Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  A backlog of simmering discontent with Herzl’s autocratic leadership, an old antagonism among the Russians for the too worldly, too Western figure who had become their leader, also played a part. They considered his reliance on high-level deals naive. But Herzl was not so much naive as he was in a hurry. His sense of urgency was greater than the Russians’ if less realistic. To them persecution was an old story; to Herzl, in whom normal experience was speeded up like a film run too fast, it seemed to require an immediate solution for which he felt personally responsible. Warned by frequent spells of heart trouble, he could hear death hovering at his back. This identification of the movement with himself was his greatest weakness; he was never quite sure that it would go on without him. “Don’t do anything foolish when I am dead,” he wrote suddenly in the midst of a long letter of instructions to a colleague. Two months later, in July 1904, he died at the age of forty-four.

  Actual progress to the Promised Land was to prove slower and more painful than he ever dreamed. Perhaps it was as well that leadership passed to the more patient, more practical, more level-headed Weizmann. Herzl’s restless spirit could never have supported another forty years of wandering in the wilderness. It has always seemed startling that the earlier Israelites took so long on a journey that need have been only a straight three hundred miles. When Joseph’s brethren came down to Egypt for grain they covered the same distance in a matter of months—and went back and forth several times. The Scriptural if not the historical explanation has been that the Exodus generation, unfit for the Promised Land, was forced to wander round about until a new generation grew up, ready to enter in. The old experience was to be repeated by the modern exiles.

  But Palestine was still the only Zion. The East African proposal split the Zionist movement into fractions, although, of course, the lines of division already existed. Under the blow the fractions simply came apart. The negatives, calling themselves “Zion-Zionists,” convened a secessionist conference at Kharkov. Subsequently Herzl, whose heart was in Palestine and who, in his last year, was trying again for the Turkish charter, effected a reconciliation with the negatives. As a result another faction, favoring East Africa, split off under the leadership of Israel Zangwill to form a group called the Territorialists.

  Meantime a survey of the land in East Africa disclosed many obstacles. In the area originally proposed large tracts were already under option. Protests from English colonists in Kenya began appearing in the Times. Empty land offered instead by the colonial administration of East Africa proved to be unsuited to Europeans. There were hints that the British government was none too anxious to follow through on the issue; and Herzl and the majority of the Zionist leaders were glad enough to be disembarrassed of it. For a while haphazard negotiations continued, and the offer, though never officially dropped, was allowed quietly to fade away.

  After Herzl’s death the Territorialists continued to press for it; but by that time Chamberlain, its progenitor on the English side, whose interest had been only a passing one, had left the government. He resigned at the end of 1903, the better to carry his protective tariff to the public without wrecking the party. Never deeply concerned anyway, he did not make much difference to the fate of the East African scheme by his departure. In not being Palestine it had been born with a congenital deformity, and of this it died.

  *Dr. Jameson’s raid on the Transvaal in 1895, planned with the knowledge of Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colonv, precipitated the Boer War and was widely believed to have had the secret blessing of the Colonial Secretary.

  *See below, pages 346–347 for Balfour’s and Lloyd George’s explanation of what they meant by the phrase “National Home.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  CULMINATION:

  The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate

  1. Mr. Balfour and Doctor Weizmann

  Palestine’s fatal geography made it inevitable that Britain would take it over when the Turkish Empire should break up. The unrolling of history from the time when British gunboats shelled Napoleon out of Syria to the time when Lord Salisbury posed the alternative of “taking the country for ourselves” was leading, as we have seen, directly to this conclusion. But that Britain should at the same time reopen the old land to settlement by its ancient proprietors added a new twist to the usual method of annexation.

  The ground had been laid in Balfour’s mind a decade before the Declaration when, as prime minister, his curiosity was piqued by the Zionists’ rejection of Chamberlain’s offer of East Africa. His curiosity led him to a fateful meeting with Weizmann and to an understanding of Palestine irredentism. In the intervening years before the war there was stirring and developing in his mind a desire to see England “do something” about the Jews.

  Cynical is a word used of Mr. Balfour by people who knew him almost as often as they try to describe his charm, which left everyone feeling happy who talked with him. He had a profound and philosophic mind, he was lazy, imperturbable in any fracas, shunned detail, left facts to subordinates, played tennis whenever possible, but pursued his principles of statecraft with every art of politics under the command of a superb intelligence. As one who belonged among the rulers by birth, owned an independent income and remained a bachelor, he was detached from the scramble of ordinary life. The aloofness together with the impression of his physical height made him seem a lofty being. “He was quite fearless,” says Churchill. “When they took him to the Front to see the war he admired the bursting shells blandly through his pince-nez.” He adds, “There was, in fact, no way of getting at him.”

  But the problem of the Jews did in fact get at him.

  In Balfour the motive was Biblical rather than imperial. If the Biblical culture of England can be said to have any meaning in England’s redemption of Palestine from the rule of Islam, it may be epitomized in Balfour. Though he was the reverse of Shaftesbury, not ardent but a skeptic, not a religious enthusiast but a philosophical pessimist, he was nevertheless strongly infused, like the Evangelicals and the Puritans, with the Hebraism of the Bible. Long before he ever heard of Zionism Balfour, steeped in the Bible from childhood, had felt a particular interest in the “people of the Book.” According to his niece, companion, and biographer, Mrs. Dugdale, it was a “life long” interest that “originated in the Old Testament training of his mother and in his Scottish upbringing. As he grew up his intellectual admiration and sympathy for certain aspects of Jewish philosophy and culture grew also and the problem of the Jew in the modern world seemed to him of immense importance. He always talked eagerly on this and I remember in childhood imbibing from him the idea that Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid.”

  In 1895 a visitor to the Balfour home at Whittingame, Lady Constance Battersea, a Rothschild by birth, records that after dinner they “talked a great deal about the Jews, alien immigration, synagogues, chorus, churches.” Echoing the usual paeans of Balfour’s lady admirers, she confides her zest at being under the same roof with “the most delightful of men … lovable, distinguished, broad, refined—oh dear, what a gulf between him and most men,” and adds that he read a chapter from Isaiah “beautifully and reverently.”

  The mention of Isaiah is interesting. Nowhere else does the eternal longing for Palestine ring with such sound of bronze as in Isaiah. The cool, aloof Balfour was anything but an Old Testament character himself. But of all the Englishmen who at one time or another helped along the Return he was possibly the only one interested in it from the point of view of the Jews. To him they were neither tools of the Christian millennium nor agents of a business imperialism, but simply exiles who should be given back, in payment of Christianity’s “immeasurable debt,” their homeland. Not just any land, but the old land. Why Palestine? “The answer is,” he wrote, “that the position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are inter-related as they are inter-related in the case of no other religion and no other country on earth.” />
  Mr. Balfour was not, of course, the only begetter of the Declaration which, as foreign secretary, he was to sign. Indeed, according to whose memoirs one reads, one can come away with the impression that Lloyd George was finally responsible; or, no, that Sir Herbert Samuel really persuaded the Cabinet; or, wait a moment, that of course Dr. Weizmann pulled all the wires behind the scenes. Mr. Balfour left no memoirs and made no claims, but it was not an accident of office that the Declaration bears his name.

  It began in 1906 when the Conservative government of which Balfour was prime minister was defeated in Parliament and called a general election. In the course of contesting his seat at Manchester Balfour was brought together by his political agent, a Mr. Dreyfus, with a young scientist and ardent Zionist who was one day to be the first president of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, then an instructor in chemistry at Victoria University in Manchester, was in those days emerging as Herzl’s successor in the leadership of the Zionist movement. He was thirty-two and had been less than two years in England, but he had been a worker in the Zionist cause since boyhood days in the Russian Pale, when he distributed leaflets and collected kopecks for the Chovevé Zion societies. Collection time came traditionally at the Feast of Purim in March, when the thaws filled the streets of Pinsk with mud and slush, and the boy in a brother’s handed-down overcoat, tramping from door to door, found these earliest steps toward Palestine cold and uncomfortable. Later, as a delegate to the Zionist Congress, when the Uganda issue came up he stood firm for Palestine first, last, and always. To an Englishman many years later he posed the question, apropos of the rejection of Uganda: Would the English, if exiled for centuries, accept as a substitute permission to return to Calais? He could be, acknowledged this man (Sir Ronald Storrs, the governor of Jerusalem), “almost frighteningly convincing.”

  Weizmann’s was the voice of Eastern Jewry, not the cultivated, cosmopolitan voice of Herzl or of the moneyed and influential Western Jew who had hitherto conducted the contacts with Western statesmen. Curiously, it was Balfour who sought the interview, out of an intellectual curiosity to understand what had motivated the rejection of the East African offer. Beneath more pressing issues the question had remained gnawingly unanswered in the back of his mind. Such Jews as he knew personally, of the assimilated Reform group, who shied violently at the very mention of Palestine, would not, if they could, explain the passion and the agony of spirit stirred up by the Uganda affair. Dreyfus, whom he questioned about it, offered to bring along his young friend from the University as a specimen of the “other Jew” and a possible source of enlightenment. It was characteristic of Balfour, as well as illustrative of his unique relation to the Palestine problem, that he alone came to it, not with ulterior designs to promote, but rather in the spirit of inquiry. One can hardly imagine any other figure who, as a freshly deposed prime minister in the midst of a slam-bang political campaign, would concern himself with a matter irrelevant to votes or to immediate political issues.

  Yet, as these things sometimes happen, the meeting proved historic. In it the Exile and the Intermediary Power met and briefly joined in a sort of chemical reaction. Neither expected much of the interview. Balfour, at his election headquarters in a Manchester hotel, had set aside fifteen minutes for his visitor. He stayed to listen for over an hour. Weizmann, for his part understandably nervous at the prospect of explaining to the renowned statesman in his shaky English all the history and hopes, the divisions and cross-currents of his people in fifteen minutes, hardly hoped to accomplish anything. Balfour, long legs stretched out in the languid Treasury Bench pose that the cartoons had made famous, asked why the Zionists were so bitterly opposed to the Uganda offer. The British government, he said, was really anxious to do something to relieve the misery of the Jews; and the problem was a practical one, calling for a practical approach.

  In reply, Weizmann recalls, “I plunged into a long harangue on the meaning of the Zionist movement … that nothing but a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms could keep the movement alive and that this conviction had to be based on Palestine and Palestine alone. Any deflection from Palestine was—well, a form of idolatry. I added that if Moses had come into the 6th Zionist Congress when it was adopting the resolution in favor of the Commission for Uganda, he would surely have broken the tablets once again.…

  “I was sweating blood and trying to find some less ponderous way of expressing myself.… Suddenly I said: ‘Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’

  “He sat up, looked at me and answered: ‘But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London.’

  “ ‘That is true,’ I said. ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’

  “He leaned back and continued to stare at me.… I did not see him again till 1914.”

  Weizmann’s emphasis on Palestine as the center of a faith, his curiously just phrase that a swerving away from it was a form of idolatry, would have bored or bewildered Joe Chamberlain, but it was exactly right for Balfour. “Balfour told me often,” writes Mrs. Dugdale, “about the impression the conversation made on him” and how from that time he understood that the Jewish form of patriotism would never be satisfied with anything less than Palestine.

  Balfour understood Weizmann. Later, during the war years, the acquaintance was renewed and became intimate. “A statesman with his heart in science,” said Storrs, “would take refuge from party routine with a scientist whose soul was in politics and the first seeds of sympathy were sown.” At the end when Balfour lay dying, Weizmann was the only friend outside his family circle admitted to see him. “No words passed between them for Balfour was very weak and Dr. Weizmann much overcome.” Balfour moved his hand and touched the bowed head of his visitor. In the silence of the room the bond between them could be felt.

  Because Weizmann represented the unassimilated Jews who accounted for the bulk of the Zionists, he personified their cause in Balfour’s eyes. Never excitable, never extravagant like Herzl, Weizmann was suave, immensely intelligent, and a shrewd negotiator, a “minimalist” who scaled his demands to what was practically obtainable. He was the possessor, too, of a charm as magnetic as Balfour’s own. His personality, one suspects, caused Balfour rather to romanticize the movement. “As guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition” the Zionists were, Balfour decided, “a great conservative force in world politics.”

  Immediately following the fateful meeting of the two personalities at Manchester in 1906 Balfour’s party lost the general election, and Balfour was freed from the duties of public office. He turned “with the ardor he reserved for his speculative moments” (to quote Mrs. Dugdale) to the new subject that had caught his interest.

  Here, he saw, was an opportunity not only of bringing the Holy Land back to life out of the desolation of Moslem rule, but also of “doing something material to wash out an ancient stain upon our own civilization.” The phrase is his own, from a critical speech in the House of Lords in 1922, when a well-supported motion to reject the Mandate was under debate. Rising to oppose the motion, Balfour on that occasion produced the one serious defense that he ever attempted of the policy in Palestine that bore his name. He would be unfair to himself, he said at the end, if he sat down “without insisting to the utmost of my ability” that there was a great ideal involved in Britain’s sponsorship of the Jews’ return to their homeland. “This is the ideal which chiefly moves me … that Christendom is not oblivious to their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them the opportunity of developing in peace and quietness under British rule, those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries which know not their language and belong not to their race.”

  Back in the early days of his study of Zionism Balfour was faced with the antipathy of the Jews of his own acquaintance, who were, almost to a man, frigidly anti-Zionist. Never himse
lf having felt insecure, never having known any challenge or possibility of challenge to his own social position, Balfour was unable to understand what upset them so. He questioned Lady Constance, who was visiting Whittingame again in 1911. “A. J. B. is hugely interested in all Jewish questions,” she wrote to her sister. “He asked a great deal about Claude [Montefiore; the intellectual leader of the assimilationist group in London]—his books, his attitude, his influence. He wanted me to tell him how C. stood with the Community and how his writings affected the Jewish question.” Regrettably, Lady Constance adds, A. J. B. “gets a good deal of information from Natty, naturally very one-sided.” The reference is to her cousin Nathaniel, first Lord Rothschild, who, since his contact with Herzl, had become too favorable to the cause, at least in the opinion of the lesser, or intermarrying, Rothschilds. Natty’s son was later to be the recipient of the Balfour Declaration, which was issued in the form of a “letter to Lord Rothschild.” But most of the English Jews shared the attitude implicit in Lady Constance’s Reminiscences as well as in another book of memoirs about her family, both published after the event, which, despite their frequent mention of Balfour himself, pass over the Balfour Declaration in tight-lipped silence.

  This attitude was to leave its mark on history when its bitter-end spokesman, Mr. Edwin Montagu, was able, from his post in the War Cabinet, not to stop the Declaration altogether, but at least so to blur its wording as to leave unclear and forever controversial exactly what its drafters had in mind. The fatal results of this evasion will appear later. The rationale of the anti-Zionists’ position is not our subject, and any attempt to elucidate it stirs such vast muddy waters as to make the attempt unwise, short of a volume. If mistaken, it was at least understandable, though it puzzled Balfour. He felt that the assimilationists’ fears that a return to Palestine would “adversely affect their position in the country of their adoption” were groundless. On the contrary, he said, “ancient antipathies” would be lessened only by giving the Jews “that which all other nations possess: a local habitation and a national home.”