The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (64 page)

Through Abdul Kerim, Enver told Zaharoff that six months earlier he and Talaat had wanted to make a separate peace with Britain, “but when Russia and Rumania began crumbling Talaat sold him—‘but that is my affair.’” Zaharoff had heard Abdul Kerim twice allude to poison in Talaat’s coffee. Here was another veiled threat. He did not believe everything the Turks told him, but “E. certainly means to do away with Talaat in some way or other.”

All that afternoon Abdul Kerim padded back and forth between the two men. At one point he reported to Zaharoff that Enver said the war would be decided “by the Americans putting or not their whole heart in it, and quickly.” At another, through his intermediary, he lamented to Zaharoff that “if the Germans won this War Turkey would become Germany’s vassal.” At still another he promised to help the Allies by arranging “for the Turkish Armies in Palestine and on the Hejaz Railway to be withdrawn north of the Railway line from Haifa to Deraa.” This suggests that Zaharoff at least broached the terms Britain was willing to offer for a separate peace, in which case the British government really did propose a continuing Ottoman presence, with flag flying, in Palestine, nearly three months after the Balfour Declaration was made public.

So Enver Pasha, architect of the Young Turk regime and of the disastrous Ottoman-German wartime alliance, parleyed with Basil Zaharoff, the infamous “merchant of death.” Between them shuttled Abdul Kerim, Enver’s not-so-faithful aide—he twice that day warned Zaharoff to beware: “He [Enver] is a traitor. Do not believe him. He will sell you. For him there is nothing in this great world but himself.” The day finally ended, perhaps on this note. Zaharoff may have hoped for more clarity during a second round of discussion. But “next morning I found that E. and A.K. had taken French leave.” He caught the next train for France. “I have given my heart and soul to this scheme and its failure has quite broken me up,” he informed Caillard.

Britain and Turkey would make no separate peace during World War I. The two countries never were in sync. When one seemed willing to make a deal, the other found reason to pull back. Abdul Kerim contacted Zaharoff again in August 1918. The arms dealer entrained for Geneva yet again. When he got there, “the time to deal had arrived,” Abdul Kerim reported Enver saying. He added: “When you meet E—you should have $25,000,000.” Zaharoff backed off. “I replied that I would do nothing of the sort, but that if a definite proposal was made, I would see what it was worth to me in dollars … A.K. said I was a fool.” Then the erstwhile intermediary went freelance. He asked what Zaharoff would pay for verbatim reports of all the Central Powers’ war councils at which Turkish delegates were present. “On my replying that such reports might be interesting, he said, ‘Man, they are worth millions, very many millions.’”

Once perhaps they would have been, but Zaharoff’s record of this meeting reveals why that was no longer the case. “I purposely stayed with him 5 days and 4 nights so as to induce him to talk over his brandy, without my appearing to be questioning him.” Abdul Kerim described breakdown among the Central Powers. At the last war council, Austrian, Turkish, and Bulgarian delegates had criticized the Germans. Hindenburg and Luden-dorff threw the blame on each other. The Kaiser “abused his Austrian Ally with strong language.” At this same meeting “the Turkish General Izzet Pasha Schishman had spat at King Ferdinand [of Bulgaria], and if anything the Pasha was applauded.” No wonder England turned a deaf ear to Enver this time. The quarreling among her opponents reflected the fact that the tide of the war had turned finally in her favor.

When it had flowed the other way, British attitudes had been very different. Then Lloyd George was prepared to risk much for a separate peace with Turkey, not merely many millions of dollars but Arab and Zionist goodwill as well. Jewish and Arab nationalists would have recoiled in horror at the sight of a Turkish flag flying over Syria, Mesopotamia, or Palestine, no matter that Ottomans had no administrative control. Lloyd George must have calculated that they would accept the situation in the end. He rode the Arab horse and the Zionist horse and the separate-peace-with-Turkey horse too, and those were only the horses in the southeastern stable. That the horses pulled in different directions demonstrates the extraordinary skill of the rider.

Had Enver Pasha kept the bribe given him in December 1917 and taken Turkey out of the war, however, could Lloyd George have continued to
ride the Zionists? Would we today term the Balfour Declaration a great Zionist triumph and a foundation stone of modern Israel? Or rather would we lump it among other beautiful phrases and promises made by wartime leaders intent upon persuading men to fight: “covenants openly arrived at,” “war to end war,” “no annexations or indemnities”? Not to discount the genius of Weizmann or the greatness of Balfour, but the famous declaration bearing the foreign secretary’s name seems to have just missed the side track. And the genius of Lloyd George notwithstanding, what might have happened then is anybody’s guess.

“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM,”
Jews avow at the conclusion of their annual Passover celebration. For nearly two thousand years the phrase could operate only as a metaphor, expressing an aspiration about Jewish collective destiny in the distant future. But after November 2, 1917, “Next year in Jerusalem” might be a practical plan of action for an individual Jew in the here and now, a genuinely possible sequence of events culminating soon in relocation to the Promised Land. On that second day in November during the third year of the most awful war in history up until then, Zionism formally gained a powerful ally. As a result, the greatest obstacles to realization of the metaphor had been, or were about to be, removed. Or at least so it seemed.

The Balfour Declaration was the result of a process that some consider practically inevitable. Certainly it is true that conditions created by the war enabled Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues to work wonders. During 1914–17 they gained access to the elite among British Jews and converted many of them to Zionism. They defeated advocates of Jewish assimilation, such as Lucien Wolf of the Conjoint Committee, whose raison d’être, lobbying the Foreign Office on behalf of foreign Jews, especially Russian and Romanian, had been swept away by the war. They gained entrance to
British governing circles and converted some of its most important members too.

During this period Weizmann and those who worked with him acted as inspired opportunists. Finally they could argue convincingly that a community of interest linked Zionist aspirations with those of the Entente. Zionists wanted the Ottomans out of Palestine; Britain and France wanted them out of the Middle East altogether. Zionists wanted a British protectorate in Palestine; Britain did too (although initially Sir Mark Sykes had bargained it away in negotiations with Georges-Picot of France).

More generally, Weizmann and his colleagues persuaded powerful men in Britain, France, and Italy that support of Zionism would benefit their wartime cause and the peace to follow. “International Jewry” was a powerful if subterranean force, they claimed, although this was a notable exaggeration if not an outright fantasy, whose goodwill would reap dividends for the Allies. Specifically, they suggested that Jewish finance in America, and Jewish influence upon antiwar forces in Russia, could help determine the conflict’s outcome. Weizmann warned the Foreign Office that Germany recognized the potential of Jewish power and had begun to court it already. He advised the Allies to trump their enemy by declaring outright support for Zionism. His arguments worked upon the minds of anti- and philo-Semites alike among the British governing elite, who were desperate for any advantage in the wartime struggle. Eventually, to gain Jewish backing in the war, they promised to support establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. It did them little good. Historians have discovered that in America Jewish financiers overwhelmingly favored the Allies already. In Russia the Bolsheviks seized power five days after the War Cabinet agreed to the Balfour Declaration. Lenin and Trotsky would take their country out of the war no matter what Russian Jews said.

Meanwhile Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons were playing as expertly upon British hopes and fears as the Zionists were. Cautiously, shrewdly, bravely, they forged their own contacts: with the underground societies of Damascus already plotting to cast off the Ottoman yoke; and with representatives of the British government stationed in Cairo, whom they recognized as potential allies in their conflict with the CUP. The Damascene plotters offered Sharif Hussein leadership of their movement. The British, represented by Sir Henry McMahon, the high commissioner in Egypt, offered Hussein pledges of support if he would rebel against the Turks, and recognition of the geographical boundaries and political independence of the kingdom he would then establish. Or, at least Hussein interpreted McMahon’s famous letters this way.

So he marshaled his forces, deployed them, and struck when he judged the moment ripe. In his own milieu Sharif Hussein was as cunning and subtle as Chaim Weizmann was in his. He had to be, for he occupied a personally dangerous position. To break with Constantinople was to risk his life and the lives of his sons and his followers. He did it anyway. His armies took Mecca, Taif, Jeddah, Wejh, and Aqaba. They besieged Medina. They arrived in Damascus almost simulataneously with the British. When they acted as guerrilla forces, they harried the Turks mercilessly, blowing up track and trestles and trains, cutting telegraph lines, slaughtering the unwary. They could not defeat their enemy alone, but they contributed to Britain’s successful Middle Eastern military campaign. Hussein thought the British owed him. Men like T. E. Lawrence, who was in a position to know, thought the British owed him too.

That was not how the British government saw it. Consider the entire business from its point of view. As soon as the Ottomans entered the war, Lord Kitchener approached Sharif Hussein because he thought Hussein had authority to counter the Ottoman caliph’s call for Muslims to wage jihad against Great Britain and her allies. Also he remembered Hussein’s prewar opposition to the CUP. Now he hoped to aim and launch him against their common foe. He offered the grand sharif inducements to act: the caliphate once the Ottomans had been defeated, pledges of material support for his rebellion, recognition of an Arab kingdom under his leadership after the war. Did British officials intentionally encourage Hussein to believe that Palestine would form part of that kingdom? The McMahon letters are too ambiguous for us to tell. Did McMahon mean for them to be ambiguous? He did. The point was to galvanize a potential ally, he explained to Lord Hardinge. Details could be worked out later.

Simultaneously other Foreign Office mandarins engaged in like behavior with the Zionists. Accustomed to dealing with the Conjoint Committee and Lucien Wolf when Jewish interests impinged upon British foreign policy, they proved reluctant at first even to meet with Weizmann or his colleagues. Then the Zionist leader worked his magic. The Foreign Office learned from him to believe in Jewish influence upon the world (not hard, many of them believed in it already) and, more to the point, in Zionist influence upon the Jews. Weizmann told them that Jews wanted a homeland in Palestine above all else. The Foreign Office believed this too. So it encouraged Zionists to think it supported their chief aspiration, even though it might conflict with what McMahon had allowed Sharif Hussein to think. Once again the point was to galvanize a potential ally.

And all the while they had been busy galvanizing, or keeping galvanized,
a third and much more important ally, one that had its eye upon the same fatal strip of land, among other strips. British imperialists did not want France in the Middle East at all, but if a postwar French presence in Syria was the price of her continued and wholehearted participation in the war against Germany, then that was a price Britain would pay, even if it meant deceiving Arabs and Zionists in the meantime.