A Peace to End all Peace (34 page)

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 interested 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.
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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.

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 Parliament 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.”
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Aaronsohn’s experiments rebutted that argument.
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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.

II

As soon as Lloyd George became Prime Minister, Leo Amery initiated a move that placed Palestine within the context of the future of the British Empire. At the end of 1916 Amery proposed creating an Imperial War Cabinet, and sent a note on the subject to Lord Milner, who arranged for Lloyd George to put the idea in motion.
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The war had created a need for such a body: the empire had contributed so much manpower to the war effort that troops from outside Britain constituted a substantial part of the British armed forces. The Dominions alone contributed more than a million men to the armed forces, while the Indian Empire contributed at least a half million fighting men and hundreds of thousands of support troops. Yet Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Britain’s other partners in the fighting had never been consulted about whether to go to war. George V had declared war, and his governor-generals in his Dominions overseas had promulgated declarations on their behalf. Neither the parliaments nor the governments of the Dominions had been involved in those decisions. Amery’s proposal was to recognize, however belatedly, the importance of these partners by giving them representation in a central body in London dealing with the overall direction of the war.

Amery was convinced, as were Lord Milner’s other friends, that the structure of the British Empire had to be changed fundamentally; and by the end of 1916, as the political situation in London became fluid, and party and other divisions were breaking down, much seemed possible that would not have seemed so before.

Until the time of Disraeli, the creation of the empire had been a haphazard and, it was said, an absent-minded affair. Disraeli gave it glamor and focused attention on it. Coming afterward, Amery and his friends in the Milner circle, who had worked in concert with Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, were among the first conscious and systematic proponents of empire, while their associates Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan were among its deliberate glorifiers. Many among them advocated the creation of an empire-wide economic system, closed to outsiders by tariffs. Others, who recognized that various parts of the empire often appeared to occupy economic positions in conflict with one another, advocated closer political association. Lionel Curtis, a founder of their publication, the
Round Table
, claimed that the British Empire had no choice but federation or disintegration. He spoke for those in the Milner circle whose program was organic, political union of the empire, with an imperial parliament elected from the Dominions as well as from Britain, giving rise to an imperial Cabinet which would rule the empire as a whole. The program had been rejected at an imperial conference in 1911, but the breakdown of world political structures during the First World War seemed to offer a second chance.

On 19 December 1916, acting on Amery’s suggestion, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that “We feel that the time has come when the Dominions ought to be more formally consulted” on the issues of war and peace.
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Accordingly, he convoked an Imperial War Conference, confusingly also called the Imperial War Cabinet, to meet in London three months later.

Nobody was more suspicious of the government’s intentions than the delegate from South Africa, Jan Christian Smuts, a lawyer-turned-general who had fought against the British in the Boer War; he had no desire to be ruled from London. He arrived in London for the conference on 12 March 1917, and his suspicions were deepened when, the same day, he received an invitation to dine at Brooks’s with Lord Milner, his former adversary.

When the conference opened, issue was joined at once and Smuts won a lasting victory. On 16 March 1917 he pushed through a resolution that postponed consideration of the details of how the British Empire should be reorganized until the end of the war, but committed the participants in advance to the proposition that the basis of the reorganization would be the independence of South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Lloyd George may have been less disappointed at this outcome than were his colleagues in Milner’s circle. The Prime Minister had purposes of his own, and saw ways in which Smuts, in particular, could serve them. Smuts was a superb administrator of the calibre of Milner, Amery, and Hankey, and could help them to run the war effort. As a successful general in his Boer War days and more recently in East Africa, and a representative of the Dominions, he could also help Lloyd George by throwing his weight against the British generals. Lloyd George prevailed upon Smuts to stay on in London and serve in the War Cabinet “on loan” from his own country’s Cabinet. Thus he served not only as a member of the British Cabinet, but also as the South African representative in the Imperial War Cabinet (or Imperial War Conference). He was the only Cabinet minister in modern British history to have no connection with either House of Parliament; and spent the rest of the war away from home, living in a hotel room at the Savoy.
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