The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (48 page)

It happened that the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, was visiting Washington, D.C., at this time. When Secretary of State Robert Lansing told him about the scheme, Balfour confirmed that the Turks were “nibbling”
⁷
at the idea of a separate peace. “If matters took
⁸
a favorable form,” he added, “results might be of enormous advantage,” which was
true so far as the British were concerned, but would have seemed debatable to Zionists who wanted British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine detached from the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, when Balfour wired news of Morgenthau’s pending mission to the Foreign Office, no one so much as mentioned the possibility of Zionist objections, although they had been dealing with Zionists for many months. Sir Ronald Graham actually wrote of Morgenthau, “He might in any case work upon the Jewish elements in the C.U.P. and Turkey.” Indeed, the Foreign Office suggested only one emendation to Morgenthau’s scheme: “Owing to the number of spies in Switzerland it is doubtful if useful work can be done there. Possibly Egypt would be [a] better base of operations.” This was
⁹
the contribution of Robert Cecil.

It seemed a good suggestion to Morgenthau and Lansing, who accepted it. The former American ambassador could claim to be on his way to check the condition of Jews in nearby Palestine. Then Morgenthau had another idea: He would invite additional American Jews to accompany him, thus further camouflaging the expedition. First he invited the distinguished Harvard Law School professor and Zionist (and future Supreme Court justice) Felix Frankfurter, who was working as an assistant to the secretary of war, Newton Baker. Frankfurter accepted the invitation and invited his own assistant, another lawyer, Max Lowenthal. A third figure who joined the team was Eliahu Lewin-Epstein, treasurer of the Zionist Provisional Executive Committee in New York City. By now the mission gave every sign of being a Zionist enterprise, an impression the government fostered with leaks to the press. Zionists began a fund-raising campaign for the mission. About his main goal,
¹⁰
however, Morgenthau kept Frankfurter, Lowenthal, and Lewin-Epstein in the dark.

The approach to Turkey could not take place, however, without the knowledge and agreement of America’s wartime allies. Morgenthau would stop with his little band at Gibraltar; the State Department requested that both Britain and France send “someone in authority
¹¹
to discuss the question thoroughly” with him there. Then Morgenthau had another brainstorm. If the British sent Chaim Weizmann to meet him, that would lend further credence to his cover story. Apparently it did not occur to him that the British Zionist might oppose his main object. Nor, apparently, did this occur to the State Department. It accepted Morgenthau’s suggestion and asked the Foreign Office to send Weizmann to meet their envoy.

Weizmann learned of Morgenthau’s mission not from the Foreign Office but from Louis Brandeis, the American Zionist and Supreme Court justice with close ties to President Wilson. Brandeis had learned of it first
from Frankfurter—not its true goal, obviously, for Frankfurter himself did not know it—and then from Wilson, who did explain the mission’s real purpose. Brandeis immediately cabled to Weizmann that an American commission was headed to the east (he did not say what for), and he suggested that Weizmann intercept it. Given Brandeis’s close connection with Wilson, this was as explicit a warning as he could deliver.

Brandeis was not Weizmann’s only source of information. The Armenian James Malcolm’s sensitive antennae were vibrating to “rumours here
¹²
[London] in pro-Young-Turk circles about some manoeuvres for a separate peace with Turkey … initiated by Mr. Wilson … at the instigation of Mr. Morgenthau in tacit cooperation with the British and French Governments.” The rumor was as explicit as Brandeis had been vague, and it troubled Mr. Malcolm. A separate peace with Turkey had the potential for undercutting Armenian nationalist aspirations as much as the Zionists’.

On Saturday, June 8, Malcolm attended an Islamic Society meeting at Caxton Hall on “Muslim Interests in Palestine.”
¹³
Its featured speaker was Marmaduke Pickthall; its chairman was Mushir Hussein Kidwai. Malcolm thought the proceedings were “of a definitely treasonable and seditious character.” Pickthall “was openly talking about an early Peace with Turkey involving no loss of territory to the Turkish Empire.” Others in the audience “were openly bragging that they were about to arrange a separate Peace with Turkey.” From what he heard that day, Malcolm concluded not only that Henry Morgenthau was about to approach the Ottomans but also that Pickthall and two British Turcophiles, Aubrey Herbert and Sir Adam Samuel Block, a Jewish anti-Zionist, were engaged in a similar mission.

An agitated James Malcolm was soon knocking at the door of 67 Addison Road, Chaim Weizmann’s house. The two men put together what they had gleaned from their various sources. Weizmann knew about
¹⁴
the Islamic Society meeting already—he had heard that assimilationist Jews were its instigators. Then the telephone rang. Wickham Steed, an influential foreign correspondent of
The Times
, was on the line. His own antennae had picked up the same signals as Malcolm’s, both about Morgenthau and about the Turcophiles. Steed opposed a separate peace with Turkey, albeit for different reasons than Zionists and Armenians. His newspaper argued for total victory over Britain’s enemies. To settle for anything less was to play the German game. Historically
The Times
had not been friendly to Jews; nor had been Steed; but both were prepared to play the Zionist card anyway. Better for the British Empire to assume a protectorate over Palestine dominated by Jews, Steed thought, than for Palestine to remain as part of an Ottoman Empire beholden to the Germans.

Recall that in November 1917 Weizmann and Malcolm went to Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office to slam the relative flea, J. R. Pilling. By that time they were accustomed to employing that particular sledgehammer against advocates of separate peace with Turkey. The first time they employed it was five months earlier, right after the telephone call from Wickham Steed. On Sunday, June 9, Graham reported to Robert Cecil: “Dr. Weizmann, whom I
¹⁵
happened to see this morning … referred in the course of conversation to Mr. Morgenthau whom he described as closely connected with … the anti-Zionist Jews in the U.S., and as being pro-German and especially pro-Turkish. He said ‘I am expecting to see Mr. Morgenthau employed in some intrigue for a separate peace with Turkey and believe that he is coming to Europe for this purpose. If so the whole thing is a German move.’” Weizmann had taken up the line Steed pursued in his newspaper.

Just as Weizmann was warning Graham against Morgenthau, Malcolm was telephoning another mandarin, William Ormsby-Gore, parliamentary private secretary of Lord Milner and assistant secretary to the cabinet, where he seconded the efforts of Mark Sykes. No doubt Malcolm would have preferred to call Sykes himself, but the latter had not yet returned to London from the discussions with King Hussein in the Middle East. Ormsby-Gore had been converted to Zionism the previous year, during his stint at the Arab Bureau in Cairo, by none other than Aaron Aaronsohn. Weizmann and Malcolm calculated he would give them a sympathetic hearing. Malcolm asked for a meeting “as soon as possible,” and Ormsby-Gore “arranged to see him at my office at 12.30.”

Ormsby-Gore (later Lord Harlech) was a capable man who would go on to a distinguished career as a Conservative politician, including a stint as colonial secretary during the 1930s. Nevertheless the double team of Malcolm and Weizmann seem to have come close to overwhelming him. “Both Mr. Malcolm
¹⁶
and Dr. Weizmann were very much excited and very angry,” Ormsby-Gore reported, “and both stated that we were not only playing with fire in approaching the Turks at this juncture but also imperiling the interests of the British Empire and the causes which they have more especially at heart. Dr. Weizmann was open in his denunciation of Mr. Morgenthau.” He was open in his denunciation of Aubrey Herbert and Sir Adam Samuel Block too, but he trained his biggest guns on the American, whom he practically accused of being a German agent. Morgenthau “was notoriously pro-German.” He acted “on behalf of an international ring of Jewish financiers in Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and New York.” His aim was “an inconclusive Peace which would give German capital and
German Jews an ascendant importance throughout the Turkish Empire and particularly Palestine.” Not knowing that the Americans wanted him present, he ended with a request that would have gladdened them: “If any Jew is to be sent to meet Mr. Morgenthau … he, Dr. Weizmann, [should] be sent.”

On Tuesday, June 12,
¹⁷
Weizmann and Malcolm called, separately this time, on Graham, to continue hammering. They mentioned Herbert and Block but reserved special venom for Morgenthau. Did their efforts have a dampening impact upon British attitudes toward the growing impetus for a separate peace? Without exception, historians agree that they did. Between them, the Zionist and the Armenian reminded British diplomats of their previous promises to free subject peoples from Ottoman tyranny. In fact they affected only the government’s attitude toward Mr. Morgenthau’s expedition. As will become apparent, Malcolm and Weizmann stymied one peace feeler only.

At the instigation of Weizmann and Malcolm, the British government came to oppose Morgenthau’s approach to the Turks, even though it supported the others. Why? Perhaps for two reasons. First of all, despite the assiduously promoted cover story the real reason for Morgenthau’s mission had become well known, both in America and in London. Morgenthau himself had been extremely indiscreet
¹⁸
(while keeping his traveling companions in the dark). As a result, Sir Ronald Graham warned his colleagues: “As condition of
¹⁹
secrecy to which Mr. Morgenthau attaches so much importance no longer exists it is doubtful whether mission could serve useful purpose at present moment, and I would suggest that it should be postponed.” The Americans refused to postpone it, but the British ceased to believe in it.

Second, the Foreign Office had concluded that Britain needed the support of “international Jewry” to win the war. In his denunciation of Morgenthau, Weizmann had shrewdly harped upon the power of this cosmopolitan cabal and upon Morgenthau’s place within it. Now he wanted to head him off at Gibraltar. Morgenthau no longer enjoyed Foreign Office confidence; Weizmann did; very well, then, the mandarins may have reasoned, keep him happy; let him go.

True, at the meeting of the Islamic Society, James Malcolm caught wind that Aubrey Herbert was planning a mission (see
Chapter 20
) and he and Weizmann protested about it. Sir Ronald Graham’s face betrayed nothing, but he had written the previous day to Horace Rumbold: “Will you be kind
²⁰
to my cousin Aubrey Herbert if he comes to Switzerland which he may do, on a sort of roving mission which he had better explain to you himself?”
Somehow Weizmann and Malcolm came to focus exclusively upon defeating Morgenthau. The Foreign Office did not enlighten them, quite the opposite. Balfour called Weizmann to his office and entrusted him with a secret assignment: “I was to talk
²¹
to Mr. Morgenthau, and keep on talking till I had talked him out of this mission.” He did not know, he never knew, that simultaneously Balfour was giving permission for Aubrey Herbert to go to Switzerland on another peace mission. Thus the British government tricked Chaim Weizmann.

Morgenthau’s party, which now included not only the three Zionists but also Ashag K. Schmarvonian, a Turkish Armenian working for the State Department who had served as Morgenthau’s interpreter in Constantinople, sailed from New York on June 21. They carried with them eighteen trunks
²²
filled with $400,000 in gold for the Jews of Palestine. Their ship zigzagged across the Atlantic, ever watchful for German U-boats. For his part, Weizmann sailed for Le Havre aboard the
Hantonia
on June 29, accompanied only by an intelligence officer, Kennerley Rumford,
²³
a well-known baritone who had married the singer Clara Butt. Rumford, Weizmann wrote to his wife Vera, was “either terribly ‘profound’
²⁴
or completely innocent: rather the latter, I think.” He may have underestimated his minder.

The two stopped first in Paris, where Weizmann met with the British ambassador and with Edmond de Rothschild. Then they entrained for Spain. Weizmann wrote his wife: “From the moment
²⁵
we entered Spanish territory we have been followed by German spies. There were 4 of them and one accompanied us as far as Madrid. It seemed that we had lost him at the railway station but he has just turned up again and will probably follow us still further.” Perhaps, however, the “innocent” Rumford now proved his worth. He and Weizmann checked into their Madrid hotel, followed by the German agent. They told the
portier
that they intended to stay the night. The
portier
, an Austrian, repeated this to the spy, a fellow German-speaker. Weizmann went out
²⁶
to pay a call. When he returned to the hotel, “a car drove up with an English guide; we packed hastily, paid the bill, and vanished within 10 minutes. You should have seen the
portier
’s rage.”

So the two parties, British and American, converged by land and by sea upon a Gibraltar baking under the summer sun. A third party, a French one, comprising Colonel E. Weyl (a former head of the Turkish tobacco monopoly) and Albert Thomas (the French minister of munitions) arrived on July 4. The next day they all met for discussions, inside the fortress, guarded by British soldiers. They spoke in German, the only language they
had in common, and as they kept the windows open because of the heat, Weizmann indulged the fantasy that the Tommies could hear them talk and deemed them to be spies who had been lured into a trap and would be shot next morning.