the Arabs all the guarantees they like for cultural autonomy; but the state must be Jewish.” Sokolow overbore him and other maximalists. He remained in constant touch with Sykes; indirectly he had communicated with Balfour himself; and at this stage he knew better than his colleagues what the British government would accept and what it would not. The group must not submit an itemized wish list, he realized; certainly it must not even mention a Jewish state. “Our purpose,”4 Sokolow wrote to Joseph Cowen, who also took part in the deliberations, “is to receive from the Government a general short approval of the same kind as that which I have been successful in getting from the French Government.”
On July 12 the group (minus Sacher, who had journalistic duties in the north) boiled down half a dozen more or less militant and detailed drafts into a single, albeit still somewhat prolix, paragraph for the British government to sanction. It argued that Britain should recognize Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people and should establish with the Zionist Organization a “Jewish National5 Colonizing Corporation,” under whose aegis Jews could immigrate to Palestine freely, live autonomously, and develop economically.
Sokolow submitted this statement to Sykes and Graham. They responded within a matter of days, but not positively. Sokolow, reporting their objections, said the paragraph was “too long”6 and “contained matters of detail which it would be undesirable to raise at the present moment.”
Sokolow reconvened the committee on July 17. This time Sacher attended. He had grasped what kind of statement the Foreign Office wanted. While sitting, or pacing, in the hotel room, the Zionists debated what to cut from their earlier paragraph and what to retain. Leon Simon jotted down on a scrap of paper the formulation at which they eventually arrived. Harry Sacher was its principal architect. The scrap survived—someone saved it. Eighty-eight years later its anonymous owner put it up for auction at Sotheby’s in London. An unidentified bidder purchased it for $884,000. Here is what Simon wrote all those years ago:
His Majesty’s7 Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people.
His Majesty’s Government will use its best endeavors to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organization.
Note that the first sentence implies an unbroken link between Jews and Palestine despite the nearly two-thousand-year separation. Note that the second sentence posits the Zionist Organization as official representative of Jewish interests. Sacher’s pithy new statement had taken note of the criticisms offered by Sykes and Graham but ceded little of substance.
Sokolow showed the condensed statement to Sykes and Graham, who approved it. He passed it along to Lord Rothschild, who sent it to Balfour, along with a note: “At last I am able8 to send you the formula you asked me for. If His Majesty’s Government will send me a message on the lines of this formula, if they and you approve of it, I will hand it on to the Zionist Federation and also announce it at a meeting called for that purpose.”
Rothschild thought, as did most of the informed Zionists, that the government statement of support would be forthcoming momentarily. Weizmann, who had just returned from Paris, was optimistic too. By this stage the Zionists had defeated the Conjoint Committee; they (himself most of all) had developed extensive and close relations with important officials and had reason to believe the officials supported them; they had nobbled the most important Rothschild, who now served as their emissary to the government; and they had produced the brief, vague, yet apt statement the Foreign Office desired. “The declaration is9 going to be given us soon I understand,” Weizmann informed Sacher on August 1. Even Balfour was sanguine. He drafted a reply to Rothschild: “I am glad to be10 in a position to inform you that His Majesty’s Government accept the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.” Zionism stood upon the verge of an epochal step forward. But Balfour did not send the note.
In the same way that much ink has been spilled examining the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, so historians have traced with infinite care British officials’ revisings and rewordings of Sacher’s two-sentence message during the late summer and autumn of 1917, the discussions and meetings among them to which it gave rise, and the reactions of Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. But here historians have no controversy (although inevitably they divide over the motivations of individuals). The War Cabinet minister Sir Alfred Milner, possibly hoping to assuage the fears of anti-Zionists such as his friend Claude Montefiore, removed the word “reconstituted” from the statement. Instead of terming Palestine “the National Home of the Jewish people” he called it in his new draft “a National Home for the Jewish people.” Later, at Milner’s request,11 Leopold Amery, an under secretary to the War Cabinet, further attenuated Sacher’s two sentences, excising any reference to the Zionist Organization and incorporating language, employed by Zionists in letters to The Times during their controversy with the Conjoint Committee, denying they would damage Arab interests in Palestine. These changes were important, but they reflected qualified support, not opposition. That came from another quarter of the cabinet, most irreconcilably from the newly appointed secretary of state for India and sole remaining Jewish cabinet minister, Edwin Montagu. Ironically, a Jew represented the greatest remaining obstacle to cabinet acceptance of the Balfour Declaration.
Like his cousin Herbert Samuel, Montagu had resigned his cabinet post in December 1916, when Asquith relinquished the prime minister’s position to Lloyd George. He took this step reluctantly but could do nothing else. He owed much to the former Liberal leader, whose friendship he still cherished and whom he greatly admired. He had no inkling of Asquith’s genteel but unmistakably anti-Semitic references to him in his correspondence with Venetia Stanley (although one wonders whether he learned about them when Venetia Stanley became his wife). He once had written to Asquith:
In all the things12 that matter, in all the issues that frighten, in all t
he apprehensions that disturb, you show yourself clear sighted and self possessed, ready to help, to elucidate, to respond, to formulate, to lead, to inspire. That’s why loving you and following you is so easy and so profitable … Whatever happens, you are firm as a rock … understanding, shielding.
But Montagu admired Lloyd George too. And he was ambitious and justifiably confident of his own powers, although perhaps socially insecure. He could not remain content outside government for long. On March 28, 1917, he wrote to Lloyd George:
As the desert sand13 for rain,
As the Londoner for sun,
As the poor for potatoes,
As a landlord for rent,
As drosera rotundifolia for a fly,
As Herbert Samuel for Palestine,
As a woman in Waterloo Road for a soldier
I long for talk with you.
Lloyd George must have proved amenable, for shortly thereafter Montagu reentered the cabinet, first as minister without portfolio working on plans for postwar reconstruction, later as replacement for Austen Chamberlain as secretary of state for India. But there was a price to pay. For such disloyalty, as he perceived it, Asquith never forgave him.
Lucien Wolf’s Conjoint Committee fell and British Jews who favored assimilation lost their leadership, when the tall, brooding, emotional Montagu, in effect, stepped into the breach. He may not have intended it, but that is what he did. He knew nothing of Zionists drafting paragraphs at the Imperial Hotel or, probably, even of the close connections linking Weizmann and Sokolow to Sykes and various Foreign Office figures. He did not see Sacher’s two-sentence statement or Balfour’s draft reply until August 22. But when finally he did see it, he was galvanized. He wanted the foreign secretary to redraft his letter and reject the Zionist statement. The scorching memorandum that he composed, five pages of coruscating irony and sarcasm, was titled: “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”—not, as he carefully explained, because he thought Lloyd George and his team held anti-Semitic views but rather because he thought their pro-Zionist policy would “prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”
We have become familiar with the arguments Montagu employed against Zionism. Most cabinet ministers knew them as well, for the arguments had changed little since Montagu’s own opposition to Herbert Samuel’s 1915 Zionist statement to the cabinet. “I assert that14 there is not a Jewish nation,” Montagu wrote again, two years later. “I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in.” And further down the page: “When the Jew has a national home surely it follows that the impetus to deprive [him] of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto.” And finally, and perhaps inevitably: “The Government are asked to be the instrument … of a Zionist organization largely run … by men of enemy descent or birth.” But such quotations do not do justice to the vehemence of Montagu’s attack. Cabinet ministers, accustomed to one another’s dry formulations and businesslike prose, would have been taken aback when they read their colleague’s cri de coeur.
For that was what it was. Montagu took the issue personally. He had once remarked that he had been trying all his life to escape the ghetto. Now he understood the Zionists to be trying to push him, and every other assimilated British Jew, back inside. If the government endorsed the Zionist memorandum, Montagu argued in a desperate letter to Lloyd George, it would mean that “the country for which15 I have worked ever since I left the University—England—the country for which my family have fought, tells me that my national home … is Palestine.” He treasured his appointment to the India Office, he reminded the prime minister. He looked forward to championing progressive reforms there, to carrying the ideals of British Liberalism to the subcontinent. But how could a Palestinian—as he must be termed if the government accepted the Zionist statement—represent Britain in India? “Every anti-Semitic organization and newspaper will ask what right a Jewish Englishman, with the status at best of a naturalized foreigner, has to take a foremost part in the Government of the British Empire.”
Montagu belonged to the cabinet but had no position in the War Cabinet, that decisive subset of the whole that would render final verdict on the Zionist statement. Nevertheless, his fervent protest ensured him a seat at the table when the body met on September 3. On that day members had before them Sacher’s two sentences, Milner’s revised version of them, and Montagu’s perfervid response. In the discussion that ensued Montagu, according to minutes of the meeting, “urged that the use16 of the phrase ‘the home of the Jewish people’ would vitally prejudice the position of every Jew elsewhere and expanded the argument contained in his Memorandum.” Bizarrely, neither Lloyd George nor Balfour could attend this particular session; perhaps that fact worked in his favor, although Milner and Robert Cecil (deputizing for Balfour) ably argued the Zionist position. Thus the British War Cabinet divided along lines adumbrated in that first confrontation between Zionists and assimilationists in the offices of Lucien Wolf in early 1915. The result was equally inconclusive. In the end, the War Cabinet agreed only to consult Britain’s ally, President Wilson of the United States, before taking action.
News of the cabinet’s indecision quickly reached Chaim Weizmann. Balked at this penultimate stage, and furious, he hurled himself into a last great effort to push the declaration through. He mobilized American Zionists to extract a pledge of support from Wilson, and urged British Zionists to press forward one more time. At his indirect instigation, hundreds of telegrams, from Jewish congregations across the length and breadth of the British Isles, all urging government support of the declaration, flooded into the Foreign Office. By the fall of 1917 Weizmann could turn the key to most doors in Whitehall. He met with Foreign Office officials, cabinet ministers, the prime minister’s closest advisers, finally even with the prime minister himself (although for only three minutes). With Lord Rothschild he drew up a toughly worded restatement of the Zionist position that could also be read as a barely concealed reproach to the government for stalling: “We have submitted17 the text of the declaration on behalf of an organization which claims to represent the will of a great and ancient, though scattered, people. We have submitted it after three years of negotiations and conversations with prominent representatives of the British nation.” Montagu took steps too. He prepared a second anti-Zionist memorandum for the War Cabinet to consider. But he stood at a disadvantage. He had no organization behind him and scarcely an ally in the government.
The War Cabinet convened again, on October 4, this time with Lloyd George in the chair and Balfour at his right hand. The foreign secretary explained briefly and lucidly what Zionism meant and why he supported it. Unexpectedly a powerful voice intervened—in opposition to him. Here was Montagu’s only cabinet-level ally, the Marquess Curzon of Keddleston, lord president of the council. But he was an ally only up to a point. He intended to offer the War Cabinet a cold douche of realism. He opposed Zionism for practical reasons, he explained. He would not concern himself with philosophical speculation about the possibility of Jewish assimilation in the countries of the Diaspora. Alone among the men sitting at 10 Downing Street, he had been to Palestine: “barren and desolate18 … a less propitious seat for the future Jewish race could not be imagined.” Anyway, how would Jews get there in significant numbers? What would they do when they arrived? And what would happen to the present Muslim population? Zionism he regarded “as sentimental idealism, which would never be realized and [with which] His Majesty’s Government should have nothing to do.”
Montagu would have been glad of Curzon’s unforeseen, if frigidly offered, support, but he may have understood that it came too late. This meeting would be his swan song. His duties as Indian secretary called him to the subcontinent, and he would be leaving England in a matter of weeks. Still he continued to hammer, arguing not on practical grounds, as Curzon had, but rather on intensely personal ones. “How
would he negotiate with the peoples of India on behalf of His Majesty’s Government if the world had just been told that [Britain] regarded his national home as being in Turkish territory?” He pointed out too that “the only trial of strength between Zionists and anti-Zionists in England had resulted in a very narrow majority for the Zionists, namely 56 to 51 of the representatives of Anglo-Jewry on the Conjoint Committee.” Surely the government could not choose one side over the other on this slight basis? And he could not refrain from underlining once again the foreign origins of leading Zionists in Britain.
For a second time the War Cabinet deferred a decision, this time so that members could read a paper Curzon wished to prepare and ascertain more precisely the views of President Wilson. The latter’s aide, Colonel Edward House, had sent on the president’s behalf a noncommittal response to the original cabinet inquiry, but then Wilson had permitted the American Zionist Louis Brandeis to send a more positive one. They decided as well to canvass representative Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in Britain to ascertain their views of the draft declaration. Montagu composed a third anti-Zionist memorandum, his most outspoken and personal yet, criticizing Weizmann specifically: “On this matter19 he is near to being a religious fanatic.” The secretary of state for India appears to have understood, however, that he was rowing against the current and that the tide was too strong. Except for Curzon, the cabinet’s big guns opposed him: Lloyd George, Balfour, Milner. He told C. P. Scott the day after submitting this last memorandum that the big three could not be moved. Therefore “the thing will go20 through.”
The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 44