The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (40 page)

“Even after approaching the Vatican,” Sokolow wrote to Weizmann, “I did not dream of being received by the Pope.” Someone, however,
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suggested that he request an audience, and two days after the meeting with Gasparri, word came that the pope would indeed see him. And so it came to pass that on May 6, 1917, the Jew from Wyszogrod met the pope in Rome. In symbolism it topped even the meeting with the French foreign minister in Paris.

“In spite of my usual
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calmness, this was rather an exciting, patriotic and emotional piece of ceremony,” Sokolow later confessed. He thought the interview had gone very well. “I am not inclined to any credulity or exaggeration,” he protested, but still for the pope to have granted so long and so friendly an audience not merely to a Jew but to a Zionist representative suggested to him that “we are not going to have any unsurmountable obstacles on the part of the Vatican.” He had been, Sokolow noted also, “the first Jew received during this Pontificate.”

Predictably, the pope had wanted from him reassurances about Jewish intentions regarding the holy places. These the Zionist gladly provided. Then he outlined his movement’s accomplishments. The pope responded
favorably, saying that the return of the Jews to Palestine was a miraculous event. Sokolow outlined Zionist aspirations for the future. “Is there enough room in Palestine to carry out your plans?” asked the pope. “There is the possibility
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to reach our goal …,” Sokolow replied cautiously.

Again we must picture Sokolow, this time exiting the Vatican and making his way through the Roman streets to the British embassy. Was he walking on air? How could he not have been? Upon arriving at his destination, he composed a telegram for Weizmann hinting at the excitement he must have felt.

A clerk would have put these words into cipher and sent them to Military Intelligence in London, where another clerk deciphered them. Weizmann read them a day later. So far had the Zionist movement come that now it made routine use of such government facilities. And the hard-headed Weizmann, when he received Sokolow’s entirely unexpected message, must have experienced a certain frisson. He had been wrong to doubt Sokolow on the Continent: “Your telegram received
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heartily congratulate brilliant result.”

Six days later the Italian prime minister, Paolo Boselli, granted Sokolow an audience too. Boselli carefully informed him that although Italy could not take the initiative, neither would it oppose another power, more closely concerned with the future of Palestine, if such a power acted in a manner
favorable to Zionism. “I am extremely satisfied,”
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Sokolow reported to Weizmann.

Nor was this the end of his remarkable tour. He had thought he would return directly to London from Rome, but the French government called for him to stop in Paris on his way. There the round of discussions resumed: with Cambon, the foreign secretary, and with Prime Minister Alexandre Ribot himself. Satisfied that Italy had no strong objections to the developing understanding with Zionism; intent upon unleashing Jewish power against the pacifists and Bolsheviks of Russia; and hoping still to win Zionism from exclusive reliance upon Great Britain, now the French leaders courted Zionism’s diplomat. Shrewdly Sokolow asked for something he had not dared request before: that they put their expressions of support into writing. On June 4, 1917, the French foreign minister, Jules Cambon, obliged:

Note that this letter reverses Picot’s refusal in London to recognize the Jews as a distinct nationality. The French government had become the first great power to do so. Sokolow had achieved a Zionist benchmark. And more: The very existence of such a declaration by her primary wartime ally would make it easier for Britain to make one too. No wonder, then, that as soon as he returned to London, Sokolow made sure the British Foreign Office received a copy of Cambon’s letter.

Sokolow’s extraordinary passage in the spring of 1917 marks a watershed. Before it took place, the Zionists in Britain struggled for purchase; afterward
they found their footing. They moved forward with a new sense of confidence and self-worth. But the world was still at war. Italy, France, and England would promise much to win it. What weight would the honeyed words of the pope, or the written words of the French foreign minister, or even the assurances of the British prime minister actually bear? Even while Sokolow was still abroad, even as the words were being spoken and written, Chaim Weizmann was discovering that they might not bear all that much.

ENGLAND AND FRANCE
went to war in 1914 in part to defend the rights of small nations like Belgium and Serbia, or so they claimed. Perhaps it was true, but such considerations did not enter into their calculations when they bribed Italy to join the war with promises of Habsburg territory, or when they induced Romania to join with similar promises, or when they helped engineer a government in Greece likewise open to such promises. Nor was it part of the thinking of Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot when they redrew the map of the Middle East. They did it to benefit their own countries, not the Arabs or the Armenians, let alone the Jews, and at the time they made no bones about it. The Tripartite Agreement, as Sykes-Picot became after Russia slightly amended it in her own interest and then approved it, is a classic example of old-style imperialism and secret diplomacy. Plenty of people in both England and France wanted their governments to live up to the beautiful early rhetoric used to justify war against Germany, but they lacked political power. In 1916 neither Sykes nor Picot felt the need to take them into account. The two diplomats and the men behind them did not foresee that World War I would turn everything topsy-turvy.

But it did. As the war ground on, the number of its critics grew. They believed
that secret diplomacy was one of the causes of the war, as well as imperialist rivalries. Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had poisoned relations between the two countries. The critics demanded “open covenants openly arrived at,” “no annexations” of territory, and much else besides. The fall of the tsar and the advent of the liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson when America joined the war in the spring of 1917 amplified their voices. In May Kerensky’s new government proclaimed that “Free Russia does not purpose to dominate other peoples or to take from them their national patrimony, or forcibly to occupy foreign territory.” Lloyd George’s government replied, “In this sentiment the British
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Government heartily concur.” But of course the Allies had negotiated covenants in secret and had planned imperialist annexations such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement envisioned. Given the growing strength of these critics, there would be hell to pay when Sykes-Picot came to light. And then it did; and then there was.

On the evening of Thursday, April 12, 1917, C. P. Scott met a French journalist, Vicomte Robert de Caix, foreign editor and lead writer of the Parisian
Le Journal des débats
. De Caix, who advised the Quai d’Orsay on Middle Eastern affairs and would go on to help shape postwar French policy there, dropped a bomb; whether he did so intentionally we cannot know. He told Scott that when the war was finished, France would claim Syria down to Acre and Lake Tiberias and across to, and including, the area of the Hauran. That was territory that the Zionists hoped would become theirs under a British protectorate. The rest of Palestine, de Caix asserted, would be put under international control: “It is settled.”
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It was pretty much what Sykes and Picot had agreed more than a year earlier, unknown to most. Scott thought the French claims grandiose but aspirational and therefore “disquieting” but not calamitous. The British government could nip French pretensions in the bud, he reasoned, by publicly stating its own plans for Palestine. The next day at
The Manchester Guardian
offices, he repeated to Harry Sacher what he had learned and what he hoped Britain would do. He warned Sacher not to trust the Foreign Office to perform as required, however, “because Balfour is weak as water and the officials are tired, indifferent and inefficient.” Sacher immediately put
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it in a letter to Weizmann. Two days later Scott wrote to Weizmann as well, repeating what de Caix had told him.

Thus did the Zionists first glean something of the Sykes-Picot Agreement
and experience their first unnerving trickle of doubt about British intentions. Scott went looking for more information in London and got some, on Friday, April 20, from Sir Alfred Milner of the War Cabinet. Scott reported to Weizmann that Milner “spoke resignedly
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about the international solution in Palestine as a whole, and said that ‘unfortunate commitments’ had been made a year ago—I gathered to the French.” Thus the War Cabinet minister sparked another glimmer of unease, evidence of some sort of Anglo-French carve-up of the Middle East.

While Scott and Milner were dancing around that very subject, James Malcolm was arriving in London from Paris. He carried a diary of Sokolow’s activities that the Zionist had entrusted to him, and a glowing report based upon them that he had written. He brought them to Weizmann next day, but by now the Zionist leader had more than Sokolow’s discussions with Jules Cambon on his mind. He questioned Malcolm closely about French intentions in the Middle East, such as the latter had been able to glean, and whether Britain accepted them as part of some larger deal. What Malcolm told him did little to quiet his growing unease.

Even without details, the outline of the Anglo-French plan for Palestine was beginning to take shape in Weizmann’s mind, along with a dawning realization that the British government had been less than frank with him. Perhaps Sokolow, who must have discerned French intentions while in Paris, had been less than frank with him too—or perhaps he was planning to tell all when he returned to London. But Sokolow now was headed for Rome. Whom could Weizmann better question at this point than Herbert Samuel, the one (former) cabinet minister who was both Jewish and Zionist? On Tuesday, April 24, Weizmann tried to pin him down, but Samuel would not be pinned: “His answer was that
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he could not disclose to me the nature of the arrangement made because he was a member of the Cabinet at that time, but he could say this much, that the arrangement was not satisfactory from the British point of view. He sees no objection at all why this
question should not be reopened, especially now when the British army is occupying Palestine.”

So “an arrangement” with France did exist! Weizmann hurried from the morning meeting with Samuel to an afternoon meeting at the Foreign Office with Sir Ronald Graham, who, while in Egypt, had hoped to replace McMahon as high commissioner, but who had been posted back to London instead to serve as assistant under secretary of state. Graham confirmed the existence of an Anglo-French deal but little else. “He found this arrangement
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after he arrived from Egypt,” Weizmann reported to Scott. “He does not consider it satisfactory.” Graham thought Weizmann should speak to someone higher up the Foreign Office ladder, namely the acting foreign secretary, Lord Robert Cecil. (Balfour was in America.) He arranged for an interview.