This story falls apart at a touch. How could a Declaration favoring Zionism be expected to influence favorably the very people who would regard it with most distaste? Lloyd George says specifically in his Memoirs that it was hoped to secure for the Allies both the sympathy of the Jews of Russia, who “wielded considerable influence in Bolshevik circles,” and “the aid of Jewish financial interests in the United States.” But both these groups regarded Zionism with the most profound aversion. A child is not wheedled into friendliness by offers of castor oil. Lloyd George has tried to pretend that it was candy, but this is a fairy tale.* To capitalist Jews in America as to Bolshevik Jews in Russia, Zionism was undeniably castor oil, not candy. The influential American Jews who were in any position to render aid, moral, financial, or other, shared, with one or two exceptions like Justice Brandeis, the anti-Zionist attitude of their fellows in England. The British government was certainly well enough acquainted with this attitude not to be in any doubt about it. They had been dealing for quite a while already with the implacable opposition of Edwin Montagu inside the Cabinet and the public protests of prominent Jews outside in the columns of the Times. The proposed Declaration had been debated by the Cabinet comma by comma, intermittently through the whole of 1917, to the accompaniment of anti-Zionist anguish, privately pleaded and publicly voiced. It is hardly likely, under these circumstances, that the Cabinet expected to woo the “well-connected” assimilationist Jews to America or Germany or any Western country by pronouncing what these Jews regarded as a sentence of doom upon assimilation.
The Jews of Russia were another matter. The mass was certainly pro-Zionist; but unfortunately it wielded no influence whatever. On the other hand the Jews who did wield some influence in Bolshevik circles were as anti-Zionist as the capitalist Jews abroad. As Marxists who believed that Jewishness would disappear in the international brotherhood of man, they despised Zionism as the worst kind of bourgeois nationalism. The Bolsheviks were at that moment on the very brink of power and threatening to make a separate peace with Germany, but the Balfour Declaration was hardly the right thing to lure those of them who were Jews into a pro-Allied mood sufficient to keep Russia in the war.
To assume that the British government was either so naive or so uninformed as to be ignorant of the anti-Zionism of the people they were supposedly attempting to influence is impossible. Lloyd George had a hard head and Balfour a cool one. Are we to believe that they, supported by Milner, Churchill, General Smuts, and most of the imperial War Cabinet, hardly novices in political experience, would have issued the Balfour Declaration so carelessly? “Hardly any step was taken with greater deliberation,” Winston Churchill told Parliament some years later. The deliberation must have had some other objective.
Consciously or not, the objective was the British conscience, not the Jewish. As Lord Shaftesbury once wanted to restore the Jews for the sake of the Second Coming of the Christian Messiah, so now the British government repeated the experiment for the sake of imperialism’s requirement of an “effective moral attitude.”
On November 2, 1917, the foreign secretary, Mr. Balfour, made public the “following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet.” Hammered thin to a form as innocuous as possible, it read:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours 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.”
The wording had previously been communicated to and approved by President Wilson, although formal approval by joint resolution of Congress was not given until 1922, during the presidency of Harding. France and Italy adhered to the Declaration in February and May of 1918 respectively.
“Oh pray for the peace of Jerusalem” had once been Shaftesbury’s motto. The Balfour Declaration, sounding over the roar of guns, seemed like a tocsin of peace and of a better world. Quite apart from what it meant to the Jews, it seemed to lift the spirits of others, at any rate of the editorial writers and speech-makers. It was hailed as the end of “the oldest of national tragedies,” as the signal for great hopes, as the triumph of liberty, justice, and the self-determination of peoples, as the dawn of the Peace of Jerusalem for the whole world. The tyranny of the Turk would at last be crushed, Palestine would flow again with milk and honey, and, according to the Lord Mayor of Manchester, “the vision of the prophet Isaiah would be realised.”
It marked not the birth of a nation, said Lord Robert Cecil, but “the rebirth of a nation.… I believe it will have a far-flung influence on the history of the world and consequences which none can foresee on the future history of the human race.” Sykes, speaking at the same mass meeting, called by the Zionists to celebrate the Declaration, said that it opened a vision of a league of continents, of races, and of ideals. And Weizmann’s cordial desert meeting with Emir Feisal a few months later almost seemed to prove him right. For a brief time an upsurge of good will and of enthusiasm was generated.
To the Jews, or to those of them who still repeated the old prayer “Next year in Jerusalem,” the event was the first hope since the Fall of the Temple. Dr. Gaster, chief rabbi of the London Sephardic community, recalled the old legend that when the Temple was destroyed splinters from its stones entered the hearts of the Jewish people. “I feel the stone in my heart already loosening,” he said. Later, in Jerusalem, the military governor, Ronald Storrs, watching the people waiting to greet Herbert Samuel, appointed as Palestine’s first high commissioner, saw them “almost faint with happiness” and “moving as if in the glory and freshness of a dream come true.”
Almost from that moment the glory began to wear off and the process of deterioration to set in, until it reached the day thirty years later when British destroyers fired on the ship named Exodus carrying Jewish refugees to the “National Home.”
3. In the trap of history: the mandate
“The most important international obligation ever entrusted to a single nation” were the words used on one occasion by a British Labour peer, Lord Snell, to describe the Palestine Mandate. In reality the Mandate was not so much entrusted as it was seized, in a polite way, by Britain. British arms had made the conquest, and British arms were on the spot. The Mandate was no more than the inevitable recognition of an accomplished fact. But in assuming it the British committed themselves to an international obligation. They were, in fact, caught in a trap of their own setting.
The Mandate, not the Balfour Declaration, gave a footing in public law to the restoration of Israel in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was simply a statement of policy that any subsequent government could have ignored, allowed to lapse, or even repudiated. But the Mandate was an international engagement, signed and ratified by the Principal Allied Powers acting through the League of Nations, and as such it raised the Balfour Declaration, which was incorporated in it, to the status of a treaty.
When the Turks capitulated on October 30, 1918 their Asiatic dominions, so long coveted by the powers of Europe, were nine tenths in British hands. Nominally Turkey, under the terms of the armistice, left her dominions at the disposal of the Allies, but practically speaking Britain was the only ally able to pick up the pieces. The Mesopotamian campaign had brought the British beyond Bagdad as far as Ramadi, near the traditional site of the Garden of Eden. The Palestine campaign left them in control of all that had been ancient Canaan. France was on the spot with only sufficient forces to claim or hold northern Syria, where her influence had always been predominant. Russia had been removed as an imperialist rival by the revolution. Germany, the latest contender, was of course, defeated. But the British were at last where they had wanted to be—from the Nile to the Euphrates, the land where it all began, Israel’s Promised Land, t
he land that had felt the foot of every conqueror from Alexander to Napoleon, where Rome had held its sway, and then Byzantium and Islam. Now the British marched on Hadrian’s roads, and their ships were anchored at Akaba on the Red Sea, where Solomon built his navy. They were in Cairo of the Pharoahs, in Nineveh and Babylon of the Assyrian kings, and they were in Jerusalem—the Jerusalem that for nearly a thousand years had appeared on medieval maps as the center of the world.
The problem that now faced the British was what to do with the inheritance; how to hold it without seeming to; how, without surrendering control, to make good the various pledges made in the course of acquiring it, to the Jews, to the Arabs, and to the French. The Sykes-Picot treaty, under which Palestine was to be left to an international administration, was now regarded as inoperative because of the disappearance of the Russian regime that had been a party to it. Some new arrangement was required. Moreover, since Sykes-Picot days a new intruder had wrought a change in the accepted European manner of dealing out colonial conquests. These things could no longer be handled in the old way. In the unaccustomed atmosphere of the Fourteen Points, diplomats had to pick their way warily. President Wilson was very insistent about the self-determination of peoples, and the would-be Mandatory was supposed to wait to be asked for by the native inhabitants.
At the Peace Conference in Paris Britain was coy about declaring herself a candidate for the Mandate. But in their own councils the British were clear as to their own intentions. Lord Curzon, who had long made the Middle East his specialty, told the Cabinet in December 1918 that Palestine was the “strategical buffer” for Egypt and the Suez Canal. The Canal must be defended from the Palestine side. The question of who was to be the “tutelar power,” which the Cabinet was called to discuss prior to the departure of Lloyd George and Balfour for Paris, must be decided with this in mind. Only France, the United States, and Britain need be considered as possible candidates, and two of these Lord Curzon disposed of easily. France, he said, was not a serious candidate, because, “whatever may be her own feelings, nobody else wants her there.” As for the United States, “I suggest that the Americans in Palestine might be a source not of assistance but very much the reverse to ourselves in Egypt.” The answer was plain: Britain was the only possible “tutelar power,” and fortunately both the Jews and the Arabs preferred her anyway. In the ensuing discussion Lord Robert Cecil, with an inkling of the future, remarked that “whoever goes there will have a poor time” and that it might be better to let the Americans have it. But the Cabinet closed with approval of Lord Curzon’s recommendation.
At Paris there was a sea of words. The French wanted as much of Syria as they could enforce a claim to. The Americans, at least President Wilson, kept talking about self-determination. Number 12 of his Fourteen Points had said that in the disposition of the Turkish Empire the subject nationalities should be assured “an absolutely unmolested opportunity for autonomous development.” Worse, he had included in the Covenant of the League the statement that “the wishes of the communities must be the principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.” The Arabs had not yet even tasted the wine of independence, but its bouquet had gone to their heads. They wanted more and more autonomy over more and more territory every day. The Zionists wanted public assurance of their right to re-establish a Jewish nation in Palestine, and the anti-Zionists wanted everyone to forget the whole thing. The British wanted the “strategical buffer”: Mesopotamia to protect the approach to India, Palestine to protect the Suez Canal.
Delays and difficulties in reconciling the conflicting interests dragged on for a year. Sykes, who might have made a synthesis, died. Lawrence, white-clad in flowing Arab robes, who shepherded King Feisal at the Peace Conference, eventually retired from Paris in disgust. Clemenceau grimly fought a losing battle with Lloyd George. Weizmann, asked by Secretary Lansing in testimony before the Supreme Council the crucial question, exactly what was the meaning of “national home,” gave his famous reply: the opportunity to build up gradually in Palestine “a nationality which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the English nation English.”
There were public hearings in solemn and private sessions in hotel rooms. There was even an American mission to Palestine—from which the British carefully withheld recognition—to ascertain the wishes of the local inhabitants. It might all have been spared. The governing fact remained that while the diplomats disputed the British army was in possession in the field. When no official agreement could be reached after a year of talk in Paris, the existing facts took over, and it became unofficially assumed that Britain would be the Mandatory.
The business of assigning the mandates was left to the San Remo conference, which on April 25, 1920, to no one’s surprise, conferred the Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia on Britain. Palestine was a Class A Mandate: that is, one under which the territory taken in charge was held without provision for future independence. Actually, because of the postponement of a peace settlement with Turkey, due to that country’s foreign and domestic upheavals, it did not legally come into force until September 1923, after the peace treaty with Turkey had been finally signed at Lausanne. By that time the seeds of trouble had already sprouted daggers. But by that time, too, the civil administration had already been operating for three years; the Jewish Agency had been set up; a Zionist in spirit, Sir Herbert Samuel, had been appointed and was governing as the first high commissioner. It was too late to go back to an old-fashioned colonial protectorate and too early to repudiate pledges. Second thoughts had counseled the British to separate Trans-Jordania under the 1922 White Paper from the terms of the Mandate; but with that exception the Mandate was allowed to stand as drafted at San Remo and as confirmed by the League and ratified by its members in 1922.
When the Mandate became public law the British undertook an international obligation that, in terms of Realpolitik, they conferred upon themselves. Only in legal fiction was the administration of Palestine a “mandate” from the League of Nations. “The League had in fact received the mandate from the Mandatory,” a member of the Permanent Mandate Commission remarked wrily some years later. “We insisted upon having the mandate for Palestine assigned to us,” the sober voice of the Economist has stated. “We, in substance, drafted the Mandate,” one of the drafters, L. S. Amery, proclaimed.
There was, then, nothing unwitting or accidental about the obligation involved. It was self-assumed. It obligated the Mandatory explicitly, in the words of the preamble, to “be responsible for putting into effect the Declaration originally made on 2nd November, 1917 by the government of His Britannic Majesty and adopted by the said [Principal Allied] Powers in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The next paragraph acknowledged that “thereby recognition has been given” to the grounds for “reconstituting” the Jewish home in Palestine. The fourth and fifth paragraphs “selected” Britannic Majesty as the Mandatory and recorded His Britannic Majesty’s undertaking to exercise the Mandate “on behalf of the League of Nations and in conformity, with the following provisions.” These provisions, detailed in twenty-eight articles, start with the primary obligation, stated in Article 2, to “place the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”
Article 4 provides that “an appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine.” Article 6 undertakes to “facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage close settlement by Jews on the land.” Article 7 provides for the “acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews.” Thus four of the first seven articles dealt with the position of the Jews; the remaining twenty-one articles were technical. The Arabs, nowhere mentioned by name, were referred to only as “other sections of the population” or as “various peoples and communities” whose civil and religious rights and personal status were to be safeguarded. “Unque
stionably,” concluded the Peel Commission in 1937, “the primary purpose of the Mandate, as expressed in its preamble and its articles, is to promote the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”
Lord Peel perhaps put the qualifying phrase in italics to indicate that there was also an unexpressed purpose of the Mandate: the imperialist purpose of the “strategical buffer.” But in the Wilsonian era imperialist purposes were better left unmentioned. The logic of the sword had for over a hundred years been leading Britain physically to the Middle East. But for far longer than that the influence of the Bible had been at work, and it had established a pattern in which it became impossible to acquire the Holy Land simply as a “strategical buffer.” A larger purpose and a higher aim had to be served. Thus, when Palestine came within reach Britain was trapped by her own history. In spite of uncomplicated imperialist intentions of the old school, conscience complicated matters terribly. It allowed Britain to acquire Palestine only by making room for the original owners. It put her, to her dismay, in the role of accoucheur to a new state.
For, regardless of the diplomatic egg dance in which Weizmann as well as the British government carefully stepped around any mention of the word “state,” there was no question in anybody’s mind that this was what was eventually contemplated. Balfour saw it clearly and said as much to the Cabinet when the final draft of the Declaration came up for decision. In explaining the phrase “National Home” he said that it did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an “independent Jewish State,” but that this “was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.” This was what the Cabinet understood by their own act. “There could be no doubt,” the prime minister, Lloyd George, told the Peel Commission twenty years later, “as to what the Cabinet then had in mind. It was not their idea that a Jewish state should be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty.… On the other hand it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded to them and had been a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth.”
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