The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (25 page)

Meanwhile in London in the late summer and early fall of 1914, leading Jews were mobilizing for action. Israel Zangwill, head of the ITO, which sought a safe refuge for Jews anywhere that would take them, worried for the Austro-Polish Jews living in the path of the advancing Russian army, and for Russia’s own Jews subject to ever harsher repression. Using contacts gained from his ITO work, he lobbied high-placed contacts on their behalf. Leopold Greenberg, of
The Jewish Chronicle
, shared Zangwill’s fears, as well as Zangwill’s hope that the British government would pressure Russia to treat Jews less vilely. Unlike Zangwill, he also hoped to persuade Britain to help them if they wished to flee to Palestine. The old wire-puller managed a brief audience with several people at the Foreign Office. “Needless to say they
⁷
have enough on their hands without our ‘tsuris,’” Greenberg reported somewhat ruefully. But he discerned in their reaction to him a shift in Britain’s Middle Eastern policy: “I think they want to see some settlement of our question.” This was before Turkey entered the war.

Despite his earlier relative unimportance, Chaim Weizmann proved during this period to be a more effective champion of Zionism than Greenberg, Zangwill, or anyone else. That he should become the undisputed leader would not have been predicted, and was even counterintuitive. During 1914–18 he mastered the political Zionist approach, which as a practical Zionist he had once condemned. The
folks-mensch
learned to circulate comfortably in august social circles. If the search for British support took him down unanticipated paths, he would follow where they led.

Unlike Greenberg and Zangwill, who looked to the government for immediate intervention on behalf of Austro-Polish and Russian Jews, Weizmann
approached the situation from a strategic point of view. He shared their concern but held that only the Russians could solve the problem of Russian anti-Semitism. Therefore, as he wrote on September 8 (to a Russian Zionist friend in New York City), he would focus instead upon “the unification of Jewry,
⁸
or such part of it as might present definite demands at a future peace conference.” The first demand, of course, would be a homeland for Jews in Palestine. Already he was thinking in terms of political rather than practical Zionism.

He considered bringing together international Zionist notables to concert their demands for the peace conference but decided instead to focus on British Zionists. Then he decided that Zionism needed not so much to formulate demands as to produce a memorandum stating the Zionist position. For this he turned to the Manchester school, notably to Harry Sacher and to Sacher’s friend Leon Simon. Simon was a follower of Ahad Ha’am who earned his living as a civil servant (he would rise eventually to head the British Post Office) while serving as president of the University of London Zionist Organization. Quickly the three set to work. Their correspondence for the months of November and December 1914 refers often to progress and lack of progress on the document.

Weizmann also reached out to former opponents, such as the old practicals Cowen and Greenberg. He contemplated approaching Israel Zangwill too, despite his loathing of the ITO program, but Greenberg warned Weizmann that Zangwill “will be difficult to
⁹
get into line. He takes such ferocious views and then he sticks to them so ferociously.” Weizmann tried anyway, even offering Zangwill leadership of the movement that he himself was attempting to organize. Zangwill turned him down flat: “It would be a case of the blind leading the blind.” Moreover, “I should find it
¹⁰
difficult to demand that the Jewish minority should rule over the Arab majority [in Palestine]; a free and equal constitution for both races is all that is in the British or the modern tradition.”

For some months Weizmann unavailingly courted Zangwill, but he had bigger fish to fry. The most important Jewish family in Britain, indeed in the world, was the great banking dynasty, the House of Rothschild. Weizmann wanted the family’s support for his concert of Jews preparing to submit demands to an eventual peace conference. (When that project lapsed, he would seek it for Zionism more generally.) His prewar advocacy of a Hebrew university in Jerusalem had brought him into contact with Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris. In fact, he had visited the baron just as war
was breaking out (and had managed to return to England only with difficulty). Weizmann also knew the baron’s son, James, a tall, elegant, monocle-wearing devotee of the racetrack, and owner of prizewinning horses, who in 1913, at age thirty-five, had married Dorothy (Dolly) Pinto, an Englishwoman or girl, really; she was just seventeen. With the outbreak of war, Baron James joined the French army, but Dorothy stayed in London.

On November 7 and 8 Weizmann had two long sessions with Dorothy in lieu of meeting with her husband (who already was serving in the army) or with her father-in-law (who had traveled to Bordeaux). “I tried to learn
¹¹
from Madame James whether Jews like [the English] Lord [Nathan Mayer] Rothschild and his circle would be willing to take any action at present, but Madame James was not well informed on these points.” But Weizmann, who could exercise great fascination upon women (and men too), had touched a deep chord. Dorothy wrote to him less than two weeks later: “I have spoken to Mr. Charles Rothschild, not in any sort of way officially, but in the course of conversation he thoroughly approved of the idea [a Jewish Palestine] and in fact thought it would be the only possible future.” Charles was the second son of Nathan Rothschild and the younger brother of Walter Lionel Rothschild, who would become the Lord Rothschild to whom the Balfour Declaration would be addressed. Thus were woven the first strands of a great web.

Dorothy, who was now playing the role of a political go-between for Weizmann, reported that she had also spoken with the Earl of Crewe, Asquith’s secretary of state for India. Crewe was related
¹²
to the Rothschilds by marriage. According to Dorothy, he too believed that “our compatriots
¹³
would not be unwelcome in Palestine … if by some chance it became British.” Crewe was very much aware of Kitchener’s recent approach to Sharif Hussein. On November 12—a few days after speaking with Dorothy Rothschild about the future of Palestine—he wrote to Lord Hardinge, the Indian viceroy: “Supposing that the Arabs
¹⁴
took up arms against the Turks I think it would be our policy to recognize a new Khalif at Mecca … If this were done there appears to me to be a possibility for allowing Syria to be organized as an Arab state under the Khalif.” He then suggested that Europeans might indirectly control the new Arab state. But as we saw in
Chapter 3
, Kitchener never mentioned any such possibility to Sharif Hussein. In fact, quite the opposite; he had held out to him the prospect of Arab independence. Perfidious Albion aside, did Crewe believe that Palestinian Jews would live contentedly within a new Syrian kingdom under a newly appointed Arab caliph, even if indirectly protected by Europeans?
Most probably he did not think about the potential for conflict between Jews and Arabs in Syria at all. This is an early sign of the incomprehension with which some important Britons initially pursued two mutually exclusive policies.

Weizmann, knowing nothing of Kitchener’s plans for Arabia, was delighted with Dorothy Rothschild’s letter. “You don’t—I am sure
¹⁵
—expect me to acknowledge your very kind letter in ordinary conventional terms of thanks. The action you undertook and your intention to help on a just cause is in itself sufficient satisfaction and so much in harmony with the glorious Jewish traditions of the house to which you belong, that my trivial thanks would only be superfluous.” Then, unexpectedly, he told her that he had been present “in the cursed town of Kishinev during a Jewish massacre … we defended the Jewish quarter with revolvers in our hands … We ‘slept’ in the cemetery—the only ‘safe’ place and we saw 80 Jewish corpses brought in, mutilated dead.” Only he had not been in Kishinev during the pogrom but in Geneva. He was making it up, trying to impress a twenty-year-old girl.

He saw Dorothy again three days later, this time with her husband, who was on leave from the French army. Baron James urged him “to try and influence
¹⁶
members of the British government” and, further, to advocate to them more ambitious goals than practical Zionism had hitherto advanced. “One should ask for something which … tends towards the formation of a Jewish State.” This remark only reinforced Weizmann’s developing approach, although he and his allies carefully avoided the word “state,” which they rightly deemed too controversial to introduce at the moment.

Through Baron James and Dorothy Rothschild, Weizmann now came into contact with other members of the Rothschild family, most important the Hungarian-born Rozsika, wife of Charles Rothschild, to whom Dorothy had spoken about Palestine. Through Rozsika he would meet Charles and Charles’s older brother, Walter. Again the
folks-mensch
exercised an irresistible fascination upon the cream of British high society. Charles, Rozsika, and Walter would become important supporters. Eventually Rozsika outdid
¹⁷
Dorothy as a political go-between, introducing Weizmann to many influential figures, including Robert Cecil, a cousin of Arthur Balfour and parliamentary under secretary of state for foreign affairs. Cecil reported to his superiors after his first meeting with Weizmann: “It is impossible
¹⁸
to reproduce in writing the subdued enthusiasm with which Dr. Weizmann spoke, or the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude, which made one forget his rather repellant and even sordid exterior.” This, one suspects, is the authentic voice of the British establishment
and a faithful recapitulation of its reaction to the Zionist leader during the early war years.

Weizmann made one of his most important contacts without Rozsika’s help, at a social event in Manchester, to which his wife dragged him early in November 1914. At that tea party someone introduced him to a Mr. Scott. Weizmann did not recognize the editor of Britain’s most famous Liberal newspaper,
The Manchester Guardian
. “I saw before me
¹⁹
a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, advanced in years, but very alert and attentive. He was inquisitive about my origin and work.” Weizmann told him, “I am a Jew and if you want to talk to me about that, Mr. Scott, I am at your disposal.”

It was the beginning of an extraordinary partnership. They did talk, at the party and then more seriously at Scott’s
Manchester Guardian
offices, or (accounts vary) possibly at his home, The Firs, a large house surrounded by extensive gardens and noble trees. Weizmann opened his heart to the older man, a complete stranger. Perhaps he sensed political affinities based upon common liberal values; possibly he had a shrewd intimation that more than mere sympathy would be forthcoming. Or conceivably, Weizmann sensed something even deeper in Scott’s reaction to him, for the elderly editor would soon take almost a paternal interest in the younger man.

Scott, for his part, found Weizmann “extraordinarily interesting, a rare combination of idealism and the severely practical which are the two essentials of statesmanship.” He was struck particularly by Weizmann’s “perfectly clear conception of Jewish nationalism, an intense and burning sense of the Jew as Jew, just as strong, perhaps more so, as that of the German as German or the Englishman as Englishman, and secondly arising out of that and necessary for its satisfaction and development, his demand for a country, a homeland which for him and for anyone sharing his view of Jewish nationality can be no other than the ancient home of his race.” But for Scott as for Grey and Lloyd George (who spoke with Herbert Samuel at roughly the same time), it was the Ottoman entry into World War I that spelled the difference between mere sympathy and active support. He asked Weizmann for a memorandum encapsulating the Zionist position. This was the document upon which Weizmann and Harry Sacher and Leon Simon worked in November and December and that came to overshadow Weizmann’s initial preparations for a future peace conference.

As their second interview came to an end, Scott said to Weizmann: “I would like to do
²⁰
something for you.” He knew most of the British government, he said, and would like Weizmann to meet Herbert Samuel, president of the Local Government Board. “For God’s sake, Mr. Scott, let’s have
nothing to do with this man,” expostulated Weizmann, assuming that a member of the Cousinhood would oppose Zionism tooth and nail.

So Scott contacted Lloyd George first and asked him to meet the extraordinary Zionist from Manchester. Lloyd George agreed—as he told Scott, he just had been talking about Zionism with Herbert Samuel. Perhaps Dr. Weizmann would meet the two of them together. (“Alas,” sighed Weizmann when he heard of it, still unaware of Samuel’s Zionist epiphany.) Lloyd George suggested a date; then he had to postpone. He suggested a second date and had to postpone again, but this time he indicated that Weizmann should meet at any rate with his colleague. Meanwhile Weizmann frenziedly exhorted Sacher and Simon to polish the memorandum so that he could present it at the meeting. But it does not appear to have been ready on the afternoon of December 9, when Weizmann took the four-fifteen train from Manchester to London. He spent the night at the home of Ahad Ha’am in Haverstock Hill and met the president of the Local Government Board in his Whitehall office the next morning.

Weizmann expected little from Herbert Samuel. He explained to him the Zionist position—for the first time, as he probably thought. Samuel listened patiently, then floored his visitor. “Since Turkey had entered
²¹
the war, he [Samuel] had given the problem much … consideration … Realization of the Zionist dream [now] was possible … Big things would have to be done in Palestine … The Jews would have to build Railways, harbours, a University, a network of schools, etc.” Flabbergasted, Weizmann told Samuel, “If I were a religious Jew I should have thought the Messianic times
²²
were near.” Shortly after the meeting he repeated this formulation in a letter to his wife: “Messianic times have really come … He told me that his programme is more ambitious than mine.” In great excitement he returned to Haverstock Hill, where he and Ahad Ha’am went over the details of the meeting again and again. “I have just remembered
²³
another of Samuel’s remarks which I have not passed on to you,” he wrote to his friend three days later. “He said:
We would rebuild the Temple, as a symbol of Jewish unity.”
Weizmann wrote delightedly to Scott, who had made the eye-opening meeting possible, that Samuel “feels the responsibility
²⁴
lying on him, as a British Cabinet Minister and [as] a Jew.” Indeed, he reported, Samuel had expressed a desire to meet additional Zionists. Weizmann would be happy to make introductions. An important meeting of minds had taken place, and an important relationship had been established.