A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Montagu was regarded as by far the most capable of the younger men in the Liberal ranks, and it was deemed a political masterstroke for the Prime Minister to have taken him and Churchill away from Asquith. Yet a typical political comment at the time (from Lord Derby, the War Minister) was, “The appointment of Montagu, a Jew, to the India Office has made, as far as I can judge, an uneasy feeling both in India and here” though Derby added that “I, personally, have a very high opinion of his capability and I expect he will do well.”29 It bothered Montagu that, despite his lack of religious faith, he could not avoid being categorized as a Jew. He was the millionaire son of an English lord, but was driven to lament that “I have been striving all my life to escape from the Ghetto.”30

  The evidence suggested that in his non-Zionism, Montagu was speaking for a majority of Jews. As of 1913, the last date for which there were figures, only about one percent of the world’s Jews had signified their adherence to Zionism.31 British Intelligence reports indicated a surge of Zionist feeling during the war in the Pale of Russia, but there were no figures either to substantiate or to quantify it.32 In Britain, the Conjoint Committee, which represented British Jewry in all matters affecting Jews abroad, had been against Zionism from the start and remained so.33

  Montagu’s opposition brought all matters to a halt. In disgust, Graham reported that the proposed declaration was “hung up” by Montagu, “who represents a certain section of the rich Jews and who seems to fear that he and his like will be expelled from England and asked to cultivate farms in Palestine.”34

  The sub-Cabinet officials who were pushing for a pro-Zionist commitment attempted to allay such fears. Amery, who was helping Milner redraft the proposed Declaration, explained the concept behind it to a Cabinet member as not really being addressed to British subjects of the Jewish faith, but to Jews who resided in countries that denied them real citizenship. “Apart from those Jews who have become citizens of this or any other country in the fullest sense, there is also a large body, more particularly of the Jews in Poland and Russia…who are still in a very real sense a separate nation…”35 Denied the right to become Russians, they would be offered a chance to rebuild their own homeland in Palestine.

  Montagu, however, took little interest in the position of Jews in other countries. It was the position of Jews in British society that concerned him; feeling threatened, he fought back with a ferocity that brought the Cabinet’s deliberations on the matter to a standstill.

  Montagu was aided by Lord Curzon, who argued that Palestine was too meagre in resources to accommodate the Zionist dream. More important, he was aided by Andrew Bonar Law—leader of the dominant party in the Coalition government and the Prime Minister’s powerful political partner—who urged delay. Bonar Law argued that the time was not yet ripe for a consideration of the Zionist issue.

  Montagu was also aided by the United States, which, until mid-October 1917, cautiously counselled delay. President Wilson was sympathetic to Zionism, but suspicious of British motives; he favored a Jewish Palestine but was less enthusiastic about a British Palestine. As the British Cabinet considered issuing the Balfour Declaration, it solicited the advice, and by implication the support, of President Wilson. The proposed Declaration was described by the Cabinet to the American government as an expression of sympathy for Zionist aspirations, as though it were motivated solely by concern for the plight of persecuted Jews. Wilson’s foreign policy adviser, Colonel House, translated this as follows: “The English naturally want the road to Egypt and India blocked, and Lloyd George is not above using us to further this plan.”36

  This was a fair interpretation of the views of the Prime Minister and of the Milner circle which advised him. According to Chaim Weizmann, Philip Kerr (the former Milner aide who served as Lloyd George’s secretary) “saw in a Jewish Palestine a bridge between Africa, Asia and Europe on the road to India.”37 It was not, however, a fair interpretation of the views of the Foreign Office, which had been won over by the argument that a pro-Zionist declaration would prove a crucial weapon against Germany in the war and afterward. The Foreign Office believed that the Jewish communities in America and, above all, Russia, wielded great power. The British ambassador in Petrograd, well aware that Jews were a weak and persecuted minority in imperial Russia and of no political consequence, reported that Zionists could not affect the outcome of the struggle for power in Russia. His home government persisted in believing, however, that the Jewish community in Russia could keep the government that ruled them in the Allied camp. As the crisis in Russia deepened, the Foreign Office was seized by a sense of urgency in seeking Jewish support.

  IV

  Fear begets fear. In Germany the press was aroused by rumors of what the British Foreign Office intended to do. In June 1917 Sir Ronald Graham received from Chaim Weizmann an issue of a Berlin newspaper known for its close relationship to the government, reporting that the British were flirting with the idea of endorsing Zionism in order to acquire the Palestinian land bridge on the road from Egypt to India, and proposing that Germany forestall the maneuver by endorsing Zionism first. (Though the British did not know it, the German government took little interest in adopting a pro-Zionist stance; it was the German press that took an interest in it.)

  That summer Graham communicated his fears to Balfour. In his minute, Graham wrote that he had heard there was to be another postponement which he believed would “jeopardise the whole Jewish situation.” This endangered the position in Russia where, he asserted, the Jews were all anti-Ally and, to a lesser extent, it would antagonize public opinion in the United States. Warning that Britain must not “throw the Zionists into the arms of the Germans,” he argued that “We might at any moment be confronted by a German move on the Zionist question and it must be remembered that Zionism was originally if not a German Jewish at any rate an Austrian Jewish idea.”38

  Graham attached to his minute a list of dates showing how extensive the government’s delays had been in dealing with the Zionist matter. In October, Balfour forwarded the minute to the Prime Minister, along with the list of dates which he said showed that the Zionists had reasonable cause to complain, to which he added his own recommendation that the question be taken up by the Cabinet as soon as possible.39

  On 26 October 1917, The Times published a leading article attacking the continuing delay. Stating that it was no secret that British and Allied governments had been considering a statement about Palestine, The Times argued that the time had come to make one.

  Do our statesmen fail to see how valuable to the Allied cause would be the hearty sympathy of the Jews throughout the world which an unequivocal declaration of British policy might win? Germany has been quick to perceive the danger to her schemes and to her propaganda that would be involved in the association of the Allies with Jewish national hopes, and she has not been idle in attempting to forestall us.

  On 31 October 1917 the Cabinet overrode the opposition of Montagu and Curzon and authorized the Foreign Secretary to issue a much-diluted version of the assurance of support that Weizmann had requested. An ebullient Sykes rushed over with the news, “Dr. Weizmann, it’s a boy” but the Zionist leader was unhappy that the original language had been so watered down.40

  Addressed to the most illustrious name in British Jewry, the Foreign Secretary’s letter of 2 November 1917 stated:

  Dear Lord Rothschild,

  I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” I should be gratef
ul if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

  Britain’s leaders anticipated no adverse reaction from their Arab allies; they had seen France as their only problem in this connection, and that had been resolved. The Prime Minister later wrote of the Arab leaders that “Palestine did not seem to give them much anxiety.”41 He pointed out that his government had informed King Hussein and Prince Feisal of its plans to re-create a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land. He caustically added that “We could not get in touch with the Palestinian Arabs as they were fighting against us.”42

  The public announcement of the Balfour Declaration was delayed until the following Friday, the publication date of the weekly Jewish Chronicle. By then the news was overshadowed by reports from Petrograd that Lenin and Trotsky had seized power. The Foreign Office had hoped the Balfour Declaration would help to swing Russian Jewish support to the Allied side and against Bolshevism. This hope remained alive until the Bolsheviks decisively won the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s. In November of 1917 the battle against Bolshevism in Russia had just begun, and those Britons who supported the Balfour Declaration, because they mistakenly believed Russian Jews were powerful and could be valuable allies, were driven to support it all the more by the dramatic news from Petrograd.

  It was not until 9 November that The Times was able to report the announcement of the Balfour Declaration, and not until 3 December that it published comments approving it. The comments followed upon a celebration at the London Opera House on 2 December organized by the British Zionist Federation. In addition to the Zionist leaders, speakers included Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Mark Sykes, and William Ormsby-Gore, as well as a Syrian Christian, an Arab nationalist, and spokesmen for Armenia. The theme of the meeting, eloquently pursued by many of the speakers, was the need for Jews, Arabs, and Armenians to help one another and to move forward in harmony. The opinion of The Times was that “The presence and the words of influential representatives of the Arab and Armenian peoples, and their assurances of agreement and cooperation with the Jews, would alone have sufficed to make the meeting memorable.”43

  Of the meeting, The Times wrote that “its outstanding features were the Old Testament spirit which pervaded it and the feeling that, in the somewhat incongruous setting of a London theatre, the approaching fulfillment of ancient prophecy was being celebrated with faith and fervour.”44 It was appropriate that it should be so: Biblical prophecy was the first and most enduring of the many motives that led Britons to want to restore the Jews to Zion.

  The Prime Minister planned to foster a Jewish home in Palestine, in any event, and later wrote that the peace treaty would have provided that Palestine should be a homeland for the Jews “even had there been no previous pledge or promise.”45 The importance of the Balfour Declaration, he wrote, was its contribution to the war effort. He claimed that Russian Jews had given invaluable support to the war against Germany because of it. The grateful Zionist leaders had promised to work toward an Allied victory—and had done so. Writing two decades later, as the British government was about to abandon the Balfour Declaration, he said that the Zionists “kept their word in the letter and the spirit, and the only question that remains now is whether we mean to honour ours.”46

  The Prime Minister underestimated the effect of the Balfour Declaration on the eventual peace settlement. Its character as a public document—issued with the approval of the United States and France and after consultation with Italy and the Vatican, and greeted with approval by the public and the press throughout the western world—made it a commitment that was difficult to ignore when the peace settlement was being negotiated. It took on a life and momentum of its own.

  V

  The Declaration also played a role in the development of the Zionist movement in the American Jewish community. American Zionism had been a tiny movement when the war began. Of the roughly three million Jews who then lived in the United States, only 12,000 belonged to the often ephemeral groups loosely bound together in the amateurishly led Zionist Federation.47 The movement’s treasury contained 15,000 dollars;48 its annual budget never exceeded 5,200 dollars.49 The largest single donation the Federation ever received prior to 1914 was 200 dollars.50 In New York the movement had only 500 members.51

  Louis D. Brandeis, an outstanding Boston lawyer not previously identified with specifically Jewish causes, had become a Zionist in 1912 and took over leadership of the movement in 1914. As the intellectual giant of the Progressive movement in American politics, he was believed to exert great influence over President Wilson. Brandeis was perhaps the first Jew to play an important part in American politics since the Civil War. Only one Jew had ever been a member of a president’s cabinet,* and Brandeis himself was to become the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  The great waves of Jewish immigration into the United States were recent, and most immigrants were anxious to learn English, to shed their foreign accents and ways, and to become American. American-born Jews, too, wanted to distance themselves from any foreign taint and feared that attachment to Zionism on their part might make them seem less than wholehearted in their loyalty to the United States.

  It was this issue, above all, that Brandeis set out to address. As he saw it, American Jews lacked something important that other Americans possessed: a national past. Others could point to an ancestral homeland and take pride in it and in themselves. Brandeis especially admired Irish-Americans in this respect and for manifesting their opposition to continued British rule in Ireland.

  Arguing that this kind of political concern and involvement is entirely consistent with American patriotism, and indeed enhances it, he proclaimed that “Every Irish-American who contributed towards advancing home rule was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine…will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”52

  The ethical idealism of Brandeis made a powerful impression on Arthur Balfour when the British Foreign Secretary visited the United States in 1917 and discussed the future of Palestine. In turn, the Balfour Declaration vindicated the arguments that Brandeis had used in his appeals to the American Jewish community. It showed that Zionism was in harmony with patriotism in wartime because a Jewish Palestine was an Allied war goal. Soon afterward it also became an officially supported American goal. On the occasion of the Jewish New Year in September 1918, President Wilson endorsed the principles of the Balfour Declaration in a letter of holiday greetings to the American Jewish community.53

  Whether because of the Balfour Declaration or because of Brandeis’s effective and professional leadership, support for Zionism within the Jewish community grew dramatically. In 1919 membership of the Zionist Federation grew to more than 175,000, though Zionist supporters remained a minority group within American Jewry and still encountered fierce opposition from the richer and more established Jews—opposition that was not really overcome until the 1940s. But Brandeis had made American Zionism into a substantial organization along the lines pioneered by Irish-Americans who supported independence for Ireland; and the Balfour Declaration had helped him to do so—even though the Foreign Office had issued the declaration in part because they supposed such a force was already in existence and needed to be appeased.

  VI

  A measure of how far British war goals had moved in the year since Lloyd George replaced Asquith is provided by Leo Amery’s reflections in his diary at the end of 1917. Looking back and evaluating what he had been able to accomplish during the year, he wrote that one of his main achievements in dealing with British government colleagues had been “all the work on Peace terms which gradually drove into their heads the importance of East Africa, Palestine, and Mesopotamia and the Imperial outlook generally.”54

  As Amery indicated, Britain’s main objectives by now were not in Europe. The destruction wrought in the first three years of the war made a meaningful victory in Europe impos
sible. The rival warring European coalitions were ruined. It was not feasible to look for an annexation or acquisition in Europe to make up for what had been lost. Even the destruction of Germany would not meet Britain’s needs. In a wartime speech Smuts pointed out that Germany had to remain a substantial power in order to uphold the European balance of power, which it was in Britain’s vital interest to maintain.55

  It was an open question as to whether the Britain that sailed onto the world ocean and around the globe under Sir Francis Drake had perished forever with the generation of 1914 on the western front. If that Britain could be revived, it would have to be through imperial expansion, partly in Africa but principally in the Middle East—that was the direction in which the Prime Minister and the Milner circle were looking.

  This shift in outlook brought the Ottoman war, which had begun as an accidental irrelevance, from the periphery to the very center of the Prime Minister’s world policy. From the beginning he had said that the Great War could be won there. Now he was saying that his postwar objectives could be won there too. With his political instinct, he felt that it was an area in which he could win tangible rewards for his countrymen, and with his strategic vision he saw—as did Milner, Amery, Smuts, Kerr, and Ormsby-Gore—that, by supplying the missing section of the line that led from Cape Town to India and on to Australia and New Zealand, it offered a new lease on Britain’s empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Where the Asquith Cabinet eventually came to see hegemony over portions of the Middle East as something that Britain merely wanted, the Lloyd George government came to see it as territory that Britain needed.

  PART VII

  INVADING THE MIDDLE EAST