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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Poor Edwin Montagu! For all his worldly success, he embodied the dilemmas and tragedies of early-twentieth-century assimilated British Jewry. He believed passionately in assimilation. At War Cabinet meetings and in his written memoranda, he fought for this ideal with all the tools of an upper-class Englishman: the irony and wit and logic he had imbibed in the debating clubs at Cambridge, the Liberalism he had learned from Asquith, the rhetorical skills he had acquired over years of political campaigning in the flatlands of Norfolk. He even allowed to appear, as an upper-class Englishman might have done when pressed, a glimpse of the antiforeigner sentiment so pervasive in wartime Britain. We cannot know whether his colleagues perceived him to be an Englishman who happened to be Jewish (as he so desperately wished) or rather as a Jew who happened to have been born and raised in England (as Asquith did). We cannot know whether true assimilation was possible for Jews in Britain in 1917.

  But surely the response Montagu elicited only a few weeks after the cabinet meeting from none other than Aubrey Herbert, recently returned from his secret mission to Switzerland, is suggestive. Let us give to Herbert, a brave and interesting man, every benefit of the doubt. Let us posit that he sympathized with Jews as he did with other oppressed and persecuted peoples. Now he was on his way, on secret government duty, to Albania to assist in the nationalist struggle against the Ottomans. Montagu had started out for India. Their paths intersected in Turin, Italy, where they dined together. Herbert described the event in his diary. He simply could not regard “Edwin of the Saxon Sword,” as he snidely called him (but not to his face), as anything other than a Jew who happened to have been born in Britain. “It’s ridiculous21 to pretend he is an Englishman,” Herbert wrote. “He is every inch an Oriental.” Then the son of the Earl of Carnarvon, and the son of Lord Swaythling, both on British government service, continued along their separate ways.

  Meanwhile the cabinet had received replies to their circular from four Zionists, including Weizmann, Sokolow, and Rothschild, and from four anti-Zionists, including Claude Montefiore and Sir Philip Magnus, MP, with responses to the proposed declaration. President Wilson, decisively influenced by Justice Brandeis via Colonel House, had telegraphed finally an unambiguous message of support for Zionism. Lord Curzon had completed his anti-Zionist memorandum. Cabinet ministers read and digested all this. A third meeting of the War Cabinet was scheduled. It would convene on Wednesday, October 31, 1917.

  We know the outcome. On that day the War Cabinet agreed to what has become known as the Balfour Declaration. The document authorized the foreign secretary to reply to Lord Rothschild in the following terms:

  His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

  On November 2 Balfour sent this message to Rothschild. The press would publish it exactly one week later. Thus did Weizmann’s long, unlikely campaign finally gain its object. Thus too did the campaign of T. E. Lawrence, King Hussein, and Sharif Feisal for some form of Arab confederation or empire (albeit one whose borders remained a matter of contention and misunderstanding) receive a grave setback. Their projected greater Arabia, if ever it came into existence, would not include Palestine.

  In the last part of the last sentence of the Balfour Declaration, the War Cabinet attempted to take Edwin Montagu’s primary fear into account. They failed to satisfy him. Montagu reached India, where he learned what the War Cabinet had done. Irreconcilable to the last, he wrote in his diary: “The Government has22 dealt an irreparable blow to Jewish Britons, and they have endeavored to set up a people which does not exist.” From the vantage point of nearly a hundred years on, however, we may say that what Montagu dreaded has not come to pass. Indeed, that last reassuring phrase of the Declaration seems almost superfluous. Anti-Semitism has scaled heights beyond Montagu’s imagining since 1917, in fact has risen and fallen more than once in different countries, but without regard to Britain’s recognition of Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish people.” As for the Indian secretary’s anguished prediction that the Balfour Declaration would make assimilation in Britain less attainable for Jews: perhaps it did, or perhaps it did not. One cannot prove or disprove a negative.

  The War Cabinet attempted also to meet the objections raised by Lord Curzon. Members had read his memorandum before the meeting on October 31. In it Curzon referred to the Syrian Arabs, mainly Muslims, who had “occupied [Palestine]23 for the best part of 1,500 years,” and asked what would become of them. “They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.” It was a good prophecy, but he did not press it. Perhaps the Declaration’s promise to uphold “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” persuaded him. It is proper to note, however, that these words have persuaded few Arabs.

  In his memorandum Curzon advanced a second reason for opposing the Declaration. The Jewish world population amounted to twelve million. He did not believe that tiny, arid Palestine could become the national home of even a small fraction of this number. Here he ran into a buzz saw wielded by Sir Mark Sykes. Alerted to Curzon’s opposition, Sykes prepared and caused to be circulated a powerful paper of his own. He knew Palestine better than “Alabaster,” as he called the Marquess of Keddleston, whom he happened to detest. He had seen with his own eyes Jewish colonies that made the desert bloom with flowers. With proper management Palestine eventually could accept a population five times its present size. No one need be24 dispossessed. During the War Cabinet discussion Balfour, relying on Sykes, dismissed Curzon’s warning with relative ease: “There were considerable25 differences of opinion among experts regarding the possibility of the settlement of any large population in Palestine, but he was informed that if Palestine were scientifically developed a very much larger population could be sustained than had existed during the period of Turkish rule.”

  Curzon, then, did not maintain his opposition to the Declaration, as Montagu, had he been present, undoubtedly would have done. For Montagu, the issues raised by Zionism were too profound for compromise. For Curzon, they could be subsumed by what he perceived to be larger issues. He and other cabinet ministers were increasingly worried that Germany intended to play the Zionist card herself. She would force Turkey to promise autonomy to the Jews of Palestine. That would rally world Jewish opinion to the Central Powers and alienate them from the Entente. Jewish American support for war bonds would dry up; Jewish Russian support for the moderate Kerensky government would be withdrawn; the Bolsheviks would seize power and make a separate peace. Such considerations overwhelmed Curzon’s hesitations regarding the dispossession of Arabs and the inability of Palestine to support a larger population.

  He also would have believed, as did everyone else in the room, that if Britain preempted Germany with her own Zionist declaration, then she rather than Germany would reap the benefits. Balfour put it to the War Cabinet this way: “The vast majority26 of Jews in Russia and America, as indeed all over the world, now appeared to be favorable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favorable to such an ideal we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.” Curzon “admitted the force27 of the diplomatic arguments in favor of expressing sympathy.” Some such expression, he thought, “would be a valuable adjunct to our propaganda,” not least since “the bulk of the Jews held Zionist rather than anti-Zionist opinions.”

  Implicit here is the wildly unrealistic estimate of the power and unity of “world Jewry” that we have seen such British officials as Hugh O’Bierne and Sir Mark Sykes to have displayed. Let an infamous notation, jotted down by Robert Cecil relatively early in the war on
a Foreign Office document, stand for all such miscalculations: “I do not think28 it is possible to exaggerate the international power of the Jews.” In his memorandum, and despite its title, Montagu had discounted “the anti-Semitism of the present government.” But stereotypical thinking about Jews did play a role in the War Cabinet’s decision to issue the Balfour Declaration.

  It is a further irony that British Zionists had done what they could to foster such thinking. The inimitable Harry Sacher wrote long afterward: “Many29 … have a residual belief in the power and the unity of Jewry. We suffer for it, but it is not wholly without its compensations. It is one of the imponderabilia of politics, and it plays, consciously or unconsciously, its part in the calculations and the decisions of statesmen. To exploit it delicately and deftly belongs to the art of the Jewish diplomat.” During 1917 the Zionists did just that. Starting in June 1917, they began warning that Germany was courting Jews. Usually they did not say, indeed it was better left unsaid, that if Germany won Jewish support, then the Entente would lose it—and possibly the war. British officials were capable of reaching this conclusion themselves. On one occasion, however, Weizmann went even that far. The Germans had “recently approached30 the Zionists with a view to coming to terms with them,” he warned William Ormsby-Gore on June 10. “It was really a question whether the Zionists were to realize their aims through Germany and Turkey or through Great Britain. He [Weizmann], of course, was absolutely loyal to Great Britain.” Meanwhile the British31 Jewish press had taken up the issue. Lord Rothschild repeated it to Balfour: “During the last few32 weeks the official and semi-official German newspapers have been making many statements, all to the effect that in the Peace Negotiations the Central Powers must make a condition for Palestine to be a Jewish settlement under German protection. I therefore think it important that the British declaration should forestall any such move.” Thus did the Zionists indirectly play “delicately and deftly” upon the ignorance and prejudice of British officials; thus did they employ a mirror image of the same card that Sharif Muhammad al-Faruki had played two years earlier, when he claimed that the Germans would help the Arabs if the British did not.

  It helped that the British government was receiving independent confirmation of the Zionist warnings. A Bavarian major, Franz Carl Endress, had authored a series of potent articles on the subject for the Frankfurter Zeitung. “This man displays33 a matchless eloquence in order to persuade the Jews that Germany and Turkey are disposed to support Zionism,” reported a War Office informant. Nor was Endress the only German to write such articles. The same War Office official listed more than half a dozen others. On October 8, Balfour received a warning from a British agent in Berne: “A meeting is said34 to have taken place lately at Berlin at which Herr von Kuhlmann [former German ambassador to Constantinople, now the German foreign minister], Jemal Pasha and a leading Zionist were present in order to discuss the Palestine question. Certain promises were made to the Jews in order to obtain their cooperation in the new war loan.” The same cable went on to advise that the current German ambassador to Turkey, Count von Bernstorff, had been courting Jews in Constantinople and that the German minister at Berne was in touch with prominent Jews in that city as well.

  British officials, then, could reasonably conclude that they must take preventive measures because something was definitely going on between German leaders and Jewish representatives. But they erred. Historians, recognizing the real basis of their suspicions, unanimously discount their conclusions. The Ottomans never would have allowed unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine, let alone autonomy for Jews once they had arrived there. Nor could the Germans ever have forced them to do so. British leaders overestimated German influence upon Constantinople, and Jewish influence everywhere. In this sense, the Balfour Declaration sprang from fundamental miscalculations about the power of Germany and about the power and unity of Jews.

  “It’s a boy,” Sykes reported gleefully to Weizmann, minutes after the War Cabinet sanctioned the Declaration. The ebullient British diplomat, who back in April could not sit still in the Paris hotel waiting for Nahum Sokolow to report on his meeting with the French foreign minister but had to dash into the streets to intercept him, could be excused this time for rushing from the War Cabinet meeting (he had been present) to the anxiously waiting Weizmann. And the Zionist leader, although disappointed that the Declaration did not go further, nevertheless greeted the news Sykes brought with elation. If the government of Lloyd George had not promised specific action, it had promised general support. Weizmann could reasonably assume this meant removal of Ottoman rule in Palestine, the main obstacle as Zionists perceived it.

  What would follow could not be certain, but given all the previous discussions, Weizmann was confident it would be some form of British oversight. We may be sure he felt a great weight lift from his shoulders and ecstatic happiness enter into his heart. Moments later he was speeding in a taxi to share the glad tidings with Ahad Ha’am. Another member of the Political Committee, Shmuel Tolkowsky, accompanied him. Weizmann was so filled with pleasure, Tolkowsky recorded, that he “behaved like a35 child: He embraced me for a long time, placed his head on my shoulder and pressed my hand, repeating over and over mazel tov.” That night, at his home, at an impromptu celebration, Weizmann and his wife and friends literally danced for joy.

  But here let us step back for just a moment. Finally Zionism had the backing of the British government. It had pledged its word. Chaim Weizmann never doubted that its word was good. Now think back to King Hussein the previous May. “The British Government will fulfill her word,” he had rebuked his doubting son Feisal and his aide Fuad al-Khatib on that steamy night in Jeddah, just before agreeing that France should treat the coastal portion of Syria exactly as Britain would treat Mesopotamia. In their admiration for Britain, at any rate, Weizmann and Hussein were more alike than they ever knew—and strange to say of such experienced and sophisticated men, in this one respect perhaps they were equally naïve. The remaining chapter in our history of the Balfour Declaration treats a subject of which Chaim Weizmann and Grand Sharif Hussein remained always, and blissfully, unaware.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Declaration Endangered

  AT THE END OF OCTOBER 1917 the door to a third option for the Middle East remained ajar, even as Chaim Weizmann strained every nerve to close it by dragging the War Cabinet toward Zionism, even as T. E. Lawrence and George Lloyd rode their camels north from Aqaba and the great desert raider confided his dream of an independent Arab kingdom. The war ground on, mercilessly, bloodily, with no end in sight, nor even, despite growing war-weariness in every belligerent power, the likelihood of compromise between the main antagonists.

  But many Turks continued to ponder the possibility of breaking free from Germany and negotiating a separate peace with Britain and her allies. The Ottoman leaders themselves were full of distrust for one another, Enver on one side, Talaat and Djemal on the other, intriguing constantly, and they played for high stakes, perhaps even for life itself. In autumn 1917 both Turkish camps made a move; or rather between them they made several moves, which cracked open the door a little wider to that alternative future in which the Ottomans would continue to perform a Middle Eastern role. British officials made sure that neither Weizmann nor Hussein heard anything about them.

  At this point both the partisans of Enver and the partisans of Talaat had high hopes of mounting an Ottoman counteroffensive in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, they simultaneously had a desperate foreboding that whichever side won the war, Turkey already had lost it. So independently of each other, both camps wanted to talk to Britain. They realized that the Allies intended to carve up the empire after the war, although they did not yet know the details. They certainly knew that Britain had held out promises to Jews and Arabs. They thought, however, that perhaps they could forestall some of them. What they did not realize was that important people in Britain also wanted to deal. At a time when Germany seemed as powerful and imp
regnable as ever, “we are watching1 all the time for an opportunity to detach Turkey,” wrote Lord Hardinge a few days after the War Cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration. Had they known it, Zionists might have hesitated before celebrating “the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last 1,800 years,” as Lord Rothschild would put it on December 9.

  In late 1917 Talaat’s proxies approached their British enemy on a variety of fronts. At the end of October, Charlton Giraud, a French national with extensive business interests in Smyrna, where he made his home, appeared at the British consulate in Athens. He had been dispatched2 by Rahmi Bey, the liberal Ottoman vali of Smyrna, ostensibly to discuss an exchange of interned Allied and Turkish civilians. Soon, however, it became apparent that he had a more important mission. Giraud reported to A. T. Waugh, British attaché at the Athens legation, that Rahmi Bey “would welcome3 an understanding with us … The main obstacle … is Enver, who is committed to the Germans. But for him Rahmi might be able to win over Talaat and Djemal, the only other men who count.” Rahmi Bey would not have acted without Talaat’s implicit consent. The latter was fishing: The vali of Smyrna was his rod, Giraud was his lure.

  Waugh approached the bait warily. He and a subordinate who also interviewed the Frenchman deemed Rahmi’s indirect advances “only of a kind4 which might be expected in similar circumstances from any oriental of his class, and one of the objects of which may be to gauge the Allies’ general condition from their readiness to negotiate.” Yet ultimately, despite such suspicions, they concluded, as the British ambassador to Greece, Lord Granville, put it, “this is an opportunity which might be seized.”

  Meanwhile Talaat was fishing in Switzerland. Here he dangled bait before two old hands, Dr. Parodi and Sir Horace Rumbold. This pair knew something about pourparlers with dissident Turks. In early November they happened to be helping arrange a meeting in Zurich regarding treatment and exchange of Allied and Turkish prisoners of war. Now they passed along the news that the Turks wished to take advantage of this conference on neutral ground to meet secretly with British delegates to discuss broader issues—that is, a separate peace. Rumbold also reported5 that the same Dr. Noureddin who had met with Aubrey Herbert in Interlaken the previous July had broken silence, was optimistic about “the project,” and intended to return to Switzerland soon.