The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (30 page)

As for Weizmann’s anti-Zionist Doppelgänger, Lucien Wolf was seeking to impress on Britain’s governors the importance of the Jewish factor too. He recognized, however, that during a world war Britain and France would never risk the Russian alliance in order to win Jewish sympathy. He knew that the Zionists were suggesting that Britain could win Jewish support by promising to satisfy Jewish aspirations in Palestine. Quite rightly, he feared that this concrete program was more appealing to the Foreign Office than his own more nebulous approach of trying to get Britain and France to pressure Russia without offending her. Then, unexpectedly, an initiative launched from across the English Channel showed him a possible way forward. France also wanted the Allies to woo the Jews, and she asked Lucien Wolf to help.

The French worried
¹²
that Germany was already outbidding the Entente for Jewish backing and that German success could have serious repercussions, especially in America, where, as they too believed, the Jewish community was financially powerful and politically influential. To counter this possibility, the French government dispatched to New York two professors (both Jewish) as emissaries and appointed a French Committee for Information and Action Among the Jews of Neutral Countries (Comité française d’information et d’action auprés des juifs des pays neutres) to support their efforts. Based on the professors’ reports, the French government came to conclusions similar to those reached by the various informants of the British Foreign Office. While French and British pressure on Russia might win friends among American Jews, it would inevitably alienate the Russian government. Dangling the bait of Palestine before American Jews,
however, could appeal to them without necessarily estranging the tsar’s ministers. The Quai d’Orsay instructed the Jewish professors to tell American Jews that the end of Ottoman rule in the Middle East would lead to an extension of liberty and increased Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Meanwhile the
comité
had concluded that Britain should establish an organization parallel to theirs and asked Lucien Wolf to form it. Wolf recognized a double opportunity. Both as a Jew and as a British patriot, he wanted to win Jewish backing for the Allies; promising Jews an increased role in Palestine after victory, without going so far as to embrace Zionist prescriptions, could win it. Simultaneously such a task would enable him, and the Conjoint Committee, to outflank Dr. Weizmann. Immediately he prepared a memorandum for the Foreign Office. “I am not a Zionist
¹³
and I deplore the Jewish National Movement,” he began, yet now was the moment for the Allies to declare their sympathy with Jewish aspirations in Palestine and to promise to grant them equal rights there after the war; facilitate their immigration to it; guarantee “a liberal scheme of local self-government for the existing colonies”; support construction of a Jewish university in Jerusalem; and recognize Hebrew as one of the languages of the land. If the Allies did these things, Wolf wrote, they “would sweep the whole of American Jewry into enthusiastic allegiance to their cause.” The next day Wolf saw Robert Cecil at the Foreign Office and offered to head up a team of propaganda committees in all the Allied capitals, especially in London, to publicize this program. (A supreme British committee was not what the French
comité
had in mind.) He volunteered to carry the message about the future of Palestine to America himself.

The Foreign Office refused to be stampeded. It weighed Wolf’s proposal along with Fitzmaurice’s recommendation, the American professors’ memorandum, and Sir Henry McMahon’s report upon the views of the Italian businessman. What Wolf was suggesting, it noted, differed only in degree from what Weizmann wanted. The Foreign Office, which previously had had little time for Zionism, now underwent a crash course. It forwarded Wolf’s memo to the British ambassador in Washington, Cecil Spring Rice. Rice had never liked Wolf. His negative response was predictable.

Impatiently awaiting word, Wolf received worrying information from a French contact: “Mr. Lloyd George has
¹⁴
formally assured Dr. Weizmann who is his ‘right hand man’ at the Ministry of Munitions that Great Britain will grant a charter to the Jews in Palestine in the event of that country coming within the sphere of influence of the British Crown.” Lloyd George had done no such thing, but Wolf accepted the warning at face value, and it
galvanized him. On March 3, 1916, he sent Robert Cecil a second memorandum, this one containing a “formula” for Palestine that went about as far as a man who did not believe that Jews constituted a distinct nationality could go toward Zionism. Wolf proposed:

Then Wolf did his best to precipitate the Foreign Office’s decision. In another message sent three days later, he added that if the Foreign Office accepted his “formula,” he would announce it at a mass meeting of Jews, to be held in East London the following Sunday, March 12.

Wolf sensed correctly that his influence among policy makers was ebbing. “We should inform
¹⁶
Mr. Wolf that his suggested ‘formula’ is receiving our careful and sympathetic consideration, but that we must consult our allies and that that must take time,” Hugh O’Bierne minuted. In other words, the Foreign Office would not allow Wolf to tell his meeting that the British government endorsed his “formula” for Palestine. Lord Crewe, substituting as foreign secretary for Sir Edward Grey, who was ill, added that “Mr. L. Wolf cannot be taken as the spokesman of the whole [Jewish] community.” Crewe was already a “Weizmannite,” according to his wife, and would have known that the Zionists would not be satisfied with Wolf’s “formula.” By now perhaps Robert Cecil had become a “Weizmannite” too: He repudiated Wolf even more thoroughly than Lord Crewe had done. “May I add,” he appended to O’Bierne’s minute, “that if and when we are allowed by our allies to say anything worth saying to the Jews it should not be left to Mr. Lucien Wolf to say it?”

Thus the tectonic plates of Britain’s Jewish policy began to slide. On February 28, 1916, O’Bierne composed the first Foreign Office minute to link the fate of Palestine both with Jewish interests and with British chances of victory. Here the influence of Dragoman Fitzmaurice was dominant, for O’Bierne aimed at influencing the Jews of Turkey, not of America. “It has been suggested
¹⁷
to me,” he told his colleagues, “that if we could offer the
Jews an arrangement as to Palestine which would strongly appeal to them, we might conceivably be able to strike a bargain with them as to withdrawing their support from the Young Turk government which would then automatically collapse.” But the influence now of American and Italian and French informants, and of the Quai d’Orsay more generally, as well as of Weizmann and Lucien Wolf, meant that the focus would shift from Turkey’s to America’s Jews and then to Jews everywhere. “To obtain Jewish
¹⁸
support,” Lord Reading explained to Edwin Montagu only three weeks after O’Bierne wrote that initial minute, finally had become “the objective of the Foreign Office.”

Here two geopolitical matters deserve consideration.

Much as Britain might wish to obtain the support of Jews by dangling the bait of Palestine before them, she could not act as a free agent. She had to consult her partners in the Triple Entente, France and Russia. Russia was likely to approve the idea, so long as the Christian holy places did not fall under non-Christian control, because she would rather offer concessions somewhere far away than relax anti-Semitic policies at home.

French acquiescence, however, could not be taken for granted. France might wish to court the Jews, but France had long-standing claims to Syria, even to “greater Syria” or Syria
intégral
, which meant Syria defined to include most of Palestine. These claims to territory (except for a northern slice) she had tentatively sacrificed during the Sykes-Picot negotiations in London, which envisioned a condominium of powers governing the region. But the French certainly did not consider that Palestine was Britain’s to dangle before the Jews or anyone else. If, after due consideration and consultation, an offer of Palestine to the Jews was to be made, France would want to be among the countries to make it.

But whatever shape such an offer might take, neither Sykes nor Picot had foreseen the need for one while negotiating their agreement in London. The Sykes-Picot Agreement already allocated Palestine, and not to the Jews. Indeed, the Sykes-Picot Agreement did not speak of Jewish interests at all. Herbert Samuel and Edwin Montagu knew this fact, but both men were bound by cabinet etiquette not to speak.

Moreover, an important actor on the Middle Eastern stage might have thought that Britain had already offered Palestine to him. What precisely Grand Sharif Hussein understood to be the likely borders of his projected Arabian kingdom remains obscure; and so do the British negotiators’ ideas about them. Some of them were now thinking that it would not contain
Palestine, but precisely to whom Palestine would belong remained unclear. The Sykes-Picot Agreement envisioned a condominium. O’Bierne wrote in his initial minute: “The Jews could be given special colonizing facilities which in time would make them strong enough to cope with the Arab element, when the management of internal affairs might be placed in their hands under America’s protection … [or] under the administration of some neutral nationality if the United States would not agree.” In other memoranda diplomats mentioned Belgium as a neutral power that might serve as trustee. France and Britain nourished their own ambitions as well.

That Jews eventually should form the predominant element, whichever European power or combination of powers oversaw the country, was not in doubt. Already Britain contemplated extending Wolf’s “formula” in a direction that would please the Zionists. Crewe informed the British ambassadors to Russia and America that if the Allies did agree to court Jewish opinion, part of the inducement could be that “when in the course of time
¹⁹
the Jewish colonists in Palestine grow strong enough to cope with the Arab population they may be allowed to take the management of the internal affairs of Palestine (with the exception of Jerusalem and the Holy Places) into their own hands.” Weizmann could have asked for little more.

That the Arabs’ reaction would be negative if they learned about such plans, nobody doubted. “It must be admitted,”
²⁰
O’Bierne noted, “that if the Arabs knew we were contemplating an extensive Jewish colonization scheme in Palestine (with the possible prospect of eventual Jewish self-government), this might have a very chilling effect on the Arab leaders.” So Britain must keep the approach to world Jewry secret. But Lucien Wolf did not realize that his “formula” cut across promises made to Sharif Hussein and continued to push the government to accept it. Eventually Robert Cecil felt obliged to shut him down. “The present time,”
²¹
he warned Wolf, “would, in the interests of the Jews themselves, be badly chosen for the publication of any formula such as that suggested.”

In other words, at this very preliminary stage of their courtship of “world Jewry,” British officials who had previously been wooing Arabs now understood that they faced a fork in the road. “It is evident,”
²²
wrote the percipient O’Bierne, “that Jewish colonization of Palestine must conflict to some extent with Arab interests. All we can do, if and when the time comes to discuss details, is to try to devise a settlement which will involve as little hardship as possible to the Arab population. We shall then, of course, have to consult experts.” In the initial minute he had indicated which expert he was likely to favor: “I would suggest that we might consult Mr. Fitzmaurice.”

The British government could not choose one course without disappointing the advocates of the other. That did not stop them from choosing. They thought that the fate of the British Empire was at stake.

At eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, June 4, 1916, Hugh James O’Bierne joined Lord Kitchener and his staff at the King’s Cross railway station in London. They all boarded the overnight train to Scotland. At Scapa Flow the next day they transferred to the HMS
Hampshire
, a 10,850-ton coal-burning cruiser. Their destination was Russia; O’Bierne had served several terms there as a diplomat, eventually rising to the rank of minister plenipotentiary in Petrograd. He would have proved an invaluable resource for Kitchener there.

But they never arrived in Russia. On the night of Monday, June 5, a German mine sank their ship, killing all but twelve of the
Hampshire’s
650-man crew and every member of Kitchener’s party. Thus the first Briton to conceive the Arab Revolt and the first to write a Foreign Office minute advocating an alliance with the Jews went down together, perishing within minutes of each other in the icy North Sea. Rarely does history afford such a weird and awful symmetry.

But by that date the divergent courses charted by the doomed pair could not be reconciled. Champions of each would compete with ever more fury. Nor were Kitchener’s and O’Bierne’s the only paths to win advocates. A new phase was opening in the struggle to define a crucial portion of the postwar, post-Ottoman Middle East.