The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (54 page)

Sometime toward the end of the second week in November, Basil Zaharoff learned that Abdul Kerim was on the move again, headed for Switzerland. He wrote to Caillard: “I will be there
²⁰
to meet him.” This time Lloyd George empowered him to make the $2 million down payment. At this desperate juncture in the war, the prime minister would go far to bring the Turks to the negotiating table, farther by a great length than the Zionists would have wanted him to. Of course, he did not tell them.

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT
issued the Balfour Declaration in early November 1917. For the twelve months preceding that date, especially for the last six, the Zionists under Weizmann’s leadership moved steadily, almost implacably, toward their goal. Obstacles they brushed aside, or overbore, or undermined. Yet Zionist victory never was preordained. To contemporaries, everything seemed to be up in the air almost until the last moment. Furthermore, under certain circumstances even Zionist implacability would have availed them little.

Think back to the fruitless meeting between representatives of the Conjoint Committee and the Zionists at Lucien Wolf’s offices in 1915 and the correspondence that preceded and followed it, and to the “formula” Lucien Wolf then devised in hopes of stealing Zionist thunder but which the Foreign Office refused to endorse. Afterward contact between the two Jewish groups lapsed. Wolf’s assimilationists on the Conjoint Committee focused on preparing for the postwar settlement, at which they hoped British and French leaders would demand abolition of the cruel disabilities from which Jews in Russia and Romania continued to suffer. They pressed the Foreign Office to promise to make such demands at the appropriate moment. The Zionists, of course, pushed forward with their campaign for a Jewish homeland in Palestine under British auspices. To an outsider, it might have
seemed that the two movements would continue along separate and parallel tracks.

In fact the two groups rode upon converging rails. When unavoidable collision came, Zionists would insist that Jews constituted a distinct nationality and must therefore receive distinct privileges while building their homeland in Palestine; against them the assimilationists would insist with equal resolve that Jews cherished a belief system in common and nothing more. As Liberals, the assimilationists held the thought of special privileges for their coreligionists in Palestine, or anywhere else, as anathema.

Another point of convergence made the smashup more complete when it finally occurred: Both groups sought the ear of the Foreign Office with equal determination. Increasingly this aspect of their competition resembled a turf war. But with regard to the future of Palestine, there could be only one victor.

Imagine two railway carriages, one containing British Zionists, the other British advocates of Jewish assimilation, rumbling down the tracks at increasing speed, flashing past signposts warning of an impending collision. One signpost had come into view during the summer of 1916, with publication of
Zionism and the Jewish Future
, edited by Harry Sacher. This book aimed to acquaint non-Zionists with the general history and aims of the movement. Unobjectionable enough, one would have thought, except that two essays in particular deeply offended the advocates of assimilation. The first, by Weizmann, argued bluntly that no matter what success and prominence a Jew who attempts to assimilate achieves, he “is felt by the outside
¹
world to be still something different, still an alien.” From this it followed that “the position of the emancipated Jew, though he does not realize it himself, is even more tragic than that of his oppressed brother.” In other words, unlike the British or French Jew, the Russian or Romanian or Polish Jew, miserable as he might be, at least knew where he stood. Then in a later chapter, Moses Gaster dismissed those who refused to acknowledge that Judaism was the “expression of the religious consciousness of the national life of the Jew.” He put his conclusion as bluntly as had Weizmann: “The claim to be Englishmen of the Jewish persuasion—that is, English by nationality and Jewish by faith—is an absolute self-delusion.”

Open attacks couched in contemptuous or even pitying terms—the Cousinhood and its “foreign secretary,” Lucien Wolf, were unaccustomed to such treatment. Worse than the tone, however, was the accusation of deluded incomprehension. Wolf understood Weizmann and Gaster to be threatening “the position of emancipated
²
Jews as citizens of their native countries.” He and Claude Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association,
published essays of rebuttal in
The Fortnightly Review
for November 1916 and
The Edinburgh Review
for April 1917. “How can a man
³
belong to two nations at once?” Montefiore asked rhetorically in his article, the first of the two to appear. No man
could
belong equally and simultaneously to two nations. One who tried to only opened himself to the charge of divided loyalties. “No wonder that all anti-Semites are enthusiastic Zionists,” Montefiore commented bitterly. Wolf dismissed Zionist claims with like decisiveness:

Wolf’s and Montefiore’s articles were only the most visible of a number of published replies to Sacher’s Zionist book by advocates of assimilation. The Zionists answered back in a further series of articles and pamphlets.

Both parties to the controversy considered themselves aggrieved. “So long as this
⁵
[Zionist] view was put forward by obscure writers we took no notice,” Wolf wrote to a friend in France. When leading Zionists such as Gaster and Weizmann made their charges, however, then the chief advocates of assimilation must reply. Meanwhile Sokolow was charging in a letter to an American Zionist that “the ‘campaign’ was
⁶
started by an article in
The Fortnightly Review.”

For every advance made by the Zionists, Wolf sought a counterstroke. Weizmann had been courting Rothschilds, especially Walter, who in 1915 inherited the baronetcy from Nathan, his father, and with it leadership of the family and of British Jewry, although he was mainly interested in zoology, ornithology, and entomology and seems to have been something of an eccentric. Weizmann made of this unlikely figure a committed Zionist. “As my sister-in-law will
⁷
have told you I am arranging for an interview with Mr. Balfour,” Walter Rothschild wrote to Weizmann in his large, scrawling, almost childish hand. “I fully realize the great importance of doing everything to further the Zionist cause with the Government in view of the
persistant [sic] and purile [sic] opposition carried on by Lucien Wolff [sic] and the C[onjoint] C[ommittee].” Meanwhile Wolf was courting Walter’s uncle Leopold, who counseled moderation, not attack. Wolf found himself constrained to write placatingly to
his
Rothschild: “I am afraid you
⁸
imagine that I am eager for the fray but I assure you this is not so … but I do feel most strongly and most earnestly that, in the highest interests of the Jewish community, we cannot leave the situation as it is … The foolish things published by the Zionists … have seriously compromised the situation of the Jews all over the world.” But Leopold was ill and would soon pass away. So another signpost flashed by, this one warning that the advocates of assimilation were losing their grip on Britain’s most important Jewish family, while the Zionist grip was strengthening.

Weizmann, Wolf knew, had held meetings with mandarins including Balfour at the Foreign Office. Rumors probably reached him of Weizmann’s meetings with Prime Minister Lloyd George as well. This was a game two could play, he must have thought, not least since he had been playing it long before Chaim Weizmann arrived upon the British scene. On January 30, 1917, he managed his own interview with Balfour, ostensibly to register Conjoint Committee discontent with the government for refusing to promise to take up the Jewish question at a peace conference after the war. It represented a grave defeat for the Conjoint Committee, and Wolf protested Britain’s unwelcome decision to Balfour. But he took at least as much time to educate the foreign secretary on the relative strength of assimilationists and Zionists.

The Conjoint Committee, he explained to Balfour, was

By contrast, Zionism “was only a part of the Jewish National Movement, which was largely inspired by the general struggle for Nationalist autonomy and independence in Eastern Europe.” Among West European Jews,
including British Jews, Wolf insisted, “there was no specifically Jewish National Movement, and relatively very few Zionists.”

So far in the interview Wolf had emphasized the turf-war aspect of his struggle against Zionism. But then he stressed that it was a battle over principles as well, and he placed the assimilationists’ principles within Britain’s liberal tradition. “We should rejoice if the Zionists made Palestine the seat of a flourishing and reputable Jewish community,” he informed the foreign secretary. “We should have no objection if that Jewish community developed into a local Jewish nation and a Jewish state.” What they did object to was Zionist subversion, as they understood it, of the twin principles of emancipation and assimilation elsewhere, as well as to the “proposal to give to the Jews of Palestine privileges not shared by the rest of the population of that country.”

Balfour, as he took it all in, seemed to Wolf to be both patient and sympathetic. But perhaps, inadvertently, the foreign secretary revealed where his true sympathies lay. He strongly objected to anti-Semitism, Balfour told Wolf, but Jews “were exceedingly
⁹
clever people who in spite of their oppression achieved a certain success which excited the jealousy and envy of the peoples among whom they lived.” Conceivably this observation anticipates the view he would publicly express later: that recognition of Jewish nationality and establishment of a Jewish national home would raise the status, and therefore alleviate the treatment, of Jews everywhere. Here then we may notice another signpost warning of the future smashup; if so Wolf did not perceive it.

Additional signposts appeared, and these Lucien Wolf saw well enough. His counterpart in Paris, Jacques Bigart of the Alliance Israélite, reported that Nahum Sokolow (present in that city on the European mission we have treated previously) had said that the British government largely approved the Zionist program already—and so did the French. Alarmed, Wolf immediately contacted the Foreign Office. “The Presidents of the
¹⁰
Conjoint Committee are anxious to be informed, if possible, whether this statement is accurate,” he wrote. “I am to add that in the opinion of the Presidents … a great injustice would be done to the Anglo-Jewish community, and very serious mischief might result, if an agreement on the Palestine Question were concluded without their participation, more especially as the gentlemen with whom His Majesty’s Government have so far been in negotiation are all foreign Jews, having no quality to speak for the native Jews of the United Kingdom.” (Note that Wolf did not scruple to play the antiforeigner card. By now it had become a staple of the British anti-Zionist
repertoire.) He received in reply a mollifying response
¹¹
from Sir Ronald Graham. Wolf pressed for further assurances, which Robert Cecil provided him at a face-to-face meeting on May 8. But Cecil also warned Wolf against publicly quarreling with the Zionists. It would be inconvenient for the Foreign Office and would do the Anglo-Jewish community no good.