The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (28 page)

On March 13, 1915, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet convened at 10 Downing Street to discuss the revised memorandum prepared by Herbert Samuel on the future of Palestine. Samuel had toned it down since showing the original version to his leader two months earlier. He had eliminated the rhetorical flourishes, to which Asquith referred disdainfully as practically “dithyrambic.” And this time he explicitly ruled out any attempt to found a Jewish state there: “Whatever be the merits
¹⁵
or the demerits of that proposal, it is certain that the time is not ripe for it.” But the justifications for British action in the region remained from the original memorandum, and this time he took great pains to emphasize that non-Jews in the region must receive equal treatment under any future scheme.

Once again Samuel prepared the ground carefully. Prior to submitting the memorandum to the cabinet, he consulted several times with Weizmann, with Moses Gaster, and with various other experts, including a few who had returned recently from the Middle East. Then he sent the modified document to cabinet colleagues whom he judged sympathetic: Viscount Haldane, the lord chancellor; Jackie Fisher, the first sea lord; and Lord Reading, or Rufus Isaacs, the (Jewish) lord chief justice. Reading reported to Samuel that Lloyd George was “inclined to the sympathetic
¹⁶
side—your proposal appeals to the poetic and imaginative as well as to the romantic and religious qualities of his mind.” Samuel would have known this already from his talks with the man.

But when the cabinet met, according to Asquith, only Lloyd George strongly supported the proposal, and he “does not care a damn
¹⁷
for the Jews or their past or their future, but … thinks it would be an outrage to let the Christian Holy Places … pass into the possession or under the protectorate of ‘Agnostic Atheistic France’!” This remark casts rather an unflattering light upon Lloyd George’s early wartime sympathy for Zionism. Was he thinking more about keeping France out of Palestine than about letting Jews in? Historians have not made much of Asquith’s comment, although they know it well.

The prime minister barely bothered to hide his own distaste for a Palestine into which the scattered Jews of the world “could in time swarm back from all quarters of the globe and in due course obtain Home Rule (What an attractive community!).” But if the letter he wrote to Asquith after the meeting is anything to go by, it was Edwin Montagu, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Herbert Samuel’s own cousin, who objected most strenuously to everything the president of the Local Government Board proposed.

Perhaps no individual better exemplified the success of Jewish assimilation in Britain than Montagu. (Or, perhaps, its failure, depending upon whether you take Wolf’s or Weizmann’s approach to the question.) Outwardly Montagu had it all: enormous wealth, inherited from his father, the great banker and Liberal politician Samuel Montagu (Lord Swaythling); cabinet rank at an early age; the friendship of important figures such as Prime Minister Asquith, whose parliamentary private secretary he had been; and a country estate called Hickling in Norfolk. Like many country gentlemen who owned estates, he enjoyed the shooting and was himself a fair shot. One morning he “fired about two hundred
¹⁸
and thirty shots at pochard and tufted ducks, bagging about forty-five, which was not so bad.” He was a big man, with heavy-lidded eyes, large hands, and in 1915 a receding hairline. Despite this rather imposing physiognomy, “children and animals
¹⁹
took to him at sight.”

Soon too he would have a beautiful and aristocratic wife, Venetia Stanley—the very confidante to whom Asquith had written so disparagingly of Samuel’s “dithyrambic” memorandum. Asquith was accustomed to write disparagingly to her about Edwin Montagu too. The prime minister simply could not forget that his close political colleague was a Jew. In his
correspondence with her, he referred to Montagu as “the Assyrian” and to his grand London residence as the “silken tent.” When she married Montagu, Asquith sent congratulations and presents but felt great dismay, a sentiment compounded of jealousy, loneliness, and, one cannot dismiss it, a genteel but unmistakable anti-Semitism.

Montagu was mordantly witty, politically clever, emotional, malicious, and thin-skinned. He wore his heart upon his sleeve. Surely he was aware that Asquith perceived him not so much as a colleague who happened to be a Jew, but rather as a Jew who happened to be his colleague. And if Asquith thought this way, then what of his other cabinet colleagues, and everybody else? Montagu wished to be recognized as a Briton who practiced the Jewish religion. In this regard his position was that of Lucien Wolf. In fact, he stood in relation to Wolf much as Samuel stood in relation to Weizmann—a Jewish supporter who belonged to the government.

On March 16, 1915, in response to his cousin’s memorandum, Montagu wrote a letter to Asquith. It was an attempt at demolition, a complete rejection not merely of the tactical considerations that Samuel had advanced as reasons for a British protectorate in Palestine but also of their underlying premise of eventual Jewish autonomy there.

“Palestine in itself offers little or no attraction to Great Britain from a strategical or material point of view,” Montagu charged. Its possession by Britain would facilitate the defense neither of Egypt nor of the Suez Canal. Moreover it was “incomparably a poorer possession than, let us say, Mesopotamia.” Nor would Jews find great fulfillment working the land there, whatever Zionists like his cousin might say: “I cannot see any Jews I know tending olive trees or herding sheep.”

What Montagu objected to at the most basic level, however, was the Zionist assumption that Palestine was the homeland of a distinct Jewish people: “There is no Jewish race now as a homogenous whole. It is quite obvious that the Jews in Great Britain are as remote from the Jews in Morocco or the black Jews in Cochin as the Christian Englishman is from the moor or the Hindoo.” A Jewish homeland in Palestine would be composed of “a polyglot, many-colored, heterogeneous collection of people of different civilizations and different ordinances and different traditions.” Unless conditions were completely insupportable where they lived now, the Jews of the world would be better off to stay put and assimilate—as he had done.

If they did not, Montagu argued, and instead moved in great numbers to Palestine and established a homeland there, they would become unwelcome everywhere else. “Their only claim to the hospitality of Russia, Bulgaria,
France, Spain, is that they have no alternative home, no State of their own, and they want to be and are patriotic citizens working for the good of the countries in which they live … When it is known that Palestine is the Jewish State which is really their home then I can foresee a world movement to get them away at any cost.” And he closed with a heartfelt plea: “If only our peoples would … take their place as non-conformists [members of a religious sect not belonging to the Church of England], then Zionism would obviously die and Jews might find their way to esteem.”

Asquith read this impassioned document and smiled. He thought it “racy,” he wrote to Venetia Stanley. He seems not to have shown it to any of his colleagues, but the conflict between Montagu and Samuel served its historical purpose, mirroring the competition between Wolf and Weizmann, and between assimilationists and Zionists more generally. At this stage the assimilationists still had the advantage, but Samuel had performed a great service for Zionism: His memorandum, and its rejection by his own cousin, demonstrated conclusively to cabinet ministers that the British Jewish community had split. The Conjoint Committee no longer voiced the views of a monolithic bloc, if ever it had done. And that Samuel, their most prosaic associate, had been the one to articulate the Zionist position may have gone some way to persuading them that Zionism had entered the realm of practical politics after all.

About a month later, on April 14, 1915, the first formal meeting
²⁰
between the Zionist leadership and the Conjoint Committee convened. Five months had elapsed
²¹
since Sacher’s initial approach to Wolf, testifying to the maneuvering for position in which both sides had since engaged. Ironically, when the two groups finally did get together, neither Sacher nor Weizmann even attended; the latter because he could not take time away from his laboratory, the former perhaps because the Zionist veterans considered him too junior. But during the interval a pair of Zionists from the central office in Berlin had traveled to England: Yehiel Tschlenow, who would soon return to his native Russia, and Nahum Sokolow, whom we have met already. Three additional men
²²
represented the Zionists, including the
haham
Moses Gaster. The assimilationist contingent included Claude Montefiore and David Alexander, president and vice president respectively of the Conjoint Committee, and of course Lucien Wolf.

The first thing to become absolutely clear at the meeting was that the cultural Zionist program, to which Sacher had initially referred, no longer
applied, if ever it truly had done. Tschlenow, in a long introductory speech, pointed out that at the peace conference following the war, even small nationalities such as Finns, Lithuanians, and Armenians would “put forward their demands, their wishes, their aspirations.” He then asked his anti-Zionist friends: “Shall the Jewish ‘people,’ the Jewish ‘nation,’ be silent?”

Note here that Wolf, in his written account of the meeting, placed the words “people” and “nation” in quotation marks. Those tiny vertical scratches signaled the profound chasm separating the two camps. Wolf believed that asserting that the Jews constituted a distinct nation would fatally undercut his argument that British Jews really were Jewish Britons. It would deny the possibility of genuine Jewish assimilation in Britain or anywhere else. It contradicted his liberal assumptions. He refused to make the required assertion.

Tschlenow further argued that Turkish entry into the war had upset all previous calculations. For if the Allies defeated the Ottomans, then “there is a good chance that Palestine may fall to England and that England may hand it over and give it to the Jews.” It was now or never: “If the Jews do not develop Palestine and make it populous and cultivated and civilized and flourishing, others will do so.” He envisioned a “big Jewish Commonwealth … 5,000,000 souls … or more … [as] in days of old.” To which Moses Gaster added, “The Zionists intended to go in and work for ‘the whole hog,’ Nothing less than a Commonwealth would satisfy them.”

So much for cultural Zionism! On what basis, then, might political Zionists and the Conjoint Committee find common ground? Tschlenow contended that the Zionist goal of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine and the Conjoint Committee’s desire to ameliorate conditions for Russian Jews were complementary, not antagonistic. Once the Jews possessed Palestine and could immigrate freely to that place, “there would be fewer Jews in Russia,” and a smaller Jewish community would be perceived as a lesser threat and therefore attract less persecution. Gaster added that “when the nations knew a Jew could go off to his own country they would persecute him less.” And Sokolow chimed in: “If Palestine was a British protectorate, and if England held it as a legally secured home for the Jews, England would be more interested in preventing the persecution of the Jews elsewhere and in obtaining rights for them.” But the Zionists insisted on the primacy of their own political program. Efforts to improve the Jewish lot, as noble and useful as they might be, “would and could never be the solution of the Jewish problem. That solution lay only in Zionism.”

Wolf and his colleagues seem to have been unsurprised by the jettisoning of the cultural program, which greatly reduced the possibility of meaningful cooperation between the two groups. They asked their guests two pertinent questions: “How would Palestine become a Jewish country?” and of equal importance: Would “special rights … be asked for the Jews” once they had entered into it?

The Zionists did not mince words in reply. Special rights would be asked for and would be necessary, Gaster explained, “till the Jews were so numerous, and in so large a minority, that they would predominate by weight of numbers.” As to how the Jews should enter Palestine, a Jewish Chartered Company with Britain’s backing “would take care that Jews should be the prevailing settlers.” Sokolow added that if Britain established some form of control over Palestine, “she would clearly and obviously take such necessary steps as to secure that the Jews should be the predominant people in Palestine [and] that it should be
their
country. The one point followed from the other.”

It was an uncompromising performance, albeit politely delivered. The Conjoint Committee promised to consider it and to respond. Within days Wolf wrote a fourteen-page encapsulation of his own optimistic liberal creed:

Therefore, Wolf argued, the Conjoint Committee must reject the Zionist approach. Not even unrestricted Russian Jewish emigration to Palestine, he argued, would improve conditions for the majority who must stay behind; after all, the massive Russian Jewish migration to America had not done so. Moreover, far from improving things, the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would “at once relieve persecuting countries of much of their present incentive to pursue a policy of emancipation.” Like Edwin Montagu, Wolf believed that anti-Semitism would increase, not decrease, upon
establishment of a Jewish commonwealth. The Zionist approach ran “counter to all experience and probabilities, and is essentially reactionary.”