“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The Balfour Declaration, written in a letter delivered on Nov. 2, 1917, from Foreign Minister Balfour to Lionel, the 2d Baron Rothschild.
“Because it was unpredictable and characterized by contradictions, deceptions, misinterpretations, and wishful thinking, the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration sowed dragon’s teeth. It produced a murderous harvest, and we go on harvesting today.”[1]
by John Ellis
(Note: I apologize for the length of this article. I tried to split it up and turn chapter 2 into 3 parts but was unable to do so in a way that I found satisfactory. I promise this will be the longest article in the series. I appreciate you taking the time to read, and don’t want to take advantage of your interest in this series by publishing super-long articles.)
A question looms large over this topic: If England was making promises to Sharif Hussein and the pan-Arabists, why did the British government feel the need to make promises to the Zionists, too? Well, first and foremost, as I’ve written in previous articles/chapters, England had a deep existential need to exert control over Palestine (as well as Egypt and other parts of the Levant). Protecting the Suez Canal while guarding and controlling access to India gave the Near East increasingly strategic importance. As the need for petroleum began to exponentially rise during the first decades of the 20th century, the region began to become even more attractive to the imperialistic nations of the West. On the one hand, coveting control over the region, England was hedging its bets by backing both sides, so to speak. Both groups – the pan-Arabists but especially the political Zionists – had powerful allies within England, including in the government.[2] And often the two parties were unaware of England’s dealings with the other.
On the other hand, interestingly and shamefully, a tentacle of anti-Semitism played a role in inducing the British government to court Zionists by making promises to them. The political Zionists played into this and used it to their advantage, but the long-standing myth that Jews possess a mystical power that plays a behind the scenes yet determinative role in world events helped convince England of their need to appease Jews. Regarding the establishment of Palestine as a home for Jews, this began to be officially worked out in England after the Young Turks deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid II. In 1908, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Sr. Gerard Lowther, commissioned Gerald FitzMaurice to investigate and report on the CUP. On May 29, 1910, Sir Lowther forwarded FitzMaurice’s final and confidential report to Sir Charles Hardinge, the head of the Foreign Office. The report asserted that “Jews had taken over a Freemason network.”[3]
Because of this, according to Lowther, via the work of FitzMaurice, Jews were now in control of the Ottoman Empire and that “Amongst the ringleaders of the Jewish freemason conspiracy … was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Oscar Strauss, whose brother owned the New York department stores Macy’s and Abraham & Strauss.”[4] This anti-Semitic conspiracy, published in an official British government document, “won wide acceptance among British officials.”[5] Among the unfortunate consequences produced by FitzMaurice’s document was one that came to fruition a few years later when it was concluded “that the world war (in which Britain was by then engaged) could be won by buying the support of this powerful group.”[6] In his series of articles written several years after the war, J.M.N. Jeffries bluntly stated, “[England’s] real motives [for the Balfour Declaration] were, firstly, to obtain the world-wide support of Zionism’s hidden powers; secondly, to establish in a strategic corner of the Near East a body of people in close coalition with Britain.”[7]
Years after the Balfour Declaration had been issued, the Zionists leader Harry Sacher confessed that he and his colleagues had used “the belief in the power and the unity of Jewry … to exploit” England and France.[8] Underlining the reach of this anti-Semitic conspiracy, historian Jonathan Schneer point out that, “The Balfour Declaration sprang from fundamental miscalculations about the power of Germany and about the power and unity of Jews.”[9]
In hindsight, though, it’s apparent that the Zionists offered little actual strategic military advantage during World War I. It’s also obvious from history that England believed themselves perfectly capable of subduing and controlling any people groups they felt like colonizing. From their imperialistic perspective, they didn’t need a Jewish presence in Palestine to control the region. They could’ve made do with the people who were already there. However, the British government did believe that courting the Zionists was in their interest, and their long history of relations with the Jewish community meant that the partnership was ready made for exploitation. It’s hard to argue with Barabara Tuchman’s authoritative conclusion, “Political effort on behalf of the Jews were never exerted except as a by-product of other nations’ quarrels.”[10] Add in the presence of Christian Zionism, and the establishment of a national home for Jews in Palestine had a powerful groundswell of support.
England’s flirtation with the Jewish community goes back a long way. In the first chapter I highlighted Lord Shaftesbury’s Christian Zionism and the Christian Zionists’ belief that a Jewish return to the Holy Land is the penultimate event before the Rapture. Some two-hundred years before Lord Shaftesbury, Oliver Cromwell sought to roll back the anti-Semitism coursing through an England still under the dark shadow of the expulsion of Jews in 1290 by King Edward I. One writer has gone so far as to gush, “Cromwell’s most remarkable project, though, was to make England welcoming to the world’s Jews.”[11] Cromwell’s desires were thwarted because both England’s elite and merchant class were rotten through and through with anti-Semitism. Much had changed by the early 20th century with Jews enjoying full civil and legal equality. In the 19th century, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, Benjamin Disraeli, served twice as Britian’s Prime Minister. His writings (and life) played an important role in shaping and promoting Zionism in the country. With the possible exception of America, England was as welcoming a place for Jews as could be found in the world at the time.
During the first couple of decades of the 20th century, the two most prominent English Jews were Edwin Montagu and Walter Rothschild. Both men represented opposite sides of the debate within the Jewish community. Montagu was a committed assimilationist who became Zionism’s toughest opponent, while Baron Rothschild used his considerable influence and wealth to promote Zionism.
The Jewish assimilationists of England kept a cautious eye on the anti-Semitism that was awakening in their home country. They believed that the progressively louder voices of political Zionism were stoking the fires of bigotry. As a member of Parliament and a secular Jew, Montagu was eager to protect his civil and political rights as well as prevent the undermining of his reputation and influence by anti-Semites. For him, Jews who sought to create and highlight national distinctions between themselves and the country in which they lived and worked played directly into the hands of anti-Semites. While ultimately unable to thwart the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, he used his influence to ensure its watering down, contributing greatly to the upheaval in the region since then. On the other side of the debate, Baron Rothschild’s vast wealth may have left him inoculated against the (worst) effects of anti-Semitism, but he too kept a worried eye on the changing social and political climate. He had become convinced through the efforts of Chaim Weizmann and others that political Zionism was the antidote.
After Theodor Herzl’s untimely death in 1904 at the age of forty-four, Chaim Weizmann quickly emerged as the new leader of the political Zionists. In 1906, the eloquent Weizmann earned an audience with Arthur Balfour, who had just lost his seat as Prime Minister of England. An esteemed chemist who discovered a method to produce artificial acetone, a necessary ingredient in the production of munitions,[12] Weizmann had only been in England for two years when he met with Balfour. He had already gained access to the upper stratosphere of English society, but meeting Balfour was on a whole other level. Weizmann understood the gravity of the meeting, and he proved up for the task.
Balfour was curious why the Zionists had rejected a proposal to establish a Jewish state in Uganda on land provided by the English government.[13] Weizmann recorded his now famous response in Trial and Error. After muddling through a convoluted answer involving a hypothetical of what would’ve happened if Moses – yes, that Moses – had attended the Sixth Zionist Conference when the establishment of a Jewish state in Uganda had been brought to the floor, Weizmann explains:
“I remember that I was sweating blood and I tried to find some less ponderous way of expressing myself. Then suddenly I said: ‘Mr. Balfour, supposing that I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’ He sat up, looked at me, and answered: ‘But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London.’
“‘That is true,’ I said. ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’ He leaned back, continued to stare at me, and said two things which I remember vividly. The first was: ‘Are there many Jews who think like you?’ I answered: ‘I believe I speak the minds of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves, but with whom I could pave the streets of the country I came from.’ To this he said: ‘If that is so, you will one day be a force.’”[14]
As a Christian Zionist, Balfour didn’t really need any encouragement to desire the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. In terms of geo-political machinations, though, Weizmann’s impressive arguments won the Zionist movement a powerful political ally. Fortuitously for them, their impressive new ally was appointed Foreign Minister upon the accension of David Lloyd George to the Prime Minister’s office after Asquith’s government crumbled under the weight of England’s disastrous war effort.
With the elevation of Lloyd George to the office of Prime Minister in December 1916, the British war machine made a slight switch of gears. Under Prime Minister Asquith, the belief and focus of the war effort was on throwing as many allied troops as possible against Germany’s western flank. Fought mostly in Paris and Belgium, the infamous trench warfare that saw scores upon scores of men die just to secure inches of ground at times was partially a product of this strategy. Lloyd George, on the other hand, was counted among those who believed that defeating the Ottoman Empire could play a large role in securing an Allied victory. The new Prime Minister was not a fan of Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, the commander in chief over the European theater of war. Haig was one of the primary proponents of dashing more and more men at the German line. While politically unable to directly challenge Haig’s strategy, Lloyd George appointed hard-core imperialists to his cabinet, including Arthur Balfour as Foreign Secretary. His government then began directing resources to help further England’s imperial goals in the Middle East. In a rare instance of personally pushing the levers of war, Prime Minister Lloyd George made the historically important decision to elevate General Sir Edmund Allenby to commander in chief over the English forces fighting in the Levant, giving him the directive to take Palestine and Syria for England, defeating the Ottoman Empire and depriving Germany of an important ally in the process. Lloyd George included a bonus objective, telling “Allenby to capture Jerusalem on the way, by Christmas; it would make a fine seasonal gift to the British people.”[15]
Surveying the changing political landscape, the Zionists realized that their objective of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine may be closer to their reach than they had realized. In May 1917, after years of lobbying in public and the press, Weizmann delivered the first official Zionist proposal to the British government asking for England to commit to supporting and aiding in turning Palestine into a Jewish nation-state. The only surviving written record between the Zionists and the British War Cabinet is a note delivered to Louis Brandeis, the first Jew to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court and the leader of the American Zionists. “The document itself, written on stationery of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, contains in embryo many of the formulae which later reappeared in various drafts of the British mandate.”[16] As its thesis statement, the document calls for the “Recognition of Palestine as the Jewish National Home.” The use – or rather, the lack of use – of the article “the” in “the Jewish National Home” plays an important part in the confusion later sown by the Balfour Declaration. But to even get to that point, the Zionists still had an uphill battle before them. Edwin Montagu, the dedicated assimilationist, was also part of Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet. Another obstacle was France.
Jews in France had responded coldly to the Zionist movement, and the French government had their own imperialist designs for the Levant. Zionist allies in Lloyd George’s government knew that overcoming French objections would be a significant hurdle that would need to be cleared before England could officially back the Zionist plan of turning Palestine into a nation-state for Jews. There is one more important level of deceit that I’ll cover in the next chapter, but the Zionists were largely unaware of diplomatic machinations that would cause their objectives to be an obstacle for Fance. Aware of some of those diplomatic machinations, allies in the British government were able to gently direct the Zionists’ arguments away from a complete dependence on an English protectorate of Palestine to one that would include, at least rhetorically, the role of France. Playing his part well during negotiations with France, Nahum Sokolov “pointedly did not raise the question of which country should be the protecting power for Palestine.”[17] France was left with the impression that the Zionists were impartial as to which European country served as protector of Palestine. They were also left uninformed “that the renaissance of the Jewish nation should occur within the context of a political entity of its own.”[18] Adding a cherry on top of the British and Zionist deceit, Sokolov told both France and the Vatican that the Zionists had no desire nor plan to exert control or even influence over the holy sites of Palestine.[19] This promise echoed Theodor Herzl’s statement in his reply to Yusuf al-Khalidi almost two decades earlier that “The question of the Holy Places? But no one thinks of ever touching those. As I have said and written many times: These places have lost forever the faculty of belonging exclusively to one faith, to one race or to one people.”[20]
Sokolov’s masterful shelf game with France aside, though, the opposition of Montagu still loomed large. A seasoned and articulate politician, Montagu was able to serve as an almost insurmountable obstacle to the Zionist’s dream. In a memorandum delivered to the British cabinet in August 1917, Montagu delivered a scathing, bitter rebuttal of Zionism, writing, “Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.”[21] He went on to argue that the Zionist argument had been formed by Jews suffering under anti-Semitic governments in Eastern Europe but that England’s extension of political and civil rights to Jews rendered that argument mute. He went so far as to “assert that there is not a Jewish nation” while going on to say that whatever connection that Jews have is purely religious.[22] His concern was that “When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter.”[23] Standing at the crux of his opposition was the belief that if England supported the Zionist’s aims, the Jewish citizens of England would be rendered second-class and would lose the rights they enjoyed.
Montagu didn’t have to stand alone in his opposition. Two of Lloyd George’s other cabinet members, Lord Curzon and Bonar Law, were skeptical of the Zionist program. Curzon argued that Palestine was too barren to support the number of Jewish immigrants the Zionists dreamed of. The future Prime Minister Bonar Law simply didn’t believe the time was right to establish a national home for Jews. Montague had another important (and unlikely) yet temporary ally in President Woodrow Wilson. While President Wilson, driven by theological concerns, desired to see Palestine converted into a Jewish state, he was suspicious of England’s motives. Wilson’s trusted advisor Colonel House warned, “The English naturally want the road to Egypt and India blocked, and Lloyd George is not above using us to further this plan.”[24] By fall of 1917, Wilson eventually signaled his tepid support for what became known as the Balfour Declaration, but his silent refusal to express support over the previous year provided the assimilationists ammo in their campaign to undermine Britian’s support for the Zionists.
The Zionists, though, had a final card to play. Steering Lloyd George’s government into the anti-Semitic belief in the mystical power of Jews, Chaim Weizmann sent Sir Ronald Graham, a high-ranking British diplomat serving in the Foreign Service in Cairo, a newspaper clipping from a German newspaper calling for Germany to back the Zionists. The newspaper argued that Germany could thwart English interests, both in the war and their imperialistic goals, if they aided Jews in establishing a nation-state in Palestine. David Fromkin makes clear that “the German government took little interest in adopting a pro-Zionist stance; it was the German press that took an interest in it.”[25] Weizmann knew this about the German government, but seized the opportunity to light a fire under Lloyd George’s government by warning, “We might at any moment be confronted by a German move on the Zionist question and it must be remembered that Zionism was originally if not a German Jewish at any rate an Austrian Jewish idea.”[26] Implicit in his threat was that the mystical powers of world Jewry as well as the boots and guns of Jewish soldiers would migrate to the Germans if England failed to act.
Weizmann’s tactic of dangling the Sword of Damocles over England that they risked the ire of a worldwide Jewry which could alter the course of the war worked. On October 31, 1917, Lloyd George’s cabinet authorized Arthur Balfour to issue a declaration of support for the Zionists, albeit a watered-down version of the one Weizmann had sent earlier that year.
It should be noted that in Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour, historian Barbara W. Tuchman dismisses the belief almost universally held by historians that England issued the Declaration in part to woo world Jewry. She argues that the majority of Jews in America, England, and Russia were opposed to Zionism. Her conclusion is that the Declaration was an extension of Lord Shaftesbury’s program of Christian Zionism. It wasn’t that imperialists in Lloyd George’s cabinet were hoping to usher in the Second Coming of Jesus, she argues; instead, “the British government repeated the experiment for the sake of imperialism’s requirement of an ‘effective moral attitude.’”[27] They wanted their imperialistic actions to have a theological backing.
Looking at all the available evidence, including many secondary sources authored by various historians, I believe that it’s “all of the above.” Yes, Weizmann exaggerated the Zionist inclinations of Jews around the world. And, yes, the British government would’ve been aware that most Jews in England did not desire for Palestine to be transformed into a Jewish state. Montagu hammered that point home again and again. But it’s also true that some of the most powerful people in the world were political Zionists, starting in their own backyard with Lord Rothschild and his incredibly wealthy extended family across Western Europe. In America, a justice on the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, was a committed Zionist as was the soon-to-be justice Felix Frankfurter, not to mention the many wealthy, influential Jewish backers of President Wilson. Tuchman isn’t wrong, though, when she points out that Balfour was also driven by theological concerns. In fact, both President Wilson, whose lukewarm approval was the final obstacle to the Declaration’s birth, and Prime Minister Lloyd George were also motivated by theology. Wilson was the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, and he held to Christian Zionist beliefs. Lloyd George liked to quip that he knew the cities and regions in the Holy Land by their names in the Bible and not their modern names. The Balfour Declaration was the product of a many-headed English foreign policy underscored by imperialism. Palestine was necessary for their goals and many different “reasons” for the Balfour Declaration were happily embraced when and where it was convenient.
The final version, the one quoted at the very top of this article/chapter, went through several revisions between Weizmann and Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild. In the summer of 1917, Harry Sacher authored a revised Zionist objective that contained two sentences: “1. His Majesty’s Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people. 2. His Majesty’s Government will use its best endeavors to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist organization.”[28] Those two sentences became the basis for Balfour’s declaration, but a very important edit made its way into the final version. With Montagu’s pushing, the article “the” changed to “a” in the final version that states, “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People.” The revisions were not finished.
Delivered in the late summer of 1917, Sacher’s two sentence statement was debated for months before the final version was decided on. Montagu’s attacks on the statement were personal. “He had once remarked that he had been trying all his life to escape the ghetto. Now he understood the Zionists to be trying to push him, and every other assimilated British Jew, back inside.”[29] Using every ounce of his considerable persuasive abilities, he argued with Lloyd George that not only would a national home in Palestine for Jews undermine patriotic assimilationists in England but that it would anger the large Muslim population in India. And even though he was not part of the War Cabinet, his arguments earned him a place in the group that would decide the final version of the statement; a group that first met on September 3, 1917.
Montagu argued forcefully for the removal of any language suggesting a national homeland for Jews, which was essentially a gutting of the Zionist’s position stated in Sacher’s sentences. Upon receiving word of Montagu’s antagonism, Weizmann used all his influence to mobilize Zionists in both England and America to lobby Lloyd George to produce a weighty declaration in support of the Zionist project. On October 4, the committee met again. This time, Lloyd George and Balfour, both who had been absent during the first round of debates dominated by Montagu, were there. By this point, Montagu’s duties as Secretary of State for India called him away from the discussions. While he was inevitably unable to defeat the release of the Declaration, his formidable arguments and presence, even in absentia, helped shape the Balfour Declaration. After a third meeting of the War Cabinet on October 31, Lloyd George’s government settled on the statement. On November 2, 1917, “addressed to the most illustrious name in British Jewry”[30] After Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued his proclamation “an ebullient [British diplomat Mark] Sykes rushed over with the news, ‘Dr. Weizmann, it’s a boy.”[31] However, the excitement over the British government finally expressing official support for the Zionist project was tempered by the watering down of the declaration’s language. “It was a game attempt to satisfy every interest group – and in the end, of course, it satisfied none completely.”[32]
J.M.N. Jeffries put it bluntly, “[The Balfour Declaration] is not, as the general public believes, Lord Balfour’s solitary emotional act, but the work of many minds, frequently altered and rearranged as its British pre-authors shrank from the frankness of the various texts which its Zionist part-authors provided.”[33]
In the introduction to a collection of Ahad Ahem (Ha-‘Am)’s essays, Leon Simon explains that the Zionist leader “was among the group of Zionists in Britain who helped secure the Balfour Declaration, despite substantial differences between the formula he wanted, ‘the reconstitution of Palestine as the National Home of the Jewish people,’ and the formula actually adopted, ‘the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people.’ [emphasis added]”[34] The Zionists wanted a positive declaration that Palestine is the rightful home for all Jews. Lloyd George’s government refused to go that far.
What was delivered to the Zionists via Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild was less robust than Weizmann had hoped for. It was robust enough, though, to provide a written contradiction to Sharif Hussein and his sons’ plans to create an Arab nation that included Palestine; plans they assumed England was still on board with. Understanding this, and with the war still raging, England banned the publication of the Balfour Declaration across the Levant.
The Declaration’s second clause, while intended to assure nervous Arabs, was recognized as a diplomatic shell-game by the Zionists. While on a trip to Palestine to assure the locals that the Zionists had no intention of undermining their society, take their property, or deny them civil and political rights, Chaim Weizmann was confessing his true feelings in letters to Balfour. Calling Arabs “superficially clever and quick-witted” Weizman asserted that they “worship one thing, and one thing only – power and success.” He went on to warn Balfour that “knowing as they do the treacherous nature of the Arab, [British authorities] have to watch carefully and constantly that nothing should happen which might give the Arabs the slightest grievance or lest they should stab the Army in the back. The Arab, quick as he is to gauge such a situation, tries to make the most of it.”[35]
Weizmann’s bigotries aside, he was correct that if England wasn’t careful, the Arabs would upset the Zionist’s objectives by refusing to submit to the British Mandate. As I’ll explore in a future article/chapter, this is exactly what happened. The thing is, though, every British commission sent to study and understand the cause of Palestinian violence concluded that the Zionists were to blame. This is because the Palestinians saw through Weizmann’s patronizing, sugary words to them, and understood the Zionist’s true objectives, which Weizmann opened up about during a Speech in London in 1919:
“I trust to God that a Jewish state will come about; but it will come about not through political declarations, but by the sweat and blood of the Jewish people. … We were asked to formulate our wishes. We said we desired to create in Palestine such conditions, political, economic, and administrative, that as the country is developed, we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America is American. … I hope that the Jewish frontiers of Palestine will be as great as Jewish energy for getting Palestine.”[36]
One of the dark aspects of this entire story was the Zionist’s goal of population transfer. This is hotly contested by supporters of Zionism and the modern nation-state of Israel. Pull-quotes can be found that both affirm and contradict population transfer. I’ve already referenced Weizmann’s trip to Palestine to ensure the locals that their way of life and lands were safe. I’ve also pointed out Sokolof’s promise that the Zionists had no interest in exercising control over Palestine’s holy sites, a promise that Herzl had made to Yusuf al-Khalidi years earlier. However, I’ve also put in print Weizmann’s words that contradict his public statements on his goodwill tour of Palestine. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, “The Trauma of the British Mandate,” “The Jewish Revolt,” and “The Nakba,” I’ll pull on this thread in more detail, showing how the Zionist program included the emptying the land of the Palestinian peasants. For now, I point readers to the private words of Balfour who wrote, “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. … The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far more profounder import than the desires or prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit the land.”[37]
The forced marriage of Palestinians and Jews was doomed from the start. According to historians Larry Collins and Dominque LaPierre, “In Arab eyes, the Balfour Declaration had been an act of pure imperialism, a mortgaging by Britain of the future of a land to which she had no rightful claim.”[38] David Hirst adds, “The Jews were not only introducing an alien culture, they planned to make it the only one in the country.”[39] As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and the individual who most Israeli’s consider the father of the modern nation-state of Israel, would say decades later, “These Arabs should not be living here.”[40]
It needs to be noted that Palestine was not (shouldn’t have been) England’s to give away or to control. But colonizers convince themselves that they know better than the locals what’s good and right; that’s the history of colonization. And it took England until 1937 to publicly acknowledge the Declaration’s two clauses are irreconcilable.[41] From the beginning, though, “[Palestinians] knew the Zionists aimed to possess Palestine, but they could not imagine a world in which such a thing could happen. Their belief in themselves, their ignorance of Zionist power (based on organization not numbers), their old-fashioned concept of war, their naïve dependence on Arab promises of help: all prevented them from fully understanding what was happening.”[42] Along with Sayigh’s insights can be added the pan-Arabists’ naïve hopes that England would keep her promises to them.
On December 9, 1917, a little over a month after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, General Allenby led his British troops into Jerusalem. For the first time since Saladin had expelled King Guy of Lusignan and the Crusader Kingdom from Jerusalem in 1187, Europeans controlled the Holy City. The British Mandate had unofficially started, and both the pan-Arabists and Zionists believed themselves closer to their conflicting goals, albeit with nagging concerns on all sides about the trustworthiness of England. Those concerns were proven justifiable. At the time, though, neither the pan-Arabists nor the Zionists were fully aware of how much England had promised to the other party. More importantly, neither the Arabs nor the Zionists knew that England, while Lloyd George’s government was making conflicting promises to them, was engaged in finalizing an agreement with England’s allies, divvying up the Levant between the imperialistic European nations.
[1] Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 370.
[2] The pan-Arabist’s allies were concentrated in the military, specifically those who served in the Levant. This helped create some of the tension that continued to grow between the locals and the Zionist immigrants during the early years of the British Mandate.
[3] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: A Holt Paperback, 1989), 41.
[4] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 42.
[5] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 42.
[6] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 43.
[7] J.M.N. Jeffries, The Palestine Deception 1915-1923 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2014), 25.
[8] Harry Sacher, Zionist Portraits and Other Essays (London: Anthony Blond,1959), 37.
[9] Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, 345.
[10] Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: Ballantine Books, 1956), 164.
[11] Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 308.
[12] You can find arguments that say that Prime Minister Lloyd George gifted Palestine to the Zionists as a thank you to Chaim Weizmann since his synthetic acetone played a large role in helping the allies defeat Germany during WWI. While it’s true that Lloyd George and England were very grateful, the theory holds no merit. There were too many actors involved, both pro and con, to reduce the creation of the Balfour Declaration to so simplistic an explanation. It makes for a good story, though.
[13] Resist the urge to rewrite history by saying that if the Zionists had accepted that proposal, many of the problems in the world wouldn’t have existed. Like Palestine, people were already living in Uganda. The hubris of imperialists to give away the land of others has been and will always remain incredibly problematic (and sinful).
[14] Quoted by Jehuda Reinharz in Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 271.
[15] Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, 195.
[16] Frank E. Manuel, “Judge Brandeis and the Framing of the Balfour Declaration,” From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), 167.
[17] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 292.
[18] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 293.
[19] To be fair to Sokolov, many of the political Zionists were committed secularists who cared little for Judaism. The movement, though, as history has born out, was larger than the movement’s early loudest voices.
[20] “Letter from Dr. Theodor Herzl to M. Youssuf Zia Al-Khalidi”, From Haven to Conquest, 92.
[21] Edwin Montagu, “Edwin Montagu and Zionism, 1917”, From Haven to Conquest, 144.
[22] Montague, From Haven to Conquest, 145.
[23] Montague, From Haven to Conquest, 145.
[24] Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine and Mitchell, 1961), 181.
[25] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 296.
[26] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 296.
[27] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 339.
[28] Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, 335.
[29] Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, 338.
[30] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 297.
[31] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 297.
[32] David A. Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Nashville, TN: Wiley, 2014), 93.
[33] Jeffries, The Palestine Deception, 25-26.
[34] Leon Simon, “Introduction”, Ahad Ha-‘Am: Selected Essays (Jerusalem: Sefer Ve Sefel Publishing, 2003), 10.
[35] Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers 1917-1922: Seeds of Conflict (London: John Murray, 1972), 31.
[36] Chaim Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann: Excerpts from His Historic Statements, Writings and Addresses (New York: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1952), 48.
[37] Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 90.
[38] Larry Collins and Dominque LaPierre, O Jerusalem! Day by Day and Minute by Minute the Historic Struggle for Jerusalem and the Birth of Israel (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1972), (24.
[39] Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 171.
[40] Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), 67.
[41] Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 179.
[42] Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 2007), 4.
Practically Known Theology 