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

by Jonathan Schneer

  What treaty of peace was that? Pilling30 maintained that one had been “agreed in June last,”29 presumably in the letter from Talaat. Now (on November 7, 1917), in a rambling message to the foreign secretary, and still without having shown Talaat’s letter to anyone, he enumerated the “treaty’s” provisions. “1. The cession by Turkey to England of the sovereignty of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Yemen.” But on May 12, Pilling had written to Mrs. Evans that the Ottomans were willing to cede only Egypt and Mesopotamia. Nothing had happened between May 12 and “June last,” when the letter from Talaat allegedly had arrived, to make the Ottomans more generous with their Middle Eastern possessions. Pilling seems to have been listing new Ottoman concessions in order to take into account changed circumstances. “I have arranged for Syria (which includes Palestine) to be entirely ceded to England, leaving England an absolutely free hand as to the establishment of [a] Jewish State,” he wrote, two days before publication of the Balfour Declaration! So far as we can tell, he had never mentioned a Jewish state before. Certainly Talaat had not.

  Most likely Pilling was simply spinning his own fantasies based on the terms outlined by Fuad Selim al-Hijari on May 12, terms that may or may not have originated with Talaat Pasha. “3,” wrote Pilling to Balfour: “Turkish Arabia outside Mesopotamia, Syria and Yemen, to be ceded to the King of the Hejaz by Turkey, or otherwise, as may be directed by England.” Nothing suggests that in June 1917 the Turks were willing to surrender the bulk of Arabia to King Hussein. But nearly six months later, with Hussein secure in Mecca and with Allenby’s and Feisal’s armies preparing to march north toward Damascus, they might have been willing to do so. Again, the only way to know for sure would be to refer to the letter supposedly written by Talaat, but “Pilling … has been unable to produce any letter or even a copy of any letter from Talaat,” reported the disillusioned MacDonagh. Furthermore, he added, “I have not seen a copy of any ‘Treaty’ and do not believe in the existence of any such document.”

  On November 15 Pilling played what he may have considered his trump card; in fact it was a desperate gesture. He wrote to the king of England: “It is impossible for me to remain silent, and to bear alone the grave responsibility which will arise by the neglect or refusal on England’s part, to receive and to meet this request of Turkey for peace.” Buckingham Palace forwarded his letter to the Foreign Office, which by now had had more than enough of this troublesome figure. “If Mr. Pilling is, as the letter rather foreshadows, about to make ‘sensational disclosures’ or play at blackmail,” warned one official, “the matter should I submit be considered by the Prime Minister.”

  The mandarins of the Foreign Office were not the only ones needing to rid themselves of this disreputable Quixote. The Armenians and the Zionists, who had probably never heard of Marmaduke Pickthall’s attempt to bring Ottomans and Britons together, did hear about Pilling and moved purposefully to defeat him. Conceivably they learned about Pilling from Sir Mark Sykes, who had access to all the relevant Foreign Office files, opposed a separate peace with Turkey, cared not a fig for Foreign Office protocol except when it suited him, and so would not have hesitated to inform them of Pilling’s activities.

  Early on the evening of November 19, in what was surely a coordinated approach, first James Malcolm and then Chaim Weizmann called upon Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office. They knew about Lloyd George’s unlikely emissary to the Turks and did not like what they knew. Graham recorded:

  A Mr. Pilling, known to them as a shady adventurer, was stating broadcast that he had been to Switzerland as agent for the Prime Minister [and] had negotiated a separate peace with Turkey. They knew Mr. Pilling to be a friend of a Mrs. Evans who was a friend of Mr. Lloyd George, and feared that he, Mr. Pilling, might in fact have some mission from the Prime Minister. They drew attention to Mr. Pilling’s discreditable antecedents and said that his language and pretensions were causing serious concern not to say alarm in Armenian, Arab and Jewish circles.

  This was two weeks after publication of the Balfour Declaration and after various government statements had been made supporting an independent Armenia. Weizmann and Malcolm both realized that a separate peace with the Ottomans might render the government’s pledges null and void. So on the historical chessboard they made this move to remove Mr. J. R. Pilling, the pawn advanced by Lloyd George. He was slightly more important than Marmaduke Pickthall, the pawn advanced by Fuad Selim al-Hijari and Dr. Valyi, whom Sir Mark Sykes had removed a year before. When Lord Hardinge read Graham’s report, he suggested immediately that Lloyd George “should, if possible, take steps to get Mr. Pilling to hold his tongue.” The prime minister evidently did so, for we do not hear from the Manchester businessman again.

  Hammering the last nail in the coffin of Mr. Pilling proved relatively easy for Chaim Weizmann. But he was, by November 1917, quite accustomed to visiting the Foreign Office to argue against the advocates of a separate peace with Turkey. Only a few months previously in fact, he had apparently taken the lead in stymieing a much more important initiative in that direction. That exercise, a better-known episode in the history of Zionism, had required all his diplomatic skill.

  CHAPTER 19

  Henry Morgenthau and the Deceiving of Chaim Weizmann

  AFTER APRIL 6, 1917, a state of war existed between the United States and Germany, but not between the United States and Turkey. Germany wanted her Ottoman1 ally to join the war against America but could get her only to sever diplomatic relations, and the Turks begrudged having to do even that. President Wilson took this as a good sign. It might mean that the Ottomans were developing second thoughts about their participation in the war altogether. If so, then perhaps his country could serve as a bridge between the Turks and the Entente powers. In other words, President Wilson too hoped to forge a separate peace.

  From late 1913 until February 1916, Henry Morgenthau served as Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. A member of the New York bar, Morgenthau had made a fortune speculating in real estate, which enabled him to make lavish contributions to the Democratic Party. During the 1912 presidential campaign, he served as chairman of the party’s finance committee. The ambassadorship followed. Morgenthau is famous for having tried, while he was ambassador, to persuade his masters in Washington to intervene against the Armenian massacres of 1915, and when that failed, for bravely taking his protests to the Ottomans themselves, notably to Talaat Pasha. Himself a Jew, he played an honorable role during these early war years as a watch guard and protector of Ottoman Jews, especially the Jews of Palestine, who benefited from a massive relief effort much facilitated by him. But he was impulsive and boastful. In May 1916, for example, in a speech delivered in Cincinnati,2 he claimed that before he left Constantinople, he had just about arranged for the Ottomans to sell Palestine to the Jews.

  As his interest in the future of Palestine demonstrates, Morgenthau sympathized with Zionism. But he was not a Zionist strictly speaking. He said in that same Cincinnati speech: “It is utterly impossible to place several millions of people in Palestine. There would be grave danger from the Arabs … If Jews continue there as at present, at the end of the war there will be no friction.” This declaration, as much as his grandiloquent statement about purchasing the Jewish Promised Land, caught Mark Sykes’s attention. He immediately contacted Moses Gaster, the Zionist he knew best at that early date, and warned him, “Nothing could be3 more unfortunate or dangerous.” Gaster agreed. By the spring of 1917, British Zionists knew something of Henry Morgenthau, and although they respected some of what he had done as ambassador, they did not approve of it all.

  The origins of Morgenthau’s mission4 to speak with Turks about a separate peace with the Allies are obscure, although historians of Zionism (including those who know little of Pickthall, Pilling, or other advocates of the policy) have gone over this particular episode with a fine-tooth comb. The idea may have5 been his, or it may have been the State Department’s. At any rate, here is the scheme Morgenthau eventually pu
t to the president: He would persuade Enver and Talaat, with whom he was on “peculiarly cordial and6 intimate terms,” to allow Allied submarines to pass through the Dardanelles straits. The submarines would torpedo the Goeben and Breslau, the battleship and cruiser that Germany ostensibly had given to Turkey at the outset of the war but that remained under German command, their guns trained upon Constantinople. Once the two ships had been scuppered, the CUP government would be free to do what it really wanted, which was to conclude a separate peace. What Woodrow Wilson thought of this plan is not recorded. In the end, he gave Morgenthau authorization only to listen to and carry back to Washington whatever information or terms the Turks were prepared to offer. Whether Morgenthau understood or intended to abide by this limit is equally uncertain.

  It happened that the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, was visiting Washington, D.C., at this time. When Secretary of State Robert Lansing told him about the scheme, Balfour confirmed that the Turks were “nibbling”7 at the idea of a separate peace. “If matters took8 a favorable form,” he added, “results might be of enormous advantage,” which was true so far as the British were concerned, but would have seemed debatable to Zionists who wanted British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine detached from the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, when Balfour wired news of Morgenthau’s pending mission to the Foreign Office, no one so much as mentioned the possibility of Zionist objections, although they had been dealing with Zionists for many months. Sir Ronald Graham actually wrote of Morgenthau, “He might in any case work upon the Jewish elements in the C.U.P. and Turkey.” Indeed, the Foreign Office suggested only one emendation to Morgenthau’s scheme: “Owing to the number of spies in Switzerland it is doubtful if useful work can be done there. Possibly Egypt would be [a] better base of operations.” This was9 the contribution of Robert Cecil.

  It seemed a good suggestion to Morgenthau and Lansing, who accepted it. The former American ambassador could claim to be on his way to check the condition of Jews in nearby Palestine. Then Morgenthau had another idea: He would invite additional American Jews to accompany him, thus further camouflaging the expedition. First he invited the distinguished Harvard Law School professor and Zionist (and future Supreme Court justice) Felix Frankfurter, who was working as an assistant to the secretary of war, Newton Baker. Frankfurter accepted the invitation and invited his own assistant, another lawyer, Max Lowenthal. A third figure who joined the team was Eliahu Lewin-Epstein, treasurer of the Zionist Provisional Executive Committee in New York City. By now the mission gave every sign of being a Zionist enterprise, an impression the government fostered with leaks to the press. Zionists began a fund-raising campaign for the mission. About his main goal,10 however, Morgenthau kept Frankfurter, Lowenthal, and Lewin-Epstein in the dark.

  The approach to Turkey could not take place, however, without the knowledge and agreement of America’s wartime allies. Morgenthau would stop with his little band at Gibraltar; the State Department requested that both Britain and France send “someone in authority11 to discuss the question thoroughly” with him there. Then Morgenthau had another brainstorm. If the British sent Chaim Weizmann to meet him, that would lend further credence to his cover story. Apparently it did not occur to him that the British Zionist might oppose his main object. Nor, apparently, did this occur to the State Department. It accepted Morgenthau’s suggestion and asked the Foreign Office to send Weizmann to meet their envoy.

  Weizmann learned of Morgenthau’s mission not from the Foreign Office but from Louis Brandeis, the American Zionist and Supreme Court justice with close ties to President Wilson. Brandeis had learned of it first from Frankfurter—not its true goal, obviously, for Frankfurter himself did not know it—and then from Wilson, who did explain the mission’s real purpose. Brandeis immediately cabled to Weizmann that an American commission was headed to the east (he did not say what for), and he suggested that Weizmann intercept it. Given Brandeis’s close connection with Wilson, this was as explicit a warning as he could deliver.

  Brandeis was not Weizmann’s only source of information. The Armenian James Malcolm’s sensitive antennae were vibrating to “rumours here12 [London] in pro-Young-Turk circles about some manoeuvres for a separate peace with Turkey … initiated by Mr. Wilson … at the instigation of Mr. Morgenthau in tacit cooperation with the British and French Governments.” The rumor was as explicit as Brandeis had been vague, and it troubled Mr. Malcolm. A separate peace with Turkey had the potential for undercutting Armenian nationalist aspirations as much as the Zionists’.

  On Saturday, June 8, Malcolm attended an Islamic Society meeting at Caxton Hall on “Muslim Interests in Palestine.”13 Its featured speaker was Marmaduke Pickthall; its chairman was Mushir Hussein Kidwai. Malcolm thought the proceedings were “of a definitely treasonable and seditious character.” Pickthall “was openly talking about an early Peace with Turkey involving no loss of territory to the Turkish Empire.” Others in the audience “were openly bragging that they were about to arrange a separate Peace with Turkey.” From what he heard that day, Malcolm concluded not only that Henry Morgenthau was about to approach the Ottomans but also that Pickthall and two British Turcophiles, Aubrey Herbert and Sir Adam Samuel Block, a Jewish anti-Zionist, were engaged in a similar mission.

  An agitated James Malcolm was soon knocking at the door of 67 Addison Road, Chaim Weizmann’s house. The two men put together what they had gleaned from their various sources. Weizmann knew about14 the Islamic Society meeting already—he had heard that assimilationist Jews were its instigators. Then the telephone rang. Wickham Steed, an influential foreign correspondent of The Times, was on the line. His own antennae had picked up the same signals as Malcolm’s, both about Morgenthau and about the Turcophiles. Steed opposed a separate peace with Turkey, albeit for different reasons than Zionists and Armenians. His newspaper argued for total victory over Britain’s enemies. To settle for anything less was to play the German game. Historically The Times had not been friendly to Jews; nor had been Steed; but both were prepared to play the Zionist card anyway. Better for the British Empire to assume a protectorate over Palestine dominated by Jews, Steed thought, than for Palestine to remain as part of an Ottoman Empire beholden to the Germans.

  Recall that in November 1917 Weizmann and Malcolm went to Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office to slam the relative flea, J. R. Pilling. By that time they were accustomed to employing that particular sledgehammer against advocates of separate peace with Turkey. The first time they employed it was five months earlier, right after the telephone call from Wickham Steed. On Sunday, June 9, Graham reported to Robert Cecil: “Dr. Weizmann, whom I15 happened to see this morning … referred in the course of conversation to Mr. Morgenthau whom he described as closely connected with … the anti-Zionist Jews in the U.S., and as being pro-German and especially pro-Turkish. He said ‘I am expecting to see Mr. Morgenthau employed in some intrigue for a separate peace with Turkey and believe that he is coming to Europe for this purpose. If so the whole thing is a German move.’” Weizmann had taken up the line Steed pursued in his newspaper.

  Just as Weizmann was warning Graham against Morgenthau, Malcolm was telephoning another mandarin, William Ormsby-Gore, parliamentary private secretary of Lord Milner and assistant secretary to the cabinet, where he seconded the efforts of Mark Sykes. No doubt Malcolm would have preferred to call Sykes himself, but the latter had not yet returned to London from the discussions with King Hussein in the Middle East. Ormsby-Gore had been converted to Zionism the previous year, during his stint at the Arab Bureau in Cairo, by none other than Aaron Aaronsohn. Weizmann and Malcolm calculated he would give them a sympathetic hearing. Malcolm asked for a meeting “as soon as possible,” and Ormsby-Gore “arranged to see him at my office at 12.30.”

  Ormsby-Gore (later Lord Harlech) was a capable man who would go on to a distinguished career as a Conservative politician, including a stint as colonial secretary during the 1930s. Nevertheless the double team of Malcolm and We
izmann seem to have come close to overwhelming him. “Both Mr. Malcolm16 and Dr. Weizmann were very much excited and very angry,” Ormsby-Gore reported, “and both stated that we were not only playing with fire in approaching the Turks at this juncture but also imperiling the interests of the British Empire and the causes which they have more especially at heart. Dr. Weizmann was open in his denunciation of Mr. Morgenthau.” He was open in his denunciation of Aubrey Herbert and Sir Adam Samuel Block too, but he trained his biggest guns on the American, whom he practically accused of being a German agent. Morgenthau “was notoriously pro-German.” He acted “on behalf of an international ring of Jewish financiers in Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and New York.” His aim was “an inconclusive Peace which would give German capital and German Jews an ascendant importance throughout the Turkish Empire and particularly Palestine.” Not knowing that the Americans wanted him present, he ended with a request that would have gladdened them: “If any Jew is to be sent to meet Mr. Morgenthau … he, Dr. Weizmann, [should] be sent.”