The Zionist movement was new, but its roots were as old as Judaea, whose independence was undermined and later crushed by ancient Rome, and most of whose inhabitants were driven into foreign lands in the second century AD. Even in exile the Judaeans—or Jews, as they came to be known—clung to their own religion, with its distinctive laws and customs, setting them apart from the peoples amongst whom they lived and moved. Inferior status, persecutions, frequent massacres, and repeated expulsions from one country after another further reinforced their sense of separate identity and special destiny. In the end—according to their religious teachings—God would bring them back to Zion, and in the course of their Passover ceremony each year they would repeat the ritual prayer, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
The future return to Zion remained a Messianic vision until the ideology of nineteenth-century Europe converted it into a contemporary political program. A representative idea of that time—which had been planted everywhere by the armies of the French Revolution and had flourished—was that every nation ought to have an independent country of its own (though, of course, what constituted a nation was an open question). The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini was the outstanding proponent of this doctrine, according to which each nation should be freed to realize its unique genius and to pursue its particular mission in the service of mankind. Thus the nationalism of each nation serves not merely its own interests but also those of its neighbors; and in the service of this creed Mazzini’s colleague Giuseppe Garibaldi—Italy’s greatest hero—fought for Uruguay and France as well as Italy.
A converse of this proposition was that a fundamental cause of the world’s ills was that some nations were being kept from achieving unity or independence—a situation that Mazzini and his followers proposed to change by war or revolution. Their program was taken over from the left by the right—Italy and Germany were formed into countries by Cavour and Bismarck respectively—and became a common theme of European political discourse. Nationalism was taken a step further in the Swiss (1847) and American (1861–5) civil wars, when seven confederated Swiss cantons and eleven Confederated States of America attempted to secede—and were crushed by the armies of their respective federal governments. Thus peoples were to be unified into one nation, like it or not.
This suggested there might be a dark side to the new nationalism: intolerance of groups different from the majority. Jews encountered this at once. In the nationalist environment of western Europe, the Jewish question assumed new guises: were the Jews of Germany Germans? were the Jews of France French?—and, if so, what of their special identity? By the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews of western Europe had achieved legal emancipation from many of the restrictions that had confined them for centuries: they could move out of their ghettos, practice the trade or profession of their choice, buy land, and enjoy the rights of citizenship—but they still encountered a wave of hostility from their neighbors who considered them alien.
In eastern Europe—the Russian Empire, including Poland, the Baltic lands, and the Ukraine—the Jewish situation was perilous. Most of the world’s Jews then lived within the section of the Russian Empire to which they were confined so long as they lived within the Czar’s domains: the Pale, or enclosure (from the word for a wooden stake used in building fences). Only a few of them—some illegally, some by special permission—lived in St Petersburg, Moscow, or elsewhere outside the Pale. The six million within the Pale were Russian Jews who were not allowed to be Jewish Russians. They were not only shackled by legal restrictions, but were victimized by the organized massacres called pogroms. In the last half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, these grew so terrible that Jews in large number fled the Russian Empire in search of refuge.
Since nationalism was then considered the cure-all for political ills, it was inevitable that somebody would propose it as the answer to the Jewish problem. National unity and self-determination within an independent Jewish commonwealth were, in fact, proposed in a number of eloquent books whose authors had arrived at their conclusions independently.* So Theodore Herzl was not the first to formulate such a program, but he was the first to give it tangible political expression, at a time when Jewish pioneers from Russia were beginning to colonize Palestine without waiting for the politics to be thrashed out.
When Herzl, an assimilated Jew, conceived the idea of political Zionism, his notion had been that Jews needed to have a national state of their own—but that its location was not of primary importance. Of Jews and Judaism Herzl knew next to nothing. He was a fashionable journalist, the Paris correspondent of a Viennese newspaper who had forgotten his Jewish origins until the shock of French anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus case convinced him of the need to rescue the world’s Jews from their historical plight.
As a man of the world, he knew how political business was transacted in the Europe of his time and began by establishing a Zionist organization. He then commenced negotiations on its behalf with officials of various governments. Only after he had come into working contact with other Jews, and with Jewish organizations that for years had been fostering settlements in the Holy Land, did he come to recognize the unique appeal of the country that the world called Palestine—the Land of the Philistines—but that Jews called the Land of Israel.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Herzl’s negotiations with the Ottoman Empire had convinced him that the Sultan would not agree to the Zionist proposals—at least for the time being. So he looked elsewhere. In 1902 Herzl held an important meeting with Joseph Chamberlain, the powerful Colonial Secretary in the Salisbury and Balfour Cabinets and the father of modern British imperialism. Chamberlain, too, believed in a national solution to the Jewish problem, and listened sympathetically to Herzl’s fall-back proposal that a Jewish political community should initially be established across the frontier from Palestine, in the hope that Palestine would eventually become available, somehow or other. Herzl was talking in terms of either Cyprus or the El Arish strip at the edge of the Sinai peninsula, next to Palestine, both areas nominally parts of the Ottoman Empire but in fact occupied by Britain. Chamberlain ruled out Cyprus but offered to help Herzl obtain the consent of the British officials in charge of Sinai.
To apply for this consent, Herzl, through his British representative, Leopold Greenberg, decided to retain the services of a politically knowledgeable lawyer, and chose David Lloyd George, who personally handled the matter on behalf of his London firm, Lloyd George, Roberts & Co. The proposal foundered as a result of opposition from the British administration in Egypt and the Foreign Office sent letters to Dr Herzl on 19 June and 16 July 1903 informing him that his proposal was not practical.
Chamberlain then suggested that he could offer an area for Jewish settlement within the jurisdiction of his own department and offered the prospect of settlement in Uganda in British East Africa. The Prime Minister, Arthur James Balfour, who had also thought deeply about the Jewish question and had concluded that it required a national solution, supported Chamberlain’s proposal. Herzl agreed, and Lloyd George accordingly drafted a Charter for the Jewish Settlement, and submitted it formally to the British government for approval. In the summer of 1903 the Foreign Office replied in a guarded but affirmative way that if studies and talks over the course of the next year were successful, His Majesty’s Government would consider favorably proposals for the creation of a Jewish colony. It was the first official declaration by a government to the Zionist movement and the first official statement implying national status for the Jewish people.29 It was the first Balfour Declaration.
A meeting of the World Zionist Congress convened shortly thereafter, where Herzl presented the Uganda proposal, urging the settlement of East Africa as a way-station and refuge along the road to the Promised Land, where the Jews of the Czarist Empire could escape the terrors of the pogroms. Herzl’s arguments swayed heads but not hearts. Though they let their leader win the vote on the issue, most delegates were not inter
ested in any land other than that of their ancestors. The Zionist movement was at a dead-end: Herzl did not know how to lead it to Palestine but it would not follow him anywhere else. In the summer of 1904 Herzl died, leaving behind a fragmented and deeply divided leadership.
In 1906, with a new Liberal government in Britain, Lloyd George again submitted the Sinai proposal for consideration, at the instigation of Leopold Greenberg. Again the British government rejected it, and Sir Edward Grey wrote on 20 March 1906 to say that the Foreign Office position had not changed.30
During its formative years, then, David Lloyd George had represented the Zionist movement as it sought to define itself. It was no more than one of his many clients—and not a major one at that—yet, as a result of his professional representation of it, no other British political leader was in a better position than he to understand its character and its goals. As he contemplated the conquest of Palestine in 1917 and 1918, nobody had a clearer idea than he of what to do with it once it was his.
Like Woodrow Wilson, whose concern in the Middle East was for American Protestant schools and missions, Lloyd George wanted his country to carry out what he regarded as the Lord’s work in the region. But, unlike the President, the Prime Minister planned to aggrandize his country’s empire by doing so.
Lloyd George had followed his own intellectual path to the conclusion that Britain should sponsor Jewish nationalism in the postwar Middle East. A number of his colleagues within the British government arrived at the same conclusion in 1917, though by different paths—many roads led to Zion. The odd thing was that, just as they had supported the Emir Hussein because of mistaken notions about Arabs and Moslems, they were now about to support Zionism because of mistaken notions about Jews.
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TOWARD THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
I
Lloyd George—an “Easterner” both in his war strategy and in his war goals—succeeded in winning support for his views from important civilian members of the government, who came to view the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular, as vital imperial interests, and who arrived independently and by various paths at the conclusion that an alliance with Zionism would serve Britain’s needs in war and peace.
Lloyd George persuaded Lord Milner and his associates of the strategic importance of the war in the East in the winter of 1917, when it was by no means clear that the Allies would be able to win a decisive victory there or anywhere else. Even after the United States entered the war in the spring, it seemed entirely possible that the Americans might not arrive in time to stave off a negotiated peace agreement that would leave the belligerent countries more or less in their existing positions. There were also those who were worried about allowing the Germans and Turks to retain control of an area whose vital importance had been underscored by the Prime Minister.
The assistant secretaries of the War Cabinet, Leo Amery and Mark Sykes, worried that in the postwar world the Ottoman Empire might fall completely into the clutches of Germany. Were that to happen, the road to India would be in enemy hands—a threat that the British Empire could avert only by ejecting the Turks and Germans, and taking into British hands the southern perimeter of the Ottoman domains. The Cabinet, from the beginning, had thought of annexing Mesopotamia. As for Arabia, arrangements had been made with the local rulers who had asserted their independence: they were subsidized and could be relied upon to remain pro-British. That left Palestine as the only point of vulnerability. As the bridge between Africa and Asia, it blocked the land road from Egypt to India and, by its proximity, it threatened the Suez Canal and hence the sea road as well.
Amery, the leading figure among Milner’s associates in the government, discussed the matter in a memorandum to the Cabinet dated 11 April 1917. Warning against allowing Germany to strike again at Britain through domination of Europe or the Middle East after the war, he argued that “German control of Palestine” was one of “the greatest of all dangers which can confront the British Empire in the future.”1
Amery, along with Mark Sykes and, later, William Ormsby-Gore, had been appointed assistant to Maurice Hankey in heading the secretariat of the War Cabinet. A Member of Parliament and an army officer who had been serving in the War Office, Amery had become one of the inner band directing the war effort. In the division of responsibilities within the secretariat, the Middle East fell outside Amery’s sphere and within that of Sykes. Yet Amery had already involved himself in a matter affecting Middle Eastern policy by lending a hand to an old friend.
An army officer whom Amery had known in South Africa, Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, had commanded a Jewish corps in the Gallipoli campaign, and asked Amery to help get permission from the War Office to create a regiment of non-British Jews to fight under British command. This regiment would then be sent to fight in Palestine if and when Britain invaded the Ottoman Empire from Egypt and the Sinai. Patterson was an Irish Protestant, a student of the Bible, a professional army officer and amateur lion hunter, known for his best-selling book The Man-eaters of Tsavo and for his buccaneering spirit. The idea of a Jewish regiment had come from Vladimir Jabotinsky, a fiery Russian Jewish journalist who believed that Englishmen resented the presence in Britain of a large immigrant population of able-bodied Russian Jews who were not yet British subjects and who did not undertake military service. While he did not at first say so, Jabotinsky was inspired by the thought that a Jewish military unit helping to liberate Palestine would go far toward making the Zionist dream a reality.2 Patterson was enthusiastic; the Jewish corps he had commanded at Gallipoli had been created in large part through the efforts of Jabotinsky’s associate, Captain Joseph Trumpeldor, and Patterson had enjoyed commanding it.3
Amery agreed to help Patterson, but it was not an easy undertaking. Official Jewish community leaders opposed the project bitterly; in their view it endangered Jews who lived in the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires by suggesting that Jews, as such, were on the Allied side. The Zionist leadership, though at odds with the British Jewish community in most other matters, joined in deploring the identification of the Zionist cause with one or the other of the warring European coalitions. When Jabotinsky raised the issue for the first time in 1915, the British authorities also saw little merit in his proposal that the Jewish unit should help to liberate Palestine. “But nobody knows yet when we shall go to Palestine,” said one high official, “and Lord Kitchener says never.”4
Amery persisted throughout 1916 and 1917 and succeeded in laying Jabotinsky’s petition before the War Cabinet. The British government then went forward to negotiate a convention with the other Allied governments, allowing each country to take into military service the resident nationals of the others; in other words, Russian Jews living in Britain could join the British army. Parliament authorized the convention, and in the summer of 1917 the Jewish unit (later called the Jewish Legion) was formed within the British army under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Patterson. Lloyd George was enthusiastic: “The Jews might be able to render us more assistance than the Arabs” in the Palestine campaign, he said.5
Until his colleague Mark Sykes spoke to him about Zionism, Amery had not put his strategic concerns about Palestine and his support of the Jewish Legion into a unified focus, even though his general leanings were toward Zionism. A Jewish national entity had behind it the authority of his political mentor, the late Joseph Chamberlain, and was viewed favorably by his leader, Lord Milner, who had acquired a sympathy for Zionism early in life. Amery himself felt a similar sympathy; he later wrote that, apart from the United States, “Bible reading and Bible thinking England was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland has always been regarded as a natural aspiration which ought not to be denied.”6
When William Ormsby-Gore joined Amery and Sykes as one of the three assistant secretaries of the War Cabinet, he brought with him a more concrete interest in the immediate prospects of the Zionist idea. Ormsby-Gore, a Member of Parli
ament and secretary to Lord Milner, had gone out to the Middle East to work with the Arab Bureau. Under his personal command was Aaron Aaronsohn, leader of a highly effective, intelligence-gathering group operation working behind Ottoman lines in Jewish Palestine to provide information about Turkish troop movements. Like Jabotinsky, Aaronsohn was attacked by fellow Jews for identifying Zionist interests with those of the Allies—and thus endangering the Palestinian Jewish community, which Djemal Pasha was tempted to treat as his colleagues had treated the Armenians. Aaronsohn’s information about Turkish defenses and military dispositions proved to be of great value to the British military command in Egypt, however, and was appreciated by Ormsby-Gore.
Another aspect of Aaronsohn’s life that fascinated Ormsby-Gore was his agricultural exploration and experimentation—the career in which he had become famous. A decade earlier, Aaronsohn had joined in the search for the original strain of wild wheat that had flourished thousands of years ago. Since that time the plant had deteriorated as a result of intensive inbreeding, becoming increasingly vulnerable to disease. To save the planet’s basic grain food by finding nature’s original plant was a romantic quest for the blue-eyed, fair-haired Aaron Aaronsohn. In the spring of 1906 he made the find of a lifetime: wild wheat blowing in the breezes at the foot of Mount Hermon, near the Jewish settlement of Rosh Pina.
Ormsby-Gore was struck by the work Aaronsohn had done at his station for agricultural research in Palestine, for it went to the heart of the argument about Zionism. The case against Zionism, which was made in the Cabinet by Lord Curzon, was that Palestine was too barren a land to support the millions of Jews who hoped to settle there. The argument made later by Arab groups, who claimed there was no room in the country for additional settlers, was that “no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation,” as George Antonius, an eloquent Arab spokesman, wrote long afterward, “except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.”7 Aaronsohn’s experiments rebutted that argument.* His work tended to show that, without displacing any of the 600,000 or so inhabitants of western Palestine, millions more could be settled on land made rich and fertile by scientific agriculture. His work had wider applications: Ormsby-Gore brought back with him to London the idea that Zionist Jews could help the Arabic-speaking and other peoples of the Middle East to regenerate their region of the globe so that the desert could once more bloom.
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