Bible and Sword

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On his return to London in October he learned of the interview, arranged for him by Leopold Greenberg, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who was Herzl’s most valuable ally, agent, and counselor throughout the English negotiations. At his first conference with the “famous master of England” on October 23, 1902, his voice was inclined to tremble, but gradually it steadied, and “in my shaky English … I expounded to the immovable mask of Joe Chamberlain the entire Jewish Question.” He next described the protracted dealings with the Sultan. “But you know how it is with Turkish negotiations. If you want to buy a carpet you must drink half a dozen cups of coffee and smoke a hundred cigarettes; then you throw in a few words about the carpet. Now I may have time to negotiate, but my people have not. They are starving in the Pale. I must bring them immediate succour.… I then came to the territory which I wanted to get from England: Cyprus, El Arish and the Sinai Peninsula.”

  Chamberlain replied that Cyprus was impossible; the Greek and Moslem inhabitants would object, and England would be duty bound to take their side. But if Herzl “could show him a spot in the British dominions where there was no white population yet, then we could talk!” As to El Arish and Sinai, Lord Cromer would have to be consulted. What a pity he had already gone back to Egypt.

  Herzl’s diary record continues: “I drew El Arish for him on a bit of paper that lay on his desk and also my Haifa-hinterland idea. I said that I hoped to induce the Turks to come more speedily to terms with me, if I also turned up by the ‘Brook of Egypt’ [Sinai]. I might then be able to get the Haifa district cheaper.

  “At this the Mask laughed and dropped his monocle. But he had no idea where El Arish was.” It amused Herzl to find that the Colonial Secretary “did not completely know his way around the British possessions of which he is at present the undisputed master. It was as though the manager of a big drygoods store was not quite sure whether some slightly uncommon article happened to be in stock.” Together they consulted an atlas, and on finding El Arish in Egyptian territory Chamberlain said that there would be the same trouble with the natives as in Cyprus. “No,” Herzl told him, “we are not heading for Egypt. We have been there before.” At this the Mask laughed again. “It was only now that he understood fully my wish to have a place of assembly for the Jewish people in the neighborhood of Palestine.”

  With Chamberlain, as with Rothschild, Herzl made no attempt to conceal his concept of Sinai as a jumping-off base for the old homeland. He argued that Arish and Sinai were untenanted; that England could give the area to the Jews and gain an increase in power thereby. This seemed to impress Chamberlain, and on being asked point-blank, “Would you agree to our founding a Jewish colony on the Sinai Peninsula?” he replied: “Yes, if Lord Cromer is in favour.…” He asked Herzl to come to see him again the following day.

  Herzl left with the impression of a practical, energetic man, not brilliant, not imaginative, but essentially a business man determined to increase his business. Chamberlain, in fact, hardly pausing to consider a problem that had baffled the world for two thousand years, went ahead with the speed of a business tycoon who has been offered a favorable deal. When Herzl arrived at the Colonial Office next morning Chamberlain told him he had arranged a meeting with the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, for that afternoon. “I have prepared the way for you. You will lay the whole matter before him. Be careful to reassure Lord Lansdowne that you are not contemplating a Jameson Raid from El Arish upon Palestine.”*

  “He positively beamed as he said that.… I said, ‘Of course there can be no question of that, as I want to go to Palestine only with the Sultan’s consent.’ He looked at me with amusement, as if to say, ‘the deuce you do!’ ”

  Herzl hurried on to his conference with Lord Lansdowne, whose secretary told him that Chamberlain had been most pressing in arranging the meeting. The Foreign Secretary listened affably, repeated everything depended on Lord Cromer, and agreed to arrange for Leopold Greenberg to proceed to Egypt, where negotiations could be carried further on the spot.

  In November Greenberg returned and reported that Lord Cromer had not said No but had raised one objection in the fact that the Sinai Peninsula was already the subject of frontier disputes between Turkey and Egypt. Nevertheless Herzl, encouraged by Cromer’s having taken the colonization project seriously, drew up the formal declaration of the Zionist program and the El Arish project that he had promised to submit to Lansdowne. The first step should be British consent for a Zionist commission to investigate the locale, the next a land concession from the Egyptian government. Ultimately the terrible problem of the Pale would be solved, and England would “benefit materially,” but above all the Jews would gain a guarantee of “colonial rights,” which would mean more than anything else.

  Here Herzl was hinting at statehood, though he was apparently not ready to say so openly to the British government. Lord Cromer, to whom the memorandum was forwarded by the Foreign Office, immediately pounced on this point. “In your letter you remark that you ‘will become great and promising by the granting of this right of colonization.’ Your letter does not make clear what is to be understood by these words and what kind of rights the colonists will expect.” This failure to make statehood an explicit aim was repeated by the Zionist leaders at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, and it led to endless trouble and bitter recriminations under the Mandate. It is quite possible, however, that an explicit statement would have led to equal if not more trouble, especially from the assimilationist Jews, whom it would have infuriated. This Herzl could not afford to do, since he was still hoping to obtain from them the money for capitalization of the Colonial Trust. Whichever way he turned this problem always baffled his efforts. He could not get the land unless he could show that he had the money, and he could not get the money unless he could show that he had the land.

  In any event Lord Cromer had warned that the Egyptian attitude indicated that “no sanguine hopes of success ought to be entertained.” And Lord Lansdowne, in his covering letter, pointed out that the colonists would have to accept Turkish citizenship under Egyptian law. Herzl, however, refused to be discouraged. Already he suspected that the Sinai project would not come off, and though he obtained the consent of his Zionist colleagues for the investigating commission, in reply to Lansdowne he began to prepare the ground for some alternative territory. This time he was more, if not wholly, explicit. The land itself mattered less, he said, than the creation of an atmosphere so Jewish in character “that it could guarantee them, as Jews, freedom, justice and security. Your Lordship will, I know, appreciate the immeasurable worth of the national consciousness which in defiance of everyone has rescued our people from the lowest forms of degradation in the past and will lift us out of the unhappy condition in which we find ourselves today.”

  At a subsequent interview at the Foreign Office early in 1903 he found no ready acceptance of this point of view. He was received by the permanent undersecretary, Sir Thomas Sanderson, “a lean, angular, clever, suspicious old man” who was scared off by the talk of colonial “rights.” He tersely remarked that there could be no question of an international guarantee; that the most to be hoped for was a charter from the Egyptian government, of which details would have to be settled by Lord Cromer. “The English government will go as far as Cromer, no farther.”

  At this time Chamberlain, the chiefly interested party on the English side, was not in London, having left it in November 1902 on a tour of Africa to bind up the wounds of the Boer War. On his travels through Uganda and the Kenya highlands in East Africa he heard from the English colonists of their need for more settlers to strengthen their fingernail hold on the country. Again Chamberlain’s quick mind seized on the opportunity. “If Dr. Herzl,” he wrote in his diary on December 21, “were at all inclined to transfer his efforts to East Africa, there would be no difficulty in finding suitable land for Jewish settlers. But I assume that this country is too far removed from Palestine to have any attractions for him.…” But he mentally fil
ed the thought for future reference.

  Meanwhile at Cairo things were going badly for the El Arish project. The crucial question of just how far Lord Cromer was prepared to go was being plainly answered: not very far. The Zionist commission of experts had reported the land quite unsuitable without massive irrigation. The Egyptian government was obstinately against permitting any diversion of the waters of the Nile. Turkish wires at Cairo were being pulled against a charter. Herzl, with his obsessive sense of time running out, himself went to Cairo to see Lord Cromer in March 1903. He knew well enough that pressure from the Proconsul could dispose of all the objections, but Lord Cromer was cool and would go no farther than to say that he would have the irrigation expert of the Anglo-Egyptian administration, Sir William Garstyne, examine the needs further.

  Back in London in April Herzl went to see Chamberlain, who had himself just returned from Africa. It was at this meeting that the Colonial Secretary first broached the historic offer. Hearing from Herzl that the Sinai prospects looked gray indeed, he said that in East Africa “I saw the very country for you. The coast region is hot, but the farther you get into the interior the more excellent the climate becomes, for Europeans too.… So I thought to myself: that would be just the country for Dr. Herzl.”

  Exactly what or where was the country Chamberlain had in mind has never been made perfectly clear. It is usually carelessly referred to as “Uganda,” but when the Zionists went out to investigate and found that country unsuitable for Europeans much criticism resulted. Herzl’s notes on the conversation specifically quote Chamberlain as naming Uganda. Chamberlain’s biographer, on the other hand, maintains that he had in mind the Kenya highlands, bordering on Uganda, which were eminently suitable for white settlement, and that in describing it to Herzl he may have mentioned seeing the country from the Uganda railway, or something of the kind, which led to Herzl’s misunderstanding. Whatever the truth of the matter, Herzl at that time tried rather to explain to Chamberlain the importance of the Holy Land as the focus of the Zionist movement. Sinai was only a step away, and he urged Chamberlain to swing Lord Cromer toward a favorable decision. Chamberlain promised to try.

  This was on April 24, 1903. In the next days the first reports of the Easter Week pogroms at Kishinev appeared in the newspapers of Europe and America. The shrieks and murders, the stoning of helpless people in flight; women attacked, babies flung on the cobblestones, homes plundered and burned, synagogues defiled; an old rabbi stabbed as, backed against the altar with arms flung out, he attempted to protect the Torah with his body; the sacred scroll torn from him and trampled in filth—these were the reports carried in the press and in the shocked dispatches of diplomats.

  On top of this, early in May, Herzl began receiving cables from Greenberg and Colonel Goldsmith, whom he had left in charge of the negotiations in Cairo, presaging their defeat. Garstyne’s report had come through, stating that five times as much water was needed for irrigation as originally estimated. Lord Cromer considered the whole project too chancy to make it worth while bringing the heavy pressure necessary to overcome Egyptian objections. Finally, on May 11, came the official rejection.

  For Herzl it was a worse defeat than the Kaiser, the Sultan, and all the others. Following upon Kishinev, it was like the implacable doom mounting in a Greek tragedy. In no other circumstances would he probably have considered the East African offer, knowing as he did that the land and the soul of Judaism were, in the end, inseparable. On May 20 Chamberlain repeated the offer on more definite terms in an interview with Greenberg. Herzl authorized him to negotiate further on the basis of a “publicly recognized, legally secured plan of settlement.” This would be his answer to Kishinev—“We must play the politics of the hour.” Privately he hoped that a show of serious interest in East Africa indicating that the Jews were prepared to go elsewhere might induce the wavering Sultan to reconsider offering them better terms. He began again to work for a Turkish charter, perhaps in Mesopotamia, anywhere within view of Palestine. In the hope of bringing added influence to bear upon the Porte, he even went to Russia to see the man behind the pogroms, the abhorred Von Plehve, minister of the interior, who, he thought, would not be averse to aiding the exit of the Jews from Russia. Herzl would have gone to see the devil himself had he thought he might prove useful.

  While he was gone Greenberg carried on the East Africa negotiations. He had few illusions about the place as a geographical solution but he believed that if the offer were made officially it would, as he wrote to Herzl, involve Britain in the first political recognition by a modern state “of our people as a Nation.” Even if the Zionist Congress should refuse the offer it would not matter, he continued, because “we shall have obtained from Britain a recognition that it cannot ever go back on,” and he added, with a quite remarkable prescience, “they will have to make a further suggestion and this, it is possible, will gradually and surely lead us to Palestine.”

  Greenberg, thinking along these lines, envisaged the offer being made in the form of an agreement between the British government and the Jewish Colonial Trust, but the Foreign Office, to which Chamberlain had turned over the negotiations, was too wary for him. On the margin of Greenberg’s draft agreement, now in the Foreign Office archives, can be read the careful comments of C. J. B. Hurst, legal officer of the Foreign Office, neatly picking out each piece of autonomy asked for. Underneath, Lord Lansdowne, the foreign secretary, has pencilled, “I fear it is throughout an imperium in imperio.”

  After a further interview with Greenberg, Hurst summarized the Foreign Office position in a memorandum of July 23 stating that there would be no objection to a Jewish colony subject to the ordinary laws of a protectorate, “but if the promoters are looking for more than this and want a petty state of their own, I fear there would be great objection.” Here is the crux of the trouble that was to reappear in the Mandate.

  But Pushful Joe, in a hurry to settle a useful and energetic people in the outposts of Africa, was not the man to worry about implications. He spurred the reluctant Foreign Office, which in August finally confirmed the offer though not in terms of Greenberg’s draft agreement. Instead, a letter of August 14, 1903, from Sir Clement Hill, superintendent of African Protectorates for the Foreign Office, was addressed to Greenberg that promised “to entertain favorably proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony or settlement on conditions which will enable the members to observe their National customs” and, if a suitable site were to be found in East Africa, to make “the grant of a considerable area of land” and appoint “a Jewish official as chief of the local administration … such local autonomy being conditional upon the right of H.M. Government to exercise general control.”

  In the impreciseness of the wording the fatal flaw that was to mar the Balfour Declaration is here already apparent. It was no doubt deliberate. Neither the Jews nor the British government ever wanted to come to grips with the problem in the back of everybody’s mind—ultimate statehood. The Zionists, or most of them, were looking ahead to statehood but avoided saying so for fear of endangering whatever negotiations were in progress. The British government, equally, knew statehood to be the goal, in 1903 as Hurst’s memorandum indicates, as well as in 1917,* but being traditionally averse to precise definitions, on the theory that the less exactness the more room for maneuver, preferred to leave as much unsaid as possible.

  Herzl was notified of the offer on his return from Russia. The Sixth Zionist Congress was to meet at Basle at the end of the month. In a painful moral struggle Herzl tried to convince himself and his colleagues on the Actions Committee (the governing body of the Congress) that they were justified in proposing an offer that was not Zionism, that could not be reconciled with the original Basle Program. But it was a place to go—a Nachtasyl, in the words of Max Nordau, a temporary asylum, a shelter for the night; and would they be justified if they did not present the first offer of land ever made to the Jews since the loss of their homeland? No official vote of the Committee in t
his agonizing situation seems to have been reached, but when the Congress met, the East African offer of the British government was announced by Herzl.

  Stunned silence, amazement, followed by a storm of applause, was the first reaction. But as soon as the delegates began to emerge from the shock of actually receiving, as a people, an offer of something from a Great Power, they became disquieted. As the various national delegations met separately to debate the issue, opposition grew, especially in the delegation from Russia, the most devotedly Zionist, the most passionately argumentative of them all. Even the delegate from Kishinev, who had previously told Herzl that, to get out of Russia, the Russian Jews would even go to hell, now rejected East Africa. When the vote was finally taken, not on whether to accept the offer, but whether to authorize the sending of an investigating committee to East Africa, it was carried in the affirmative, 295 to 178. But in a body the negatives rose and left the hall. At a meeting called among themselves there was anger, with cries of “Traitor!” at Herzl’s name; but there were also weeping and rending of clothes in the traditional rites of mourning.

  The depth of feeling, the principles at stake, cannot be fully understood without a realization of the passionate attachment to Palestine. Palestine was, as Ahad-ha-Am continually preached, not only the land, but also the source—and the only possible source—of the spiritual strength that would re-create a sense of nationhood in the Jews. Back in the days of the first Congress, as a self-proclaimed “mourner at the wedding,” he had refused to be swept away by Herzl’s political visions and had always maintained that “a cultural center” in Palestine must come first. His influence, particularly on the Eastern Jews, had been profound and was expressed now in their sense of betrayal of the cause. One of them, shouting “Death to the East African!” attempted to assassinate Max Nordau.