The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (29 page)

So much for Zionist tactics; Wolf then dismissed the Zionists’ fundamental premise.

Thus political Zionism threatened to undermine even the most assimilated Jews. It threatened to make strangers of Jews like himself, and his colleagues on the Conjoint Committee, in the land of their birth, England.

Wolf went on to reject the Zionist claim to special privileges for Jews once they had arrived in Palestine. Britain, the likely future suzerain power in Palestine, specifically barred special privileges based upon religion. Moreover “nothing could be more detrimental to the struggle for Jewish liberties all over the world,” than for Jews to claim special privileges anywhere. “How could we continue to ask that the Russian Government shall make no distinction between … Jews and Christians?” he asked.

In sum, the Zionist scheme if implemented,

The main lines of disagreement could hardly have been more clearly stated. The Zionists replied to Wolf on May 11, 1915; exactly one month later the Conjoint Committee wrote a rejoinder, ending with the pious hope “that the progress of events may lead to such an approximation of the views of the two parties as to render some useful scheme of cooperation yet possible.”

It would not happen. On the crucial issue of Jewish nationality, neither side budged. Consultations and discussions would continue, and memoranda
would be written from both sides, but the gulf remained unbridgeable. Henceforth their competition for the ear of the government would grow increasingly fierce. And although Wolf began from the better-established and therefore more advantageous position, Weizmann was an absolute master of the political game.

A YEAR AND A HALF
into the war, the British government and the Foreign Office faced a grim situation. On the Western Front, despite appalling sacrifices, the Allies had achieved only a bloody stalemate. In the east a war of comparatively rapid movement had produced equally indecisive results. To the south, Turkey had beaten Britain at Gallipoli; in Mesopotamia it had captured and interned thousands of British troops and officers at Kut. Meanwhile Serbia had fallen to the Austrians, and Italy’s belated entry into the conflict on the side of the Entente had done little to help, either in the southern theater or anywhere else.

Thus the view from Whitehall early in 1916: If defeat was not imminent, neither was victory; and the outcome of the war of attrition on the Western Front could not be predicted. The colossal forces in a death-grip across Europe and in Eurasia appeared to have canceled each other out. Only the addition of significant new forces on one side or the other seemed likely to tip the scale. Britain’s willingness, beginning early in 1916, to explore seriously some kind of arrangement with “world Jewry” or “Great Jewry” must be understood in this context. The British never believed that the Jews alone could alter the balance of the war, but they did come to believe that the Jews could help fund it; and perhaps more important, they could persuade mightier forces to weigh in or out or to stand firm. Many Britons in 1916,
including policy makers, apparently believed in the existence of a monolithic and powerful Jewish factor in world affairs. But there was no such thing. The government’s wartime decision to appeal to the Jews was based upon a misconception.

A year and a half into the war, that misconception formed part of the worldview of Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice, the former British dragoman in Constantinople whom Grand Sharif Hussein had successfully courted in 1908 when he wanted British support for his candidacy to become emir of Mecca. Hussein had discerned in the British dragoman a likely ally: When it came to Ottoman politics, Fitzmaurice was an ultraconservative who shared the sharif’s admiration for Sultan Abdul Hamid II as well as his hatred of the Young Turks. Sharp-featured, with receding ginger hair, piercing eyes, and a full handlebar mustache, the dragoman possessed “an eagle mind and a personality of iron vigor,” according to T. E. Lawrence, who nevertheless did not like him. He exercised great influence (too much, and of the wrong kind, as Lawrence saw it) over a series of British ambassadors to the Ottoman government.

From his appointment to Constantinople as a junior consul in 1905 until his recall to London in February 1914 (by which time he had been promoted to chief dragoman in Constantinople and first secretary in the diplomatic service), Fitzmaurice did his best to pump life into the moribund Ottoman court and to sustain its cruel, corrupt, and capricious ruler. Aubrey Herbert, then an honorary attaché in Constantinople (along with Mark Sykes and George Lloyd), likened him to the chains of ivy that may sometimes hold up a great and ancient but rotten oak tree. And like certain other British diplomats, scholars, and journalists of the era, Fitzmaurice labored under the misperception that the Young Turks who had thrown out Sultan Abdul Hamid II and taken control of the empire were dominated by Jews and
dömnes
, or “crypto-Jews.”
¹
These Jewish puppeteers,
²
according to this worldview, were part of a wider conspiracy to gain control of the Ottoman Empire in order to acquire Palestine for the world Zionist movement.

Fitzmaurice reenters our tale now because he was probably the first responsible British diplomat to suggest that Jewish power, both in Turkey and elsewhere, held the key to Entente victory in World War I. He imparted this piece of wisdom to Hugh James O’Bierne,
³
CVO (Commander of the Victorian Order) and CB (Commander of the Order of Bath), an experienced, accomplished, and well-respected British diplomat who apparently saw no reason to doubt it. The two men came into contact
⁴
in Sofia, to which Fitzmaurice had been sent in February 1915 to link up with dissident
Turks who opposed their government’s alliance with Germany; O’Bierne arrived in July 1915 as part of a British team tasked with bribing Bulgaria to join the Entente. Fitzmaurice took part in this mission as well, but it proved unsuccessful because Britain could not offer Bulgaria what she wanted most—territory in Macedonia that had been occupied by Serbia during the Second Balkan War. Germany, on the other hand, could offer it; unlike Britain, she was Serbia’s enemy. After some hesitation
⁵
the Bulgarian prime minister, Vasil Radoslavov, accepted Germany’s inducement to align with her in the war. Mere days later, just before Bulgaria declared war on Britain, O’Bierne and Fitzmaurice beat a hasty retreat. Back in London, the former dragoman took a position with the Intelligence Division at the Admiralty Office, while O’Bierne went to work at the Foreign Office.

Late in 1915 or early in 1916, Fitzmaurice met Moses Gaster; possibly Herbert Samuel
⁶
provided the introduction. At any rate the former dragoman learned something of the Zionist program from the
haham
of the British Sephardim and applied it to what he thought he knew about who really ruled Turkey. To put it baldly, Fitzmaurice put two and (something less than) two together and came up with five. He reasoned thus: The Allies should offer Palestine to the
dömnes
of Constantinople, in return for which they would withdraw their support from the Ottoman regime. This would result in the latter’s collapse. Allied victory would follow. Moreover, as Jews everywhere focused on returning to, and building up, their promised land, the shadowy, malign
⁷
influence of world Zionism would fade. This was the insight Fitzmaurice shared with Hugh James O’Bierne at about the turn of the year 1915–16.

O’Bierne was primed to entertain the notion and even to appreciate it. Only a month earlier the Foreign Office had received a memorandum that likewise emphasized the power of Jews, in this case American rather than Turkish. Its author, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, was a prominent U.S. Zionist with English connections. Now he wished to warn the Foreign Office about German propaganda among the American Jewish community, which, he stressed, possessed significant political and financial power. Fortunately for the Allies, the professor said, this group held instinctive pro-British and pro-French views, but also, and for obvious reasons, strong anti-Russian ones. To win over American Jews, he recommended, among other measures, “a very veiled suggestion
⁸
concerning nationalization in Palestine,” by which he must have meant some form of French or British control.

Only a few weeks later a second memo reached the Foreign Office, again emphasizing the power of Jews and seconding the American’s warning. It
came from none other than Sir Henry McMahon in Egypt. In the midst of his ambiguous but far-reaching correspondence with Grand Sharif Hussein, the high commissioner had received a report on the views of “a prominent Italian businessman and head of the Jewish colony at Alexandria.” McMahon found the report so suggestive that he summarized it and forwarded it to his masters in London. Apparently his informant feared that the Allies risked losing Jewish support, especially from the all-important American branch, because of Russian anti-Semitism. Also like the American professor, this gentleman thought that Jewish support could be a factor in the war and that it could be obtained easily enough. “What the Jews
⁹
in America were waiting for,” the Italian businessman averred, “was only the knowledge that British policy accorded with their aspirations for Palestine.” If Britain did not act quickly to assuage this longing, he warned, then Germany might.

These reports filtered into the Foreign Office entirely unknown to our Jewish protagonists, but they too, each in his own way, continued their attempts to persuade British authorities that the Jewish factor was important. Herbert Samuel gave a copy of his cabinet memorandum to Sir Mark Sykes, who had just finished negotiating his agreement with François Georges-Picot. Sykes and Picot were about to leave for Russia to seek support for their proposed postwar partition of Ottoman territories. Sykes was hardly a Zionist at this point, but on the eve of his departure he reported to Samuel that “I read the memorandum
¹⁰
and have committed it to memory and destroyed it—as no print or other papers can pass the R. Frontier except in the F.O. bag.” Indeed when Sykes read the report, it lit a lightbulb in his mind. All during the wearying journey to Russia, he would ruminate on the Jewish factor, and his ruminations would soon help to shape British policy. Like O’Bierne, he was primed. It is worth noting that Sykes, O’Bierne, and Fitzmaurice all were devout Catholics who perhaps had learned in their early years that Jews represented a powerful and mysterious world force, one that, they now thought, could be activated on behalf of the Allies if only the proper switch could be found. Alternatively, it is conceivable that the Catholicism of Sykes, O’Bierne, and Fitzmaurice had nothing to do with the fact that they were among the small cadre of British officials who first discerned a potential ally in “world Jewry.”

As for Chaim Weizmann, he was hard at work in the laboratory, perfecting a process for fermenting acetone from grain rather than from wood, which was growing scarce. Acetone is an essential ingredient in the manufacture of cordite for explosives. His work was so important and successful that it brought him into further contact with leading government officials,
including Lloyd George, whom Asquith just had made minister of munitions. Meanwhile he remained engaged in his great charm offensive, teaching Zionism to Jews and non-Jews alike. By now the Rothschild women had taken him in hand, coaching him on how to speak and act at the nonacademic version of high table. The erstwhile
folks-mensch
proved to be as quick a study in the drawing and dining rooms of the British elite as he was in the chemistry department. A testament to his effectiveness: At one of her dinner parties during this period the Marchioness of Crewe was heard to remark to Robert Cecil, “We all in this house are ‘Weizmannites.’” Nancy Astor invited Weizmann to dine one evening with a number of luminaries including Balfour and Philip Henry Kerr, editor of the influential
Round Table
(soon to become a member of Lloyd George’s personal secretariat). “You must speak Zionism
¹¹
to Dr. Weizmann,” Mrs. Astor instructed as they sat down to dinner. The Zionist leader had developed access to policy makers and managed to keep the issue of Palestine before them.