The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (55 page)

Was Cecil’s warning a signpost too? Wolf remained uneasy. With the two presidents of the Conjoint Committee, David Lindo Alexander and Claude Montefiore, he plotted strategy. Montefiore thought he could approach Lord Milner of the War Cabinet, with whom he was personally acquainted. Wolf immediately endorsed
¹²
this plan. Montefiore saw Milner on May 16. He argued the assimilationists’ case and urged the government to stick with the Conjoint Committee because its British-born members better represented Jewish interests than foreign-born Zionists such as Weizmann, Sokolow, and Gaster. Milner tried to reassure him. The Foreign Office would consult the Conjoint Committee before deciding upon its policy for Palestine. On the other hand, he acknowledged that “Mr. Lloyd George was impressed by and sympathetic to many of the ideas of the Zionists,” and he downplayed Conjoint Committee fears of the Zionist program: “Anti-Semitism and emancipation depended upon far other considerations than the erection of a small Jewish autonomous community in Palestine.” As to whether Britain
¹³
would grant special privileges to Jews in Palestine if she proclaimed a British protectorate there, he would not be pinned down.

Montefiore left the meeting not reassured. “I would beg of you,”
¹⁴
he reiterated to Milner the following day in a letter, “to trust your own fellow citizens who, at all events, are Englishmen through and through, and whose sons are serving in England’s armies, rather than foreigners who have no love for England, and who, if the fortunes of war went wrong, would throw her over in a trice and hurry over to Berlin to join the majority of their colleagues.” It was the chauvinist card yet again, but Milner did not mind. Montefiore “is an able, temperate
¹⁵
and most honest man,” he wrote to Robert Cecil, “and when he begged me almost passionately to be very careful how we commit ourselves to Sokoloff or Weizmann I am sure that he does so from an honest conviction that they are not reliable guides.” But Milner too leaned toward the Zionists. Five months previously he had read Herbert Samuel’s Zionist memorandum and wrote to him: “Among the possible
¹⁶
alternatives which you review, the one which you yourself favor certainly appears to me the most attractive.”

Three days later Wolf received a report of Chaim Weizmann’s most recent
address to a Zionist conference in London. “I am entitled
¹⁷
to state in this assembly,” Weizmann had announced, “that His Majesty’s Government is ready to support our plans.” This repetition of Sokolow’s claims in Paris reinforced Wolf’s conclusion that Zionism stood upon the verge of a great triumph. Only desperate measures could now rescue the position of the Conjoint Committee; the advocates of Jewish assimilation now must stake all or lose all.

On Tuesday, May 17, Wolf, Alexander, and Montefiore presided over a meeting of the Conjoint Committee to discuss the situation. The group decided “to issue a public
¹⁸
statement of their attitude on the Zionist question.” They drew it up “there and then … and approved [it] with only two dissentients.” The statement hammered “the Zionist theory
¹⁹
which regards all the Jewish communities of the world as constituting one homeless nationality, incapable of complete social and political identification with the nations among whom they dwell.” It condemned the Zionist proposal “to invest the Jewish settlers in Palestine with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population, these rights to be embodied in a Charter, and administered by a Jewish Chartered Company.” They further resolved to publish the statement not only in the Jewish press but in
The Times
. Those members of the Conjoint Committee, Wolf foremost among them, who claimed that the statement was couched in conciliatory language, were either fooling themselves or attempting to fool others.

Wolf left the meeting accompanied by Joseph H. Hertz, Britain’s chief rabbi, who had attended by special invitation and had cast one of the two dissenting votes. The two men stood outside the Regent’s Park tube station. As Wolf wrote afterward, Dr. Hertz reiterated “his regret at
²⁰
the action that had been resolved upon. He asked me whether anything could be done to stop it. I said … if Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Gaster could be induced to modify or otherwise explain away their published statements obviously there would be no longer any need for the action resolved upon.” Hertz reported that Wolf went further: “‘And you would render
²¹
a great service to the community’ he told me, ‘if you could induce them to do so.’” Acting upon this advice (although Wolf denied that he ever gave it), the chief rabbi contacted Leopold Greenberg, editor of
The Jewish Chronicle
, “because he was the only man who could bring pressure to bear upon the Zionist leaders.” Alarmed, Greenberg got in touch with Wolf.

On Tuesday evening, May 22, the Zionist editor and the Jewish “foreign
secretary” met for nearly three hours at Wolf’s home. Over the course
²²
of a wide-ranging discussion, Greenberg argued that the quarrel between Zionists and anti-Zionists concerned the Anglo-Jewish community primarily and should not be aired outside it. Wolf replied that Zionists had published outside the Jewish press and that the Conjoint Committee, in defending itself, reserved the right to publish where it would. In fact, Wolf and his colleagues had just decided to give their statement to
The Times;
it was published there on Thursday, May 24. But Alexander refused
²³
to publish the statement in
The Jewish Chronicle
without Montefiore’s explicit assent, and Wolf could not reach Montefiore on Wednesday the twenty-third, so it was too late for the statement to appear there since the
Chronicle
published on Fridays. That
The Jewish Chronicle
did not publish the statement, but
The Times
did, made a bad impression on the Jewish community as a whole and alienated Greenberg further, if that were possible. Nor can it have pleased Sir Robert Cecil, who had warned against a public dispute. That Wolf threw down the gauntlet anyway must be an index of his increasing alarm.

Publication of the Conjoint Committee’s statement in
The Times
created a firestorm. Lord Walter Rothschild picked up his copy that morning, read the offending piece, and dashed off a response. He sent it to Weizmann: “If you approve
²⁴
please go and see the Editor personally and hand it to him. I fear it is not in very good style and not as clean as I could wish.” Weizmann did better than that. Not only did he polish Rothschild’s letter, which
The Times
published on Monday, May 28, but in his own more formidable prose he took on the committee as well: “It may possibly be inconvenient to certain individual Jews that the Jews constitute a nationality. Whether the Jews do constitute a nationality is, however, not a matter to be decided by the convenience of this or that individual. It is strictly a question of fact.” The chief rabbi sent in a letter too: “I cannot allow your readers to remain under the misconception that the said statement represents in the least the views held either by Anglo-Jewry as a whole or by the Jewries of the Oversea Dominions.”

To Wolf, Alexander, and Montefiore,
The Times
had seemed a natural outlet for expression of the views of the Cousinhood. It was the newspaper of record for England’s governing class, of which they formed at least a tangential section. They may even have hoped that
The Times
would endorse their position, but if so they miscalculated. The same Wickham Steed who a few weeks later would warn Weizmann of Henry Morgenthau’s pending journey to Gibraltar wrote
The Times
leader for May 29. He endorsed the Zionist movement: “It had fired with a new ideal millions of poverty-stricken Jews … It has tended to make Jews proud of their race.” And he
condemned the Conjoint Committee’s statement in Weizmann’s own words: “It may possibly be inconvenient to certain individual Jews that the Jews do constitute a nationality. The question is one of fact, not argument.”

Other newspapers took a similar line. “Does not the Jew already stamp himself as a stranger and an alien?” asked
The Glasgow Herald
. “Whether it be his religion or his inextinguishable pride of race or his hopes and dreams in the fulfillment of prophecy is he not now ‘a stranger and a sojourner’ in our midst? The barrier is there and whether he has once more a land of his own … or whether he remains as he is … it does not seem to us that his status would undergo visible alteration in the near future.” Even
The Nation
, an organ of the nonsocialist Left in which Lucien Wolf usually found comfort, failed to comfort him this time. Editors of
The Nation
did not actually endorse the Zionist position but nor did they completely endorse assimilation. Rather they cherished “the hope that for
²⁵
the sake of the very numerous body of Jews who are not and do not want to be assimilated and absorbed, an international regime may be possible in Palestine which would secure a cultural focus for Hebrew Nationalism.”

Within the Anglo-Jewish community itself, debate stoked by the Zionists raged fiercely. Samuel Cohen of Manchester, a provincial vice-president of the English Zionist Federation, proudly claimed to be a chief stoker. “It was
²⁶
 … thanks to the interest I have taken and the energy I have displayed that the Board [of Deputies] … were bombarded with letters of protest from the Synagogues and Societies all over England,” he boasted to Weizmann. The journal
Palestine
, turning things upside down as only the clever Harry Sacher could, accused Wolf and his partners of being pro-German in thought if not in deed:

Leopold Greenberg, furious that Wolf had ignored his plea to keep the quarrel with Zionism within the family, as it were, wrote more ferociously
still. “All that the Committee
²⁸
have achieved is to exhibit the Jewish people in its worst aspect—in a state of strife and disunion—and to injure,
pro tanto
, the Jewish prestige. It is a sorry result but one for which they should be quickly brought to account.” Even Israel Zangwill, who was making his way back toward the Zionist position, condemned the committee’s “manifesto” in a private letter to Wolf. Its publication had been “a grave error
²⁹
 … Palestine at your price is not worth having, and is certainly nothing to be thankful for.”

On June 2, at a meeting of the council of the Anglo-Jewish Association, one of the two pillars upon which the Conjoint Committee rested, Moses Gaster mounted a Zionist attack: He moved a vote of no confidence in the AJA leaders. Gaster no longer held the chief position among Zionists—Weizmann had that now; but he delivered a stem-winder of a speech, demonstrating the histrionic skills that once had brought him to the fore. The association “had declared the Zionists
³⁰
to be faithless to their past. How dared they take their name and glory away? They were a nation … The statement which had been published would be quoted over and over again as if they intended to justify oppression … It was an irreparable blunder that such a manifesto should have been given to the world.” But, the advocates of assimilation gave as good as they got. Montefiore mocked Gaster: “The most curious thing about the Zionists was that directly the least thing was said in criticism of their acts they set up the most fearful howl and complained bitterly, as though they were a privileged body.” Sir Philip Magnus, MP, insisted that advocates of assimilation did not oppose establishment of Jewish colonies in Palestine, only establishment of Jewish rule. Gaster and his friends should accept “the formula put forward by the Conjoint Committee and … endeavor to establish in Jerusalem a great center of Jewish learning and culture.” The
haham
saw which way the wind was blowing. He withdrew his motion.

Two weeks later, however, on June 15, at the most heavily attended assembly in its history to date, the second pillar of the Conjoint Committee, the Board of Deputies, collapsed entirely. The board had before it the following motion of censure:

One by one the censurers spoke. The statement had been “issued at an inopportune
³¹
time,” said one. “It was disingenuous in origin, defamatory in effect, and altogether unrepresentative.” Was there so much trouble “in the community that
The Times
should be the mouthpiece of Anglo-Jewry while the Anglo-Jewish press had been ignored?” wondered another. A third charged that publishing in
The Times
had been “a case of super
chutzpa.”
A fourth: “If any man of honor, whether pro-Zionist or anti-Zionist, voted against a resolution of censure he did not deserve to be a member of the Board representing Anglo-Jewry.” Although most speakers focused upon the impropriety of the Conjoint Committee airing Jewish linen in public, Lord Rothschild attacked a main plank of the assimilationists’ position: “I have always thought that such a Home [a Jewish Palestine under British protection] was only meant for those people who could not or did not desire to consider themselves citizens of the country in which they lived, and I can truly say that the National Zionists have done nothing, and would never do anything, inconsistent with the status of the true British citizen of which I am proud to be one, just as proud as I am of being a Jew.”