A Peace to End all Peace (36 page)

II

In the first half of 1917, General Sir Archibald Murray, commander of the British army in Egypt—the Egyptian Expeditionary Force—sent his troops lurching in fits and starts toward Palestine. Whether because London kept issuing and then countermanding instructions, or because he himself was inept, or a combination of both, Murray allowed the German commanders and their Turkish troops time to regroup. But then he hastily attacked—at Gaza, which dominated the coastal road to Palestine—in the early morning fog on 26 March, and was beaten. Kress von Kressenstein, the brilliant German commander, who had fortified Gaza effectively, suffered only half as many casualties as the British.

Calling up reinforcements from Egypt, Murray launched a second attack on fortified Gaza on 29 April, and Kressenstein defeated him even more decisively: the ratio of British to Turkish casualties was three to one. Weary and discouraged, the British armies withdrew; and within weeks Sir Archibald Murray was relieved of his command. Lloyd George was determined to renew the battle for Palestine in the autumn but, for the moment, London was unwilling to commit fresh troops to the campaign.

Murray’s two defeats led Sir Mark Sykes to worry that the Turks—in the breathing space before Britain resumed the attack in the autumn—might retaliate against the Jewish, Arab, and Armenian populations whose support he had been enlisting on behalf of the Allies. He cabled the Foreign Office suggesting that Britain should not go forward with Zionist, Arab, and Armenian projects so long as they exposed these peoples to jeopardy.
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His suggestion met with no response.

Discouraged by the war news—the failure of the French offensive in Champagne, the mutiny of French army units there, the disintegration of Russia, and Murray’s failure to invade Palestine—Sykes attached even greater importance to winning the support of the peoples of the Middle East. To him it seemed, as it did to Leo Amery and his colleagues, that even if the Allies were to win the war, their victory might be an inconclusive one; and that such positions as they might win for themselves in the Middle East could be subject to continual pressure by a German-controlled Turkey that would make full use of the Sultan’s leadership of Islam. In his view, that made the annexationist claims of pre-Clemenceau France and of Baron Sonnino’s Italy all the more short-sighted. In a “Memorandum on the Asia-Minor Agreement” he wrote that

He went on to say that France, if she were wise, would deal with her areas of influence in the Middle East as Britain planned to deal with hers: in Syria and the Lebanon France should sponsor Arab independence. If she did
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do so, wrote Sykes, Britain should do nothing to help France deal with the troubles she would have brought on her own head.

Outlining his own vision of the future, Sykes wrote that “I want to see a permanent Anglo-French entente allied to the Jews, Arabs, and Armenians which will render pan-Islamism innocuous and protect India and Africa from the Turco-German combine, which I believe may well survive Hohenzollerns.”
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Sykes had won over Amery to this point of view, and Amery later wrote that “the Jews alone can build up a strong civilisation in Palestine which could help that country to hold its own against German-Turkish oppression…It would be a fatal thing if, after the war, the interests of the Jews throughout the world were enlisted on the side of the Germans.”
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III

Chaim Weizmann was elected President of the British Zionist Federation in February 1917, enabling him to propose officially that the British government should make a public commitment to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine. After his meetings with Sykes he continued to meet with public officials who expressed sympathy with his ideas.

Lord Robert Cecil, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and the third son of Lord Salisbury, Victoria’s last Prime Minister, became a devoted convert. Five young Cecils were killed in the First World War, and Lord Robert was moved to draft a memorandum outlining a plan for perpetual peace: the first draft of what later became the Covenant of the League of Nations. His ideas of self-determination disconcerted his political colleagues, who pointed out that logically his plan would lead to the dissolution of the British Empire.
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A contemporary essayist wrote in wonder that “He took the cross in an odd international crusade for peace; and he found his allies in places where Cecils normally look for their enemies.”
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In a similar crusading spirit he took up the cause of a Jewish Palestine.

Another sympathizer was Sir Ronald Graham, an Arabist who had come back to the Foreign Office after more than a decade of service in Egypt, where he had been the first British official to discuss with Vladimir Jabotinsky the creation of a Jewish unit within the British army. Now, having returned to London, he urged the Foreign Office to make its support of Zionism public. While the notion of committing Britain to Zionism was inspired by Gerald FitzMaurice and Mark Sykes, Graham was probably more responsible than anyone else in the government for actually embodying the commitment in an official document, though his role tends to be passed over by historians—possibly because he failed to leave a significant archive of private papers behind him.

Graham and other officials of the Foreign Office were keenly aware that France was the obstacle in the way of giving Chaim Weizmann the public commitment he requested. Graham concluded, as had Sykes, that Zionism was weakened by its exclusive attachment to Britain. He worried that the Zionists were gambling everything on the prospect that Britain would govern Palestine—in ignorance of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in which Britain had pledged not to do so. On 19 April 1917 Graham wrote to Sykes that it was disquieting that the Zionist movement relied so completely on the prospect of Britain having Palestine.
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However it was difficult to see how the Zionist movement could turn to France for support. Within the French Foreign Ministry Zionism was spoken of with scorn, and important segments of French opinion had expressed hostility all along to the movement, which was regarded as pro-German. Zionism had attracted little support among France’s Jews and, as a result, the French government held a low opinion of its strength—until the revolution in Russia made Jews seem much more politically important than they were. Even after events in Russia made it seem desirable to win Zionist support, the Quai d’Orsay hesitated to bid for it, fearing that an Allied commitment to Zionism might amount to an abandonment of France’s claim to Palestine.

The problem was solved by Nahum Sokolow who, in his negotiations with the French Foreign Ministry, pointedly did not raise the question of which country should be the protecting power for Palestine. Officials at the Quai d’Orsay therefore were led to assume that Zionists would remain neutral on that issue. French officials were not prepared to support Zionism in a postwar Palestine—and did not envisage allowing Jews to achieve a separate national status—but they saw no harm in offering the Zionists words of encouragement so long as they were meaningless. They believed that those who held Zionist “daydreams” might be won over by granting them some form of verbal encouragement that did not constitute a real commitment.
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In return for Sokolow’s agreement to go to Russia to use his influence with the Jews there, on 4 June 1917 Jules Cambon, Director-General of the French Foreign Ministry, gave him a written formal assurance from the French government of its sympathy in the following terms:

It was subtly phrased. Omitted from the pledge was the crux of the Zionist idea: that the renaissance of the Jewish nation should occur within the context of a political entity of its own. Moreover, the Holy Places, which were to remain independent of the pledge of sympathy, had already been defined by the French in the Sykes-Picot Agreement as a large enclave that took in most of inhabited Palestine west of the Jordan river. If that definition were to apply, French sympathy for the Jewish nation in Palestine would be restricted to Haifa, Hebron, northern Galilee, and the Negev Desert. The Cambon letter was, as it was intended to be, noncommittal.
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Nonetheless, the French had outmaneuvered themselves. Their formal assurance was too cautiously phrased to be meaningful, but its existence licensed the British to issue an assurance of their own. Once it became common ground that the Allies supported Jewish aspirations in Palestine, however defined, the Zionist movement would have an important role in selecting its protector, and would choose Britain. This was a matter of less concern to Graham and Sykes, whose principal objective at that time was to secure a homeland in Palestine for the Jews, than to Leo Amery and his friends, to whom Zionism was attractive mainly because it ensured that Palestine would be British.

Armed with the written French statement that Sokolow had brought back with him from Paris, Graham and Cecil advised a willing Balfour in mid-June 1917 that the time had come to issue a written public British commitment to Zionism. Balfour invited Weizmann to participate in the process of drafting an appropriate document. It was what Weizmann and Sykes had sought all along.

The process of drafting the appropriate language, and deciding to whom it should be addressed, went on through the summer until September, when Milner and Leo Amery took charge of it. Almost all the governmental figures who mattered were disposed favorably toward the proposed declaration. Sykes, fortified by Ormsby-Gore, had converted the War Cabinet secretariat to Zionism. Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, had long sympathized with Zionism and now believed that Britain should go on record in its favor; and within his own department he was pushed forward in this by Cecil and Graham. Smuts was deeply pro-Zionist. Milner and his set, including Philip Kerr of the Prime Minister’s secretariat, had come to view the establishment of a Jewish Palestine as a vital British imperial interest. The Prime Minister had always planned to carry through a Zionist program; and while he did not express an interest in declaring Britain’s intentions in advance, neither did he place any obstacle in the way of his government’s doing so once his colleagues thought it useful.

Yet the proposal that Balfour should issue his pro-Zionist declaration suddenly encountered opposition that brought it to a halt. The opposition came from leading figures in the British Jewish community. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, led the opposition group within the Cabinet. He, along with his cousin, Herbert Samuel, and Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) had broken new ground for their co-religionists: they had been the first Jews to sit in a British Cabinet.
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The second son of a successful financier who had been ennobled, Montagu saw Zionism as a threat to the position in British society that he and his family had so recently, and with so much exertion, attained. Judaism, he argued, was a religion, not a nationality, and to say otherwise was to say that he was less than 100 percent British.

Montagu was regarded as by far the most capable of the younger men in the Liberal ranks, and it was deemed a political masterstroke for the Prime Minister to have taken him and Churchill away from Asquith. Yet a typical political comment at the time (from Lord Derby, the War Minister) was, “The appointment of Montagu, a Jew, to the India Office has made, as far as I can judge, an uneasy feeling both in India and here” though Derby added that “I, personally, have a very high opinion of his capability and I expect he will do well.”
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It bothered Montagu that, despite his lack of religious faith, he could not avoid being categorized as a Jew. He was the millionaire son of an English lord, but was driven to lament that “I have been striving all my life to escape from the Ghetto.”
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The evidence suggested that in his non-Zionism, Montagu was speaking for a majority of Jews. As of 1913, the last date for which there were figures, only about one percent of the world’s Jews had signified their adherence to Zionism.
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British Intelligence reports indicated a surge of Zionist feeling during the war in the Pale of Russia, but there were no figures either to substantiate or to quantify it.
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In Britain, the Conjoint Committee, which represented British Jewry in all matters affecting Jews abroad, had been against Zionism from the start and remained so.
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Montagu’s opposition brought all matters to a halt. In disgust, Graham reported that the proposed declaration was “hung up” by Montagu, “who represents a certain section of the rich Jews and who seems to fear that he and his like will be expelled from England and asked to cultivate farms in Palestine.”
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