The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (36 page)

But Curzon and Milner had not changed their imperialist spots. When the government discussed the future of the German and the Ottoman Empires, these men staked broad terrorial claims for Britain. Perhaps they influenced their prime minister, for Lloyd George too staked broad claims.
Meanwhile the new, lean cabinet worked efficiently and at full throttle, calling upon other members of government only when necessary. One upon whom it called often was Arthur J. Balfour, the Conservative imperialist whom Lloyd George had made foreign secretary.

The new prime minister, it will be recalled, belonged to the camp of easterners who sought a way around the abattoir on the Western Front. Curzon, the former Indian viceroy, favored the “eastern” strategy too, and so did Milner. All three, Lloyd George in particular, distrusted the commander in chief of Britain’s forces on the Continent, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who could think only to throw more and more men against the Germans. They had no high opinion either of the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, who essentially shared Haig’s outlook and approach. As civilians, they did not quite dare to overrule these top military experts, but the ascendancy of easterners in the cabinet meant that Lloyd George’s government, more than Asquith’s, would look with favor upon those who requested support for the Arab Revolt against the Turks,
³
or who asked for reinforcements for the army in Egypt so that it could engage the Turks in Palestine and push them out of Syria altogether. That this approach might help Zionists as much as Arabs, the Zionists in England quickly realized. Given their preference for a British protectorate in Palestine, they realized too that the new government’s willingness to expand Britain’s imperial reach in the Middle East might redound to their benefit. They had lost their chief advocate in the cabinet, Herbert Samuel, but from the sea change in the British government’s general outlook, they gained.

In far-off Egypt, the sea change swept up General Murray. He appears to have been a rather cautious warrior. Slowly, systematically, he pushed his forces beyond the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula, beating off Ottoman attacks, extending supply lines and a water pipe, aiming for the port town of El Arish, only twenty-five miles south of the Palestinian border. “The Turks … are fine fighters, especially behind entrenchments,” he warned Robertson back in London. “Their handling of machine guns is excellent … I am proceeding with all due precautions.” A week later El Arish fell to Murray’s well-prepared forces. But the easterners who had just taken hold of the government wanted much more than El Arish. Robertson wrote to Murray, “The War Cabinet is very
⁴
impatient. They want a victory every day and if they do not get it they begin to propose going to some fresh place to find one. They are giving me a good deal of trouble.”

Murray attempted to provide his masters in London with a fresh victory. On March 26, 1917, his troops crossed the border into Palestine, aiming for
Gaza, some forty miles farther up the Mediterranean coast. Twice the Turks beat them back, the second time inflicting heavy casualties, although nothing like those on the Western Front. Murray wrote to Robertson, perhaps in propitiation, “I feel that it is a great blessing to have a straight white man at the head of affairs.” But Robertson was not all that straight. He never mentioned to Murray what he actually thought: that the War Office had sent Murray to Egypt “in order to get him
⁵
out of the way … and there they have kept him all these months knowing that he was no good.” Nor did he inform the man who had taken El Arish of the War Cabinet’s growing disillusionment with his stumbling Palestinian campaign. Murray discovered it as a bolt from the blue: “I have just got
⁶
your telegram notifying that [General Sir Edmund] Allenby takes my place.” Lloyd George instructed this new man, whom he had recalled from France, to take Gaza and continue right up through Palestine and into Syria. The ultimate aim was to capture Damascus and to drive the Ottoman Empire from the war, but he wanted Allenby to capture Jerusalem on the way, by Christmas; it would make a fine seasonal gift for the British people. He promised to ensure that Allenby had the means to do it.

The Zionists in London sensed these shifting currents. They caught the tide and rode it, balancing with great skill.

With the help of the Persian Armenian, James Malcolm, Chaim Weizmann made his first contact with Sir Mark Sykes on January 28, 1917. The two protagonists quickly realized each other’s importance and the need for fuller discussion and closer cooperation. A second meeting between Sykes, Weizmann, and the latter’s Zionist allies must take place soon, but because Herbert Samuel could not attend until the following week, it was put off until February 7. All concerned appear to have realized that Moses Gaster would have to be handled delicately. Malcolm, who happily assumed the role of go-between, wrote to Sykes: “From what I hear
⁷
it seems that Dr. Gaster wants to take the leading part, whereas the general impression is (including I think both yours and mine) that Dr. Weitzman [sic] … should take the leading part in the negotiations.”

Malcolm relished his role as intermediary, meeting with Zionists, meeting with Sykes, and interpreting (or occasionally misinterpreting) one to the other. Clearly he aspired to be more than a bit player fostering Sykes’s connection with Zionism; he wanted to facilitate an effective Zionist movement. He understood that Sykes increasingly viewed the peoples of the Ottoman Middle East—Armenians, Arabs, and Jews—as links in a future
chain of British dependencies. Possibly his own mind had been moving along a similar track, or perhaps he merely wished to curry favor. At any rate he wrote to Sykes, “For some time past I have considered that the greater object of the establishment of the proposed new autonomous States in the Near East should be a defensive federation between them … in close sympathy with England and France. This is one of the reasons why I have interested myself in the Palestine question.” He wanted each people to be sufficiently organized so as to be able to negotiate with its future protector.

Malcolm took the opportunity to lecture Sykes about Jews: “Most people have misunderstood the Jewish character. The Jew will always stick to his bargain, but he will never consent to readjusting the terms of an agreement.” Himself the unwitting target of John Buchan’s misdirected anti-Semitism as we have seen, Malcolm was not above indulging in anti-Semitic thinking of his own. Somewhat obscurely, he blamed the Jews for starting World War I: “In the Near East hitherto the Jew has pursued an exclusive policy, which has perhaps contributed more than anything else to bring about the present war.” On the other hand, he also believed that the Jews held the key to future peace. “The question of finance will be a great factor in the future,” he lectured Sykes. “It would therefore be important to secure the sentimental support, at least, of the Jewish people.”

For the Zionists, the week preceding February 7 passed in a blur of small conferences, preparations, and a fair amount of scheming. Weizmann’s assiduous cultivation of Rothschilds now began to pay off. James de Rothschild agreed to attend the February 7 meeting; so did Walter Rothschild, who, upon his father’s death, had taken up the role of titular head of the British branch of the family and therefore of the British Jewish community. Herbert Samuel agreed to attend as well, as did Nahum Sokolow. Weizmann also mobilized Harry Sacher and tried, unsuccessfully, to bring in Ahad Ha’am. It was to be a gathering of Weizmannites with the man who, they now realized, played the crucial role in advising the British government on its Middle Eastern policy.

Weizmann had determined to end Moses Gaster’s role in representing Zionism to such important people. He must have conferred with Sokolow about how to do it; probably the two men together buttonholed James de Rothschild and persuaded him to suggest at the February 7 meeting that Sokolow take up the critical diplomatic role. On Thursday, February 1, Weizmann and Sokolow met with Gaster at his home. They did not mention the plan they had concerted with James Rothschild but managed to antagonize the
haham
nonetheless; this was not hard to do. Gaster “was laying down the
⁸
law … I had to tell him off once or twice,” Weizmann noted. On
Monday, February 5, Sokolow and Weizmann met with James Malcolm at the latter’s club, the Thatched House. Afterward Malcolm reported to Sykes, reiterating that “it is the opinion
⁹
of the Jews that Dr. Weitzman [sic] should have the matter in hand here.” Finally on the night before the meeting Weizmann met with Gaster yet again. Without mentioning the plan with James de Rothschild, he suggested that the
haham
voluntarily make way for Sokolow. Gaster absolutely refused. When he learned
¹⁰
that Weizmann had invited Sacher and Ahad Ha’am to attend the meeting next day, he invited allies of his own, including Joseph Cowen, the outgoing EZF president.

But Gaster’s men were already spent forces in the Zionist movement, as he himself soon would be. Weizmann and his allies clearly permitted Gaster to host and to chair the gathering as a matter of form. (“The most important
¹¹
meeting ever held concerning Zionism was held
here
under my chairmanship,” Gaster proudly asserted afterward in his diary.) But at this meeting, where a British government official finally met a Zionist delegation and took its claims seriously, Weizmann and Sokolow and their designees dominated; henceforth they, not the
haham
, would negotiate on the movement’s behalf. They allowed Gaster to present Sykes with a document encapsulating
¹²
the Zionist program, but they had drafted and polished it themselves. (Gaster may have had some input.) When Sykes mentioned that on the next day he would be seeing Picot, who was then attached to the French embassy in London, and that it would be useful for a Zionist to accompany him to put the Zionist case, the
haham
assumed he would be the one to do it. But James de Rothschild nominated Sokolow for the job, and the meeting, dominated as it was by Weizmannites, agreed. Weizmann himself did not feel the need to represent Zionism to Picot at this point. As Leonard Stein puts it, “He needed no formal
¹³
credentials to give him the commanding position he occupied
de facto
in the transactions which followed.”

For his part, Sir Mark Sykes went to the meeting on February 7 expecting the eclipse of Gaster and intending to mobilize Zionism’s more effective leaders both on behalf of the Allies and on behalf of British suzerainty in Palestine, and to throw this in the face of France. The Weizmannites happily agreed to be thrown. They wanted a British protectorate in Palestine above all. They believed that Britain afforded her (white) colonial subjects more liberty than any other imperial power did. They believed that France insisted upon making her colonial subjects into French citizens, erasing their national identities. As Jewish nationalists, they could never accept that. They believed that a condominium of imperial powers over Palestine,
even one consisting of Britain and France, would be nearly as bad as purely French rule; its members would quarrel among themselves, and all Palestinians, including Jews, would suffer. They feared that Britain and France were planning a joint condominium over Palestine, but the only one they would agree to would be international control over Palestine’s holy places.

They did not realize that a year previously Sykes and Picot had agreed precisely to international control of Palestine as a whole, the so-called Brown Area, except for the British corridor running west-east and the northern slice that would go to France. Herbert Samuel, who had been a member of the cabinet when the Sykes-Picot Agreement was made, knew of this plan but was bound by cabinet oath not to speak of it. The meeting on February 7, then, was based upon at least three layers of deceit. In the first layer, Sykes was attempting to undermine an agreement with France that he (and Herbert Samuel) knew the British government already had accepted, that he himself actually had helped to negotiate, and that bore his name. In the second layer, Sykes and Samuel both were keeping the Sykes-Picot and Tripartite Agreements secret from everyone else at the meeting. From his French contacts James de Rothschild had gained some inkling of them. Twice he asked Sykes to confirm that Britain had made no promise of Palestinian territory to France. The first time Sykes replied that “no pledges had been given to the French concerning Palestine,” an outright lie if Zionist definitions of Palestine’s borders are accepted. The second time he referred the question to Samuel: “Mr. Samuel replied
¹⁴
that he could not reveal what had been done by the Cabinet.”

The third layer, historically speaking, may have been the most important of all. No one at the meeting except for Sykes knew of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence or that Arabs might believe Palestine had been promised to them. On this subject, Sykes merely said: “The Arabs professed
¹⁵
that language must be the measure [by which control of Palestine should be determined] and [by that measure] could claim all Syria and Palestine. Still the Arabs could be managed, particularly if they received Jewish support in other matters.”

Given this triple burden of ignorance, Sokolow performed amazingly well the very next day when he appeared at 9 Buckingham Gate, Sykes’s London residence, to meet Monsieur Picot. He impressed the French diplomat in a way that Moses Gaster never had done. Cagily, Sykes chose to remain in the background. He wanted Sokolow to make the running, and Sokolow obliged. When Picot asked the Zionist for a general explanation of the aims of his movement and Sokolow delivered one, Picot expressed great interest and complimented him on his exposition. But then he wanted to
know, how did “the Jews propose to organize themselves as a nation in Palestine?”