A History of Zionism (36 page)

Authors: Walter Laqueur

Tags: #History, #Israel, #Jewish Studies, #Social History, #20th Century, #Sociology & Anthropology: Professional, #c 1700 to c 1800, #Middle East, #Nationalism, #Sociology, #Jewish, #Palestine, #History of specific racial & ethnic groups, #Political Science, #Social Science, #c 1800 to c 1900, #Zionism, #Political Ideologies, #Social & cultural history

BOOK: A History of Zionism

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We have retraced in broad outline the developments that eventually led to the Balfour Declaration. The main milestones on this road are not in dispute, but the causes, as usual, are. Why did the British government decide to make the Declaration and what did it expect from it? It may be useful to put the issue into a broader perspective: for the Zionists this was the central political problem, whereas for the British leaders (not to mention the French and the Americans) it was marginal. Neither the friends nor the enemies of the Zionist cause had the time or interest to engage in a thorough study of its various aspects. Hence the frequent inconsistencies in their attitude. There was no more enthusiastic Zionist than Sir Mark Sykes, no one less patient with anti-Zionist arguments. But Sykes was also convinced that the objects of Zionism did not involve a Jewish state, and he advised the Jews in their own interest to look at the problem through Arab eyes.
*
Lord Cecil, assistant foreign secretary, declared in December 1917 at a public meeting: ‘Our wish is that the Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians and Judaea for the Jews.’ Yet only a few weeks later he informed the American ambassador that all the British government had done was to give a pledge to put the Jews in Palestine on the same footing as other nationalities and to see that there should be no discrimination against them.
†
Such inconsistencies do not necessarily reflect Machiavellian schemes and hidden designs. The Balfour Declaration was, as Leonard Stein has pointed out, not a legal but a political document, and a fairly vague one at that. It could be interpreted in different ways, and as the international situation was so fluid, the interpretation changed from week to week.

There is conflicting evidence as to what Balfour, Lloyd George and others expected to happen in Palestine after the war. It has been argued that there never was any intention to establish a Jewish state, but this opinion was probably coloured by subsequent developments, by the fact that after 1918 influential circles within the British government gradually dissociated themselves from the original concept. There is no reason to disbelieve Forbes Adams, the Foreign Office expert on Palestine, who wrote before this change in climate took place that the intention of the British government was to create a state in Palestine and to turn it into a Jewish state.
‡
Such a transformation was expected to take years, perhaps many years. Lloyd George, two decades later, wrote that the war cabinet did not intend to set up a Jewish state immediately, but that it was contemplated that Palestine would become a Jewish common-wealth after the Jews had responded to the opportunity afforded them and become a majority of the inhabitants.

Some of the reasons which helped to induce the British government to enter into a commitment
vis-à-vis
the Zionist movement have been mentioned; they were aware that the goodwill of world Jewry was an important if intangible factor. The year 1917 was not a happy one for the Allies, and they needed all the assistance they could get. The support of American Jewry for the allied cause was no longer an issue of paramount importance, since America had entered the war. But Russia was about to leave it, and thus Russian Jewry became a factor of some significance. Sir Ronald Graham, head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, wrote in a memorandum dated 24 October 1917 that the Zionists might be thrown into the arms of the Germans unless an assurance of sympathy was given to them: ‘The moment this assurance is granted, the Zionist Jews are prepared to start an active pro-allied propaganda throughout the world.’
*

During the autumn of 1917 the situation in Russia became more and more critical. The country was exhausted, and it seemed doubtful whether the provisional government would be able to stay in power. If Russia left the war, no great powers of prediction were needed to realise that the allied forces in the west would at once be subjected to heavier German pressure: the great offensive in France had been a failure, and the Italian army was facing a critical situation. No substantial American forces had as yet appeared in Europe. In this situation, and in view of the fact that Jews were conspicuous in the Russian revolutionary movement, allied efforts to win over Russian Jewry did not come as a surprise. But it is unlikely that any British statesmen expected immediate, dramatic returns. According to the advice the British government received from Petrograd, Russian Jews were not important politically and the less said and done about the subject the better, Ambassador Buchanan had written earlier in the war. He thought (as his colleagues in Washington did) that the weight of the Jews was usually overrated and that it was hardly worth investing great efforts to win their support.

The war cabinet did not quite share this opinion. It took a graver view of the deteriorating situation in Russia and of the spread of pacifist attitudes in both Russia and America. But this (to quote Leonard Stein again) does not answer the question why the Zionists were taken seriously enough for the British government to enter into a long-term moral obligation towards Zionism. Its ambassadors in Washington and Petrograd, and the other critics of Zionism were, after all, not seriously mistaken in their assessment of Zionist influence. Russian Jewry was divided in its attitude towards Zionism and a Jewish national home, and would not in any case have been able to keep Russia in the war. The Allies, on the other hand - to put it somewhat crudely - would have won the war even if no promise to the Zionists had been made. Even in the third year of the war Zionism was only a minor factor in world politics.

It is true that early in December Weizmann cabled Rozov, the Russian Zionist leader, to do all he could to strengthen pro-British sentiment in Russian Jewry and counter adverse influences. ‘Remember the providential coincidence of British and Jewish interests. We rely on your doing your utmost at this critical and solemn hour. Wire what steps you propose to take.’
*

But neither allied difficulties nor Zionist strength were great enough to make this explanation wholly convincing. When, at a private gathering soon after the event, Balfour was asked whether it had been his intention to make a bid for Jewish support in the war, he replied: ‘Certainly not.’ He and Lloyd George wanted to give the Jews their rightful place in the world. It was not right, they felt, that a great nation should be deprived of a home.
†
Balfour believed, as Lloyd George did, that the Jews had been wronged by Christendom for almost two thousand years and that they had a claim to reparation. The whole culture of Europe, he said in a speech in 1922, had been guilty of great crimes against the Jews, and the British had at last taken the initiative in giving them the opportunity of developing in peace the great gifts which in the past they had been able to apply only in the countries of the diaspora.
‡
Balfour thus had the feeling that he was instrumental in righting a wrong of world-historical dimensions, quite irrespective of the changing world situation. There was a similar element in Lloyd George’s thinking. He once told Mrs James de Rothschild about Weizmann: ‘When you and I are forgotten this man will have a monument to him in Palestine.’
§

Such reference to moral considerations and issues of principle have appeared naïve, if not disingenuous, to latter-day historians and have been flatly rejected by some of them. Surely there must have been more tangible interests involved? It is, of course, quite true that the British statesmen of the day were convinced that the aims of Zionism were not incompatible with those of Britain in the Near East, for otherwise no support would have been forthcoming. But having established this obvious fact, we still know very little about the deeper motives. There is a temptation to explain them in terms of the psychology of British statesmen of a later age, but such an approach ignores the profound changes resulting from five decades of imperial decline. Principles counted for more at that time, and there was wider scope for disinterested action. It was still possible for a British government to take decisions from time to time which were of no obvious political, economic or military benefit. The Balfour Declaration may well have been the ‘last wholly independent imperial act of a British government done without any reference at all to pressure from any other great state or combination of states’.
*

The Declaration fell short in most essential respects of Zionist aspirations. It was so cautiously worded that it left the future of Palestine wide open. It stated that Britain would ‘facilitate’ the establishment of a national home, but it did not commit itself to the idea of a British protectorate or mandate. It made no promise that there would be a Jewish commonwealth or state in Palestine; there was merely reference to a Jewish home, which did not exclude other national homes. There was no mention of Jewish autonomy or that the Jews would have a preponderant influence on the future of Palestine. It did not promise that the Zionist Organisation or any other Jewish body would participate in the administration of the country. Much of this may have been implicit in the thoughts of the authors of the Declaration, but these principles were not spelled out in the watered-down version. Hence the lack of enthusiasm on the part of Weizmann and his colleagues upon receiving the news that this vague formula had been accepted instead of the more concrete and stronger one suggested by them earlier on. But the spirit of elation which attended the announcement of the Declaration affected not only the Jewish masses, who did not know about the struggle behind the scenes which had preceded it - Weizmann himself was infected by it. Sokolow commented on the event in biblical terms and references: ‘Mid storm and fire the people and the land seemed to be born again. The great events of the time of Zerubabel, Ezra and Nehemiah repeated themselves. The Third Temple of Jewish freedom is rising before us.’
†

After the publication of Herzl’s
Judenstaat
and the first Zionist congress, the Balfour Declaration was the second great turning-point in the history of political Zionism. But it was not immediate redemption, only the beginning of a new phase in an uphill struggle, which in some respects was even more arduous than earlier ones. A leading British newspaper, commenting on the Balfour Declaration, wrote that it was no idle dream to anticipate that by the close of another generation the new Zion might be a state ‘including, no doubt, only a pronounced minority of the entire Jewish race, yet numbering from a million to two million souls, forming a true national people, with its own distinctive, rural and urban civilisation, its own centres of learning and art.’
*
It was a remarkably acute forecast, yet it would never have materialised but for another world war, untold suffering and losses to the Jewish people, and, in the end, the abdication of the very power which had given Zionism its great chance in 1917.