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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Instead he concentrated his well-honed diplomatic skills upon Nicolson’s private secretary, the Earl of Onslow. Smoothly, even charmingly no doubt, the Zionist diplomat explained to this gentleman that his movement aspired to till the soil of Palestine; that it had successfully established more than two dozen agricultural colonies there; and that it had its difficulties with Ottoman officials and policies. “It [is] to the advantage3 of Great Britain,” he said, “to have the Jewish element increase in a country next door to Egypt,” but the point was not taken. Indeed, little of Sokolow’s message seems to have gotten through. “Jews have never made good agriculturalists,” Nicolson sniffed after conferring with his aide about the meeting. “In any case we had better not intervene to support the Zionist movement. The implantation of Jews is a question of internal administration on which there is great division of opinion in Turkey. The Arabs and the old Turks detest the movement.”

  No doubt the Earl of Onslow behaved with impeccable courtesy during his ninety-minute interview with the Zionist diplomat; no doubt, too, so acute an observer as Nahum Sokolow privately registered the earl’s unexpressed disdain for Zionism. Still he refused to be discouraged. The World Zionist Federation had had few if any formal contacts with British officials since the death of its founder Theodor Herzl nearly a decade before. The reestablishment of relations, however tenuous, was cause for satisfaction. Moreover, the great powers must consider the question of Palestine someday, and then this initial visit would be viewed as “a preparatory step.”4

  In the meantime Nahum Sokolow would work to consolidate the toehold he had gained. A little more than a year later, he wrote to request a second audience. The Zionists had been busy; the Foreign Office should receive an update. It was July 1914, however, and unknown to him, Europe was teetering. Foreign Office mandarins were even less inclined to meet with him than before. “It is not really necessary,” one wrote, “that anyone’s time should be wasted in this way, but as M. Sokolow has been received before I suppose we might tell him that we shall be happy to see him again. I strongly object, however, to being myself the victim.” In the end no one was victimized, except perhaps for Nahum Sokolow, and he had merely wasted his time. “I think,”5 decided the responsible official, “we can safely reply that no useful purpose would be served by a verbal statement but that if he will be good enough to submit a report in writing it will receive careful consideration.” Sokolow appears not to have written the report. No doubt its composition was interrupted when, only a few weeks later, the European powers descended into the madness of world war.

  Not too many months later, when the Foreign Office discovered an interest in Zionism after all, Sokolow would be back. But prewar indifference to Jewish nationalism was widespread; the British public, including the vast majority of British Jews, shared it. Of 300,000 Jews living in Britain in 1913, only 8,000 belonged to a Zionist organization. Of the 150,000 Jews living in London, fewer than 4,000 called themselves Zionists. The great majority of British Jews were recent immigrants, or were the children of immigrants, refugees from the pogroms of Russia and eastern and southern Europe. They found new homes in the squalid “two-up, two-downs” of East London’s narrow streets and alleyways and in the less salubrious quarters of the great industrial cities like Manchester and Leeds and other provincial centers. They labored in sweatshops as tailors and furriers and seamstresses; they served as clerks and shop assistants and bookkeepers; they toiled in northern factories and mills. Some succeeded in opening their own small shops or businesses. Intent upon earning their daily bread, such people had little time for Zionists, who spoke to them of a promised land several thousand miles away in Palestine. Few wished to deny their Jewish heritage, but few wished to assert it by joining a utopian movement, populated, as they thought, by dreamers and visionaries.

  Jews whose families had lived in Britain for more than a generation or two were even less likely than the newcomers to identify with the Zionists. Some of them had prospered as businessmen or financiers; others had entered the liberal professions. Among this fortunate minority, an even smaller number had grown extraordinarily rich. In London the families occupying this apex of Jewish society lived in the West End and were referred to as the “Cousinhood.” This informally designated body consisted of only a few extended families, often linked by marriage: the Rothschilds, Montefiores, Mocattas, Cohens, Goldsmids, Samuels, and Montagus, to name some of the most prominent. Most of them were active in the worlds of finance and philanthropy; a few had risen in politics to enter Parliament, where they sat on both sides of the House. Two literal cousins belonging to the Cousinhood, Herbert Samuel and Edwin Montagu, served in Asquith’s Liberal government.

  Such figures lived like other Englishmen of their class, set apart from them, however, by the religion they practiced and the response it evoked among certain of their fellow citizens. But British anti-Semitism was relatively mild, and as a result most of the Cousinhood viewed with patriotic affection the country that since 1858 had afforded them and their coreligionists equal civil and political rights. They considered themselves to be Jewish Britons, not British Jews, and they abhorred Zionists, who insisted that Jews constituted a separate people or nation, unassimilable by Britain or by any other country except Palestine.

  This did not mean that they ignored the plight of Jews already settled in Palestine. Some among the Cousinhood were generous in their support. But they did not wish to live there themselves, and they did not believe that establishment of a larger Jewish presence there would contribute much to a solution of the “Jewish problem” in Russia or Romania, or lead to the reduction of anti-Semitism more generally. That a latent sympathy for Zionism underlay this prewar indifference became apparent only a few years later. World War I changed everything, including the attitude of the British government toward both the so-called Zionist dreamers and the Ottoman Empire. Once Zionism entered the realm of practical politics, British Jews flocked to the Zionist banner. Interestingly, however, many among the Cousinhood continued to hold themselves aloof.

  In prewar England three main Zionist associations struggled to gain purchase. The most important, historically speaking, was the English Zionist Federation6 (EZF). This body, founded in 1899, was the local branch of the World Zionist Organization that the Austrian Theodor Herzl had established two years before. On the eve of World War I about fifty EZF branches dotted the map of Britain in the provincial cities and important towns, in some of the universities, and in London. Its membership rolls contained about four thousand dues-payers. But the prewar EZF did not flourish, lacking impact upon the mass of poor immigrant Jews and upon the British Jewish establishment, including the Cousinhood. It contained a number of able men, including a few with outsize personalities; but its impact upon prewar Britain, Jewish and non-Jewish, was negligible.

  Aside from its seeming utopianism, the EZF failed to prosper before the war because its leadership engaged in unedifying quarrels, sniping, and backstabbing. Plain cussedness and egotism prompted much of it, but a genuine ideological difference existed as well, mirroring a split in the international movement. Some Zionists held, as Herzl had done, that their proper role was political and diplomatic: Zionists must focus on persuading the great powers to support establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Turkish sultan and his government must be the first target of their politicking, since Palestine lay within the Ottoman Empire.

  Britain, which was relatively free of anti-Semitism, was both liberal and imperial, held extensive interests in the Middle East, and still possessed some influence over Turkey, should be the second target. Germany represented a third, and Russia a fourth, but especially for British Zionists, the latter two powers were very much an afterthought. They agreed with Herzl that the great fulcrum upon which Zionists could shift world opinion was in England. During his visits to Britain, Herzl met with Liberal and Conservative politicians and other influential people, testified to a parliamentary commission, and addressed public a
nd private meetings. In other words, he did his best to utilize the fulcrum. In 1914 Leopold Greenberg, proprietor and editor of Britain’s leading Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, and Joseph Cowen, a shirt manufacturer and current president of the EZF, still were trying to do that.

  Herzl never found the proper lever, however, and because the plight of Jews in Russia especially remained dire, some political Zionists developed an alternative strategy. Herzl himself broached it in 1903 in Basel, Switzerland, at the sixth Zionist Congress, after meeting with British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain and British foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne. Lansdowne had offered to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration into Uganda. East Africa was not Palestine, Herzl acknowledged to the Congress, but it could be a safe refuge for any Jew wishing to leave Russia. The recent bloody pogrom in Kishinev, where at least forty-seven Jews had been murdered, many hundreds injured, and their property looted and destroyed, proved the necessity of this new strategy. Moreover Uganda need not be a permanent resting place for the immigrants—they could move on to Palestine if and when it opened to them.

  A majority of Zionist delegates supported Herzl’s line of reasoning, but the opposition was intense. The very Russian Jews most in danger of pogroms, including the Zionist delegates from Kishinev, led the charge against it. In his willingness to abandon Palestine, even if only temporarily, they charged, Herzl had proved himself a traitor to Zionism. Their feelings ran so high that they marched out of the hall. In the end, without abating their hostility in the slightest degree, they agreed to a temporary compromise: An exploratory group would report back the following year on Uganda’s suitability for colonization. But Herzl died7 that year, of a broken heart according to some, and the East African scheme, although debated again at the next Zionist Congress, in 1905, essentially died with him.

  In the years before World War I political Zionists divided between those for whom Palestine was the sine qua non and the territorials, who believed that a way station in Uganda or somewhere else deserved consideration. In the wake of the 1905 congress, when Uganda was taken off the table, some of the territorials, led by a charismatic Englishman, the author Israel Zangwill, broke away from the Zionist Federation altogether to found their own Jewish Territorial Association (ITO). This constituted a second Zionist organization in Britain, apart from the EZF, although since it did not necessarily aim for Palestine, it was Zionist mainly in the sense that it was Jewish nationalist. By 1914 it had a headquarters in London and branches scattered throughout Europe. It had about as many British members as the EZF did. Its strategy was to get the desperate Jews of Russia and Romania somewhere else—in fact, almost anywhere else that was safe. Uganda now was closed to them, but the ITO helped Jews move, or looked into the possibility of helping them move, to Galveston, Texas, Mesopotamia, Western Australia, British Honduras, Brazil, Mexico, and Cyrenaica, among other places. From those locations, if ever it became truly feasible, and if they wished to do so, the Jews could decamp yet again, this time for Palestine.

  Meanwhile, within the EZF, a faction of practical Zionists emerged to constitute a powerful opposition to the politicals. Moses Gaster, the haham or chief rabbi of the Sephardic Jews in Britain, took the lead among this contingent. An extraordinary figure, Romanian born, bearded and bulky and tall, quarrelsome and egotistical, Gaster was also a profound scholar of Jewish and Middle Eastern history, linguistics (he could speak and write in ten languages), mythology, and even English folklore. Unfortunately Gaster quarreled not only with politicals such as Greenberg and Cowen but with his fellow practicals too. Indeed there appears to have been virtually no one with whom the learned haham did not quarrel eventually.

  In one respect the practicals resembled Zangwill’s territorials: They did not believe that a great power would support establishment of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine anytime soon. Unlike the territorials, however, they failed to find Uganda, or any other temporary substitute for the Promised Land, even slightly beguiling. They fashioned an alternative strategy to both territorial and political Zionism that emphasized building up Jewish society within Palestine as it was, and strengthening Jewish culture throughout the lands of the Diaspora. They worked to settle Jewish immigrants in the agricultural colonies and in Palestinian towns; to improve conditions for them; and to establish schools, hospitals, clinics, and the like. Simultaneously they strove to turn Hebrew into a living language. They founded a Hebrew journal to publish Hebrew literature and poetry. Above all they wished to establish a Hebrew university in Jerusalem. It would be a beacon and a shining example; it would showcase Jewish abilities and accomplishments. They believed that eventually a Jewish homeland would be built upon such practical and cultural accomplishments, that in fact they were its precondition.

  Personality clashes and the ideological rift between political and practical Zionists eventually led the latter group, Gaster at their head, to partially secede from the EZF. Without giving up membership in the parent body, the WZF, they managed to take over a third Jewish organization in Britain with Zionist inclinations, a debating society called the Ancient Order of Maccabeans, and to persuade the WZF that Zionist affairs in Britain should be managed by a Joint Zionist Council composed of EZF members and Maccabeans working together. Zangwill’s ITO remained an outlier, unrepresented in the WZF. This was the arrangement on the eve of World War I.

  Finally, still another tendency arose among these fissiparous English Zionists, although its aim was to bridge the fissures. After all, the practicals had never abandoned politics and diplomacy altogether, only deemphasized them in favor of practical and cultural work. Now a group among the culturals argued for a synthesis of practical, cultural, and political-diplomatic Zionism. At the 1911 WZF congress they carried the day. Just before the outbreak of war, this synthetic approach more or less characterized the international organization, but not the EZF, in which the obstinate politicals Greenberg and Cowen remained influential.

  The leader and spokesman of the synthetic Zionists at the 1911 congress was a delegate from Britain belonging to the WZF’s actions committee. Chaim Weizmann was also a leader of a so-called Democratic Fraction of Zionists that while not explicitly advocating strategy or tactics, did so implicitly by objecting to Herzl’s grand airs and to the grandees surrounding him. This advocate of both synthesis and simplicity was “pre-eminently what the8 Jewish people call folks-mensch,” wrote one who came to know Weizmann very well, “a man of the people, of the masses, not of the elite, a leader in whose breast beat the common heart of man.” Originally from Russia, the folks-mensch was sturdily built, of perhaps a little more than middle height, with a great dome of a forehead and a short dark beard covering his cheeks and jaw. He had attended every Zionist congress except the first. Though well known within the WZF, he was by no means a power in its English branch. In 1911 he successfully ran for election as one of its two vice presidents. That brought him a few steps nearer the top, but he still spent the prewar years in relative obscurity within the world of English Zionism, laboring hard on the practical and cultural fronts, especially on the campaign to build a Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Later all the Zionists in Britain would recognize that he possessed an unrivaled talent for Herzlian political and diplomatic work. Chaim Weizmann, more than any other individual, would orchestrate the wartime campaign for British support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

  Born in Motol, near Pinsk, Russia, in 1874, Weizmann was the son of a relatively prosperous timber transporter. As a child he excelled at his studies, beginning in his village’s filthy single-room cheder (Jewish elementary school). At secondary school in Pinsk, which was slightly less insalubrious, one of his teachers instilled in him an abiding love of science, particularly chemistry. This subject he chose to pursue at the university level, but in Germany, not in Russia, where the obstacles placed before Jews who aspired to higher education were humiliating and nearly insuperable. He then carried out his graduate work in Switzerland and earned his doctorate s
umma cum laude in 1899 from the University of Fribourg. In 1904 he took up a post at the University of Manchester in a chemistry lab. Six years later he became a naturalized British subject.

  Weizmann loved his laboratory and would do important work there, but he loved Zion more. That was a central theme of the cheder he had attended in Motol, where his instructors taught him in Yiddish, not Russian. It was a central theme of his university days too, when he played a leading role in the Russian-Jewish Academic Society in Berlin. He had always at heart been a fervent Zionist, although sometimes, from impatience or disgust or exhaustion, he sought to distance himself from the movement. One of these episodes occurred in 1904 after Herzl recommended the Uganda scheme, which Weizmann opposed vehemently. It was then that he thought to begin a new life in Britain. But such emotions never lasted long. He stayed in Britain, coming eventually to revere it, but by 1905 he was back in harness for the Zionists again.

  Although Weizmann opposed Herzl’s Ugandan gambit, many of the London politicals, Greenberg and Cowen among them, favored it. In fact Greenberg, a natural-born wire-puller, had been instrumental in bringing Herzl and Joseph Chamberlain together. When Weizmann arrived in England, he found himself ostracized by the politicals, who held his opposition to Herzl against him. Greenberg would hardly speak to him. But the practicals, including the volcanic Gaster, embraced him, indeed sought to administer a bear hug. But the haham was never a reliable or easy ally. Weizmann would cooperate with him when necessary, but before long he built up an alternative Zionist base in Manchester, where he continued to pursue his academic career. This Manchester school of Zionists would later prove an important source of money and brains for British Zionism; it would come to rival London for influence. Moreover it provided Weizmann with comradeship and spiritual sustenance of incalculable value.