Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (18 page)

The policy difference between Trotsky and Lenin’s successor Stalin, was very great. Initially Stalin wanted only to create “socialism in one country” as an impregnable stronghold against counter-revolution. Trotsky wanted the Soviet Union to become the communist base for world revolution. That had been his idea from the beginning; and that was why, in 1917, the British were more frightened of Trotsky and what he represented than they were of Lenin. After the first revolution, and prior to the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, British thinking was something like this: If there was a second revolution and if, after it, Trotsky’s ideas prevailed, a communist Russia would become the engine of anti-capitalism and would inspire and support revolutions by the workers throughout the capitalist West and, no doubt, the colonies of the British Empire. Trotsky and his Jewish revolutionaries had to be stopped.

It was the realisation by Weizmann and his Zionist leadership colleagues of how much the British feared Trotsky and what he represented that gave them their bargaining power with Britain in the “in Russia” context of Neumann’s statement.

So far as I am aware there is no record of what was said by the Zionists when they propositioned the British for the Balfour Declaration, but in the light of comments subsequently made by Churchill on the significance of events in revolutionary Russia, it is not difficult to imagine what Weizmann might well have said to Balfour, or somebody with the foreign secretary’s ear.

On 8 February 1920 Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, wrote an article for the
Illustrated Sunday Herald
. It was headlined “ZIONISM VERSUS BOLSHEVISM”. In it Churchill told his readers about Trotsky and “his schemes of a worldwide communistic state under Jewish domination.” Churchill then noted “the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally and Dr. Weizmann in particular.” But, Churchill declared, Trotsky’s scheme was being “directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal (Zionism).” Churchill’s conclusion was the following: “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”
⁴

When Weizmann informed the British that he was ready to put Zionism to work for them in Russia, probably very soon after the collapse of the monarchy, I think it is reasonable to speculate that he said something like this: “We understand and sympathise with your fears about what is happening in Russia. To the extent that some of our Jewish people there are a cause of the problem, we Zionists can assist you to overcome it. Use us.”

History in the shape of Zhitlovksky’s scornful rejection of Herzl’s willingness to allow Zionism to be used as an anti-revolutionary taskforce should have warned Weizmann and his WZO leadership colleagues how difficult their “in Russia” mission was going to be.

Churchill’s graphic description of the struggle invites a question about the exact nature of Zionism’s in-Russia strategy. Was it premised, at least initially, on the hope that Zionists could persuade those Russian Jews who supported Trotsky to turn away from the path of revolution? Or were Weizmann and his leadership colleagues committed from the beginning to setting Jew against Jew in Russia, in order to reduce the prospects of victory for communism?

I am not aware that such a question has ever been asked and I cheerfully confess that I don’t know the answer to it. But whatever the truth, one thing seems to me to be clear. For Zionism to have had even a chance of influencing events in Russia in Britain’s favour, it had to be able to assure Russia’s Jews that Zionism was in a position to give them a better future in Palestine than that on offer in Russia from Trotsky and the Bolsheviks if their revolution succeeded. But Zionist words alone were not going to be convincing enough. What the Zionists had to have, in order to be taken seriously by Russia’s Jews, in order to be of service to Britain, was a declaration of Britain’s support for Zionism’s ambitions in Palestine.

It may have been that Weizmann gave the British a short history lesson in order to underline Zionism’s need for a public declaration of Britain’s support. If he did, he might have drawn attention to Zhitlovksy’s comment to Herzl that Jewish revolutionaries were not about to call off their struggle for elementary human rights in Russia in return for “a vague promise” of a better life in Palestine. (I can almost hear Weizmann saying to the British: “We’ve got to be able to demonstrate that Britain is serious in its support for us. A vague promise won’t do.”)

Zhitlovky’s fundamental criticism of Herzl was that he did not give a damn about Russia’s Jews and their real needs in Russia, and was only intending to use them to serve Zionism’s political ambitions. Was Weizmann any different from Herzl in that respect? I think not. The British were using Zionism and Zionism was using Russia’s Jews. It was a matter of political expediency, politics without principles, all down the line. Weizmann was saying to the British what Herzl had said to the Kaiser, “We’re taking Jews away from the revolutionary parties
.”

There is nothing in any record to suggest that Weizmann and his Zionist leadership colleagues never allowed themselves to be troubled by thoughts about the price Russia’s Jews might pay in the future, if communism triumphed, for Zionism’s collusion with Britain and her capitalist allies. It must have been obvious to anybody who thought about it at the time that, in the event of a communist victory, all of Russia’s Jews, because of the anti- revolutionary and anti-communist activities of some, would be regarded by the Soviet authorities as potential subversives and would suffer accordingly. One can only wonder about how much better the life of Russia’s Jews might have been after the coming into being of the Soviet Union if Zionism had not meddled Russia’s internal affairs. If that meddling had not happened, Jews in the Soviet Union may not have had such a tough time as they did have in the decades that followed.

As it happened Zionist influence on events in Russia changed not a lot—one might say the situation there was too far gone for the Zionists to have had anything but a marginal impact; but that is not the point. It is that at the time Weizmann was propositioning the British, they had good reason to hope and believe that the Zionists could and would deliver something of value. But in the “in Russia” context I agree with Neumann. The British did exaggerate Zionism’s influence.

But perhaps it was not in Russia that the Zionists performed their most valuable service for Britain.

There were some people close to the action who believed that the issuing of the Balfour Declaration was also a “thank you” to the Zionists for mobilising America’s Jews to play a critical and perhaps decisive role in bringing America into the war. Among those who thought so was Lawrence. When the U.S. State Department sent Professor William E. Yale to the Middle East to gather information about “the Arab situation”, Lawrence was one of those who briefed him. According to Yale, Lawrence said: “Britain is supporting the Zionists for the help it is thought they could be to us in Russia and because they brought America into the war.”
⁵
(I return to this subject in Chapter Seven, which includes the story of America’s entry into the war and how President Wilson tried to prevent the doing of an injustice to the Arabs of Palestine).

There was also a particular strategic consideration which played a part in motivating Britain to issue the Balfour Declaration. It was the need to protect the Suez Canal, which was vital for the maintenance of “the spinal chord” of the British Empire. In his book
Trial and Error
, Weizmann recalled a conversation he had on the subject of the Canal with Lord Robert Cecil, Britain’s assistant secretary of state for foreign affairs. The Zionist leader said he stressed to Cecil the point that a “Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in particular in respect to the Suez Canal.”
⁶

But Weizmann’s suggestions that Zionism should be used as an instrument to help preserve and protect the British Empire were not confined to private conversations. In his book he also recalled an important public announcement he had made on the subject:

We can reasonably say that should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more: they would develop the country, bring back civilisation to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
⁷

I do not mean to suggest that Britain would have refrained from using Zionism for its own ends if the Zionists had not asked Britain to use them. The British had their own logic. With the fire of Arab nationalism burning, and with Arab leaders learning to play the Game of Nations (or so it seemed), they, the Arabs, could not be relied upon to put Britain’s interests first when it came to protecting the Canal, especially with Egypt on its way to independence (and given, also, that the French were not to be trusted). In any future crisis with Britain the Arabs might even threaten to close the Canal as a bargaining chip. That, surely, was what the British would do if they were the Arabs and the need arose. So the best way to guarantee that interests with regard to the Canal would always be put first was to have, as close to it as possible, a protective Zionist base; a Zionist presence which, because of the Balfour Declaration, would obligate the Zionists to do whatever had to be done to protect the Canal for Britain. (Forty years later when the Zionist state went to war with Egypt, it was at the request of Britain and France for the purpose of giving them the pretext to intervene, to take back the Suez Canal from Egypt and remove President Nasser from power.)

There was also a wild card in the pack of Britain’s considerations in 1917. This was a report that Germany was considering a Balfour-type Declaration to win over Zionism and its influence on matters political and financial. It is not difficult to imagine that this report caused alarm in the highest levels of the British government. Was the report true—were the Germans really thinking about offering the Zionists a deal? Or did Zionist negotiators invent that story to put pressure on the British? Those are questions without answers. They, the answers, went to graves with men.

And now a most intriguing question.

How much was “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government” (Lloyd-George’s wartime coalition government) a motivating factor in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, the playing of the Zionist card?

The quotation in the paragraph above was the title of a memorandum marked SECRET written by Montagu—the only Jewish Englishman in the cabinet and Secretary of State for India—and distributed by him to his cabinet colleagues.
⁸
(Montagu also had jurisdiction over British Colonial interests in the Near and Middle East as well as India).

This amazing document was dated 23 August 1917—i.e. when Montagu the passionate anti-Zionist was leading the fight against the creation of a Jewish state and, at the particular moment, was insisting that any declaration Balfour might make had to contain safeguards for the rights of the Arabs in Palestine.

As it happened, Montagu’s memorandum was not de-classified, not considered to be fit for public consumption, until 1970. Put another way, it was suppressed for more than half a century. (Truth was—as it always has been and no doubt always will be—a most worrying thing for politicians; and all the more so when it’s to do with the politics of the creation of the State of Israel).

Edwin Samuel Montagu was a Jewish Englishman by birth, in London in 1879. He entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1906 and became secretary to Herbert Asquith who was prime minister from 1908 to 1916. As parliamentary undersecretary to the India Office between 1910 and 1914, Montagu had the job of explaining Indian matters to the House of Commons. After the outbreak of World War I he served in a number of minor government posts and entered the cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1915. As financial secretary to the Treasurer he helped to popularise the first war loans and set up voluntary war-savings organisations. He was appointed Secretary of State for India in 1917, when the government had decided to play the Zionist card and the discussion was only about the wording of the Balfour Declaration.

As Lilienthal put it, Montagu “deeply resented the efforts of Zionist nationalists to persuade unwitting co-religionists that they were an ethnic racial group, one of superior stock entitled to rule over Palestine.”
⁹

This most remarkable Jewish Englishman feared that endorsement by the government of Zionism’s Palestine project could endanger the hard-won status of Jews as an integrated religious community enjoying equal rights, privileges and obligations in Western countries in which they lived. In plain language Montagu’s gut fear in its English context was that English people who succeeded only with great effort in suppressing their anti-Semitism would say out loud: “We really don’t want you Jews here. Now you don’t need to be here. Go to your home in Palestine.”

In conversation with Prime Minister Lloyd-George, Montagu said he had striven all his life “to escape from the ghetto” to which he now faced possible relegation as a result of the contemplated British policy lurch in Zionism’s favour.

Under the heading The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government, the text of Montagu’s memorandum as slightly shortened by me was as follows (emphasis added):

I have chosen the above title for this memorandum not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view, which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic, but I wish to place on record my view that
the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country of the world.