A Peace to End all Peace (33 page)

The idea recurred: in the mid-nineteenth century, the social reformer Anthony Cooper, who became Earl of Shaftesbury, inspired a powerful evangelical movement within the Church of England that aimed at bringing the Jews back to Palestine, converting them to Christianity, and hastening the Second Coming. Shaftesbury also inspired Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary and his relation by marriage, to extend British consular protection to Jews in Palestine: “Palmerston had already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people,” Shaftesbury noted in his diary.
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Palmerston acted from a mixture of idealistic and practical reasons not unlike those of Lloyd George in the next century. He pressed a Jewish Palestine on the Ottoman Empire in the context of the Great Game rivalry with France, at a time in the 1830s and 1840s when the rebelling Viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, backed by France, marched from Egypt on Syria to threaten the territorial integrity of the empire and the throne of its Sultan. As usual, Palmerston upheld the Ottoman cause. One of his purposes in advocating a Jewish Palestine was to strengthen the Ottoman regime, by providing it with Jewish support. Another was to foil the French and their protégé Mehemet Ali by placing along their line of march a British-backed Jewish homeland which would block their advance. Another was to provide Britain with a client in the Middle East, and therefore an excuse for intervention in Ottoman affairs. The Russians, as defenders of the Orthodox faith, and the French, as champions of the important and strategically located Maronite (Roman Catholic) community in Lebanon, claimed to represent significant Middle Eastern interests and communities. For the want of Protestants in the area, Britain had to adopt some other protégé in order to be able to make a similar claim.

Palmerston’s notion of restoring the Promised Land to the Jewish people also proved to be shrewd domestic politics. It struck a responsive chord in British public opinion that harked back to Puritan enthusiasm.
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According to the leading authority on Palmerston’s diplomacy, his policy “became connected with a mystical idea, never altogether lost in the nineteenth century, that Britain was to be the chosen instrument of God to bring back the Jews to the Holy Land.”
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This somehow coexisted, at least in Britain’s upper classes, with pervasive anti-Semitism.

In 1914 the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war appeared to have brought about the political circumstances in which the Zionist dream at last could be realized. “What is to prevent the Jews having Palestine and restoring a real Judaea?” asked H. G. Wells in an open newspaper letter penned the moment that Turkey came into the war.

A similar thought occurred soon afterward to Sir Herbert Samuel, Postmaster General in Asquith’s Cabinet, one of the leaders of the Liberal Party, and the first person of the Jewish faith to sit in a British Cabinet. In January 1915 he sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Asquith proposing that Palestine should become a British protectorate—because it was of strategic importance to the British Empire—and urging the advantages of encouraging large-scale Jewish settlement there. The Prime Minister had just been reading
Tancred
—a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British leader (baptized a Christian, but born of a Jewish family), who advocated a Jewish return to Palestine—and Asquith confided that Samuel’s memorandum “reads almost like a new edition of
Tancred
brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted by this proposed addition to our responsibilities. But it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s [Disraeli’s] favourite maxim that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.…”
²³

In March 1915 a revised version of Samuel’s memorandum was circulated to the Cabinet. It did not attract support, and Asquith’s private comment was that “Curiously enough the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, who, I need not say, does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future…”
²⁴
The Prime Minister was unaware of the complex of motives behind the position taken by Lloyd George, who told the Cabinet that it would be an outrage to let the Christian Holy Places in Palestine fall into the hands of “Agnostic Atheistic France.”
²⁵
Asquith found it odd that Samuel and Lloyd George should advocate a British protectorate for Palestine for such different reasons: “Isn’t it singular that the same conclusion shd. be capable of being come to by such different roads?”
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It was a prescient remark for, in the years to come, British officials traveling along many different roads happened to arrive at the same conclusion: a distinctive characteristic of Britain’s evolving Palestine policy was that there was no single reason for it.

Kitchener threw the great weight of his authority against Samuel’s proposal. He told the Cabinet that Palestine was of little value, strategic or otherwise, and that it did not have even one decent harbor.
²⁷
Samuel’s proposal, therefore, was not adopted; but Lloyd George continued to disagree with Kitchener about the strategic importance of Palestine.

V

Lloyd George, though of a Welsh family, was born in Manchester, Britain’s second-largest city, and the home of the Radical Liberal tradition which he was to uphold throughout much of his political life. Manchester was also, next to London, the home of Britain’s largest Jewish community; and Members of Parliament from the area, such as Balfour and Churchill, were aware of the special concerns of their Jewish constituents.

C. P. Scott, editor of the great Liberal newspaper the
Manchester Guardian
, was converted to Zionism in 1914 by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. Scott, who was considered to be Lloyd George’s closest political confidant, took up the cause with all the force of his idealistic nature. The military correspondent of the
Guardian
, Herbert Sidebotham, saw a complementary aspect of the matter: a military advantage to Britain. In the issue of 26 November 1915, he wrote that “the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire” depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state inhabited “by an intensely patriotic race.”
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The
Manchester Guardian
’s conversion was brought about in the context of the First World War, but Lloyd George had come to Zionism—or rather it had come to him—more than a decade before. In 1903 he had been retained as the British attorney for the Zionist movement and for its founder, Dr Theodore Herzl, in connection with an issue that caused an agonizing split in Zionist ranks: whether a Jewish state necessarily had to be located in Palestine. As one who represented Herzl at the moment of decision, he was in a position to understand the movement’s dilemmas.

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.
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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.