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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Enver had instructed Zaharoff to meet him at Lucerne during January 25–31. “Send me30 full instructions,” Zaharoff told Caillard, “about the Turks withdrawing to a certain line and our paying a certain sum, and then withdrawing to another fixed line and our again paying and finally opening the Straits.” He then headed off to Monte Carlo to recover his health, for he suffered from a debilitating skin condition.

  At 10 Downing Street on January 9 at three-thirty in the afternoon, Lloyd George’s secretary, Davies, handed to Caillard for transmission to Zaharoff the precise negotiating instructions that the arms merchant had requested. They read as follows:

  We should be31 prepared to pay the sum of ten million dollars to secure a permanent safe passage through the Dardanelles and Sea of Marmora. This would entail the evacuation of the forts and defenses in the Dardanelles and on the islands of the Sea of Marmora and their occupation by British forces. When the above is secured we will endeavor to obtain the revictualling of Constantinople from Southern Russia through the Bosphorus, which would have to be opened.

  The second paragraph remained as before.

  It is agreed32 that in the event of all Turkish troops in PALESTINE and on the HEJAZ Railway being withdrawn North of the railway line from HAIFA to DERAA a sum of $2,000,000 will be paid and the following guarantees will be given:

  The Turkish forces will not be molested while carrying out the withdrawal.

  PALESTINE will not be annexed or incorporated in the British Empire.

  A few days earlier Lloyd George had delivered a famous speech to a conference of the Labour Party in which he defined Britain’s war aims. With regard to Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, he said: “Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are in our judgment entitled to a recognition of their separate national conditions. What the exact form of that recognition … should be need not here be discussed.” Caillard flagged this immediately: “You did not mention33 that Mesopotamia, Palestine &c. would remain under the Turkish flag, although not under Turkish Administration. It would, I think, be effective if I instructed Zaharoff from you to confirm this.” Lloyd George provided the reassurances, and Caillard sent them on to Zaharoff: “Please explain34 to them [the Turks] that your previous communication concerning the retainment of their flag in those districts to be placed under the system of ‘conseils judiciaires’ (Egyptian model as a general illustration) has been confirmed … It is considered desirable you should do this, as the Chairman (consulted) agrees because that particular point about the flag was not mentioned in the Chairman’s speech.”

  This exchange is important because it shows Lloyd George yet again contradicting the Foreign Office position that Balfour had cabled to Rumbold a few weeks earlier.

  To make things as clear as possible in an extraordinarily murky situation: In late December 1917 Smuts instructed Dr. Parodi to tell Mouktar Bey, Talaat’s emissary, that part of a larger arrangement for peace between Britain and the Ottomans would include provision for Turkey to continue to fly her flag over Palestine. The Foreign Office warned against this course. Balfour sent a countermanding telegram to Rumbold also in December 1917 and reiterated its message in March 1918, and referred to it yet again in the letter to Beaverbrook in August 1918. In mid-January 1918, however, Lloyd George repeated the Smuts position to Zaharoff. He should tell Abdul Kerim and Enver Pasha that the Turkish flag could continue to fly over Palestine. As far as can be told, Balfour did not know about this. He sent no countermanding telegrams. Anyway, one doubts that a British foreign secretary can ever countermand a prime minister. Really, we have come upon a mystifying thicket of contradictory orders and instructions. One thing, however, is clear: In July 1917 Weizmann and his colleagues had judged any discussion of peace with Turkey out of bounds. Had they known that Lloyd George proposed to accept any form of Ottoman suzerainty in Palestine, they would have deemed it a gross betrayal. So would have the Arabs.

  Zaharoff embarked upon an extraordinary journey from Monte Carlo to Geneva on January 23, 1918. His skin remained bad, and a personal physician accompanied him. He rented an entire saloon car of the train for the price of twenty-four first-class tickets. Upon crossing into Italy, however, soldiers invaded the carriage, driving him and his doctor into the corridor. They stole his food and cutlery and then his money. “We were four days35 and four nights getting to the Swiss frontier, hardly any food except sometimes soldiers’ rations, no bed, no wash, etc. etc., and useless complaining to officers.” When they reached the border, Swiss authorities searched him: “(I had not a single paper with me, and had learnt my instructions from your Chairman by heart).” They forced him and the doctor to strip naked and took their clothing into another room to examine. Then they noticed Zaharoff’s skin condition. A quarantine doctor sent him to bed in a local hospital: “God, what a bed, what a place!”

  Zaharoff deduced that the Swiss border authorities had recognized his name and were stalling while awaiting instructions from their superiors. When eventually they allowed him to continue his journey, he noticed that Swiss detectives were following him.

  More extraordinary than the journey were the meetings that followed. Zaharoff arrived in Geneva on January 27, two days late. Abdul Kerim greeted him with the news that Enver was on his way from Lucerne. The three would meet next day. When Enver arrived, however, he refused to meet Zaharoff face-to-face, “claiming that all his movements were being always watched by the inquisitive Swiss; that A.K. was badly suspected of intriguing with me [Zaharoff], that the Swiss were more Niémtze (German) than the Germans.” As a result, “I did not see E. but A.K. kept going backwards and forwards as a sort of telephone.” Is it possible that either Zaharoff or Abdul Kerim lied about Enver’s presence? Probably not: Zaharoff was too experienced to be fooled by Abdul Kerim; Lloyd George was too experienced to be fooled by Zaharoff. The prime minister never renounced the arms merchant; in fact, he saw to it that he received his “chocolate” after the war. It seems that Enver had come to Geneva to speak, however indirectly, with the representative of Lloyd George.

  So: Abdul Kerim shuttled back and forth, whether between hotels or even possibly between rooms in the same hotel, we do not know. It quickly became apparent that the news he carried was disappointing for Britain. At the last moment Enver had developed cold feet. He would pay back most of his share of the bribe, five million French francs, into Zaharoff’s Paris account. When the arms dealer arrived home, he found that the payment had been made. Abdul Kerim, however, did not return his share. He feared to contradict his chief, but to Zaharoff he said “he would not part with one piaster; he had honestly done his share, and if E. was now backing out, through fear, it was not his fault.”

  Through Abdul Kerim, Enver told Zaharoff that six months earlier he and Talaat had wanted to make a separate peace with Britain, “but when Russia and Rumania began crumbling Talaat sold him—‘but that is my affair.’” Zaharoff had heard Abdul Kerim twice allude to poison in Talaat’s coffee. Here was another veiled threat. He did not believe everything the Turks told him, but “E. certainly means to do away with Talaat in some way or other.”

  All that afternoon Abdul Kerim padded back and forth between the two men. At one point he reported to Zaharoff that Enver said the war would be decided “by the Americans putting or not their whole heart in it, and quickly.” At another, through his intermediary, he lamented to Zaharoff that “if the Germans won this War Turkey would become Germany’s vassal.” At still another he promised to help the Allies by arranging “for the Turkish Armies in Palestine and on the Hejaz Railway to be withdrawn north of the Railway line from Haifa to Deraa.” This suggests that Zaharoff at least broached the terms Britain was willing to offer for a separate peace, in which case the British government really did propose a continuing Ottoman presence, with flag flying, in Palestine, nearly three months after the Balfour Declaration was made public.

  So Enver Pasha, architect of the Young Turk regime and of the disastrous Ottoman-German
wartime alliance, parleyed with Basil Zaharoff, the infamous “merchant of death.” Between them shuttled Abdul Kerim, Enver’s not-so-faithful aide—he twice that day warned Zaharoff to beware: “He [Enver] is a traitor. Do not believe him. He will sell you. For him there is nothing in this great world but himself.” The day finally ended, perhaps on this note. Zaharoff may have hoped for more clarity during a second round of discussion. But “next morning I found that E. and A.K. had taken French leave.” He caught the next train for France. “I have given my heart and soul to this scheme and its failure has quite broken me up,” he informed Caillard.

  Britain and Turkey would make no separate peace during World War I. The two countries never were in sync. When one seemed willing to make a deal, the other found reason to pull back. Abdul Kerim contacted Zaharoff again in August 1918. The arms dealer entrained for Geneva yet again. When he got there, “the time to deal had arrived,” Abdul Kerim reported Enver saying. He added: “When you meet E—you should have $25,000,000.” Zaharoff backed off. “I replied that I would do nothing of the sort, but that if a definite proposal was made, I would see what it was worth to me in dollars … A.K. said I was a fool.” Then the erstwhile intermediary went freelance. He asked what Zaharoff would pay for verbatim reports of all the Central Powers’ war councils at which Turkish delegates were present. “On my replying that such reports might be interesting, he said, ‘Man, they are worth millions, very many millions.’”

  Once perhaps they would have been, but Zaharoff’s record of this meeting reveals why that was no longer the case. “I purposely stayed with him 5 days and 4 nights so as to induce him to talk over his brandy, without my appearing to be questioning him.” Abdul Kerim described breakdown among the Central Powers. At the last war council, Austrian, Turkish, and Bulgarian delegates had criticized the Germans. Hindenburg and Luden-dorff threw the blame on each other. The Kaiser “abused his Austrian Ally with strong language.” At this same meeting “the Turkish General Izzet Pasha Schishman had spat at King Ferdinand [of Bulgaria], and if anything the Pasha was applauded.” No wonder England turned a deaf ear to Enver this time. The quarreling among her opponents reflected the fact that the tide of the war had turned finally in her favor.

  When it had flowed the other way, British attitudes had been very different. Then Lloyd George was prepared to risk much for a separate peace with Turkey, not merely many millions of dollars but Arab and Zionist goodwill as well. Jewish and Arab nationalists would have recoiled in horror at the sight of a Turkish flag flying over Syria, Mesopotamia, or Palestine, no matter that Ottomans had no administrative control. Lloyd George must have calculated that they would accept the situation in the end. He rode the Arab horse and the Zionist horse and the separate-peace-with-Turkey horse too, and those were only the horses in the southeastern stable. That the horses pulled in different directions demonstrates the extraordinary skill of the rider.

  Had Enver Pasha kept the bribe given him in December 1917 and taken Turkey out of the war, however, could Lloyd George have continued to ride the Zionists? Would we today term the Balfour Declaration a great Zionist triumph and a foundation stone of modern Israel? Or rather would we lump it among other beautiful phrases and promises made by wartime leaders intent upon persuading men to fight: “covenants openly arrived at,” “war to end war,” “no annexations or indemnities”? Not to discount the genius of Weizmann or the greatness of Balfour, but the famous declaration bearing the foreign secretary’s name seems to have just missed the side track. And the genius of Lloyd George notwithstanding, what might have happened then is anybody’s guess.

  Conclusion

  CHAPTER 26

  A Drawing Together of Threads

  “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM,” Jews avow at the conclusion of their annual Passover celebration. For nearly two thousand years the phrase could operate only as a metaphor, expressing an aspiration about Jewish collective destiny in the distant future. But after November 2, 1917, “Next year in Jerusalem” might be a practical plan of action for an individual Jew in the here and now, a genuinely possible sequence of events culminating soon in relocation to the Promised Land. On that second day in November during the third year of the most awful war in history up until then, Zionism formally gained a powerful ally. As a result, the greatest obstacles to realization of the metaphor had been, or were about to be, removed. Or at least so it seemed.

  The Balfour Declaration was the result of a process that some consider practically inevitable. Certainly it is true that conditions created by the war enabled Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues to work wonders. During 1914–17 they gained access to the elite among British Jews and converted many of them to Zionism. They defeated advocates of Jewish assimilation, such as Lucien Wolf of the Conjoint Committee, whose raison d’être, lobbying the Foreign Office on behalf of foreign Jews, especially Russian and Romanian, had been swept away by the war. They gained entrance to British governing circles and converted some of its most important members too.

  During this period Weizmann and those who worked with him acted as inspired opportunists. Finally they could argue convincingly that a community of interest linked Zionist aspirations with those of the Entente. Zionists wanted the Ottomans out of Palestine; Britain and France wanted them out of the Middle East altogether. Zionists wanted a British protectorate in Palestine; Britain did too (although initially Sir Mark Sykes had bargained it away in negotiations with Georges-Picot of France).

  More generally, Weizmann and his colleagues persuaded powerful men in Britain, France, and Italy that support of Zionism would benefit their wartime cause and the peace to follow. “International Jewry” was a powerful if subterranean force, they claimed, although this was a notable exaggeration if not an outright fantasy, whose goodwill would reap dividends for the Allies. Specifically, they suggested that Jewish finance in America, and Jewish influence upon antiwar forces in Russia, could help determine the conflict’s outcome. Weizmann warned the Foreign Office that Germany recognized the potential of Jewish power and had begun to court it already. He advised the Allies to trump their enemy by declaring outright support for Zionism. His arguments worked upon the minds of anti- and philo-Semites alike among the British governing elite, who were desperate for any advantage in the wartime struggle. Eventually, to gain Jewish backing in the war, they promised to support establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. It did them little good. Historians have discovered that in America Jewish financiers overwhelmingly favored the Allies already. In Russia the Bolsheviks seized power five days after the War Cabinet agreed to the Balfour Declaration. Lenin and Trotsky would take their country out of the war no matter what Russian Jews said.

  Meanwhile Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons were playing as expertly upon British hopes and fears as the Zionists were. Cautiously, shrewdly, bravely, they forged their own contacts: with the underground societies of Damascus already plotting to cast off the Ottoman yoke; and with representatives of the British government stationed in Cairo, whom they recognized as potential allies in their conflict with the CUP. The Damascene plotters offered Sharif Hussein leadership of their movement. The British, represented by Sir Henry McMahon, the high commissioner in Egypt, offered Hussein pledges of support if he would rebel against the Turks, and recognition of the geographical boundaries and political independence of the kingdom he would then establish. Or, at least Hussein interpreted McMahon’s famous letters this way.

  So he marshaled his forces, deployed them, and struck when he judged the moment ripe. In his own milieu Sharif Hussein was as cunning and subtle as Chaim Weizmann was in his. He had to be, for he occupied a personally dangerous position. To break with Constantinople was to risk his life and the lives of his sons and his followers. He did it anyway. His armies took Mecca, Taif, Jeddah, Wejh, and Aqaba. They besieged Medina. They arrived in Damascus almost simulataneously with the British. When they acted as guerrilla forces, they harried the Turks mercilessly, blowing up track and trestles and trai
ns, cutting telegraph lines, slaughtering the unwary. They could not defeat their enemy alone, but they contributed to Britain’s successful Middle Eastern military campaign. Hussein thought the British owed him. Men like T. E. Lawrence, who was in a position to know, thought the British owed him too.

  That was not how the British government saw it. Consider the entire business from its point of view. As soon as the Ottomans entered the war, Lord Kitchener approached Sharif Hussein because he thought Hussein had authority to counter the Ottoman caliph’s call for Muslims to wage jihad against Great Britain and her allies. Also he remembered Hussein’s prewar opposition to the CUP. Now he hoped to aim and launch him against their common foe. He offered the grand sharif inducements to act: the caliphate once the Ottomans had been defeated, pledges of material support for his rebellion, recognition of an Arab kingdom under his leadership after the war. Did British officials intentionally encourage Hussein to believe that Palestine would form part of that kingdom? The McMahon letters are too ambiguous for us to tell. Did McMahon mean for them to be ambiguous? He did. The point was to galvanize a potential ally, he explained to Lord Hardinge. Details could be worked out later.