The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (32 page)

So it began: Mark Sykes made personal contact with English Zionism, a significant moment in the prehistory of the Balfour Declaration. At this preliminary meeting he brought Gaster up-to-date on relevant matters. Then he arranged for Gaster to make contact with the British government (G. H. Fitzmaurice at the War Office, again, and Lancelot Oliphant at the Foreign Office); and with the French government too (François Georges-Picot). Sykes questioned
⁹
the
haham
closely on Zionist history, present policies, and future goals and requested that he prepare maps locating significant Jewish settlements in Britain, continental Europe, Russia, Ottoman Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle East including Palestine.

Unfortunately, Sykes had not made contact with the right Zionist. Moses Gaster was jealous, self-important, quick to take offense, and sometimes neither clear-sighted nor clear-minded. He told Sykes that he could speak for and control the Zionist movement in Britain, but that was not true. Although he had enthused about the Franco-British condominium for Palestine in his diary, he strongly opposed it to Sykes in person, indicating that even a German-British condominium would be preferable because at least the Germans were not interested in Egypt. He attributed this idea to Chaim Weizmann, whom Sykes had not yet met, but Weizmann could not conceivably have favored such an idea. In the end Gaster failed to impress: Picot told Sykes
¹⁰
that he found the
haham
interesting but lacking a realistic grasp of the situation. He would like to meet someone else. Sykes, who was nothing if not quick, no doubt was thinking along similar lines.

And then Sykes did meet a Zionist with a more realistic grasp, a burly
Jewish Palestinian agronomist (born in Romania) who was on terms with Djemal Pasha in Damascus and who was also a British spy. Aaron Aaronsohn
¹¹
is yet another extraordinary character in a tale replete with them. He flits briefly across the stage now, playing an important role in Mark Sykes’s final conversion to Zionism.

Aaronsohn had built a brilliant reputation as Palestine’s foremost authority on agriculture and agricultural science. Invited to America by the Department of Agriculture to advise on wheat cultivation in the western states, he made an electric impression. He turned down a professorship at the University of California. After a session with Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice wrote: “He is one of the
¹²
most interesting men I have ever met.” American Zionist philanthropists jumped to fund his next project, an agricultural experimental station, to be established in Athlit on the coastal plain at the foot of Mount Carmel. Once war began, it turned out to be the perfect location for making clandestine rendezvous with agents dropped from British naval vessels.

As a prominent Jewish Palestinian, Aaronsohn had served in Jerusalem as an administrator of American relief funds. This brought him into contact with Djemal Pasha. When a plague of locusts descended upon Palestine in the summer of 1915, the Turkish minister of marine appointed Aaronsohn to defeat it. The agronomist had carte blanche to travel the country. He recorded his observations in a diary, and they were not only about locusts. He noted troop movements and gun emplacements too.

Where most Jews in Palestine believed they should do nothing during the war to excite Turkish suspicion, let alone reprisal, Aaronsohn scorned such timidity. Contact with Djemal Pasha convinced him that Zionism had no future under Turkish rule. What precisely he thought should be the relationship between Zionists and the Western powers is obscure, but he had no doubt the Jewish movement needed an Allied victory. His brother Alexander, his two sisters, Rivkah and Sarah, and a colleague at the experimental station in Athlit, Absalom Feinberg, agreed.

In January 1915 Turkish authorities arrested Feinberg, accusing him of contact with British ships anchored in Haifa Bay. The accusation was false, but it gave Feinberg an idea. When he gained his freedom, he went to Aaronsohn with a plan: They would supply the British navy with information they gleaned in their travels as agronomists. Aaronsohn approved. A first attempt to make contact with the British in Cairo failed: Officials there were preoccupied with preparations for the Arab Revolt and thought this unsolicited advance might have been inspired by Germany. A second approach, to British Intelligence in Port Said, proved fruitful—there the responsible
official was willing to take a chance. Some two weeks later in the dead of night, a British sailor slipped ashore near Athlit. A packet of papers awaited him. The clandestine organization had made its first delivery. Eventually the Aaronsohns and Feinberg established the NILI spy ring.
¹³
(NILI was an acronym of a verse from 1 Samuel 15:29,
Netzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker
, “the eternity of Israel will not lie.”) They recruited twenty-one active members; eventually more than a hundred individuals aided the group in one way or another.

The NILI spy ring, whose ultimate goal was the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, carried out missions as dangerous to its members as any of Sharif Hussein and his sons’ efforts to establish a new Arab kingdom. NILI’s informants worked on the land, in the towns and cities, and even in the Ottoman army. But in October 1917 the Turks intercepted one of the carrier pigeons by which the members communicated with one another. Nearly all the NILI activists paid with their lives; some of them, including Aaronsohn’s sister Sarah, who took her own life, died after dreadful torture.

The year before this awful dénouement, Aaronsohn had been traveling the country on agricultural business, recording what he saw in his diary. In June 1916 he gained information about a planned Turkish advance upon Suez. He thought a preemptive British counterthrust might enable a Zionist takeover in Palestine. He decided to deliver this message, along with the diary, to the British in person. But he would not go to Cairo, which had rejected his circle’s initial approach; and his contact in Port Said had been captured by the Germans while sailing home on leave. So Aaronsohn went to London.
¹⁴
His route was perforce circuitous; it required resource and courage. He traveled to Damascus, Constantinople, Vienna, and Berlin (where he connected with American Zionists), then to Stockholm and Copenhagen. In the Danish port he made contact with the British consul. He boarded the Danish liner
Oskar II
, bound for the United States. When she reached the Orkney Islands, not far from where Kitchener and Hugh James O’Bierne perished, a British patrol boat intercepted her. British officials interviewed all passengers in their cabins. Aaronsohn’s stateroom, they informed the Danish captain with a wink and a nod (for Aaronsohn had just informed him of the plan), was “full of German stuff.” They “arrested” the “German spy” and brought him to London.

It was a funny kind of arrest. The authorities arranged for Aaronsohn to stay at the First Avenue Hotel in High Holborn under an assumed name. They permitted him to attend the theater at night and to sightsee during the day. But Scotland Yard and the War Office thoroughly debriefed the
“Inhabitant of Athlit,” as they called him in their reports. Aaronsohn provided them with details on Turkish and German troop movements, the economic and political situation in Syria, and the general mood of people and soldiers. More important perhaps from his own point of view, Aaronsohn marshaled his intimate knowledge of the Palestinian terrain to urge the feasibility of a British invasion. He knew even the most obscure passageways of the Syrian interior, the high and low ground, where water could be found, and so on, arguing for British help in establishing Jewish rule in Palestine. Inevitably the authorities concluded that he should be brought into contact with Sir Mark Sykes.

The two met on October 27 and appear to have talked mainly about Zionism. They met again three days later with the ubiquitous G. H. Fitzmaurice in attendance as well. Aaronsohn reverted to the immediate theme: the need for a British invasion of Palestine. Sykes heard him out. He hoped Britain soon would be in a position to help, he said, but “it requires work.” Of course it did. Fitzmaurice, whose idea it first had been for Britain to approach the Jews, must have been pleased. A third meeting took place a week later. By now Aaronsohn realized that his interrogators at the War Office could not commit the Foreign Office to any specific policy; that the Foreign Office sympathized with but would not make a public statement about Zionism; and nor would Mark Sykes. He wrote in his diary, after this third and final meeting, that although his mission had been successful in convincing British authorities that the NILI group could play a useful role,
“Au point de vue diplomatique, fiasco.”

His pessimism was mistaken. Sykes the diplomat gave nothing away, but Aaronsohn had made a strong impression. The Zionist returned to the Middle East, to Cairo, where he went to work for British Intelligence. Thus he avoided the dreadful fate of his sister and other NILI agents. (He would die in an airplane crash in 1919.) In the spring of 1917, when Sykes returned to Egypt on a diplomatic mission, he sought out the charismatic agronomist first of all. He preferred the settler-scientist to the vain and bombastic Moses Gaster. Indeed when he had asked the
haham
about Aaronsohn, the rabbi did little to strengthen his credibility. Aaronsohn was probably a Turkish agent, Gaster warned. “I do not trust [him]. An ambitious man.”

If Moses Gaster was not up to the job, and if Aaron Aaronsohn toiled for Great Britain in far-off Cairo, then which Zionist could Mark Sykes productively work with? He did not yet know of Chaim Weizmann, or knew at best only the scantiest details, and Weizmann did not yet suspect the importance
of Sir Mark Sykes. But the two could not remain unacquainted for long.

The day after the newspapers broke the story of Lord Kitchener’s death in the North Sea, and only shortly after Sykes had returned to England from Russia, a public meeting convened
¹⁵
in the vast Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House in the City of London. This imposing building, with its grand marble portico supported by six Corinthian columns, is the official residence of the city’s Lord Mayor. Many of the city’s formal functions take place there; it is where Britain’s chancellors of the exchequer still deliver their annual report on the state of the economy. The purpose of the present meeting was to mark the collection of £50,000 under the auspices of Sir Charles Wakefield, London’s lord mayor that year. The fund would provide aid to Armenian Christians living in the war zone with Russia, victims of a brutal Turkish policy of virtual ethnic cleansing. Sir Mark Sykes, among others, addressed this meeting, over which Wakefield presided.

Sykes’s interest in the Armenian question had the same root as his interest in the Arab rebellion and his growing interest in Zionism. The three nationalities (he now conceived the Jews to be a nation too) could serve the needs of the British Empire in the former Ottoman dominions, he thought, and the empire could reciprocate by serving the needs of these three long-suffering peoples. Sykes’s evolving views on race, nationalism, and imperialism require separate treatment, not least for the light they shed upon Britain’s evolving wartime policy on these subjects. Suffice to say here that just as Sykes had sought out Zionists in London with whom to work, so too he had sought out Armenians: hence his presence at the Mansion House on that June afternoon.

A self-conscious Armenian community existed in London. It published a monthly journal called
Ararat;
it sponsored various cultural organizations grouped under an umbrella organization, the Armenian United Association of London; and it supported the British Armenia Committee, which publicized Turkish-inflicted sufferings upon Armenians in their native land and which had a parliamentary branch led by the Liberal MP for North-West Durham, Aneurin Williams. This parliamentary contingent belonged to the radical wing of the Liberal Party and looked to tsarist Russia to liberate Armenia from the yoke of the Young Turks. This was the general attitude of politically conscious Armenians in England, up until about 1919.

One such politically conscious Armenian boasted an Anglicized name. James Aratoon Malcolm was born in Persia, to which his Armenian ancestors had moved in Elizabethan times. There they engaged in shipping and
commerce, often with English interests, so that they had come to enjoy a special relationship with the commercial representatives of the United Kingdom. They were well disposed to Jews and accustomed to business dealings with them. In 1881 Malcolm’s parents sent their son to study in England (eventually he attended Oxford University), placing him with an old Jewish friend and agent of the family, Sir Albert Sassoon.

After leaving Oxford, Malcolm stayed in London to represent the family firm. Possibly he cut corners in his business dealings. “His previous career
¹⁶
as a financier will not bear enquiry,” observed an official at the Board of Trade in August 1916. Moreover, if the reaction to him of the famous author John Buchan was typical, he faced obstacles that scarcely could have been anticipated. Buchan had been posted to the News Department of the Board of Trade during the war. The Foreign Office asked for information on Malcolm. “I only once met Malcolm,”
¹⁷
wrote the author of
The Thirty-nine Steps
, “and he looked an exceedingly unpleasant Jew.”

In fact, this Armenian Catholic’s true métier appears to have been not commerce and finance (his ostensible British occupations) but rather politics, if not the public kind. He gloried in the role of a fixer, happiest pulling strings or at least thinking he was pulling them, from behind the scenes. During July 1944 he wrote a twelve-page account of his connection with the Zionists during World War I. It is a grandiloquent document and possibly not entirely reliable, but it does suggest the crucial role he played, or liked to think he had played, nearly thirty years earlier.

A few months before Sykes delivered his speech at the Mansion House, the Armenian Catholikos appointed Malcolm to the five-member Armenian National Delegation, whose purpose was to represent Armenian wartime and postwar interests in Europe. Malcolm became its British representative. His work for the delegation brought him into contact with officials at the War Office, Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, and various embassies in London. Possibly it brought him into contact with Sir Mark Sykes.