The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (24 page)

Even better positioned to influence Britain’s foreign policy was Herbert Samuel, a member of the Cousinhood who in 1914 belonged to the cabinet of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Son of a prosperous banker, Samuel had graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first-class degree. In 1889 he took part in his older brother Stuart’s successful campaign to represent the East End district of Whitechapel on the London County Council. Whitechapel was a filthy, impoverished, and overcrowded neighborhood, the home of many thousands of recent Jewish immigrants. The terrible conditions Samuel saw there moved him deeply. Governments exist to ameliorate poverty, he concluded, a conviction that never left him. His early political connections were with the radical wing of the Liberal Party and the moderate Fabian wing of socialism. In 1902 he published
Liberalism: Its Principles and Proposals
, which would provide a moral and
practical foundation for many of the reforms that the Asquith government carried out only a few years later.

Samuel’s political ascent also began in 1902, when he gained entrance to Parliament. When the Liberals won the general election of 1905, he gained minor government office, and then in 1909 he gained cabinet rank as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Five years later he climbed higher still, to become president of the Local Government Board. As he advanced, he learned impassivity. Although he still believed in the meliorating role of government, “he conveys no impression
¹⁹
of enthusiasm,” wrote a journalist, “and is as free from passion as an oyster.” He championed mild, incremental social reform, such as an act ending child imprisonment, restricting corporal punishment, and establishing juvenile courts. His approach was piecemeal and painstaking. The same journalist wrote that he was “a splendidly efficient instrument, but never an inspiration.”

Nor was he much liked by his colleagues, who judged him, unfairly, to be both interfering and self-serving. Anti-Semitism may have lain at the root of this dislike. Certainly it was at the root of an ugly episode, the Marconi Scandal, in which he became embroiled in 1912. Journalists discovered that several cabinet ministers, including David Lloyd George and Sir Rufus Isaacs, who was Jewish, had profited from inside knowledge to make gains on the stock market. Samuel attracted criticism too, although he had nothing to do with the business. The critics attacked him because he was Jewish.

Samuel endured this trial with characteristic stoicism, betraying little, which only furthered the false impression that he was a man of stone. But beneath his expressionless exterior, the president of the Local Government Board nursed an unexpected, indeed counterintuitive, emotional bond with the Jewish people and a romantic attachment to the goals of the Zionist movement. “Zionism was the one
²⁰
political passion of a singularly passionless career,” writes the best historian of his life and times.

Where it came from, we cannot tell: Samuel himself never said. He seemed the sort of wealthy, assimilated, disconnected Jew whom Zionists despised. Yet he cherished his link with his father’s brother and business partner, Samuel Montagu (who had reversed his first and last names). Montagu was in the Cousinhood but not entirely of it. Immensely wealthy and forceful, he took his religion seriously. He visited Palestine more than once and wished to purchase land there. Not a formal Zionist, he had many Zionist connections. When Herbert Samuel’s father died unexpectedly, Montagu interested himself in his nephew. Perhaps his preoccupations influenced the younger man.

Samuel had a second, more direct connection with Zionism: none other
than the disputatious practical of the EZF, Rabbi Moses Gaster. The link came
²¹
via Samuel’s wife, one of whose childhood friends had gone on to marry the
haham
of England’s Sephardic Jews. The wives remained close, and as a result the two couples socialized on occasion. At least once Gaster sought a political favor from Samuel, asking him to help obtain naturalization papers for a Russian émigré, none other than Chaim Weizmann. Samuel obliged. Naturally enough, when sometime later he became acquainted with Zionist ideas, he looked to Gaster for reading material. “I remember Dr. Gaster
²²
being associated from time to time with my early inquiries into the Zionist Movement,” Samuel later recalled. That happened after 1914, but before the war he held at least “a benevolent goodwill
²³
toward the Zionist idea,” as he told the West London Zionist Association in 1919. He had no intention in those days of doing anything about it.

The announcement of war on August 4, 1914, fell upon Herbert Samuel like a thunderclap, as it did upon Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow and Lucien Wolf. For these men, as for so many, it had profound impact upon their lives, which now would intersect in unforeseen ways. At this moment of supreme crisis, prime ministers and monarchs and generals occupied center stage. But the proto-Zionist Herbert Samuel, the
folks-mensch
Chaim Weizmann, the subtle diplomat Nahum Sokolow, and the anti-Zionist Lucien Wolf—the Jewish protagonists in the struggle for and against the Balfour Declaration—were waiting in the wings.

THE DECLARATIONS OF WAR
in late July and early August 1914 burst upon an unprepared world like a volley of gunshots at a summer garden party. They sliced through illusions, ripping up the pretty picture of great powers at peace and taking their ease. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28; Germany declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France on August 3. Britain declared war upon Germany on August 4. Initial shock quickly gave way to martial ardor, however, and then to apprehension for loved ones serving in rapidly deploying armies all over Europe. British Jews had additional worries. They feared for their coreligionists in Russia, where anti-Semitism was scaling new heights, and in Habsburg Poland, which lay directly in the path of the tsar’s advancing forces.

Then Turkey gave British Zionists a reason to hope. When the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the Central Powers in early November, they called into question the future of their own empire, which meant the future of Palestine as well. It took a moment for the implication to sink in. At first even the most sophisticated and best-informed British Zionists foresaw only additional calamities. “The fate of Palestine
¹
thus becomes dreadful and, moreover, uncertain,” Ahad Ha’am wrote to Weizmann. “Our colonies,
²
our institutions—everything may now be swept away,” Weizmann lamented. But then dread gave way to a wild and surging anticipation.
Assume that Britain won the war, against Turkey as well as against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Middle East would drop into the melting pot at last. And then perhaps
⁵
the ingot of Palestine could be pried loose from the great slab of Turkey’s Middle Eastern empire.

But should Zionists hope that Britain won the war? Zionism was a world movement—Jews lived everywhere, fought everywhere, on every front, against each other, for their respective countries of residence. The World Zionist Organization tried to insist that its various branches remain neutral, but this was impossible. Much as socialists from Germany, France, and Britain marched to the trenches (while singing the Internationale), so too Jews, even Zionists, loyally supported the wartime governments of the countries in which they lived. A typical example: Leopold Greenberg wrote on August 14 in
The Jewish Chronicle
, “England has been all she could be to the Jews; the Jews will be all they can to England.” Outside his office he put up a giant placard displaying the same words.

For a British government minister such as Herbert Samuel, neutrality was obviously impossible. But the Ottoman attack on Russia in early November, like a flash of lightning, illumined a landscape that had been previously dark to him. “The moment Turkey
³
entered the war the position was entirely changed,” he recalled. The prewar proto-Zionist, the self-described “first member of the Jewish community ever to sit in a British Cabinet” (Disraeli, born Jewish, had converted to Christianity at age twelve), emerged as the Zionist movement’s most effective and highly placed champion. He could and would combine his duties to Britain with his duties, as he now conceived them, to the Jewish people.

He kept a record
⁴
of his initial steps as a fully fledged, if as yet publicly undeclared, Zionist and reproduced the relevant passages verbatim in his memoirs. On November 9, 1914, only a week after Turkey entered the war, Samuel met with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in the grand building with the Italianate facade and six-story tower overlooking Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park. He was no unfamiliar Jew from Poland seeking audience with a distant and disdainful official. He was a member of the government. For once, a Zionist had entered the inner sanctum on equal terms to discuss the future of Palestine.

He prepared carefully for the interview and came right to the point. “Perhaps,” he told Sir Edward, “the opportunity might arise for the fulfillment of the ancient aspiration of the Jewish people and the restoration [in Palestine] of a Jewish state.” He ticked off the reasons why Britain should support this “ancient aspiration.” Most important, “the geographical situation of Palestine and especially its proximity to Egypt would render its
goodwill to England a matter of importance to the British Empire.” But almost equally significant in the present wartime circumstances, if Russia could be induced to back the Zionist policy, then Russian Jews would have some reason to support their government. That would benefit Russia’s ally Britain. For that matter, Samuel argued, a pro-Zionist policy would rally Jewish opinion throughout the world on behalf of the Allies.

Britain should support establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, he added, for less self-interested reasons. Such a state would be good not merely for Britons but for everyone: “It might become the centre of a new culture. The Jewish brain is rather a remarkable thing, and under national auspices the state might become a fountain of enlightenment and a source of a great literature and art and development of science.” Obviously it would be good for the Jews themselves: “If they could see men of their own kin achieving great things it would have a profound influence on their outlook.” And this would benefit their Middle Eastern neighbors as well: “Raising their [the Jews’] character would add to their usefulness to the peoples among whom they lived.”

How Grey would have responded only weeks before, when Britain was hoping to keep Turkey’s goodwill, can readily be imagined. With Turkey having chosen the wrong side in the great conflict, however, he could make only one response. Zionism, which would undermine Turkey in the Middle East if given free rein, finally had entered the realm of practical politics, from the British point of view—or at least had got its toe inside the door. So without actually committing himself to a specific policy, Grey smiled upon a proposal that his Foreign Office subordinates had rejected, politely but scornfully, just a few months before when put to them by Nahum Sokolow. “The idea had always had a strong sentimental attraction for him,” Samuel recalled him saying. “The historical appeal was very strong. He was quite favourable to the proposal and would be prepared to work for it if the opportunity arose.”

Later that day Samuel broached the same subject with another colleague, chancellor of the exchequer David Lloyd George. The previous April, Lloyd George had described the president of the Local Government Board as “a greedy, ambitious
⁶
and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race”; on November 9, however, when Samuel mentioned the “ancient aspiration” of Jews to establish a state in Palestine, Lloyd George replied that he was “very keen to see a Jewish state established there.” Thus encouraged, Samuel prepared a memorandum on the subject for circulation among the other cabinet ministers.

It is worth noting here the parallel evolution of British interest in and
sympathy for the rise of both Arab and Jewish nationalism. Before the war, when Sharif Hussein’s son Abdullah inquired about British support, he received polite but short shrift from Lord Kitchener and Sir Ronald Storrs in Cairo. At roughly the same time the Zionist Nahum Sokolow was leaving the Foreign Office in London equally empty-handed. But once the war was raging, and the Ottoman Empire was a declared enemy, Lord Kitchener discovered a coincidence of interest among Arabs and Britons after all. Simultaneously Grey and Lloyd George were expressing a newly avowed, but ostensibly long-held, concern for Zionist goals. Did Grey know that Kitchener had approached Abdullah? Perhaps. Did it occur to him that the Arab nationalism that Kitchener now encouraged and the Jewish nationalism that he himself supported were potentially contradictory? Probably not. Sharif Hussein and Herbert Samuel knew nothing of each other, but from now on their two movements would advance in unsuspecting tandem.