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

by Jonathan Schneer

  During the second and third weeks of November 1917, Lloyd George’s War Cabinet engaged in serious deliberations about these signals emanating from Turkey. Balfour argued that Rahmi Bey’s twitch6 upon the line merely indicated how Turkey would approach Britain when circumstances finally compelled her to do so. He advised that Britain not bite. Alfred Milner disagreed: “The time has come7 when we must rely upon diplomacy as well as upon arms in order to detach Turkey … There is a growing party in Turkey which is very anxious for peace … notably Talaat and Djemal.” Then came word via Switzerland of the additional approaches; this tipped the balance. The War Cabinet began discussing specifically what terms to offer the Ottomans. Recall Dr. Weizmann’s reaction when he learned of J. R. Pilling’s trip to Switzerland to speak with Turks about a compromise peace. Recall his fury when he heard of Aubrey Herbert’s similar mission and how decisively he responded to Henry Morgenthau’s intended journey. It is safe to bet that five months later, had he known the War Cabinet was debating Talaat’s overtures, he would have reacted with comparable outrage. Such knowledge probably would have stopped Zionists celebrating the Balfour Declaration in their tracks.

  The War Cabinet attempted to define its negotiating position. Ministers agreed that Britain and her allies must have permanent free passage through the Dardanelles Strait into the Sea of Marmara and thence into the Black Sea. In return Turkey should receive financial aid and protection from Germany if necessary; also that the state of Turkey itself should not be dismembered and should be allowed to keep Constantinople as its capital. (Russia had renounced her claim to that city after the February Revolution.) What to do about the rest of the Ottoman Empire proved a much more difficult subject.

  Milner had supported Zionism in the War Cabinet and was an architect of the Balfour Declaration. Nevertheless, two weeks later, when he learned of Rahmi Bey’s approach, he argued that Britain should persuade the Ottomans they “could now get out of the war … without the loss of what still remains to them of Europe and of Asia Minor.” What did this mean for Palestine? Milner explained further during ensuing War Cabinet discussions. France and Italy would have to relinquish their territorial ambitions in the Middle East, at least partially. Britain could concede titular power over some of the lands occupied by her troops. The Turkish flag could be allowed to fly over Mesopotamia, over Syria—over Palestine!

  Lord Curzon responded furiously: “I ask how far8 our own pledges and commitments will enable us to make any concession, even that of a purely ostensible or nominal sovereignty, to the Turks in respect of the Asiatic possessions which we have in part or in whole lopped off from her. Almost in the same week that we have pledged ourselves, if successful, to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?”

  Mark Sykes, likewise outraged, weighed in with yet another powerfully argued paper prepared at the request of War Cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey. “We are pledged9 to Zionism, Armenian liberation, and Arabian independence,” he wrote. These should be Britain’s “only desiderata.” As for the question of the flag, “it is impossible to ask Armenians and the King of Hejaz to accept Turkish suzerainty, symbolized by a flag which connotes the old doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.” He did not mention the Zionists, but surely the Ottoman flag offended them too. Sykes concluded: “This is not palatable reading for those who desire easy and swift things.”

  Perhaps it was not, yet Milner digested it and prevailed. The War Cabinet arranged for A. T. Waugh and another intelligence officer, C. E. Heathcote-Smith, who had known Rahmi Bey before the war, to sound out the vali of Smyrna. They could meet with him ostensibly to discuss an exchange of interned civilians. The War Cabinet also empowered a British delegate to the Zurich conference on prisoners of war to speak about a separate peace with Turkish representatives there. Ironically they chose the man whom Marmaduke Pickthall had first approached at the Foreign Office back in 1916, Thomas Legh (the second Baron Newton), a Conservative MP and an assistant under secretary of state for foreign affairs. Unlike Waugh10 and Heathcote-Smith, who were instructed merely to get Rahmi Bey talking, Lord Newton was told that while he must not initiate discussions about peace, he could outline what he understood the British position would be if formal talks took place. This included the Ottoman flag over Palestine.

  Then everything changed. At a meeting on December 2, the date on which Zionists celebrated the Balfour Declaration in London at the Opera House, Rahmi Bey explained that earth-shaking news had just arrived from the Eastern Front, news that significantly reduced his country’s interest in a separate peace. “This is the most favorable11 moment of the war for Turkey,” Heathcote-Smith reported Rahmi Bey as saying, although “I got the impression that it was Talaat rather than Rahmi who was talking.” The vali continued: “We had only one real enemy and this was Russia. Russia today is offering an armistice and peace on the basis of the freedom of nationalities.” German military might had prevailed in the East after all. It could save the Ottoman Empire yet. Why then discuss a separate peace with Great Britain? Turkish interest in that subject would revive only if she again feared imminent defeat. In the meantime Rahmi Bey was happy to leave open the channel of communication.

  Discussions in Switzerland developed along different lines from those in Greece because they began later in December and took place over a more protracted period of time. By then Britain had recouped the loss of Russia, to a certain extent, with victories in Palestine, culminating for the moment in Allenby’s entrance into Jerusalem on December 11. Zionists cheered these victories, not realizing that they revived to a degree Turkish interest in reaching a settlement.

  In Switzerland, Newton made contact, through Sir Horace Rumbold, with two Turks already stationed there. Rumbold thought little of them. The first belonged to the Ottoman legation but “the fact that he is12 known to be Anglophil would probably cause any communications made by him through his Minister to the Turkish Government to be discounted.” The second, whose brother was the wakil, or general factotum, of a former grand vizier, suffered from the same lack of credibility. He received his Egyptian pension from British officials in Berne. Nevertheless one or the other or possibly a third Turk altogether (for no name is mentioned) had expressed a “strong desire” to meet the British emissary when he should arrive. Lord Newton agreed to a conference. There he followed instructions, stating only what he thought British policy toward Turkey would be. In reply the “Agent, who is believed13 to be in the confidence of Talaat, stated that large section of Turks would recommend anything which would free them from Enver and German domination … He is considering advisability of proceeding to Turkey and personally communicating our views to Talaat.”

  Newton also made contact with a Turkish delegate to the conference on prisoners of war, Mouktar Bey, former Ottoman ambassador to Berlin, who was, according to Rumbold, “the only important Turk from our point of view.” What then transpired cannot quite be pieced together. Mouktar Bey had reason to be cautious. Of the five Ottoman delegates to the conference, three had been chosen by Talaat, two by Enver: “Needless to say, they watched each other very carefully.” Mouktar quickly realized that a German and a Turkish spy were tracking him. The German had booked a room next to his at the hotel in Zurich. Nevertheless he managed to get a telegram to Talaat. He reported that “Lord Newton had given [me] to understand that England would be quite ready to come to an arrangement with Turkey if the latter would embark on pourparlers for a separate peace.” How do we know this? “We get all the details about Mouktar’s proceedings from his friend Hakki Halid Bey,” Rumbold reported smugly to Lord Balfour.

  Lord Newton, however,14 denied he had made any such declaration to the Turk. Perhaps then Mouktar was making it up in order to impress his master. Or conceivably he was reporting his interpretation of something said to him by Dr. Parodi, for we know that they talked too. At any rate, and despite the waxing and waning and perh
aps waxing again of Turkey’s interest in a separate peace, British interest remained strong. Not surprisingly, the next move appears to have come from her.

  For some months the War Cabinet had been contemplating trying to detach Austria too from the Central Powers. Just as it had been receiving feelers from Talaat, it had been receiving them from Count Albert von Mensdorff, Austria’s prewar ambassador in London. Amazingly, Horace15 Rumbold relayed these overtures too; really, he did occupy the center of the spider’s web. And just as the War Cabinet debated how to respond to the Turks, so it considered what to do about Austria. In mid-December, at the same time as Lord Newton was conducting his negotiations with Mouktar Bey, the South African Jan Smuts, who was the War Cabinet’s newest addition, made a secret journey to Geneva to talk matters over with the count, who likewise traveled there incognito. Their discussions proved unproductive. Mensdorff aimed at a general peace; Smuts aimed at separating Austria from Germany. But while in Switzerland Smuts and a second Briton, Phillip Kerr, private secretary to Lloyd George and a future British ambassador to Washington, spoke with Turks too.

  Again we cannot be precise about what was said or even to whom, but we do know that afterward Kerr and Rumbold arranged for Dr. Parodi to “cause a communication in the following sense to be made unofficially and verbally to Mouktar Bey.” Then they laid out the terms we have seen Milner outline in mid-November at the War Cabinet, except apparently in one respect. Kerr first submitted the instructions for Parodi to his superior, Smuts. The latter made a single alteration: “to include Palestine16 in the area over which the Allies might be willing to allow the Turkish flag to fly.” So he was a Milnerite too. Like Milner, he had supported authorization of the Balfour Declaration the previous month. The Zionists thought him a strong supporter.

  Two days before Smuts amended Kerr’s instructions for Parodi, Foreign Office mandarins debated how far British agents might go to reassure Turks, and specifically what should be said regarding the Turkish flag in Palestine. They must have had before them the memorandum in which Milner first argued for the separate peace. “I trust that17 the language regarding Palestine may be modified,” Sir Ronald Graham urged. “To agree to any form of Turkish suzerainty over Palestine would be regarded by the Zionist Jews as a complete betrayal and alienate all their sympathies from us. Dr. Weizmann, for instance, would drop the whole scheme at once.” Lord Hardinge, who was prepared to revise Sykes-Picot, as we have seen, nevertheless found Graham’s warning persuasive. “I doubt the wisdom of saying so much to Mouktar Bey,” he cautioned Balfour. The foreign secretary concurred too as he made clear in a cable to Rumbold.

  In other words, the War Cabinet and the Foreign Office came to contradictory conclusions on this crucial matter. Moreover apparently they gave out contradictory instructions. On March 21, 1918, while Parodi remained engaged in talks with Mouktar Bey, Rumbold received a wire from Balfour18 drawing attention to a telegram he had “sent at the end19 of December”—obviously the one referred to above—“in which the Foreign Office state that His Majesty’s Government could not grant the Turkish flag in Palestine.” Likely Balfour sent this reminder because he wanted to change the instructions Smuts and Kerr had issued a few months earlier. Possibly confirming this, in August 1918, in a letter to the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, who was serving as the government’s minister of information, Balfour explained the instructions “we” had given to Lord Newton and to Rumbold and Dr. Parodi the previous winter. “We thought20 it of great importance that the Turkish flag should not be flown in either Palestine or Syria.” Who “we” refers to must remain ambiguous, but clearly it did not mean Milner or Smuts or perhaps even the War Cabinet. It may have meant the Foreign Office. What view Prime Minister Lloyd George took of this apparent disagreement, we will discover in our next section.

  But first: Mouktar and Parodi continued their clandestine meetings. Britain continued to take them seriously. On February 6, 1918, before Balfour reminded Rumbold of the Foreign Office position with regard to Palestine and the Turkish flag, he telegrammed Parodi to inform Mouktar that if Talaat sent a Turkish representative to discuss peace terms, “my Government will21 be ready to send negotiators of equal authority to meet him.” Whether in these prospective negotiations Britain would have promised to let Turkey fly her flag over Palestine remains a moot point. Mouktar Bey returned to Constantinople at the end of March. Neither Rumbold nor Parodi heard from him again. Perhaps Talaat Pasha had concluded that a separate peace with Britain was not in Turkey’s interest after all.

  But Turkey’s most serious effort to reach an understanding with Great Britain at this point in the war had not come from Talaat Pasha anyway. It had come from Enver.

  “Abdul Kerim will22 arrive [in Geneva] next week and I will be there to meet him,” Basil Zaharoff wrote to Sir Vincent Caillard on November 18, 1917. This latest approach from the emissary of Enver Pasha did not take the arms dealer by surprise. Only two days23 previously he had returned to Paris from London, where he had spent more than a month at the request of Lloyd George. The two men met24 for breakfast shortly after November 6. (The precise date cannot be ascertained.) Still, some time before Rahmi Bey sent Charlton Giraud to Athens and Mouktar Bey to Switzerland, the prime minister predicted to Zaharoff that a new overture from Enver would also be forthcoming.

  Zaharoff had kept two million American dollars of Britain’s money in one of his bank accounts. Lloyd George instructed him to pay it next time he saw Abdul Kerim. Risking this relatively small amount as an earnest of Britain’s good intentions would be worth it, said the prime minister. He also outlined what Britain’s attitude should be toward the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern possessions. Anticipating Milner’s position at the War Cabinet, he envisioned “Egyptian conditions”25 for most of them. It will be recalled that until 1914 Egypt remained nominally under Turkish rule, although in fact Britain exercised there what historians have called a “veiled protectorate.” Up until the war, then, the Turkish flag continued to fly in Egypt. Lloyd George saw “no difficulty” in allowing it to go on flying if that would ease Turkey toward a separate peace. This would have been about a week after publication of the Balfour Declaration.

  Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader and chancellor of the exchequer, knew what Lloyd George contemplated. As chancellor he would be responsible for arranging the much larger payment to Enver, $10 million, that Abdul Kerim had mentioned to Zaharoff the previous July. There is no evidence that anyone else in the War Cabinet discussed or even knew about it. On the British side the only men involved, so far as the evidence shows, were the prime minister and chancellor, the prime minister’s principal private secretary J. T. Davies, the intelligence officer Brewis, and Caillard and Zaharoff.

  Zaharoff set out to meet Abdul Kerim. The two men arrived in Geneva almost simultaneously on about November 20. It quickly became apparent that the Turk was fishing, not prepared to negotiate serious matters, for with much regret and “using a very coarse26 expression,” he turned down the bribe that Zaharoff immediately offered. He could not accept it, he explained, because Enver had told him not to without consulting him first. So now he did. “The moment he gets a reply he will communicate with me,” reported the arms merchant in a letter to Caillard, “and I will pay into the Banque Suisse et Française and then your people will have to consult the experts as to the Turkish lines to be withdrawn so that I can meet Enver with a program.” Zaharoff returned to Paris and discovered the prime minister was in the city attending an Allied council. “I have just sat with your Chairman at breakfast for half an hour. Lloyd George ‘took written notes of my statement on which he paid me a great compliment … He is a lovely chappie.’”

  The expected summons from Abdul Kerim to another meeting arrived less than a week later. Zaharoff needed to know what would be Britain’s negotiating position with regard to Constantinople, Armenia, and the Middle East, including Palestine, now that Russia was out of the war. “No time should be lost i
n seeing the Chairman” to ascertain the position, he exhorted Caillard. But he was not in too much of a hurry to remind his friend that he still wanted “chocolate,” as he called it—that is to say, an English title. “If the previous27 Chairman’s letter to me about ‘critical time’ and my present work merit recognition, I shall be proud, very proud.”

  Lloyd George lay sick in bed with influenza. He could not see Caillard but wrote out for him directions for Zaharoff. They contained no reference to “chocolate,” and they represented the prime minister’s “‘personal opinion’”28 only, Caillard warned, “the special board [War Cabinet] not having been consulted … (but you know the weight the Chairman carries with his Board).” Pace Curzon, Sykes, Balfour, and the Foreign Office, the instructions regarding Palestine remained unchanged: “Mesopotamia and Palestine must be run on Egyptian lines; the flag, you observe, remains untouched.” This does seem to indicate again that 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office took opposite positions on the issue that Zionists would have found critical.

  Zaharoff embarked upon his journeys once more. When he met Abdul Kerim in Switzerland for the fourth time on Wednesday, December 12, “I did not go one29 iota from your letter. He took notes as I repeated item per item.” The Turk reported what was obvious already, that Enver was willing to talk and would accept the bribe. So this time Zaharoff really did pay into the Crédit Suisse et Française $500,000 for the envoy and $1,500,000 for his chief. The two men went to dinner. Imagine a first-class hotel dining room in neutral Switzerland at the height of World War I: bone china, silver cutlery, crystal goblets and snifters, dinner jackets, the hum of conversation in a variety of languages. Zaharoff made sure that the champagne and brandy flowed copiously. In this incongruous setting Abdul Kerim described conditions in Turkey and relations among the leaders of the Central Powers. He let his tongue wag. Enver and Talaat were at daggers drawn, he said, siding with his own boss and again introducing the possibility of poison: “I myself will give Talaat his coffee.” He was drunk and under tremendous pressure. He let his ugly side show. “He [Abdul Kerim] only had to lift a finger and I [Zaharoff] would be arrested as a spy conspiring in a neutral country against friendly belligerents at the instigation of the Allies,” Zaharoff reports him saying. “I laughed it out [but] it makes me think.”