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

by Jonathan Schneer

  On Tuesday, June 12,17 Weizmann and Malcolm called, separately this time, on Graham, to continue hammering. They mentioned Herbert and Block but reserved special venom for Morgenthau. Did their efforts have a dampening impact upon British attitudes toward the growing impetus for a separate peace? Without exception, historians agree that they did. Between them, the Zionist and the Armenian reminded British diplomats of their previous promises to free subject peoples from Ottoman tyranny. In fact they affected only the government’s attitude toward Mr. Morgenthau’s expedition. As will become apparent, Malcolm and Weizmann stymied one peace feeler only.

  At the instigation of Weizmann and Malcolm, the British government came to oppose Morgenthau’s approach to the Turks, even though it supported the others. Why? Perhaps for two reasons. First of all, despite the assiduously promoted cover story the real reason for Morgenthau’s mission had become well known, both in America and in London. Morgenthau himself had been extremely indiscreet18 (while keeping his traveling companions in the dark). As a result, Sir Ronald Graham warned his colleagues: “As condition of19 secrecy to which Mr. Morgenthau attaches so much importance no longer exists it is doubtful whether mission could serve useful purpose at present moment, and I would suggest that it should be postponed.” The Americans refused to postpone it, but the British ceased to believe in it.

  Second, the Foreign Office had concluded that Britain needed the support of “international Jewry” to win the war. In his denunciation of Morgenthau, Weizmann had shrewdly harped upon the power of this cosmopolitan cabal and upon Morgenthau’s place within it. Now he wanted to head him off at Gibraltar. Morgenthau no longer enjoyed Foreign Office confidence; Weizmann did; very well, then, the mandarins may have reasoned, keep him happy; let him go.

  True, at the meeting of the Islamic Society, James Malcolm caught wind that Aubrey Herbert was planning a mission (see Chapter 20) and he and Weizmann protested about it. Sir Ronald Graham’s face betrayed nothing, but he had written the previous day to Horace Rumbold: “Will you be kind20 to my cousin Aubrey Herbert if he comes to Switzerland which he may do, on a sort of roving mission which he had better explain to you himself?” Somehow Weizmann and Malcolm came to focus exclusively upon defeating Morgenthau. The Foreign Office did not enlighten them, quite the opposite. Balfour called Weizmann to his office and entrusted him with a secret assignment: “I was to talk21 to Mr. Morgenthau, and keep on talking till I had talked him out of this mission.” He did not know, he never knew, that simultaneously Balfour was giving permission for Aubrey Herbert to go to Switzerland on another peace mission. Thus the British government tricked Chaim Weizmann.

  Morgenthau’s party, which now included not only the three Zionists but also Ashag K. Schmarvonian, a Turkish Armenian working for the State Department who had served as Morgenthau’s interpreter in Constantinople, sailed from New York on June 21. They carried with them eighteen trunks22 filled with $400,000 in gold for the Jews of Palestine. Their ship zigzagged across the Atlantic, ever watchful for German U-boats. For his part, Weizmann sailed for Le Havre aboard the Hantonia on June 29, accompanied only by an intelligence officer, Kennerley Rumford,23 a well-known baritone who had married the singer Clara Butt. Rumford, Weizmann wrote to his wife Vera, was “either terribly ‘profound’24 or completely innocent: rather the latter, I think.” He may have underestimated his minder.

  The two stopped first in Paris, where Weizmann met with the British ambassador and with Edmond de Rothschild. Then they entrained for Spain. Weizmann wrote his wife: “From the moment25 we entered Spanish territory we have been followed by German spies. There were 4 of them and one accompanied us as far as Madrid. It seemed that we had lost him at the railway station but he has just turned up again and will probably follow us still further.” Perhaps, however, the “innocent” Rumford now proved his worth. He and Weizmann checked into their Madrid hotel, followed by the German agent. They told the portier that they intended to stay the night. The portier, an Austrian, repeated this to the spy, a fellow German-speaker. Weizmann went out26 to pay a call. When he returned to the hotel, “a car drove up with an English guide; we packed hastily, paid the bill, and vanished within 10 minutes. You should have seen the portier’s rage.”

  So the two parties, British and American, converged by land and by sea upon a Gibraltar baking under the summer sun. A third party, a French one, comprising Colonel E. Weyl (a former head of the Turkish tobacco monopoly) and Albert Thomas (the French minister of munitions) arrived on July 4. The next day they all met for discussions, inside the fortress, guarded by British soldiers. They spoke in German, the only language they had in common, and as they kept the windows open because of the heat, Weizmann indulged the fantasy that the Tommies could hear them talk and deemed them to be spies who had been lured into a trap and would be shot next morning.

  The discussions, which lasted two days, began with a report from Schmarvonian on conditions in Turkey, which he had left with the rest of the American diplomatic staff only six weeks earlier. The Ottoman army had just about shot its bolt, he thought; bankruptcy loomed over the empire as a whole; most Turks hated and feared the Germans, he continued; and relations between Talaat and Enver had reached the breaking point. “I am not aware27 whether this information is quite new to the Foreign Office or not, but I am giving this résumé because I consider that these are the only real facts which Mr. Morgenthau was able to communicate to us,” Weizmann reported afterward to Ronald Graham.

  Where Schmarvonian had been incisive, Morgenthau was vague. Weizmann put it this way in his autobiography: “Mr. Morgenthau had28 had an idea. He felt that Turkey was on the point of collapse … It had occurred to him that perhaps Talaat Pasha might be played off against Enver Bey.” But when Weizmann asked him whether the Turks realized they were beaten in the war, and if they did, what their terms for a separate peace would be, neither the American nor anyone in his entourage could answer. Weizmann then told Morgenthau what he understood Britain’s terms to be. She must be “satisfied that Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are to be detached from the present Turkish Empire.” Whether this was wishful thinking on Weizmann’s part is another matter, but no one at the conference disputed him. Nor did anyone think that “such conditions29 would be acceptable at present to the Turks.” Therefore, and even though it became apparent during the discussions that the French government strongly favored an approach to Turkey (which disquieted Weizmann), “it was no job at all to persuade Mr. Morgenthau to drop the project.”

  Weizmann also made very clear to the American that it had been a mistake to try to associate his mission with Zionism. “On no account30 should the Zionist organization be in any way compromised by his negotiations,” Weizmann lectured the diplomat. “On no account must the Zionist organization be in any way identified or mixed up even with the faintest attempts to secure a separate peace … We Zionists feel about this point most strongly, and we would like assurances from Mr. Morgenthau that he agrees and understands this position.” The assurance was offered, with what painful swallowing of pride one may imagine. In fact, the deeply humiliated Morgenthau capitulated on all fronts. He would not continue his journey to Egypt or even to Switzerland but rather would “stay in Biarritz and then try and get into contact with General Pershing.” He would take the $400,000 in gold back to America. Morgenthau never forgave the author of his mortification and thenceforth opposed the Zionists.

  Weizmann’s bravura performance justified Foreign Office confidence in his abilities. He had been “eminently successful,”31 Graham reported to Lord Hardinge; he was “a shrewd observer.” Still, he had not quite carried off the diplomatic coup that virtually all historians of the episode celebrate. After all, Weizmann had not killed the separate peace idea, only Morgenthau’s version of it, and in that the Foreign Office had ceased to believe anyway.

  Weizmann returned to London on July 21 to report to Graham in person. Two days later Graham sent him to Paris to brief Balfour and Lloyd George
, who were attending a war conference there. The two were glad to learn that Weizmann had scotched Morgenthau’s mission. Nothing they said to him suggested anything except that he had scored a complete triumph.

  Back in London again, however, Weizmann soon realized there was a fly in the ointment, or rather two flies, and that they were Harry Sacher and Leon Simon, his close, junior associates. Like every other British Zionist who learned of Weizmann’s mission to Gibraltar, they took it at face value, accepting that Weizmann had defeated the advocates of a separate peace with Turkey. But unlike their colleagues, they disapproved of what he had done. They had been arguing for months that their leader was becoming too enamored of Mark Sykes and other Foreign Office mandarins, none of whom were trustworthy. “The Zionists in public32 must preach pure Zionism and be detached from any Power,” Sacher wrote to Simon, who had just expressed similar sentiments in a letter to him. “The Zionist movement as such33 must of course not stake all on Great Britain. I have never dreamt of such a doctrine.” But that meant that they believed Zionists ought not to depend upon complete British victory in the war either. And that meant that they did not necessarily oppose the idea of a compromise peace with Turkey.

  Just before Weizmann embarked for Gibraltar, he called Simon to his home for a lengthy discussion. He may have come to regret it. Simon recorded in his diary:

  I said that it was not34 for us to try to stop peace with Turkey if we could get decent conditions. He said that we could not get decent conditions and that the only terms on which G[reat] B[ritain] would make peace with Turkey included the detachment from the Turkish Empire of Armenia, Syria, and Palestine, and that of course Turkey would not accept these terms … I expressed the opinion that probably the people of this country, and certainly the Russians, would not go on fighting Turkey if they knew that these conditions had been laid down and I further suggested that his going to Gib[raltar] along with representatives of G[reat] B[ritain] whose object was to stop a separate peace with Turkey would look as though we Zionists were trying to use our influence in the same direction.

  But of course Weizmann did go to Gibraltar, not as an observer accompanying British representatives but rather as the sole representative himself. Simon’s doubts multiplied. “Assume [?] the peace35 proposals break down … and it gets known that a Zionist leader had met the Americans as emissary of the Government,” he worried in his diary. “The movement will incur well deserved odium … For my part I will not tie myself up with the policy, or tendency, this move implies.”

  Sacher and Simon judged that after three years of bloodshed the peoples of the belligerent powers had grown weary of war. They thought the forces of the Left were rising and that “the centre of gravity36 will shift steadily towards the ‘pacifists.’ The future is with them.” It made no sense, then, from a practical point of view, for Zionists to ally with a government that was publicly wedded to “the knock-out blow.” When Sacher saw Weizmann briefly right after the latter returned from Gibraltar, he tried to make these points but did not have time to develop them. Simon tried on August 1 at the initial meeting of a political committee composed of Weizmann’s closest associates. Sacher could not attend, and so Simon reported to him by letter the following day:

  Chaim gave us an account37—a bit discursive—of his mission … What struck me most was that while he was at great pains to make it clear to Morgenthau that Zionism is not trying to make a separate peace with Turkey, he had not suggested that Zionism was not trying to stop a separate peace with Turkey—rather the reverse. I raised a discussion on this question and of course was in a minority of one … If you share my views at all I wish you would find an opportunity of rubbing them in, if only by letter.

  Sacher did rub them in, the next day, in a long and powerful communication to Weizmann. “I think you were much38 too emphatic in discouraging and combating the idea itself of a separate peace with Turkey, instead of opposing any form of peace which did not safeguard our interests,” he wrote flatly. He reiterated that Zionist and British interests were not identical: “A British protectorate is … one form under which our aims in Palestine may be realized … There are other forms—an international arrangement; Turkish suzerainty under guarantees.” He broadened Simon’s earlier critique: “I see the peril that we Zionists in England may be infected with imperialism at the very time when the rest of the world is beginning to cast it off.” And he injected a moral note: To oppose the advocates of peace with Turkey meant possibly prolonging the war. “I myself would not buy a British protectorate at the cost of prolonging the war by a single day.”

  Sacher missed the next meeting of the political committee too. Generously Weizmann had copies of his letter made and “handed around … and Simon [Marks] read it out. So you had your innings.” Leon Simon thought, “It is a very good letter but it hadn’t much effect. These people don’t believe that the future is to the pacifists—that is the fundamental difference.” Again Simon did his best to argue the position, but as he confessed sadly to his friend, he made little impression. Afterward Sacher fumed: “But think of tying39 ourselves with [Lloyd] George and his Cabinet swine and getting athwart the world’s democracies as our ‘leaders’ want to do!” Weizmann had become enamored of “the general policy40 of Imperialism and militarism,” and of “Sykes and other ‘politicians,’” and of “armies, diplomacy and other muck no good in themselves.” Sacher tried to warn his mentor and leader: “In politics one is41 always dependent on politicians … We Jews, like all mankind, are puppets in their hands, and their hands are as clumsy as their morals are base and their intellects feeble.”

  The warning was prescient but ineffective. Weizmann swatted him down, and Simon too. He maintained and even strengthened his ties with the politicians and the men of the Foreign Office. He continued to insist upon a British protectorate in Palestine and to oppose the separate peace with Turkey. He staked everything on Allied victory, and the gamble paid off. History belongs to the victors. But spare a moment to consider what might have been. Had Weizmann’s gamble failed, had Britain lost the war, the history of Zionism (and of the world) would be very different. Or had his two critics on the political committee succeeded in persuading their colleagues to support a separate peace with Turkey (which would have represented a smaller and therefore more plausible wrinkle in the historical record), then too Zionism, and history, would have taken a different path. Absent Zionist opposition, sentiment in favor of the separate peace might have strengthened, might have proved irresistible. Then perhaps, in return for withdrawing from the war, the Ottomans might have kept part of their Middle Eastern empire, including Palestine, Syria, even Arabia. No one can know where that might have led.

  The government and Foreign Office made effective use of Chaim Weizmann to check the Morgenthau mission. They had learned to respect him over the past two years, and he repaid their confidence with a bravura performance at Gibraltar. Nonetheless, the government played him with breathtaking cynicism. Sir Ronald Graham did not tell either him or James Malcolm, when the two called, that J. R. Pilling (not yet discredited) had just returned to London claiming to have a letter from Talaat Pasha spelling out Turkey’s peace terms, which, had it ever arrived, the government would have been eager to review. Graham hid from them too that only the day before he had paved the way for his cousin, Aubrey Herbert, to travel to Switzerland to meet dissident Turks to discuss peace. When Weizmann returned triumphant from Gibraltar, Graham sent him to Paris on July 23 to brief Lloyd George and Balfour and to receive their congratulations on scotching the Morgenthau peace mission. Two days later the prime minister and the foreign secretary received Aubrey Herbert, just returned from Berne and carrying an outline of peace terms provided by Turks. They congratulated him too.

  CHAPTER 20

  “The Man Who Was Greenmantle”

  THE FOREIGN OFFICE did not take Marmaduke Pickthall seriously as a British emissary to dissident Turks, and eventually it ceased to take J. R. Pilling seriously either.
At first it approved the mission of American ambassador Henry Morgenthau, but when it decided his mission would not bear fruit, it dispatched Chaim Weizmann to cut him off. But the Foreign Office took Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert very seriously indeed. When Herbert made his trip to Switzerland in July 1917 to meet with Turks, he carried with him the good wishes of some of the War Cabinet, of the foreign secretary, Balfour, and of other important Foreign Office figures. Like Pickthall, Pilling, and Morgenthau before him, however, Herbert ran into fierce opposition. In the end it proved too much even for him.

  We have previously caught glimpses of Herbert: as a young honorary attaché in Constantinople along with the two men who became his friends, George Lloyd and Mark Sykes; as a Conservative Turcophile MP who joined the Anglo-Ottoman Soceity; as an army intelligence officer in Cairo in 1915; and as a supporter of Marmaduke Pickthall one year later. Now he moves to the center of our narrative.

  He came from an august family. His father, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, served Lord Derby as secretary of state for the colonies, and Disraeli as lord lieutenant of Ireland. His half brother discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen. Tall and slim, with thick, wiry, untamable hair that turned gray during the war, an aquiline nose, and gray, heavy-lidded eyes, he explored the Middle East and the Balkans as a young man, gaining a reputation for bravery, kindness, eccentricity, and dash even among the Albanian bandits who befriended him—and yet he was nearly blind. In 1913 came a startling inquiry from Tirana, the Albanian capital: Would he accept the Albanian throne? He wanted to, but the British government would not let him. He knew and admired Young Turk leaders and remained in touch with them right up until the moment Enver arranged the fateful alliance with Germany. “He loved to dare;1 he loved adventure; he loved to let people off and to give,” Desmond MacCarthy wrote of him, shortly after his friend’s untimely death at forty-four in 1924. John Buchan, who modeled his eponymous hero, Sandy Arbuthnot, after Herbert in the thriller Greenmantle, adds: “He was the most2 extraordinary combination of tenderness and gentleness, with the most insane gallantry that I have ever known—a sort of survivor from crusading times.”