The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (60 page)

Like his cousin Herbert Samuel, Montagu had resigned his cabinet post in December 1916, when Asquith relinquished the prime minister’s position to Lloyd George. He took this step reluctantly but could do nothing else. He owed much to the former Liberal leader, whose friendship he still cherished and whom he greatly admired. He had no inkling of Asquith’s genteel but unmistakably anti-Semitic references to him in his correspondence with Venetia Stanley (although one wonders whether he learned about them when Venetia Stanley became his wife). He once had written to Asquith:

But Montagu admired Lloyd George too. And he was ambitious and justifiably confident of his own powers, although perhaps socially insecure. He
could not remain content outside government for long. On March 28, 1917, he wrote to Lloyd George:

Lloyd George must have proved amenable, for shortly thereafter Montagu reentered the cabinet, first as minister without portfolio working on plans for postwar reconstruction, later as replacement for Austen Chamberlain as secretary of state for India. But there was a price to pay. For such disloyalty, as he perceived it, Asquith never forgave him.

Lucien Wolf’s Conjoint Committee fell and British Jews who favored assimilation lost their leadership, when the tall, brooding, emotional Montagu, in effect, stepped into the breach. He may not have intended it, but that is what he did. He knew nothing of Zionists drafting paragraphs at the Imperial Hotel or, probably, even of the close connections linking Weizmann and Sokolow to Sykes and various Foreign Office figures. He did not see Sacher’s two-sentence statement or Balfour’s draft reply until August 22. But when finally he did see it, he was galvanized. He wanted the foreign secretary to redraft his letter and reject the Zionist statement. The scorching memorandum that he composed, five pages of coruscating irony and sarcasm, was titled: “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”—not, as he carefully explained, because he thought Lloyd George and his team held anti-Semitic views but rather because he thought their pro-Zionist policy would “prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”

We have become familiar with the arguments Montagu employed against Zionism. Most cabinet ministers knew them as well, for the arguments had changed little since Montagu’s own opposition to Herbert Samuel’s 1915 Zionist statement to the cabinet. “I assert that
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there is not a Jewish nation,” Montagu wrote again, two years later. “I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in.” And further down the page: “When the Jew has
a national home surely it follows that the impetus to deprive [him] of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto.” And finally, and perhaps inevitably: “The Government are asked to be the instrument … of a Zionist organization largely run … by men of enemy descent or birth.” But such quotations do not do justice to the vehemence of Montagu’s attack. Cabinet ministers, accustomed to one another’s dry formulations and businesslike prose, would have been taken aback when they read their colleague’s cri de coeur.

For that was what it was. Montagu took the issue personally. He had once remarked that he had been trying all his life to escape the ghetto. Now he understood the Zionists to be trying to push him, and every other assimilated British Jew, back inside. If the government endorsed the Zionist memorandum, Montagu argued in a desperate letter to Lloyd George, it would mean that “the country for which
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I have worked ever since I left the University—England—the country for which my family have fought, tells me that my national home … is Palestine.” He treasured his appointment to the India Office, he reminded the prime minister. He looked forward to championing progressive reforms there, to carrying the ideals of British Liberalism to the subcontinent. But how could a Palestinian—as he must be termed if the government accepted the Zionist statement—represent Britain in India? “Every anti-Semitic organization and newspaper will ask what right a Jewish Englishman, with the status at best of a naturalized foreigner, has to take a foremost part in the Government of the British Empire.”

Montagu belonged to the cabinet but had no position in the War Cabinet, that decisive subset of the whole that would render final verdict on the Zionist statement. Nevertheless, his fervent protest ensured him a seat at the table when the body met on September 3. On that day members had before them Sacher’s two sentences, Milner’s revised version of them, and Montagu’s perfervid response. In the discussion that ensued Montagu, according to minutes of the meeting, “urged that the use
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of the phrase ‘the home of the Jewish people’ would vitally prejudice the position of every Jew elsewhere and expanded the argument contained in his Memorandum.” Bizarrely, neither Lloyd George nor Balfour could attend this particular session; perhaps that fact worked in his favor, although Milner and Robert Cecil (deputizing for Balfour) ably argued the Zionist position. Thus the British War Cabinet divided along lines adumbrated in that first confrontation between Zionists and assimilationists in the offices of Lucien Wolf in early 1915. The result was equally inconclusive. In the end, the War Cabinet agreed only to consult Britain’s ally, President Wilson of the United States, before taking action.

News of the cabinet’s indecision quickly reached Chaim Weizmann. Balked at this penultimate stage, and furious, he hurled himself into a last great effort to push the declaration through. He mobilized American Zionists to extract a pledge of support from Wilson, and urged British Zionists to press forward one more time. At his indirect instigation, hundreds of telegrams, from Jewish congregations across the length and breadth of the British Isles, all urging government support of the declaration, flooded into the Foreign Office. By the fall of 1917 Weizmann could turn the key to most doors in Whitehall. He met with Foreign Office officials, cabinet ministers, the prime minister’s closest advisers, finally even with the prime minister himself (although for only three minutes). With Lord Rothschild he drew up a toughly worded restatement of the Zionist position that could also be read as a barely concealed reproach to the government for stalling: “We have submitted
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the text of the declaration on behalf of an organization which claims to represent the will of a great and ancient, though scattered, people. We have submitted it after three years of negotiations and conversations with prominent representatives of the British nation.” Montagu took steps too. He prepared a second anti-Zionist memorandum for the War Cabinet to consider. But he stood at a disadvantage. He had no organization behind him and scarcely an ally in the government.

The War Cabinet convened again, on October 4, this time with Lloyd George in the chair and Balfour at his right hand. The foreign secretary explained briefly and lucidly what Zionism meant and why he supported it. Unexpectedly a powerful voice intervened—in opposition to him. Here was Montagu’s only cabinet-level ally, the Marquess Curzon of Keddleston, lord president of the council. But he was an ally only up to a point. He intended to offer the War Cabinet a cold douche of realism. He opposed Zionism for practical reasons, he explained. He would not concern himself with philosophical speculation about the possibility of Jewish assimilation in the countries of the Diaspora. Alone among the men sitting at 10 Downing Street, he had been to Palestine: “barren and desolate
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 … a less propitious seat for the future Jewish race could not be imagined.” Anyway, how would Jews get there in significant numbers? What would they do when they arrived? And what would happen to the present Muslim population? Zionism he regarded “as sentimental idealism, which would never be realized and [with which] His Majesty’s Government should have nothing to do.”

Montagu would have been glad of Curzon’s unforeseen, if frigidly offered, support, but he may have understood that it came too late. This meeting would be his swan song. His duties as Indian secretary called him to the subcontinent, and he would be leaving England in a matter of weeks.
Still he continued to hammer, arguing not on practical grounds, as Curzon had, but rather on intensely personal ones. “How would he negotiate with the peoples of India on behalf of His Majesty’s Government if the world had just been told that [Britain] regarded his national home as being in Turkish territory?” He pointed out too that “the only trial of strength between Zionists and anti-Zionists in England had resulted in a very narrow majority for the Zionists, namely 56 to 51 of the representatives of Anglo-Jewry on the Conjoint Committee.” Surely the government could not choose one side over the other on this slight basis? And he could not refrain from underlining once again the foreign origins of leading Zionists in Britain.

For a second time the War Cabinet deferred a decision, this time so that members could read a paper Curzon wished to prepare and ascertain more precisely the views of President Wilson. The latter’s aide, Colonel Edward House, had sent on the president’s behalf a noncommittal response to the original cabinet inquiry, but then Wilson had permitted the American Zionist Louis Brandeis to send a more positive one. They decided as well to canvass representative Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in Britain to ascertain their views of the draft declaration. Montagu composed a third anti-Zionist memorandum, his most outspoken and personal yet, criticizing Weizmann specifically: “On this matter
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he is near to being a religious fanatic.” The secretary of state for India appears to have understood, however, that he was rowing against the current and that the tide was too strong. Except for Curzon, the cabinet’s big guns opposed him: Lloyd George, Balfour, Milner. He told C. P. Scott the day after submitting this last memorandum that the big three could not be moved. Therefore “the thing will go
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through.”

Poor Edwin Montagu! For all his worldly success, he embodied the dilemmas and tragedies of early-twentieth-century assimilated British Jewry. He believed passionately in assimilation. At War Cabinet meetings and in his written memoranda, he fought for this ideal with all the tools of an upper-class Englishman: the irony and wit and logic he had imbibed in the debating clubs at Cambridge, the Liberalism he had learned from Asquith, the rhetorical skills he had acquired over years of political campaigning in the flatlands of Norfolk. He even allowed to appear, as an upper-class Englishman might have done when pressed, a glimpse of the antiforeigner sentiment so pervasive in wartime Britain. We cannot know whether his colleagues perceived him to be an Englishman who happened to be Jewish (as he so desperately wished) or rather as a Jew who happened
to have been born and raised in England (as Asquith did). We cannot know whether true assimilation was possible for Jews in Britain in 1917.

But surely the response Montagu elicited only a few weeks after the cabinet meeting from none other than Aubrey Herbert, recently returned from his secret mission to Switzerland, is suggestive. Let us give to Herbert, a brave and interesting man, every benefit of the doubt. Let us posit that he sympathized with Jews as he did with other oppressed and persecuted peoples. Now he was on his way, on secret government duty, to Albania to assist in the nationalist struggle against the Ottomans. Montagu had started out for India. Their paths intersected in Turin, Italy, where they dined together. Herbert described the event in his diary. He simply could not regard “Edwin of the Saxon Sword,” as he snidely called him (but not to his face), as anything other than a Jew who happened to have been born in Britain. “It’s ridiculous
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to pretend he is an Englishman,” Herbert wrote. “He is every inch an Oriental.” Then the son of the Earl of Carnarvon, and the son of Lord Swaythling, both on British government service, continued along their separate ways.

Meanwhile the cabinet had received replies to their circular from four Zionists, including Weizmann, Sokolow, and Rothschild, and from four anti-Zionists, including Claude Montefiore and Sir Philip Magnus, MP, with responses to the proposed declaration. President Wilson, decisively influenced by Justice Brandeis via Colonel House, had telegraphed finally an unambiguous message of support for Zionism. Lord Curzon had completed his anti-Zionist memorandum. Cabinet ministers read and digested all this. A third meeting of the War Cabinet was scheduled. It would convene on Wednesday, October 31, 1917.

We know the outcome. On that day the War Cabinet agreed to what has become known as the Balfour Declaration. The document authorized the foreign secretary to reply to Lord Rothschild in the following terms:

On November 2 Balfour sent this message to Rothschild. The press would publish it exactly one week later. Thus did Weizmann’s long, unlikely campaign finally gain its object. Thus too did the campaign of T. E. Lawrence, King Hussein, and Sharif Feisal for some form of Arab confederation or empire (albeit one whose borders remained a matter of contention and misunderstanding) receive a grave setback. Their projected greater Arabia, if ever it came into existence, would not include Palestine.