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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  That much Balfour accomplished, and he rated it above all else in the fifty-year career that had taken him to the pinnacle of government. “Near the end of his days,” reports Mrs. Dugdale, “he said to me that on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.” The burden of the past must have weighed heavily in Balfour’s estimate. There was more to it than the satisfaction of righting an old wrong. He felt (one can only suppose) that a special dignity attached to this one act out of all his life’s work, when for a moment he had walked in the footsteps of the ancestral heroes of the Old Testament.

  2. The Balfour Declaration: acetone or conscience?

  The popular legend that England’s promise of a “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine, as incorporated in the Balfour Declaration, was a reward to Dr. Weizmann for his solution of the acetone shortage is attractively simple but totally inadequate. Responsibility for it rests with Lloyd George, whose War Memoirs record how he proposed to recommend Dr. Weizmann for some honor, how Weizmann demurred, how Lloyd George asked: “Is there nothing we can do as recognition of your valuable assistance to the country?” and how Weizmann answered: “Yes, I would like you to do something for my people.” This, remarks Lloyd George with a flourish, was the “fount and origin” of the Balfour Declaration.

  No doubt the conversation took place, but the “fount and origin” was not in this chivalric episode, but in the hard facts of the war in the Middle East.

  The world had gone to war in August 1914. Last-ditch English diplomacy tried hard to secure Turkish neutrality, but the Turks openly joined the Central Powers late in October, having in fact been in secret alliance with Germany for some months. The break was finally made; Lord Salisbury’s harsh judgment of long ago—“we put our money on the wrong horse”—was proved only too true; the wrong horse was now racing in German silks. The Allies, England, France, and Russia declared war on Turkey, November 2–5, England incidentally allowing herself the small comfort of annexing Cyprus. Two weeks later English forces from India took Basra on the Persian Gulf and began the advance toward Bagdad in a general movement to close in on the Turks from the East.

  The crucial point, however, was of course the Suez Canal, the hinge on which hung the British Empire. Reinforcements were hurriedly sent out just in time to meet the Turkish troops who had crossed the Sinai Peninsula and launched their attack on the Canal in February 1915. Though thrown back, they remained a threat that was to make the Middle East a major theater of war from then on. The strategy enthusiastically urged by Winston Churchill, seconded by Kitchener and Lloyd George, focused on the Middle East as the major theater of English effort, especially in view of the deadlock on the Western front. The Dardanelles campaign was a famous failure. It did not succeed in taking Constantinople or bringing assistance to Russia by the back door. But the land campaigns in Mesopotamia and later in Palestine eventually, after four years of sieges, attacks, and stalled operations, rolled the Turks back, out of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, back into Turkey proper. On the Mesopotamian front the British succeeded in taking Bagdad in March 1917, but their advance up the Tigris and Euphrates was halted when their Russian allies, supposed to be flanking the Turks from the north, melted away after the Revolution. Meanwhile the other movement, based on Egypt, began the advance into Syria in December 1916. The British after laying a railroad and a pipeline across the Sinai desert, took El Arish and crossed into Palestine. At Gaza on the border, where the Turks had been reinforced by German troops, the British twice met defeat, but at last, after a six months stalemate and a regrouping under a new commander, General Allenby, they took the town of Samson’s tragic triumph. Jaffa, where Richard forced the beachhead long ago, was taken next, then Jerusalem in December 1917, and ultimately Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo, until all of Syria was in Allied hands.

  Behind and between these military campaigns were carried on some of the war’s most complicated, entangled, and mutually conflicting diplomatic maneuvers, of the kind that so disgusted President Wilson with secret covenants secretly arrived at.

  This was the moment for which the eagles had gathered. The Turkish carcass was about to be distributed. Russia, France, and England each had claims; and meanwhile two new parties had entered the picture: the Jews and the Arabs, with ambitions of their own that were being simultaneously encouraged by Britain for various strategic reasons. Everybody was negotiating with somebody, and nobody held all the strings in any one hand at any one time. The Foreign Office was negotiating with France and Russia. The War Office was negotiating with the Arabs, sometimes with one set, sometimes with another, sometimes through the Arab Bureau at Cairo, sometimes through Colonel Lawrence in the field. The Zionists were negotiating with various Cabinet members in London. A crisscross of secret treaties, pledges, promises, and “understandings” were made which have never since been satisfactorily untangled. It would be foolish as well as futile to attempt to extract a basic British policy out of this mess. There was no single clear policy except to win the war and to emerge from it as firmly intrenched in the Middle East as possible. This was the goal that the British were pursuing by whatever pragmatic means seemed necessary at the moment or seemed advisable to a particular negotiator in his particular task.

  One of the wordiest quarrels of our time—and one of the saddest—has been the result. Endless disputation by opposing groups among the British, by Arabs and Zionists and anti-Zionists, by White Papers, by the Permanent Mandates Commission, by some seventeen Commissions of Inquiry; hours, even weeks, of Parliamentary debate, countless books, columns in the press, reports, mass meetings, legal briefs, have all quite failed to pin down for history exactly what the British intended the future fate of Palestine to be. The fact is they hardly knew themselves. They certainly intended that Palestine should come under British control and that France should be kept out. But as to what form that control should take they were never too specific. They rather hoped that time would work it out. Meanwhile the various negotiators each followed his own bent. What Colonel Lawrence intended was rather more sweeping than what his chief at the Arab Bureau, Sir Henry MacMahon, intended; what Sir Mark Sykes intended was never entirely clear to anybody for long and tended to veer according to whether he was dealing with the French, the Arabs, or the Zionists; nor are we quite sure that what the Foreign Secretary intended was what the Prime Minister intended. Indeed, we can be sure that it was not. Balfour’s eye was on the revival of Israel, Lloyd George’s on containing the French.

  All that we can tell is what happened. At the outbreak of war Sir Herbert Samuel, the future first high commissioner for Palestine, was a member of Asquith’s government. According to his account he felt it incumbent on himself, as the first Jewish Cabinet minister, to learn about the Zionist movement, and after some study he emerged favorably disposed. In November 1914, after the Turks’ entrance into the war, he talked over the possibilities with Sir Edward Grey, then foreign secretary, and Lloyd George, then at the Exchequer. He argued that England should take the lead in supporting the project because the geographical situation of Palestine made it important to the British Empire to have friendly inhabitants there. Grey showed “a strongly sentimental attraction” for the plan and Lloyd George was “very keen” on it. The advisability of securing Russia’s support in an attempt to regain for the hard-pressed Czar the loyalty of the Russian Jews was discussed, likewise the probable attitude of France. Grey warned that when France came to put forward her claims in Syria, Britain should be careful not to acquiesce in any that might be “inconsistent with the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” The wording shows that these earliest talks were in terms of a “state,” not a “home.”

  On the strength of this conversation Grey, through his ambassador in Petrograd, asked for the support of the Russian government, but received no encouragement. Meanwhile there entered into the act one who was to play a galvanizing yet a background role: C. P. Sc
ott, the respected editor of the Manchester Guardian. He had met Weizmann shortly after the outbreak of war, had acquainted himself thoroughly with the Zionist aims, and quietly but persistently thereafter saw to it that Weizmann and his colleagues met the key people in Whitehall; and his paper kept the problem in the public mind. In December Scott brought Weizmann to London to meet Lloyd George and Samuel.

  “Lloyd George began to fire questions at me,” runs Weizmann’s account, “about Palestine, about our colonies there, about the number of Jews in the country and the number who could go there. Then I had the surprise of my life when Herbert Samuel interposed some helpful remarks.… Lloyd George pointed out that I ought to talk with Balfour and the Prime Minister, Asquith. At this point Herbert Samuel said—I could hardly believe my ears—that he was preparing a memorandum on the subject of a Jewish state in Palestine to present to the P.M.”

  Weizmann had supposed Samuel to be an anti-Zionist; but, though he found him instead an advocate, he seems never to have worked closely with him. The next move, however, was Samuel’s. In January 1915 he presented his Memorandum on “The Future of Palestine” to the Prime Minister. Asquith found it distasteful. Samuel, he noted, proposed “the British annexation of Palestine, a country the size of Wales, much of it barren mountain and part of it waterless. He thinks he might plant in this not very promising territory about three or four million European Jews and that this would have a good effect upon those who are left behind. It reads almost like a new edition of Tancred brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted by this proposed addition to our responsibilities, but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favorite maxim that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H. S.”

  More cold water was poured by the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Bertie, whom Weizmann sounded out. Lord Bertie, who was a Catholic, considered the whole thing “an absurd scheme” and trembled as to “what the Pope would say.”

  Meanwhile Samuel, having revised his Memorandum—though without toning it down, for it still spoke of “an autonomous Jewish State”—sent it back to the Prime Minister, with little effect except to elicit the petulant remark that this “dithyrambic” proposal found its only other partisan in Lloyd George, “who I need not say does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass under the protectorate of ‘agnostic, atheistic France.’ “

  Here Asquith was quite wrong, but he was temperamentally incapable of fathoming Lloyd George. In Balfour’s opinion Lloyd George’s interest was initially caught by the reappearance of the Old Testament in modern politics, and Lloyd George himself confessed that “when Dr. Weizmann was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place names which were more familiar to me than those of the Western front.” Indeed, there was hardly an Englishman to whom Dan and Beersheba did not mean more than Ypres or Passchendaele. In any event Asquith’s disapproval did not matter in the long run. Under the stress of the war and divided councils he melted away before the more vigorous Lloyd George and finally disappeared from the scene altogether. For the time being, in a preliminary shake-up, Lloyd George moved nearer to direct control as minister of munitions, and at the same time Balfour entered what was now a coalition government as First Lord of the Admiralty. A year and a half were to pass before the line-up changed again, and it was not until Lloyd George became prime minister and Balfour foreign secretary, in December 1916, that the government began seriously to consider a public statement of policy on Palestine and opened official talks with the Zionists on the question.

  But before that happened policy began to take shape in the field. We are still in the spring of 1915. The scene shifts to the Ottoman front. Two figures appear somewhere between Cairo and Damascus—“private eyes,” one might call them today, for the War Office. In command at the War Office was a great and imaginative soldier, the onetime surveyor of the Holy Land, the savior of Khartoum, now the country’s hero, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener. He had an eye for remarkable men. On his staff, buried at a desk job because he was undersized for the army, was a young archaeologist, an Arabic scholar, a wanderer of the lands from the Euphrates to the Nile who had just before the war done a survey of Sinai for the Palestine Exploration Fund. Perhaps it was this fact that led Kitchener to pick out T. E. Lawrence, a “desert man” like himself, and to send him to Cairo on what was vaguely called “military intelligence.”

  Ever since the proud days of Pasha Mehemet Ali rumbles of revolt against Ottoman rule had been heard from one corner or another of the Arab world. No one had paid much attention, but now it was suddenly to Britain’s interest to mobilize what harassment of the Turk she could. The Arabs, ridden by their own rivalries, were of questionable value as allies, and their price was even more questionable; but Britain was now committed to the overthrow of the Turk and fully intended to take over his Arab dominions in some form or other. Whether by direct sovereignty, protectorate, or sphere of influence depended on how things developed; but it was necessary, or at least it would be convenient, to win the inhabitants over to her side.

  Lawrence’s dramatic adventures, the desert campaign, the disguises, the wooing of Hussein the old Sherif of Mecca and of his sons Feisal, the future king of Iraq, and Abdullah, the future king of Jordan, have passed into history. The promises concerning future autonomy and concerning the territory that it was to cover, made by Lawrence to the Arabs and confirmed in the correspondence between the Emir Hussein and Sir Henry MacMahon, are only tangential to this story, for they did not cover Palestine this side of the Jordan.

  Before coming to them we must follow another figure in the story. Sir Mark Sykes, the one man who came the nearest to holding all the threads in his hand at any one time, and who, but for his sudden death, might have been able to bind them into a workable policy. In 1919, in the midst of the peace conference, he was stricken by influenza and died within five days at the age of forty. “Had he lived,” wrote Ormsby-Gore, another veteran of the Arab Bureau, in which Sykes and Lawrence both served, “the history of the Near East would have been different.… The disastrous delays which followed the Armistice would never have been possible had Mark been alive, buzzing about the government offices, speaking in Parliament, interviewing everybody, compelling attention.…”

  Sykes compelled Kitchener’s attention in 1914 when, as a brilliant, erratic, adventurous foreign service officer, already widely traveled in the East, he was serving on the War Office general staff. “Sykes,” said Kitchener, suddenly turning on him one day, “what are you doing in France? You must go to the East.”

  “What am I to do there?” Sykes asked.

  “Just go there and come back,” said the War Minister, whose distaste for written orders was an agony to his colleagues. But Sykes was not a man to need further instruction. He was off, he investigated, he prowled around, he interviewed, he came back. What he saw, more especially what he foresaw, shaped policy as it developed during the next four years. Like Lawrence, he exerted an influence far beyond his official position; Lawrence because he had the force that attaches to all dedicated men, Sykes because of his irresistible energy and enthusiasm. Both belonged in that long line of Englishmen possessed by the spell of the East, now fallen into neglect and decay, but once the teeming center of the world, in which the faith, the arts, the laws of nations had their birth. Upon such men the East exerted the imperative pull of a natal land. Like Lawrence, Sykes was gripped by a vision of a renaissance of the East, and both believed that the time was now at hand. With the sweeping away of the Ottoman pall the ancient Semitic peoples, Israel and Ishmael, could renew themselves and their land.

  “I meant to make a new nation,” wrote Lawrence in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.” The restoration of Israel he included in this dream-palace. �
��I back it,” he said elsewhere, “not because of the Jews but because a regenerated Palestine is going to raise the whole moral and material status of its Middle Eastern neighbours.”

  Sykes’s motive was the same. He came home determined to work for an Arab nation, and later, when he discovered the Zionists, he saw in their zeal and energy an auxiliary to the goal of Middle Eastern revival. “It might be the destiny of the Jewish race,” he said, “to be the bridge between Asia and Europe, to bring the spirituality of Asia to Europe and the vitality of Europe to Asia.”

  At the moment what was urgent, coincidently with the Dardanelles campaign designed to take Constantinople, relieve Russia, and annihilate the Turk, was a settlement among the Allies as to the future share of each in the Ottoman dominions. Sykes was picked to negotiate terms, and the Sykes-Picot Treaty, one of the most unpopular documents of the war, was the result. In an ex post facto explanation made available to Sykes’s biographer, the Foreign Office described the treaty in a matchless phrase as one of “imperative expediency.” One can see why. It was indeed the most delicate of problems. Each of the Allies was on tiptoe to gratify century-old ambitions and acutely sensitive to any pretensions by a fellow eagle to grab more than its share of the carcass. But how to deal out the spoils without at the same time upsetting the applecart of the Arab Bureau, which was just then slowly drawing Hussein nearer and nearer to revolt against Turkey by promises of hegemony as future king of the Arabs? Obviously secrecy was essential lest the Arabs catch a whiff and balk. Both sets of negotiations were running concurrently. While Sykes was bargaining in Petrograd and Paris, Sir Henry MacMahon was exchanging correspondence with Sherif Hussein, who had Lawrence at his elbow in Arabia. While the Sherif was being promised one form of sovereignty, his future territories were being allotted among the Allies under another form.