Homeward Bound

On the eve of World War I, the Zionist movement was in the same position as the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population of the world at that time: utterly powerless. So lacking in influence was it that in 1913 when Nahum Sokolow, one of the chief Zionist diplomats, sought a meeting with the British Foreign Office to discuss the success of the burgeoning Jewish colonies in Turkish Palestine, he was forced to wait for months and then was ushered into the office of the secretary to the department’s undersecretary, who listened to him with disdain and indifference.

But within four short years Sokolow and the Zionists’ leader Chaim Weizmann would not only get all the meetings they wanted with the highest-ranking figures in British politics, but would win their support for their grand project to facilitate the return of the Jews to their ancient and historic homeland in Palestine. That success was crowned when, on November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote the following sentence to Lionel Rothschild: 

That note, known to history as the Balfour Declaration, was the product of years of tireless lobbying and political wrangling in which the Zionists overcame entrenched opposition from anti-Zionist Jews (including the one Jewish member of the British cabinet at the time the declaration was approved) as well as others who viewed their project with hostility. How this turn of events came to pass depends upon where one sits. For those who despise Israel, the only explanation for how the hitherto marginal Zionist movement achieved the support of the British Empire involves anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that rest on the malign influence of the unseen yet powerful Elders of Zion. That the Zionists succeeded while a British-backed Arab revolt that was also launched during the same time period laid claim to the entire Middle East makes this achievement even more startling, and therefore more sinister, in the eyes of those who deplore the modern Jewish state that sprung from it.

By contrast, supporters of Israel have always preferred to explain their 1917 victory by emphasizing the philo-Semitic sentiments of the crucial members of the British cabinet, such as Balfour and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who responded favorably to the appeal for justice for a homeless people by Zionist statesmen like Weizmann, whose reputation was burnished by his success as a research chemist in Britain’s wartime munitions industry. Yet one of the important insights of Jonathan Schneer’s new book is that the truth may be somewhat closer to the conspiracy theory than to those about the British elite’s affinity for the legacy of ancient Israel.

It was the outbreak of World War I that transformed Zionists from nonentities to potential allies in British eyes. With the war seemingly locked in an unbreakable deadlock after years of slaughter and stalemate on the Western Front, the Jews’ strongest selling point was the belief that championing Zionism would galvanize Jewish backing for the Allied war effort, most specifically in a faltering Russia and neutral United States.

Viewed objectively, the idea that the impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe would have any influence on whether Romanov Russia stayed in the war was as absurd as a belief that they had any political sway after the collapse of the monarchy, first with the reformist Kerensky government and then with the Bolsheviks after their coup. Equally spurious was the notion that Jewish support was crucial for getting the United States to enter the war alongside the Allies and for keeping American enthusiasm for victory at a fever pitch after joining the fight in 1917. Yet some of the most sophisticated political and strategic thinkers in the British Empire believed all of these to be true. The Jews, they were sure, could help them win the war.

Schneer chronicles the years of hard work by Zionist activists who, one by one, earned the support of critical figures within the British establishment. Lloyd George, a Welshman who claimed to know the geography of Palestine better than that of England because of his Nonconformist upbringing, was personally sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Another vital convert was the diplomat Sir Mark Sykes. It was Sykes who first planned the postwar division of the Middle East between Britain and France in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement. But after he fell in with the Zionists, he and his government backed away from that document and then worked hard to win Palestine for the Zionists. 

But the chief weapon in the Zionist arsenal was not the argument that justice required the Jews’ return to Palestine to develop the land and promote the rebirth of their national language and culture while finding a shelter from anti-Semitic persecution.     Unlike the assimilated English Jews who opposed their initiative because they feared it endangered their tenuous hold on their places in gentile society, the Zionists had, as Schneer writes, “that bit of steel” in their spines that set them apart from others who sought protection or favors from anti-Semites. The Zionists “spoke as the representatives of a power whose support the other powers needed.” Thus it was easy for them to argue, as Sokolow did, that Jewish support for the Allies could only be assured if “the cause of Jewish liberty was intimately bound up with the success of the Entente.”  

The noxious libel that Jews tightly controlled the globe via the forces of both capitalism and revolution serendipitously created a mystique of international might to be regarded with deference. And libel though it was, it was genuinely believed by those in the upper reaches of the British power elite, even by the most seasoned diplomats such as Sykes. As Schneer points out, Sykes and other British diplomats—especially those, like Sykes, who were Anglo-Catholics, a group heavily represented in the Foreign Office—“had learned in their early years that Jews represented a powerful and mysterious world force, one that, they now thought, could be activated on behalf of the Allies if only the proper switch could be found.” This the Zionists knew and used to their full advantage.

Yet if one of the chief virtues of The Balfour Declaration is Schneer’s clear-headed examination of British attitudes toward the Jews, its chief fault is devoting half its pages to detailing the parallel effort of the family of Sharif Hussein, the emir of Mecca, to manipulate the British into backing his effort to overthrow the Ottoman Empire and create a new far-flung Muslim Caliphate under his personal rule. Schneer’s account of the topsy-turvy story of the Arab Revolt, best known for the participation of T. E. Lawrence and the wildly inaccurate David Lean film supposedly based on his exploits, is admirably lucid and worthwhile reading. But the pairing of the Zionist enterprise with the struggle of Hussein and his four sons to use the war to win a kingdom serves only to mislead the reader.

That the Hashemite clan’s maneuverings were directly aimed at asserting control over the same territory as the political campaign being waged by the Jews is simply untrue. Hussein wanted to win independence, first, for his Arabian fiefdom and then to extend his new kingdom as far as modern-day Iraq and Syria which, in the view of some at the time, might also include Palestine. Their goal was to win Turkish-controlled Medina and then Damascus; Jerusalem was barely an afterthought. Neither can it be fairly argued that early British promises of support for Hussein’s revolt also included a pledge that they would be given Palestine. 

As for the inhabitants of Palestine, the growth of Palestinian Arab nationalism postdates the revolt. Almost no one there had any interest in Hussein’s war, or lifted a finger to help him. Nor did the Hussein family necessarily view the Zionists as rivals, as the 1918 exchange of letters and pledges of mutual support between Weizmann and Hussein’s son Prince Faisal illustrate. If, as Schneer’s subtitle indicates, he is searching for the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, his disproportionate interest in Hussein confuses more than illuminates the subject.

The story of the Balfour Declaration, however, did not end in November 1917. As Schneer rightly points out, the greatest danger to the Zionist enterprise had nothing to do with the Arab revolt but was, instead, the little known threat of a separate peace between the Ottomans and the Allies during the last year of the war. In the months after the issuance of the declaration, and unknown to the Zionists, Lloyd George himself surreptitiously endorsed covert negotiations with Turkey that might have led to their withdrawal from the conflict. The price for this bold stroke almost certainly would have been the Turks’ retention of their empire, which included Palestine. Had those talks succeeded, all that the Zionists had attained would have been lost. But their luck held, and every time Turkey’s leaders came close to throwing in their lot with the British, an Allied setback caused them to stick with the Germans.

The end of the war found the British in possession of Palestine and ready to take up the League of Nations Mandate that, in 1922, would task them with facilitating the growth of a Jewish national home. They would subsequently lop off much of the territory then considered Palestine to create what would become the modern kingdom of Jordan as a consolation prize for Hussein’s son Abdullah after his father’s plans for a pan-Arab empire collapsed. Later British governments would repudiate Balfour’s promise altogether when the spirit of appeasement led to their decision to shut off Jewish immigration to Palestine in the vain hope that the Arabs would back the Allies in World War II. 

In spite of all this, the process set in motion by the declaration could not be stopped. Less than 31 years after the note to Rothschild had been sent, the state of Israel was born. It is easy to blame the problems of the contemporary Middle East, as Schneer appears to do, on Britain’s complicated and often contradictory entanglements during World War I. But those looking for a common thread between the background of the Balfour Declaration and today’s Arab-Israeli conflict must also look to the traditions of Jew-hatred and the conspiracy theories that stem from it. Where once false notions of Jewish global dominance enabled a powerless people to facilitate their return to the place of their national birth, similar strains of this centuries-old myth now feed the compulsion of the Islamic world to extinguish the Jewish state.

Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary.