A History of Zionism (83 page)

The Jewish community recovered only slowly from the ravages of the war. By 1920 it had grown to sixty-four thousand and only in 1922 was it back to its prewar size.
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It would not have been able to defend itself against any outside attack, and the arrival in 1918 of the legionnaires, the 4,500 Jewish volunteers from England and America, was a momentous event. But of these thousands of volunteers only 260 chose to settle in the country. It was only with the beginning of the immigration wave in December 1918 that a transfusion of fresh blood took place and Zionist activities showed fresh life.

The British troops entering Palestine were received by a jubilant Jewish population. The beginning of liberation, the days of the Messiah seemed at hand. But the return to normal conditions took much longer than anticipated. There was no news from the Zionist executive in London and no money. Galilee, the northern part of the country, remained in the hands of the Turks almost to the end of the war. Immediately after the arrival of the British a Provisional Committee (
Va’ad Zemani
) had been set up to pave the way for the establishment of a representative council of Palestinian Jewry (
Asefat Hanivharim
). But this body, in which there was no outstanding personality, had little authority, and even if there had been leadership little could have been achieved without financial resources. Meetings were convened, blueprints prepared, resolutions passed, but all as it were in a vacuum. The orthodox Jews, opposing women’s right to vote and the creation of a joint rabbinate, rejected the very idea of a common Jewish representative body. It was, in the words of a contemporary observer, the era of
Tohu vabohu
, utter confusion and anarchy.
†

Palestine was administered from December 1917 to July 1920 by
OETA
(Occupied Enemy Territory Administration), a section of the British army. The officers established a system of direct rule, subject to the orders of the C-in-C, General Allenby. From the start there was friction between the Jewish population and the military administration. While the Zionists expected that the new masters would be above all concerned with the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, most of the British officers, in so far as they were at all aware of the obligations entered into by Whitehall, were by no means in sympathy with official policy. A few, such as Wyndham Deedes, were pro-Zionist, but most preferred the Arabs to the Jews, whose insistent demands they regarded as at best a nuisance. In their eyes their main task was to preserve the
status quo
, to maintain public services with the least disturbance of the existing order. Even if they had been more sympathetically inclined towards the Zionist cause it is doubtful whether they would have been able to do much to promote it. For the war continued for another year after the occupation of Jerusalem, and during that time military requirements took precedence over all other considerations. Furthermore, they had little if any experience in administrative work, and when they first encountered Arab opposition to Zionism their instinctive reaction was to refrain from any step which might further antagonise the Arabs, who after all constituted the overwhelming majority of the population.

The Balfour Declaration had expressed a general intention to facilitate the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people but it was by no means clear at first what this would mean in practical terms. When the Zionists demanded the establishment of their own military defence force, this was rejected by the local command as premature. This in turn created much bitterness among the Jews, since the British forces (as was soon to appear) proved unable or, as some asserted, unwilling to protect the Jewish population against Arab attacks. Thus disillusion set in within only a few months after the arrival of the British forces. Small incidents poisoned the atmosphere, such as the case of the senior officers who remained seated when the
Hatiqva
, the Jewish anthem was played at a concert.
OETA
refused to use Hebrew together with Arabic and English as an official language on railway tickets, tax forms, and other official documents. The Red Cross received privileges which
Hadassa
was denied. The Land Registry Office remained closed and there was no legal possibility of acquiring land; even private transactions in land were not permitted.

Thus Palestinian Jewry became embittered and suspicious: ‘the angels became devils in their eyes. They saw themselves the victims of a conspiracy.’
*
Rumours were rife that certain
OETA
advisers were not merely in sympathy with the Arab claim that the Balfour Declaration implied the denial of the right of self-determination, but actively encouraged the Arab protest movement. These suspicions were perhaps exaggerated, but there is no denying that most British oriental experts were in fact convinced that their government had been mistaken in allying itself with the Zionists rather than the Arabs. As for the rest, probably the majority, they simply did not want to be bothered. There was a tendency (as one observer put it) ‘to look down on the people in their care as a tiresome gaggle of Yids and Wogs’, and since the Yids were clamouring even louder than the Wogs, insisting on their rights, demanding to be treated as equals, forever complaining about British arrogance if not downright antisemitism, they got the worst of the deal. Thus an unfortunate pattern for Zionist-British relations was established even before the mandate came into force. There was little Weizmann and other British Zionists could do to smooth things over.

Weizmann left for Palestine in March 1918 and stayed there for five months. He was a member of a Zionist commission (
Va’ad Hazirim
) which had been dispatched on the initiative of the British government to survey the situation and prepare plans for the future. The commission included a French Jew, Professor Sylvain Levi (an anti-Zionist) and an Italian (Levi Bianchini), but the majority consisted of Weizmann’s friends and collaborators (David Eder, Joseph Cowen, Leon Simon and Israel Sieff). Weizmann had an introductory letter from Lloyd George, which, however, made little impression on Allenby, who immediately informed his guest that nothing could be done at present. Weizmann ruefully wrote that ‘the messianic hopes which we had read into the Balfour Declaration suffered a perceptible diminution when we came into contact with the hard realities of
GHQ
’.
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Subsequently he got on reasonably well with Allenby, though the commander-in-chief probably never changed his basic view that there was no future for the Jews in Palestine.

During his stay Weizmann met Emir Faisal; details of this inconclusive meeting are given elsewhere in the present study. And, in July 1918, while the war was still in progress, he laid the cornerstone of the Hebrew university on Mount Scopus which was to be opened six years later. Since there was little else that could be done for the time being, Weizmann decided to return to London to pursue the political work in the European capitals, which had by no means been completed. The Zionist commission took over the Palestine Office in Jaffa which had been established before the war by the World Zionist Organisation. This body was in charge of all political work and served as liaison between the Jewish population and the British administration. Departments for agricultural affairs, engineering and education were established, but the commission suffered from successive changes in leadership. David Eder replaced Weizmann after his departure, and was in turn replaced by Lewin-Epstein, who was himself succeeded by two American Zionists, Friedenwald and Robert Szold. They were followed again by Eder, who was succeeded by Ussishkin, the Russian Zionist leader, who was succeeded by Kisch – all this within about three years.

Such frequent changes prevented any consistent effort, though it is doubtful whether in the uncertainties of 1918-20 much could have been achieved anyway. Relations with the British authorities deteriorated: Ronald Storrs, governor of Jeusalem district, wrote about ‘Tsar Menahem (Ussishkin)’: ‘When he was announced for an interview I braced myself to take my punishment like a man, praying only that my subordinates would keep an equal control over their tempers.’
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Storrs was clearly exasperated by the Zionists, to whom he applied Dryden’s couplet: ‘God’s pampered people whom, debauch’d with ease, No King could govern and no God could please.’ In their milder moments, the Zionists would say that God had not pampered them and that Storrs, at any rate, had not tried very hard to please. It was Storrs who in 1920 had his friend Ernest Richmond appointed political secretary of the Palestine government. Richmond, as it soon appeared, was a fanatical opponent of the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
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The Struggle for the Mandate

The diplomatic battle in the capitals of the world for a Jewish Palestine entered a new stage on the morning after the Balfour Declaration and lasted until the San Remo Conference (spring 1920) which decided to include the Declaration in the peace treaty with Turkey. Strictly speaking it was not until August 1924 that the Treaty of Lausanne came into force, legalising the status of Palestine as a League of Nations mandate.
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But
de facto
the mandate came into force in July 1920 when Herbert Samuel assumed office as the first high commissioner. Many difficulties had to be overcome by the Zionist leaders: American policy hesitated between active participation in world affairs and isolationism. This introduced yet another uncertain factor into the situation, for the Balfour Declaration had not provided a clear answer with regard to the identity of the protecting power. The American King-Crane commission in 1919 reported that the Arab Muslims, the great majority of the population, were in favour of Syrian independence, and that a mandate over a united Syria, including Palestine, should be assigned to the Americans or as a second choice to Britain. This recommendation was not acted upon, but in London too there was no wholehearted support for a British mandate and the idea of an American mandate or a mandate under combined sponsorship was revived by influential circles. After lengthy deliberations the eastern committee of the war cabinet decided that a single power should be selected to administer Palestine and that it should be neither Italy nor France. Consequently the choice lay between the United States and Britain, the conclusion being that ‘while we would not object to the selection of the United States of America, yet, if the offer was made to Great Britain we ought not to decline’. This decision was based largely on considerations of imperial defence; Zionism and the Balfour Declaration played little part in it.
*

The scene next moved to Paris where the peace conference opened in January 1919. On 18 January the conference approved the creation of a League of Nations under which a mandatory system was to be established. The great powers were to act as trustees for the new states which were emerging in Europe and the Near East. There was, however, an obvious contradiction between the high-minded wartime declarations against imperialist annexations and the secret treaties about the division of spheres of influence. On the whole, the eastern question figured less prominently at the peace conference than generally expected; European affairs had top priority. Decisions concerning the Near East were postponed time and time again, one important reason being British-French rivalry. London informed Paris that it wanted Palestine and Mesopotamia ‘and a good connection between them’, and that it had no designs on Syria and Lebanon. But at the same time the British supported Emir Faisal’s ambitions for an independent, united Syrian state, a scheme which was of course unacceptable to the French. Agreement between London and Paris became possible only after the British decided to drop Faisal. President Wilson demanded that the wishes of the population should be taken into account, whereas the Zionists, in the early drafts of their programmes for the peace conference, demanded majority rights for the existing Jewish community in Palestine irrespective of present numbers. The official Zionist memorandum eventually submitted was somewhat more cautious in approach.

When a Zionist delegation appeared on 27 February 1919 before the Supreme Allied Council, Weizmann was asked by Lansing, the American secretary of state what exactly was meant by the phrase ‘a Jewish national home’. Weizmann replied that for the moment an autonomous Jewish government was not wanted, but that he expected that seventy to eighty thousand Jews would emigrate to Palestine annually. Gradually a nation would emerge which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals. Sylvain Levi used the opportunity to make an anti-Zionist speech which profoundly embarrassed Weizmann and Sokolow, who had stressed all along the attachment of the Jewish people since time immemorial to Eretz Israel. But Levi’s appearance made no lasting impression on those present, nor did the Zionist cause suffer as the result of the fact that the negotiations between Faisal and Weizmann led nowhere.

Other attempts were made to torpedo Zionist policy: a cable from General Money, head of the British military administration in Palestine, advised London to drop the Balfour Declaration. The people of Palestine were opposed to the Zionist programme, he wrote, and if Britain wanted the mandate it was necessary ‘to make an authoritative announcement that the Zionist programme will not be enforced in opposition to the wishes of the majority’.
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On several occasions
OETA
demanded that the Zionist commission should be dissolved, but Balfour and Lloyd George were not inclined to accept this advice and Generals Money and Bols were instructed to make known to all concerned that the policy of the British government had not changed. This they did, but in a half-hearted way and with so many reservations that the impression was created among the Arabs (to quote a contemporary observer, Horace Samuel) that the administration favoured a pro-Arab policy and that the cabinet in London could be deflected from its policy by the requisite amount of energy and determination.