Rescuing Balfour Declaration: Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office 1921-22, By William Mathew
Posted on April 2, 2015 by admin
Given the sheer improbability of the Balfour Declaration, its source in temporary war-time contingencies, its activation of inter-communal conflict in Palestine, and its exposure to increasing opposition both at home and in the Levant, the 1917 War Cabinet pledge to Zionism was in manifest danger of collapse in the early 1920's in advance of the final, formal settlement of the Palestine mandate. It is a matter of great significance that the man who more than any other – as will be argued here – saved and advanced that loosely worded governmental commitment, Winston Churchill, himself harbored the most serious reservations – political, imperial, financial – over his country`s sponsorship of a Jewish National Home, concerns that never quite left his ever-receptive political mind. If the individual who rescued the policy displayed fundamental equivocations – these relieved for the moment by the excitements of an office carrying major overseas responsibilities after recent years on the comparative periphery of government – much, one might suggest, is revealed about the intrinsic folly of the entire pro-Zionist enterprise. In the recent half-century commemoration of Churchill`s death, little has been said about his Levantine legacy as Colonial Secretary in 1921-22. This short essay attempts to make good some of that deficit.
I
Winston Churchill,.. played a vital role in securing the British government`s long-term commitment to the terms of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917.
Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary between January 1921 and October 1922 in David Lloyd George`s last administration, played a vital role in securing the British government`s long-term commitment to the terms of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. It can indeed be argued that without his efforts in the face of mounting domestic opposition in the press and Parliament the British could well have abandoned, or at least radically modified, their war-time promise to support the establishment of a Jewish National Home. The state of Israel might indeed be seen to owe its existence as much to Winston Churchill as to Arthur Balfour. As Michael Makovsky writes in his Churchill`s Promised Land. Zionism and Statecraft (2007), `as colonial secretary Churchill implemented the Balfour Declaration, ensured that Jews retained the right to immigrate to Palestine…, advanced several significant and enduring intellectual defenses of Zionism, insisted to the Palestine Arabs that they accept Zionism, and allowed the Zionists to establish durable national institutions – all of which set in motion the founding of the state of Israel in 1948`.
There is, however, a major conundrum here. Despite the powerful legacy, Churchill was not by any means a consistently vigorous supporter of the Zionist project. In the years preceding and immediately following the Balfour Declaration his position was, to say the least, contradictory and, to the concerned observer, confusing and erratic. His position, Makovsky observes, was `at various times moderately supportive, ardently supportive, opposed, and indifferent`. Zionism was, for him, always subordinate to wider imperial concerns: `his attachment to the cause was weak. In the 1910's and 1920's, strategic, imperial, and political factors all led him to ignore Zionism and resent it`. The question then is: how could someone of such scepticism and periodic hostility prove crucial to the consolidation of Balfour and the launching of a trajectory towards the formation of an enduring Jewish polity in Palestine?
II
The reasons for Churchill`s recurring negativity are worth exploring in some detail, in part because they refer to the real dangers for Britain inherent in the sponsorship of the Jewish National Home, well reflecting contemporary concern that Zionist privileging in Palestine did not serve the British national interest; and in part because they highlight the appeal, for Churchill, of certain convenient arguments that, for a while, entered his idiosyncratic political calculus – and casting illumination on the man`s protean character as a widely distrusted maverick, carried along on the tides of wordy, exaggerated, and self-persuading rhetoric endlessly adaptable to the circumstances of the moment. Churchill`s own reflection, in his 1927 essay `Consistency in Politics`, was that `The only way a man can remain consistent around changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose`.
It is important to note at the outset that he played no part in the formulation of the Balfour Declaration. As Minister of Munitions at the time (following his post-Gallipoli exile to the Western Front), he was not in the Lloyd George War Cabinet, and there is no record of him having anything to say either privately or publically on the policy. In his subsequent war memoir, he had no comment to offer on the Declaration specifically or on Zionism generally, For a man rarely short of words, these are significant omissions, confirming that Palestine affairs were, for him, of comparatively minor importance. As for the broader issue of British mandatory control there, essential for any sponsorship of Zionist settlement, he had advised Lloyd George in a memorandum of October 1919 that all such close political involvements in the Middle East should be abandoned: `we should give up Palestine and Mesopotamia`, he insisted. And even when settled into his tenure at the Colonial Office, he suggested that, in the light of continuing uncertainties in the region, it might `be impossible for us to maintain our position either in Palestine or in Mesopotamia`, and that `the only wise and safe course would be to take advantage of the postponement of the Mandates and resign them both and quit the two countries at the earliest possible moment, as the expense to which we shall be put will be wholly unwarrantable`.
Churchill was, first and foremost, an unreformed imperialist, hostile for most of his career to arguments in favor of progressive colonial independence, especially as these concerned policy on India – the seemingly indispensable prop to British economic survival, military power, and international prestige. In his 1919 memorandum he had expressed serious misgivings over the likely damage that the Zionist project might effect on British imperial interests. Injustice towards Muslims in Palestine might rebound on the security of the raj. Writing of `the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience`, he warned that such eventuality would `act and re-act` on Britain`s position as `the greatest Mohammedan Power`, with her near-70 million Islamic subjects in India, causing the imperialists `immense expense and anxiety`. His general conclusion, applicable to the entire Middle East, was that the post-war partitioning of the Ottoman empire represented a critical error. In this respect he parted company from many of his political contemporaries in London who saw (as I have argued elsewhere, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, July 2013) a strategic gain for Britain in control over Palestine and, with it, the capacity to protect the eastern flank of the Suez Canal against likely imperial rivals – this power possibly enhanced by the gratitude and loyalty of her new Zionist subjects. But by Churchill`s perspectives, the Ottomans had been Britain`s traditional allies in the Middle East, ensuring that no other expansionist powers – most notably Russia – could comprise her Levantine access to India. Any dismemberment, as provisionally agreed at the San Remo and Sèvres Conferences of 1920, was not in the interests of the eastern empire. If some degree of territorial integrity was to be preserved for the Ottomans, Zionist plans would have to be abandoned.
A second set of worries, particularly affecting him when he entered the Colonial Office, were the military, and consequent monetary, implications of advancing Zionism at a time of major Treasury-imposed retrenchment in British finances. `I do not think that things are going to get better in this part of the world, but rather worse`, he observed in June 1921, in the same month urging that `unless some change is made we may be confronted with a situation beyond our capacity to cope with`. In a memorandum of August 1921 he wrote of his personal `perplexity and anxiety. The Zionist policy is profoundly unpopular with all except the Zionists. Both Arabs and Jews are armed and … ready to spring at each other`s throats`. The best he could say for the Balfour Declaration was that he stood `prepared to continue on this course, if it is the settled will of the Cabinet`: less than an unequivocal endorsement. There was, as he saw it, much `irritation, suspicion and disquietude` in `the hearts of the Arab population` resulting from Britain`s pro-Zionist commitments and their contradiction of `our regular policy of consulting the wishes of the people in mandate territories and giving them a representative institution as soon as they were fitted for it`.
Had it not been for `our promises in regard to it [Zionism]`, he lamented, the British garrison in Palestine could by then have been `sensibly reduced`. In early 1920 he estimated the cost at £9 million a year – `far beyond anything which Palestine could yield in return`. And there were additional burdensome commitments in Turkey, Mesopotamia, and Persia. `Do please realise`, he minuted to an aide in mid-1920, `that everything else that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense`. In February 1922 he asked the British High Commissioner in Jerusalem, Sir Herbert Samuel, for a cut in expenditure on the Palestine gendarmerie: `it is increasingly difficult to meet the argument that it is unfair to ask the British taxpayer, already overburdened with taxation, to bear the cost of imposing on Palestine an unpopular policy`. Later in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he continued to cast a bleak eye on such outlays: `There is no excuse whatever`, he wrote in 1927, `for Palestine being a burden on the Exchequer of this country` – complaining about its remaining `in a dole-fed condition at the expense of our taxpayer…`.
A third worry derived from Churchill`s notion that Jews displayed a marked and historic proclivity towards revolutionary politics. In the post-war period the particular spectre was Bolshevism. The idea that Jews might carry this political infection into British Palestine under the guise of Zionism was, for him, profoundly alarming. Chaim Weizmann at the time privately expressed the opinion that Zionism was, indeed, `constructive Bolshevism`, recalling in his later memoirs that `Russians, Jews, Bolsheviks were different words for the same thing in the minds of most of the British officers in Palestine in those days…`. The journalist Joseph Jeffries, in a series of Daily Mail articles in early 1923 entitled `The Palestine Deception`, dismissed as `preposterous nonsense` the idea that Zionist incomers in the Levant, overwhelmingly `Judaeo-Slav` and non-religious, could ever develop any loyalty to the British Empire, offering an extended roll-call of individuals heavily socialist in political complexion.
Churchill`s equating of Jewry with subversive ideology was powerfully expressed in a newspaper article of February 1920: `Zionism versus Bolshevism, A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People`. His words are worth quoting at some length, showing his penchant for dramatic overstatement and, in this instance, an easy resort to familiar anti-Semitic tropes. `The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race….It would almost seem…that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical` . `National` Jews, assimilated to varying degrees into European societies stood in stark contrast to `International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy` had for the most part `forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization…has been steadily growing….Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every bit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing`. The Jewish Chronicle, in a prompt response, accused him of reactionary political attention-seeking, `adopting the hoary tactics of hooligan anti-Semites`.
Zionism, then, as a possible threat to the political stability of the British Empire; as a likely source, through its local provocations, of inflated military and administrative expenditures; and as a carrier of seditious socialist politics. And even in office as Colonial Secretary he made a dramatic policy decision in March 1921 that caused much upset to the Zionist interest, detaching the largely desert tracts to the east of the Jordan as the separate kingdom of Transjordan under the rule of Hussein`s son Abdullah in Amman – which he had just occupied at the head of a small army. In August of the following year the British government informed the League of Nations that it wished Transjordan to be excluded from all provisions relating to Jewish settlement.
III
How, in Churchill`s mind, were such serious anxieties transcended? What, to cite his own wordson the subject of `Consistency in Politics`, was, for him, the interplay of `changing circumstances` and `dominating purpose`.It can well be argued that, circumstantially, a progressive change of heart had much to do with his move in January 1921 from the War Office, where he had presided since 1918, to the Colonial Office – in the latter department given special responsibility for the affairs of Palestine (and Iraq) and, as such, open both to the `fiery energies`, as he described them, of Chaim Weizmann in London, and to the pro-Zionist advice of his permanent officials, most notably Sir John Shuckburgh. He had also had control over Palestine as War Secretary, following its military occupation in 1917-18, but by the early 1920's the issue of governance there had become a much more urgent matter as the League of Nations mandates were being defined and ideas formulated for the appropriate constitutional arrangements for the territory following Sir Herbert Samuel`s appointment as High Commissioner in 1920. Weizmann, as always, was on the alert; and Shuckburgh, who had been brought in from the India Office, was someone with whom the Zionist leader was in regular, insistent contact – declaring in 1924 that he saw Weizmann `constantly` when the latter was in London, and, showing him, by the account of one of Weizmann`s biographers, `unusual deference`. `The evidence from the first two years of the Middle East Department`s operations`, writes Sahar Huneidi, `suggest that the exceptional relations between Weizmann and the staff of the department were a significant factor in preventing the British government`s pro-Zionist policy from being revoked or modified`. And as Makovsky has observed, Churchill – a man with little knowledge of, or interest, in Middle East affairs – `mostly displayed a short attention span with Palestine matters … and relied heavily on his… staff for information, guidance, and policy implementation`. Of these officials, Shuckburgh in particular played a leading role in setting the Levantine priorities. Also recruited to the Office were T.E. Lawrence, with qualified Arab sympathies, and the ardent Zionist, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen.
Churchill himself was especially open to Weizmann`s entreaties, their mutual acquaintanceship stretching back for almost twenty years when, newly appointed as Under-Secretary-of-State for the Colonies in Herbert Asquith`s first Liberal administration of December 1905, he shared a platform in Manchester with Weizmann (then a Manchester University chemistry lecturer) at a public meeting to protest against recent pogroms in Russia. As a local M.P., first for Oldham after 1900, and for N.W. Manchester after 1905, he had energetically cultivated the large Jewish vote in the extended urban area, taking a stand in 1904 against the Aliens Bill of the then Prime Minister Arthur Balfour on account of its targeting of Jewish immigration – this just after formally switching his party allegiance from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Getting to know Weizmann, his almost exact contemporary (by age, a mere three days his senior), he appealed to him to help energize support among Jewish voters.
In 1915 their acquaintanceship was renewed when Weizmann was asked by Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to provide the government with acetone, a solvent for cordite used in naval guns, which Weizmann had been attempting to produce by biological fermentation processes in his Manchester laboratory. `Mr Churchill was brisk, fascinating, cheery and energetic`, Weizmann records. `Almost his first words were: “Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?”` Weizmann moved to a special laboratory in London in 1916, his work bringing him, as he later wrote, `into touch with all sorts of people, high and low, in the British Government`, affording `more opportunity to see British statesmen than had been the case when I lived in Manchester`. Further contacts between the two men came when Weizmann approached Churchill as War Secretary in 1919 on matters concerning military rule in Palestine. One of Weizmann`s biographers, Isaiah Berlin, has described him as an `irresistible political seducer`, Churchill himself offering acknowledgement of his powers when he pointed to him at a social event in the early 1920's: `He is your teacher`, he remarked to Clement Attlee, `he is my teacher, he was Lloyd George`s teacher – we will do whatever he tells us`. Weizmann – who recorded that Churchill was `of a highly impressionable temperament` – was duly appreciative: `To you personally,` he wrote in July 1922, `as well as to those who have been associated with you at the Colonial Office, we tender our most grateful thanks. Zionists throughout the world deeply appreciate…the great part you have played in securing for the Jewish people the opportunity of rebuilding its national home in…Palestine`.
As for Churchill`s `dominating purpose`, this was, as we have seen, two-fold: the protection of fundamental imperial interests, and the defeat of Bolshevism. With both he, so to speak, flipped the coin, discovering by a combination of open-mindedness and circumstantial opportunism, that Zionism could, perhaps, be recruited for both objectives. Indeed, as early as 1908 he had expressed the conviction that the `establishment of a strong free Jewish State astride the bridge between Europe and Africa … would…be an immense advantage to the British Empire`, saying much the same again twelve years later in his `Zionism versus Bolshevism` already cited: `a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four million Jews…would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire`. And in July 1922 he offered the House of Commons some territorial specifics: `Palestine is all the more important to us…in view of the ever-increasing significance of the Suez Canal…`. Britain should, accordingly, accept the costs attendant on `the control and guardianship of this great historic land…`.
Too much, though, should not be made of these pronouncements: they were occasional and, to a degree, abstract. By Makovsky`s account, it took until the 1930's for Churchill to be convinced that Palestine served a positive imperial purpose, particularly in relation to India. The negative aspects of the Palestine connection were never quite absent from his mind. But there were rhetorical and parliamentary purposes to be served, and it may well be that Churchill`s grand pronouncements were in part directed towards persuading himself that a powerful imperial case could be made both for British control of Palestine and for the sponsorship of a friendly Jewish polity – or as the journalist Joseph Jeffries sarcastically suggested, `a little loyal Jewish Ulster amid the enveloping hosts of Arabism`.
As for Bolshevism, the case against Jewry, as set out in his 1920 article, was balanced by a complementary case for Zionism – not so much as an infected body in the British imperial polity, but as a diversion from world revolution. `The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people….Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost rapidity a Jewish national center in Palestine which may become … a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest`. Zionism offered Jews a clear choice over their political redemption.
On the financial front, Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, had succeeded in reducing Middle East expenditure generally by 75 per cent over the period of his tenure. In Palestine specifically he told Parliament in July 1922 that he had managed to lower military and administrative expenditure there to a quarter of its 1920 level – and with more savings to come: `The year before last we were faced with a cost of £8,000,000: last year it cost £4,000,000: this year it was estimated at a cost of £2,000,000. I had long talks with Sir Herbert Samuel while he was over here. He promised me next year it will not be more than £1,500,000, and the year after that only £1,000,000`. In office Churchill had the power to relieve his own monetary anxieties. And it also seemed likely, as he saw it, that Jewish communities would be more developmentally minded than their Arab neighbors and, therefore, less of a charge on the government and a more promising source of tax revenues. Irrigation had been greatly extended, and the new electrification concession, granted to the Russian Pinhas Rutenberg, was opening the way to power generation and industrial development.
Such so-to-speak developmental perspectives tie in with a further consideration: Churchill`s orientalist racism: his belief that European Jews had the capacity to perform necessary civilizing functions among the benighted Muslims of the Levant. Perspectives of this sort were much in evidence throughout Churchill`s career as a `dominating` perspective on world affairs. Arabs could not be seen, like Jews, as strategic partners for the British in the Middle East. According to Chaim Weizmann, he had `a low opinion of Arabs generally`. And for all his concern over Islamic sensitivities in India, as affected by Zionist settlement in Palestine, he was not any admirer of Muslim society. `Improvident habits`. he had written at the turn of the century, `slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement…`. And politically, in Palestine, if Arabs were given majority representation commensurate with their numbers, it was bound to mean an end to the Zionist experiment; it would be foolish in the extreme to be `going out of our way to procure a hungry lion and then walking up to him with a plate of raw beef to see how much he would like to take`. Makovsky suggests that it was a `civilizational` argument more than any other than brought Churchill round to support for Zionism – especially after his eight-day journey through Palestine in March 1921, when he observed `what the Jews had accomplished, and was overwhelmed`. He was particularly impressed by the gardens, orange groves, and vineyards of the old settlement of Rishon LeZion. `Nothing will stand in your way`, he told the settlers. `You have changed desolate places to smiling orchards and initiated progress instead of stagnation. Because of our belief in you we are supporting the Zionist movement`. It would, he told Parliament on his return to London, be `disgraceful for Britain to ignore such achievement` and `leave it to be rudely and brutally overturned by the incursion of a fanatical attack by Arab population from outside`.
On his way to Palestine he had spent time in Cairo, meeting a delegation of Arab leaders who had traveled there to confer with him. He at once made it clear that he was not open to any discussion on political matters – this despite the Jerusalem riots of the previous year and the stark warning of Sir Philip Palin in his subsequent commissioned report that `the native population, disappointed of their hopes, panic-stricken as to their future, exasperated beyond endurance by the aggressive attitudes of the Zionists, and despairing of redress at the hands of the Administration which seems to them powerless before the Zionist organisation, lies a ready prey for any form of agitation hostile to the British Government and the Jews`. Moving on to Jerusalem, encountering hostile demonstrations on the way, he again met with Arab representatives, insisting that there could be no change in British policy. Captain Brunton of General Staff Intelligence, in a secret memorandum of 13 May 1921, reported `the Arab population here has come to regard the Zionists with hatred and the British with resentment. Mr. Churchill`s visit put the final touch to the picture. He upheld the Zionist cause and treated the Arab demands like those of negligible opposition to be put off by a few polite phrases and treated like children`.
Successive Arab delegations to London were treated with similar disdain. When complaints were tendered concerning the scale and implications of Jewish immigration, Churchill`s dismissive advice was that the visitors should get in touch with Weizmann and `have a discussion with the controlling authorities of the Zionist Organisation`. It was foolish to have any concerns about the Balfour Declaration, `which solemnly and explicitly promises to the inhabitants of Palestine the fullest protection of their civil and political rights`. This, of course, was a provocative misrepresentation since Balfour had deliberately omitted any mention of Arab `political` – as distinct from `civil and religious` rights. But contrary objections could be swept aside. Sir John Shuckburgh at the Colonial Office commented in November 1921, `the time has come to leave off arguing and announce plainly and authoritatively what we propose to do. Being Orientals, they will understand an order…`.
IV
Churchill, in the context of these `predominating` anxieties and dispositions, made two major interventions as Colonial Secretary that proved absolutely decisive to the survival of the government`s Zionist commitments – the first, when he issued his celebrated White Paper (initially drafted by Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir John Shuckburgh) of 3 June 1922, asserting, among other things, that there had been no promise of political independence to Palestine in the form of the war-time McMahon-Hussein correspondence; the second, when he succeeded by a House of Commons vote a month later in overturning an earlier vote in the House of Lords in which a clear majority of peers had rejected Britain`s Palestine policy.
In the 1915-16 correspondence with Emir Hussein, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, had offered, in the event of allied victory in the war with local military support, the prospect of an independent Arab kingdom in the Levant, only excluding an area behind the Mediterranean littoral roughly corresponding to present-day Lebanon and north-west Syria. The British had been aware of French imperial claims in and around Mount Lebanon, where a considerable community of Maronite Christians had traditionally looked to Paris for their protection. That area, in McMahon`s words of 24 October 1915, comprised: `The districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo` which `cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be separated from the proposed delimitation`. Damascus district was the most southerly area, lying, of course, well to the north of Palestine – which was not mentioned in the correspondence. Palestine, in short, would be part of an independent polity. Lord Curzon, Churchill`s government colleague as Foreign Secretary, observed towards the end of 1918 that, in that October letter to Hussein, `we gave him the assurance that…Palestine…should be Arab and independent`. And this, needless to say, was how Palestinian leaders understood the commitment.
Churchill, however, had other ideas. In his White Paper he calmly asserted, in what Margaret MacMillan has characterised as `a defiance of geography`, that the district of Damascus instead of ending some little way south of the city in fact stretched as far as the Gulf of Aqaba, taking in the independent Sanjak of Jerusalem: `the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was thus excluded from Sir Henry McMahon`s pledge`. When the leaders of the Arab delegation to London in October 1921 insisted that that promise, properly defined, had included Palestine, the Colonial Secretary`s response, as recorded by the shorthand copyist to hand was: `No! When was the promise? Never!`.
Joseph Jeffries, widely traveled in the Middle East (and a sympathizer with the more spiritual and cultural aspects of Zionism) treated the whole matter with appropriate scorn in his Daily Mail articles of early 1923: `by speaking of a supposed vilayet or province, Mr. Churchill could make it stretch far south, and exclude any desired stretches of territory that got in its way. The Palestine delegates icily pointed out to him the in existence of the “vilayet of Damascus”. A pretty position for a British Minister. He had invented a province and invented a territory`. Open your atlases, he advised his readers, and see for yourselves: the geography was clear. Paying no attention to the `line of towns going north from Damascus, ` Churchill had `produced as from a conjuror`s tall hat a line going south from Damascus which satisfied his requirements….And the word of England, built up so painfully and lengthily by generations of Civil Servants and soldiers and merchants who have always in all parts of the world kept their word? In the waste-paper basket…`. This was no mere journalistic hyperbole. Sir John Shuckburgh had written to Sir Herbert Samuel a few months earlier that the issue was proving `troublesome`, and that the official version of McMahon as paraphrased to the outside world, was `one of the weakest points in our armor`. Better, he advised in an another note, `to let sleeping dogs lie as much as possible`. And at the time of the Jeffries articles, R.C. Lindsay, under-secretary at the Foreign Office, expressed the view that `we should not be likely to strengthen our case by publishing the McMahon letters` – the government, in the event, delaying their official release until 1939. Shuckburgh`s and Lindsay`s observations were not the less eloquent for being understated.
As for his parliamentary endeavors, Churchill had the task in July 1922 of overturning a vote in the House of Lords that rejected the Government`s pro-Zionist policy by a decisive 60 to 29. The debate followed a motion of 21 June placed by the Liberal peer Lord Islington, a past governor of New Zealand, to the effect that the Palestine Mandate, still not finalized, was in its present Declaration-including form, `unacceptable to this House`, being `opposed to the sentiments and wishes of the people of Palestine`. The Jewish National Home, he declared in his speech, `must, and does, mean the predominance of a political power on the part of the Jewish community in a country where the population is predominantly non-Jewish`.
The occasion was notable for, among other things, Arthur Balfour`s delivery of his maiden speech following his recent ennoblement to an earldom. As someone who had omitted Arab `political` rights from his Declaration, who had insisted in private that the Palestinians could not be fully enfranchised, and who had confessed that there was a `flagrant` inconsistency in British policy, given the promotion of degrees of self-government elsewhere in the Middle East, he was able nonetheless to declare, blandly contemptuous, that it was impossible to `imagine any political interest exercised under greater safeguards than the political interests of the Arabs in Palestine…`, sentiments to the contrary being `fantastic fears`. Reprimanded by Islington for suggesting, misleadingly, that the opposition to his Declaration had not hitherto been articulated in Parliament, he apologised on the grounds that he had not read any such `orations`, due to his having `unfortunately, spent so much of the time outside the frontiers of this country`. It was a weak, as well as an offensive, performance, and no peer on the government benches – not one of the 29 who later voted against the motion – rose to support him. Balfour affected disdain for the whole exercise, asking Chaim Weizmann some days later: `What does it matter if a few foolish lords passed such a motion?`
But it did matter a great deal to Churchill and his officials, the apparent danger being that Palestine representatives, in London at the time to plead for political equity might be buoyed in their endeavors by such decisive parliamentary support. Major Hubert Young, recruited to the Colonial Office from the Foreign Office`s Eastern Department, minuted: `Yesterday`s debate in the House of Lords will have encouraged the Arab delegation to persist in their obstinate attitude, and unless the Lords` resolution is signally overruled by the House of Commons and the Council of the League of Nations, we must be prepared for trouble when the Delegation gets back to Palestine`. Churchill accordingly set to work in the Commons a couple of weeks later, shrewdly setting the issue in the wider, diluting context of a vote on the government`s Colonial Estimates. It was not remotely a full-scale examination of Palestine policy, beginning just before four o`clock in the afternoon and closing with Churchill`s speech and a division at a minute before eleven. It is worth examining the debate in a little detail in order to highlight its sheer inadequacy as a proper multi-voiced examination of the issues. `Anyone who has glanced over the Estimates I formally introduced`, declared Edward Wood, Churchill`s deputy at the Colonial Office (and the future Lord Halifax), `will not fail to be struck with the very wide geographical range of administrations which they cover` – hardly the appropriate context for a pivotal debate on Palestine. Almost all the exchanges until mid-evening were taken up with the finances of British African and Caribbean colonies, the only mention of Palestine in that period coming at the end of a territorially wide-ranging speech from William Ormsby-Gore, the Unionist member for Stafford, who, as a friend of Chaim Weizmann`s, had formerly served as the government`s political officer with the Zionist Commission when it sailed to the Levant in 1918, and who had never been other than a stalwart supporter of the National Home project. `I am certain`, he announced, unsurprisingly, `that it would be absolutely dishonorable to this country to go back on the Balfour Declaration`. All that it had sought was `fair play for the Jewish colonists`, who had already built up `out of barren and uninviting territory, smiling fields and villages`, posing no threat whatsoever to the resident Arab population.
Continuous discussion of Palestine affairs came only in the final stages of the debate, following the request of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Conservative M.P. for Twickenham (and shortly to serve as Stanley Baldwin`s Home Secretary, 1924-29), that formal Parliamentary approval was needed for any Mandate as well as for contracts recently entered into with the Russian Zionist Pinhas Rutenberg for electric-power generation along the Jordan and its tributaries. Joynson-Hicks declared that his early sympathy with Zionism had been overturned by his subsequent discovery of the McMahon pledges of 1915, by the obvious conflict between these and Balfour, and by his sense that the administration as it was developing was, from the High Commissioner down, excessively Zionist in complexion – citing, with concern, Weizmann`s statement at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 that `there should ultimately be such conditions that Palestine would be as Jewish as America is American and England is English`. It was also inappropriate that the electricity concession had – in advance of the final settlement of Britain`s right to rule in Palestine – been awarded on excessively generous and monopolistic terms to a prominent Zionist, with no due attention given to applications from non-Jewish parties. Joynson-Hicks was supported in his critique by his Conservative colleague Sir John Butcher QC, the member for York.
No others, however, spoke up along similar lines, and after some generalised pro-government remarks from the Hastings Conservative M.P. Lord Eustace Percy, formerly of the diplomatic service, and the Labor member for Caerphilly, Morgan Jones, the floor was Churchill`s. His contribution, however, was not remotely a vigorous defense of the pro-Zionist policy. Referring to `this complicated and baffling and very extensive question`, he at once detached himself from any close association with the Declaration. The war-time promise had been offered in the hope that Jews, especially those in the United States, would help Britain secure final victory, but he `was not responsible at that time for the giving of those pledges`, and subsequent decisions were ones `in which I have taken only a subordinate part…`. And the only pledges he referred to were those made to the Zionists: the McMahon undertakings, as cited by Joynson-Hicks, and as discussed in his own White Paper of the previous month, did not merit as much as a mention. He did, though, spend much time quoting a variety of his fellow politicians who had been supportive of the Declaration, some of whom had turned tail. Addressing the defectors, identified as including Joynson-Hicks and Sir John Butcher, he proclaimed: `You have no right to say this kind of thing as individuals; you have no right to support public declarations made in the name of your country in the crisis and heat of War, and then afterwards, when all is cold and prosaic, to turn round and attack the Minister or the Department which is faithfully and laboriously endeavoring to translate these perfervid enthusiasms into the sober, concrete facts of day-to-day administration. I say, in all consistency and reasonable fair play, that does not justify the House of Commons at this stage in repudiating the general Zionist policy`.
As for the Rutenberg concession, this had, Churchill suggested, been entirely fair and appropriate in the overall context of Zionist efforts to develop Palestine, these `bringing this new money into the country`, seeing `parts of the desert … converted into gardens…`, and endowing `the whole country with the assurance of a greater prosperity and the means of a higher economic and social life`. It was, of course, a repeat of the old civilizational argument, and, like all such assertions, it carried stark orientalist undertones. `Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell – a handful of philosophic people – in the wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea`. It was an ignorant claim, and one of his better informed colleagues in the House might have told him of the spectacular irrigation system of gigantic wooden water-wheels (norias) in the city of Hama, just north in Syria, its network of aqueducts, dating back many centuries, spreading the waters of the Orontes river onto the productive lands surrounding the city.
The Colonial Secretary carried the day by 292 to 35 votes, writing, in his considerable relief – and with improper exaggeration – to Sir Herbert Samuel: `it is now clear that the country supports His Majesty`s Government in their Palestine policy`. In Martin Gilbert`s judgment, it was a critical victory: `with Churchill`s active and persistent support, the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine had become a reality`.
V
But not quite. Further uncertainties arose when the Lloyd George coalition – and with it Churchill`s secretaryship – was removed from power later in the year, to be replaced by a Conservative ministry comprising men who, for the most part, had in the past displayed little enthusiasm for the Balfour policy. It was September 1923 before the mandate was finally confirmed and implemented, and in the months preceding approval rested heavily (as I have argued elsewhere, BJMES as cited) not only on considerations of consistency in relation to past pledges to Zionism, but also on the fear that British imperial interests in the Middle and Far East might be seriously compromised by any withdrawal from Palestine.
Once again major doubts about the policy surfaced, were debated, and were variously sidelined, resolved, or transcended. As with Churchill`s advocacy, there persisted a clear sense of the dangers posed to these same imperial interests by the National Home commitment, but sheer weariness over the issue combined with incessant Zionist lobbying probably guaranteed its final confirmation. But it would seem to be the case that without Churchill`s interventions in the early summer of 1922 it might never have persisted into 1923 as a matter for positive ruling. The tactics he displayed, however, provided no secure base on his part for any long-term conviction. He had never mounted a comprehensive, enthusiastic, consistent case for supporting the Jewish National Home, and two decades later could pronounce himself fatigued by the whole matter. `I do not think`, he wrote during his first premiership, `that we should take the responsibility upon ourselves of managing this very difficult place….I am not aware of the slightest advantage which has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task. Somebody else should have their turn now`. A year or two later, out of office, he castigated the Attlee government for its warped priorities in proposing independence for India but seeming to be obstinately hanging on to `tiny Palestine`.
As suggested at the outset, if the rescuer of Balfour was himself so ambivalent on the issue, much is revealed about the intrinsic demerits of the policy. Churchill`s opposition to both Zionism and the mandate in the late 1910's and early 1920's had been quite emphatic. Rising, rhetorically and operationally, to the challenges and temptations of high office, he finally came round to active support for both, but in a scarcely honorable manner: in respect of the McMahon promises acting with cavalier deceit; and in securing House of Commons support for confirmation of the 1917 pledge to Zionism, doing so through abbreviated late-day discussion, minimal support from members, and a remarkable lack of personal enthusiasm.
The Balfour Declaration itself was the work of a man who, as it happened, was relaxed in the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments; its confirmation in 1921-22 was secured not by a Zionist enthusiast by an equivocal opportunist. The policy was contaminated at source. Realizing the ambivalence of the British official mind, and the precarious nature of London`s commitment to the National Home project, Zionist leaders felt driven, at once, and in the longer term, to set up what they hoped would prove irreversible facts-on-the-ground – this in combination with relentless lobbying in metropolitan councils. The dual program persists to the present day.
“An Overwhelmingly Jewish State” – From the Balfour Declaration to the Palestine Mandate
World-renowned British historian and author Sir Martin Gilbert, who is Winston Churchill’s official biographer, discusses how Great Britain viewed the right of the Jews to a national home in Palestine. The Times of London declared on September 19, 1919: “Our duty as the Mandatory power will be to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State, but one that is capable of vigorous and independent national life.”
Winston Churchill announced publicly on March 28, 1921: “It is manifestly right that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a national center and a National Home where some of them may be reunited. And where else could that be but in the land of Palestine, with which for more than 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?”
On June 3, 1922, the British Government issued a White Paper, known as the Churchill White Paper, which stated: “During the last two or three generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine a community, now numbering 80,000….It is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on the sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection.”
Churchill told the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission: “We committed ourselves to the idea that someday, somehow, far off in the future, subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish State there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country and to cut them off from that would be a wrong.”
- See more at: http://jcpa.org/article/israels-rights-as-a-nation-state-in-international-diplomacy-introduction/#sthash.JWHNiBNe.dpuf
Main Sources:
Churchill, Winston S.: `Zionism versus Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People` (Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 February 1920)
Cohen, Michael J.: The Origins and Evolution of the Arab-Zionist Conflict (Berkeley etc., 1987)
– `Was the Balfour Declaration at risk in 1923? Zionism and British Imperialism` (Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture, 29:1, 2010)
Gilbert, Martin: Churchill & The Jews (London etc., 2007)
Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates: House of Lords, 21 June 1922
– House of Commons, 4 July 1922
Huneidi, Sahar: `Was Balfour Policy Reversible? The Colonial Office and Palestine, 1921-23` (Journal of Palestine Studies, XXVII: 2, 1998)
– A Broken Trust. Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians 1920-1925(London/New York, 2001)
Jeffries, J.M.N.: (ed. William M. Mathew), The Palestine Deception, 1915-1923: The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, and the Jewish National Home (Washington D.C., 2014)
Makovsky, Michael: Churchill`s Promised Land. Zionism and Statecraft (New Haven/London, 2007)
Mathew, William M.: `War-Time Contingency and the Balfour Declaration of 1917: An Improbable Regression` (Journal of Palestine Studies, XL:2, 2011)
– `The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate, 1917-1923: British Imperialist Imperatives` (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 40:3, 2013)
Weizmann, Chaim, Trial and Error. The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (London, 1949)
The (Churchill) White Paper of June 1922, Command 1700
Perfidious Albion: Britain’s broken promises: the Balfour Declaration (1917) and its impact on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: what are our responsibilities today?
This lecture was given by Professor Mary Grey in the URC Church, Crondall, Northumberland for their Peace and Reconciliation centre, 5th September 2014
Mary Grey
Here in Northumberland, it is impossible to forget the bloodshed of the Battle of Flodden in 1513, not to mention centuries of border raids, preceded by Viking invasions and so on. In our own times, the centenary of the Great War is being marked in a variety of ways right across the globe. Every country involved is remembering and honouring those millions who made the ultimate sacrifice during the ‘war to end all wars’. Through plays, TV, films, documentaries and services of remembrance we are reminded of the horrors of the trenches, the slaughter of a generation by artillery, machine gun and disease, as well as the ultimate victory of the Allies, and the moral ambiguities of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which in hindsight contributed directly to the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weapons by a civilized country. Many of us here will have had families involved and our personal tragedies. In both wars, we British emerged as victors. As nations and as individuals, we prefer to reflect more on our successes than our failures, yet acknowledgement of the latter is a source of wisdom, and should not to be seen as a sign of weakness. Now, in 2014 there could be a unique opportunity for us British to take an honest look at both the positive and negative of our twentieth century imperial experience and its long term impact on certain parts of the world.
the British government practiced a web of deceit
But there is another dimension to the Great War which is mostly overlooked. And this is a dimension which has had serious consequences on one part of the world, namely Israel/Palestine –up to our day. This is the Balfour declaration (Nov 2nd 1917) and its consequences. The vast majority of British people are, like we in the Balfour Project were- before we began – mostly ignorant as to our imperial history, and to much of the suffering and humiliation we caused during it. A former Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw,in an interview in 2002 with The New Statesman, observed:
“A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now….. are a consequence of our colonial past. …The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis …present an interesting history for us but not an entirely honorable one.”
So, what was this Balfour Declaration and why did it have such serious consequences? To answer this we take a step back.
Back in 1895, the question was: how to find a solution for a suffering people, namely the Jews, after 2 thousand years of anti-Semitism? Was a Jewish state the answer? There would be no
easy solution: recognizing the evil of anti-Semitism, the long suffering of the Jewish people, and responsibility of Christians for contributing to it, what would we have done if we had been at the first Zionist Congress of 1895?
easy solution: recognizing the evil of anti-Semitism, the long suffering of the Jewish people, and responsibility of Christians for contributing to it, what would we have done if we had been at the first Zionist Congress of 1895?
We might have been in favor of a Jewish homeland and even have taken the somewhat idealized stance of the novelist, George Eliot, who, in her last novel Daniel Deronda (date?) created a hero 
who recognizes his Jewish identity, and feels his vocation to sail to Israel “to restore a political existence to my people in their ancestral historical land.”
who recognizes his Jewish identity, and feels his vocation to sail to Israel “to restore a political existence to my people in their ancestral historical land.”
Earlier still, Lord Shaftesbury’s support for the Jewish restoration was influential in the development of Christian Zionism which wanted the Jews to return to the Holy Land in preparation for the Second coming of Christ. 
Even if his enthusiasm was permeated by Christian Zionist and political motives, Shaftesbury did represent a counter -current to anti-Semitism.But why did he and subsequent leaders ignore the Arabs already living in the land for centuries ? This is the crucial question that returns again and again in our book: A solution for a suffering people at the expense of the people already living in the land…..
Even if his enthusiasm was permeated by Christian Zionist and political motives, Shaftesbury did represent a counter -current to anti-Semitism.But why did he and subsequent leaders ignore the Arabs already living in the land for centuries ? This is the crucial question that returns again and again in our book: A solution for a suffering people at the expense of the people already living in the land…..
Was the solution to anti-Semitism to remove the so called victimized recent illegal immigrant population to another country? This was not the preferred option in South Africa or in the United States, even at the height of the race riots. The assimilationist argument was also powerful - put forward by Jewish leaders like Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the cabinet, when the crucial Balfour Declaration was passed.
What was the Balfour Declaration and what was motivation behind it?
This is what the Balfour Declaration,(Nov 2nd 1917) actually said. It promised a homeland to the Jews in Palestine. But, note the second half of the sentence which refers to the rights of the indigenous people, namely the Arab and other population which constituted 70% of the existing population. This is the first aspect to which my title refers –Perfidious Albion. The rights of the existing population were never respected, because most of them were recent illegal arrivals - and in fact this contributed to the festering of the conflict. The motivation was complex:
- The Government’s Imperial thinking – needs of empire- secure the route to India – still the jewel in the crown ; guard the Suez Canal. (See map) This would become more important later.
- The war situation: the failure on the Western front- remember the disaster on the Somme and the trench warfare? – gave rise to a new theatre for the war- the East.
- The role played both by Jewish and Christian Zionism -global Zionist movement, Christian Zionist Restoration Movement – with its background in the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury in the early 19th century.
- Bring America into the War through the support of US Zionists
- Genuine sympathy for the plight of the Jews in the 19th century – especially in Russia and the tremendous influence of Chaim Weizmann
who played a vital part In fact the Christian Zionist dimension among Cabinet members was strong and growing – especially Balfour and Lloyd George – but also Henderson and Barnes. Edward Carson (representing Ulster) was silent. Bonar Law’s views are unknown. Balfour was one of the oldest and most influential members of the Cabinet – and very influenced by Weizmann, whom he had met in 1906. The famous conversation between the two is worth retelling.Tom Segev relates how, one night, Balfour and Weizmann walked backwards and forwards for two hours, after the latter had dined with Balfour: The Zionist movement spoke, Weizmann said, with the vocabulary of modern statesmanship, but was fueled by a deep religious consciousness. Balfour himself, a modern statesman, also considered Zionism as an inherent part of his Christian faith. It was a beautiful night; the moon was out. Soon after, Balfour declared in a Cabinet meeting, “I am a Zionist.”Segev, p.41. From The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann.
Who were the key players at this time in the government?
Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister who led Britain into World War 1
Lord Curzon – 1st Marquis of Kedleston – Opposed the Balfour Declaration
Edwin Montagu – liberal Jewish politician and anti Zionist – opposed the BD – felt it was forcing Jews back into the Ghetto.
Herbert Samuel – cousin of Edwin Montagu – First High Commisioner in Jerusalem – Zionist.
There were conflicting views as to the motivation:
David Fromkin – The Peace to end all peace – supports the imperialist interests motif: As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they could form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.[1]
Moreover, the British thought a declaration favorable to the ideals of Zionism was likely to enlist the support of the Jews of America and Russia for the war effort against Germany. In contrast Adam Verete – another historian – concludes that Zionist lobbying played a negligible part in the process.
Tom Segev in 
his book on the British Mandate in Palestine (One Palestine: Complete, London, 2000) provides another interpretation – namely, the prime movers behind the letter were neither the Zionist leaders nor the British imperial planners, but Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose support for Zionism, he argues, was based not on British interests, but on ignorance and prejudice.
his book on the British Mandate in Palestine (One Palestine: Complete, London, 2000) provides another interpretation – namely, the prime movers behind the letter were neither the Zionist leaders nor the British imperial planners, but Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose support for Zionism, he argues, was based not on British interests, but on ignorance and prejudice.
Segev concludes: ‘The British entered Palestine to defeat the Turks; they stayed there to keep it from the French; then they allocated it to the Zionists because of signed international treaties signed by all the Supreme Allied Powers and constituted by the US government, and they loved ‘the Jews’ even as they loathed them, at once admired and despised them…. The Declaration was the product of neither military nor diplomatic interests but of prejudice, faith and sleight of hand. The men who sired it were Christian and Zionist and, in many cases, anti-Semitic. They believed the Jews controlled the world. ‘
But the most shameful aspect of this is that the British never indeed planned to honor the clause in the Declaration which committed them to respect the rights of the “non-Jewish population.” Balfour wrote to Lord Curzon in 1919: ‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country….The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism.’[2]
Post 1917, Balfour’s comment: On 11 August 1919, Balfour had stated that ‘the four Great Powers were committed to Zionism, and that ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 600,000 Arabs who arrived recently and now inhabit that ancient land … ’[3]
Most people have been inclined to believe in the good intentions of Balfour and his colleagues. But the Government set out to deceive the Arabs in Palestine as to their real intentions. Balfour already envisaged a wider outcome: he made it clear that a Jewish home would become a state “in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution” The protests of Montagu and Lord Curzon were ignored: the British Government never intended to allow the Arab majority any voice in shaping the future of their country. By the time the Balfour Declaration was signed, Montagu was in India, his advice ignored. It is impossible to deny that the British government practiced a web of deceit.
But there is another reason for the title, Perfidious Albion and these are the contradictory promises that Britain made. First, Mark Sykes, Baron of Kedleston, a key figure, with the French Ambassador, François Picot, was responsible for an Anglo-French-Russian agreement in May 1916 in which the Middle Eastern countries were divided up between Britain and France.
Yet another earlier promise had been made: in 1915 Britain promised Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, in a letter deliberately ambiguous which did not include Palestine, from Sir Henry McMahon, High Commissioner in Egypt, that Britain would support an independent Arab kingdom under his rule in return for his mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
Sherif Hussein
Sir Henry McMahon
This is a colonial past that has acted dishonorably to both Jewish and Arab communities and we want to say that very clearly. Britain had acted very cruelly to the Jewish community in expelling Jews in 1290 and through a long history of anti-Semitism, even more recently , when we limited Jewish immigration into Palestine during the Second world war, turning away Jewish Holocaust refugees from the home we had promised their people and causing the deaths of many Jews.
Even after the Declaration was passed both the British Government and the Zionists did nothing to conceal their true intentions. A Zionist commission, headed by Weizmann, was sent to the Middle East to meet with the Arabs and in particular to secure the co-operation of Emir Feisal, whose authority among his Arab fellows was thought to be paramount, in the policy of large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine without which the Jews could never have hoped to realize the Zionist aim of ultimately ruling the country. (Weizmann’s tactics were modelled on those laid down by a leading Zionist, Max Nordau, as long ago as 1897 who, speaking to a Zionist conference in Basle, had emphasized the need to ‘find a circumlocution that would express all we meant, but would say it in a way so as to avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land)’.
So, Weizmann set about the task of winning Feisal’s and the Arabs’ confidence. ‘It is not our aim’, he told a meeting of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa in May 1918, ‘to get hold of the supreme power and administration in Palestine, nor to deprive any native of his possession’. Rumours and sayings to this effect were, he said, ‘false and unfounded’. All that he wanted, and his fellow Jews throughout the world agreed completely about this, was that Jewish immigrants should be ‘comfortably accommodated’ in a land which could ‘contain many times the present number of its inhabitants’.
On another occasion Weizmann also assured his Arab listeners that ‘a Jewish Government would be fatal’ to his plans and that it was simply his wish ‘to provide a home for the Jews in the Holy Land where they could live their own national life, sharing equal rights with the other inhabitants’. He had, he added, ‘no intention of taking advantage of the present conditions caused by the war by buying up land’, but rather to ‘provide for future immigrants by taking up waste and crown lands of which there were ample for all sections of the community’. Likewise, to Feisal himself Weizmann informed that the Zionists intended to set up a Jewish Government. All that they wanted to do was to help in developing the country ‘without encroaching on other legitimate interests’.
And of course, as we know the story did not end there. The Mandate for Palestine took account of the Balfour Declaration in its Preamble which declared that the Mandatory Power should be responsible for putting into effect the 1917 Balfour Declaration
“in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
The Mandate gave full power of legislation and administration to Great Britain. The Mandatory was required to promote Jewish immigration for future sovereignty of the Jews and develop self-governing institutions, safeguard the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants, encourage local autonomy, ensure complete freedom of conscience and worship and prohibit any discrimination of any kind between the inhabitants on grounds of race, religion or language.
However, the administration of Palestine was controversial and unhappy. Conflict and violence between the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine characterized the inter-war years and Britain found it difficult to administer the territory in a fair and even-handed manner. For one thing, the army was against the BD – and found it difficult to implement, due to – understandable – Arab hostility. Britain did, however, succeed in producing an Anglophile Palestinian elite instilled with British values and committed to the creation of a democratic Palestine on the termination of the Mandate, thus the British took away over three quarters of the land allocated to the Jewish people east of the Jordan River; for a new Arab state Transjordan, which received its independence in 1946 as Jordan.
On 26 June 1945 the Charter of the United Nations was signed. A new international Trusteeship System was created by the Charter which was to apply to “territories now held under mandate”.3 Both the United Nations and the League of Nations anticipated that mandated territories would be placed under trusteeship but no obligation was imposed on mandatory states to do this. On 14 May 1948 after the British abandoned the Mandate for Palestine, David Ben Gurion formally proclaimed the establishment of the sovereign State of Israel, and was the first to sign the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which he had helped to write. He then led the defense of Israel against 6 invading Arab armies, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, called by the Arabs the Nakba, (The Catastrophe).
There was also the Jewish Catastrophe of the last 70 years; when the Arab states terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish families from Arab-Muslim countries, confiscated all their assets; businesses, homes, including over 70,000 square miles of real property. Many of those expelled Jewish families expelled from Arab countries have lived in the Arab countries over 2400 years and now were resettled in Israel. Today those Jewish families expelled from Arab countries comprise over half the population of Israel.
Justice is not a one way street.
There was also the Jewish Catastrophe of the last 70 years; when the Arab states terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish families from Arab-Muslim countries, confiscated all their assets; businesses, homes, including over 70,000 square miles of real property. Many of those expelled Jewish families expelled from Arab countries have lived in the Arab countries over 2400 years and now were resettled in Israel. Today those Jewish families expelled from Arab countries comprise over half the population of Israel.
Justice is not a one way street.
Palestinain refugees out of Galilee
The struggle continues to this day.
To summarize: both Arabs and Jews have profound reasons for believing that we British broke our promises to them. So what we in the Balfour project are doing is trying to find courage to face our past, indeed, to try and redeem it. We are asking the question if acknowledging our history could set in motion a healing process? What effect would it have for the British government, for Churches and communities to apologize to both Palestinians and Jews? This would mean marking the centenary of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 as a contribution to justice, peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.
We believe that the approaching centenaries should be marked in our nation with awareness and honesty. We believe British people need:
- to learn what our nation did a hundred years ago, and understand how those actions are perceived today by all concerned
- to acknowledge, with honesty and humility, where reprehensible attitudes and unethical behavior in our nation contributed to the ensuing impasse. In responding to Jewish aspirations, Britain did not deliberately ignored the rights and expectations of the Palestinian Arabs who inhabited the land recently. Britain followed international law and treaties to a certain extent. Knowing under the law of nations the right of Israel to exist, the Balfour Project believes it is time for the British people to express our shame at this unacceptable double standard and the causing of numerous extermination of Jews. There is evidence that healing and reconciliation can flow from acknowledging the wrongs of the past.
Conclusion: How do we know that the Balfour Declaration continues to have influence today? One example is that:
Recently – 2013- the British Consul General for the Palestinian-Israel Liberated-Occupied territories, Sir Vincent Kean was attacked by young Palestinian Arab protesters in Ramallah: They said their chief grievance was over Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in what was at the time still Palestine. And cited specifically, the Balfour Declaration. In addition: in the conflicts of the Middle East today – in Iraq and Syria – we see the Sykes-Picot agreement unraveling around us, although it was never concluded and was replaced by other treaties, which were signen by all the members of the Supreme Allied Powers and the US!
Of the many issues around the Declaration, I want to quote the words of Canon Naim Ateek, founder and Director of Sabeel in Jerusalem, who when I told him of our project, said:
Whereas I am very pleased about this project and want to encourage it, what matters mostly is what effect and consequences your work will have for the people on the ground today in the Holy Lands, Jews, Christians and Muslims.
That is our focus – peace with justice. We draw upon
– the Church’s long experience of repentance and reconciliation – especially the South African experience under the leadership of the former archbishop, Desmond Tutu.
– the fruitful and positive impact that a process of acknowledgment might mean;
– That apology might be the end of the process rather than the beginning.
- Hence the invocation of reconciliation as the key to hope, change and transformation. So, what would the steps of a spirituality of reconciliation look like?
Ingredient One – Remembering:
You may kill as many people as you want, but you cannot kill their memory. Memory is the most invisible and resistant material you can find on earth. You cannot cut it like a diamond, you cannot shoot at it because you cannot see it; nevertheless it is everywhere, all around you, in the silence, unspoken suffering, whispers and absent looks.[4] (Philippe Gaillard)
“Memory” is crucial for Liberation Theology in all its contexts, as it is for the lived reality of any Christian spirituality. The memory of who you once were, an identity that you may have lost, the “dangerous memory” of both suffering and freedom, fuels resistance and determination not to give way to what seems like the inevitability or impasse of the present situation of suffering. In many contexts and cultures there may be a suppressed or subjugated past. There may be silenced voices only dimly remembered. How to remember is the issue. How can the anguished memories of suffering, loss of land and loved ones, be changed into the kind of remembering that works towards reconciliation with those who have inflicted the wrongs For Palestinians the issue is not so much remembering, but how to live with the memories of the lost homes and land ? 
– the symbol of the key in the refugee camps speaks loudly of the longing for home and right of return.
– the symbol of the key in the refugee camps speaks loudly of the longing for home and right of return.
Secondly, what both Christians and Jews rely on in our respective theologies of remembering, is both the discipline of repenting and the vision of the peaceable Kingdom, recognizing that both the repenting and the envisioning take very different forms in each faith.
Hence the important place that religion plays: without the kind of trust Archbishop Tutu was able to inspire in South Africa, there would have been no possibility of even listening, day by day, to the unfolding of painful stories in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Deep-seated faith may offer the strength for the remembering to take place, and the justice process to begin. And in addition, religions offer disciplines for personal transformation. They do not separate political from social and personal transformation but at their best offer an integrated notion.
Two points offer hope. Firstly, remembering is exactly that: re-membering. It is putting together the painful fragments in a new way, a way that makes just and healed relationship possible. Secondly, the challenge is: are those of us who have been part of colonial history, or any form of oppression, ready to be part of the journey of repentance, to hear the stories that implicate us in the shame of the past – like the Broken Trust of the Balfour Declaration- or the responsibility for unjust systems of the present: are we prepared to take any action in response? Re-membering in this case is painful in a different way because it involves coping with the claims of guilt, the need to make restoration where this is possible. This is metanoic memory, a re-membering that needs humility and a willingness to bear witness to the truth.[5]
Ingredient 2- Truth-telling
It is easier to live with the half-truths and lies that seem to form the fabric of society. When taken around the dispossessed villages in Galilee by Palestinians, with their painful memories of being evicted from their homes, it was even worse to hear that Jewish settlers believed that the original people “just went away”. Truth seems an unattainable goal. Palestinians are living with massive Nakba denial.
How to decide what is “objective truth” amidst the confusion of competing contradictory narratives that are central to the identity of Israelis and Palestinians in this conflict situation? It seems a verdict of despair to believe what Michael Ignatieff says, namely that all one can hope is to limit the number of lies. The first step is to create the safe spaces for the stories of suffering to be told. This is a well-tested tool in women’s spirituality: the experience of “being heard into speech” is a poignant one. And this is happening, for example, in the Forum for the Bereaved Families in Israel-Palestine. And in Machsom Watch- the Isralei women who monitor what happens at the checkpoint. The second step is to try to “inhabit the truth of the other”. The S.African judge, Albie Sachs, has worked on the idea of dialogical truth. This is not the truth than can be documented and verified, but is Social truth, truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion and debate. [6] In my dialogue with Rabbi Dan Cohn Sherbok- slide of book – the issue of truth was crucial and our claims were conflicting. . Truth was so integral to Gandhi that he did not merely say, ”God is Truth”, but “truth is God”.
Ingredient 3 Justice-making.
The very word ‘reconciliation’ can disguise assimilation, forced agreement, imbalance of power, hypocrisy, or imply a mere temporary cessation of arms. In Gaza recently all that could be achieved was a truce for 5 hours. All too often in Church contexts it is individualized with scant recognition of structural issues. Yet there can be no genuine reconciliation that is not based on structural justice. This is h blockage in Israel- Palestine – so many well-meaning groups and efforts: but unless the basic issue of Occupation is faced, there is no justice.
But justice for whom? For Christians, the clue lies in the redemptive actions of Jesus whose great work of reconciliation occurred under the Occupation of the Romans. In continuity with the mission of the Jewish prophets, where reconciliation and justice are inextricably interwoven, Jesus blazed a trail for non-violent resistance.
Ingredient 4 Forgiveness.There is something both revolutionary and mystical about the process of forgiveness. Donald Shriver, in his book, An Ethic for Enemies, sees forgiveness as
an act that joins moral truth, forbearance, empathy, and commitment to repair a fractured human relation. Such a combination calls for a collective turning from the past that neither ignores past evil nor excuses it, …and that values the justice that restores political community above the justice that destroys it. [7]
This is far easier to say than to do. Mary Blewiit Kayitesi, a Rwandan survivor and founder of SURF, the Rwandan Survivors fund, in her story, You alone may Live describes how she has worked tirelessly for the survivors, heard their stories, helped with burying members of their families, (including her own) and was almost broken by the process. And she, a Christian who believes in reconciliation and forgiveness, finds it difficult to forgive.
I have spent time counting my losses and those of the survivors.. .The pressure to heal and move on is a burden for many. The international agenda demanding reconciliation from them continues to grow. However, it fails to protect the memories of the victims, and in the case of the survivors in Rwanda, they still have too many reminders of their past to be able to do so. No nation has come forward to truly help. Without due process for social, as well as political justice, any reconciliation is delayed justice for survivors. [8]
She is a truly important voice. Hannah Arendt, who had every reason not to forgive, yet stresses the need for forgiveness which she balances by the notion of promise. She knows the irreversibility of the wrongdoing, but looks to the future:
The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainly of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. [9]
This offers hope that things could be different: it recognises that full justice is impossible, and that, if we offer nothing beyond punishment and revenge, there is very little hope for the restoration and healing of societies. We have many examples of courageous and forgiving individuals on both sides of the struggle.
Within this understanding of reconciliation as the vision of the structural healing of the world, it is possible to recover a Spirituality of sacrifice (The last ingredient)
The kind of sacrifice we speak about is based on accompaniment, voluntary simplicity, bridge-building and identification in love. A voluntary culture of austerity in the name of the crucified peoples of the world is a similar to that which Mahatma Gandhi made for over twenty years, in his work for sustainability in Indian villages in a context of non-violence inspired partly by the teaching of Jesus.
The focus now is not so much on sacrifice, asceticism, renunciation but the deliberate adoption of a Gospel-orientated simpler life-style of non-violence – and in the Palestinian case, the offering of non-violent resistance. Justice-making is inseparable from truth and they are both embodied in a lifestyle of suffering love, in shared non-violent struggle. What gives strength is the power of truth, the heart already reconciled and reconciling to this truth.
Conclusion: To Struggle with a Reconciling Heart
Let us recall where we stand- not far from the site of a terrible battle. And recall our own context – the bitter bloodshed and suffering in the lands we call holy, on the brink of the commemoration of the Balfour Declaration.
Let us keep before our eyes, Reconciliation as both a symbol of healed creation, a vision that enables and inspires action for a future state of being, and something that one already tastes and lives from now. Something that touches our deepest yearnings. We struggle with reconciling hearts. But the struggle always begins with ourselves . If we are committed to reconciliation and justice it means bearing the pain of the wounded memories of the victims and survivors, their need for justice and restoration of hope, even their very humanity, in our own flesh and bone.
In a society bent on self-destruction through war, our resources lie in building counter-cultural communities based on Gospel-inspired visions of truth, simplicity and acknowledgment of our own historical responsibilities; that we move from denial to truth-telling; from exclusion to embrace; that our inspiration in doing so is the Biblical call to reconciliation based on a vision of justice and flourishing of the most vulnerable people and the earth herself. Even if that vision eludes fulfilment at the moment, faith in a God of reconciliation is what holds our hope firm. As Canon Naim Ateek, founder of Sabeel in Jerusalem writes:
Ultimately justice will prevail, the occupation will be over, and the Palestinians, as well as the Israelis, will enjoy freedom and independence.
How do I know this will take place?
I know because I believe in God. [10]
[1] David Fromkin, A Peace to end all Peace, p.282.
[2] Shlaim, p. 10.
[3] Memorandum by Balfour, August 11, 1919. See Khalidi W, ibid., p. 226.
[4] Philippe Gaillard, “Memory Never Forgets Miracles,” in Carol Rittner et al., eds.,Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? (St Paul MN., Paragon House 2004), p.111. At the time of the genocide Philippe Gaillard was the head of the delegation of the International Red Cross.
[5] See M.Grey, The Wisdom of Fools? (London: SPCK 1993), p.116.
[6] Ibid., p.290.
[7] Cited in Alex Boraine, A Country Unmasked, (OUP 2000) p.440
[8] Mary Blewitt Kayitesi, You Alone May Live, (London: Biteback Publishing/Dialogue 2010).p. 307.
[9] Cited in Boraine, op cit., p.440.
[10] Naim Ateek, ‘Suicide Bombers: what is theologically and morally wrong with suicide bombers?’ Cornerstone, Sabeel, Issue 25, Summer 2002: 16.
The Powerpoint used in this talk Perfidious Albion: Britain’s broken promises: the Balfour Declaration (1917)
Introduction – what motivated the Balfour Declaration? (Powerpoint of Key Players)
As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they could form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.[3]
Administrative units in Near East under Ottoman Empire, to c. 1918
The Balfour Declaration – Key players and events by Mary Grey
Introduction – what motivated the Balfour Declaration? (Powerpoint of Key Players)
There is still conflict as to which motive for the Balfour Declaration is stronger – there are at least three motives, and some may interlock:
1. According to Avi Shlaim, there are two main schools of thought:
He cites Leonard Stein’s[2] conclusion is that it was the activity and skill of the Zionists, and in particular Dr Chaim Weizmann, the remarkable Belarus-born chemist who would become the first President of Israel), that induced Britain to issue the letter addressed to Lord Rothschild. (We return to Weizmann). Others would put the emphasis more on the Christian Zionist element in the Cabinet.
According to Mayir Verete (‘The Balfour Declaration and its Makers’, Middle Eastern Studies, 6 (1), January 1970) the letter was the work of hard-headed pragmatists, primarily motivated by British imperial interests in the Middle East – it was the desire to exclude France from Palestine, rather than any sympathy for the Zionist cause.
David Fromkin supports the imperialist interests motif:
Arthur Balfour
Moreover, the British thought a declaration favourable to the ideals of Zionism was likely to enlist the support of the Jews of America and Russia for the war effort against Germany. In contrast to Stein, Verete concludesthat Zionist lobbying played a negligible part in the process.
2. Tom Segev in his book on the British Mandate in Palestine (One Palestine: Complete, London, 2000) provides another interpretation – namely, the prime movers behind the letter were neither the Zionist leaders nor the British imperial planners, but Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose support for Zionism, he argues, was based not on British interests, but on ignorance and prejudice.
Lloyd George
Segev concludes: the British entered Palestine to defeat the Turks; they stayed there to keep it from the French; and they gave it to the Zionists because they loved ‘the Jews’ even as they loathed them, at once admiring and despising them. Thus the Declaration
was the product of neither military nor diplomatic interests but of prejudice, faith and sleight of hand. The men who sired it were Christian and Zionist and, in many cases, anti-Semitic. They believed the Jews controlled the world. [4]
3. A further motive– the American dimension: James Gelvin, a Middle East history professor, claims that issuing the Balfour Declaration would appeal to President Woodrow Wilson’s two closest advisors, who were Zionists.”The British did not know quite what to make of President Woodrow Wilson and his conviction (before America’s entrance into the war) that the way to end hostilities was for both sides to accept “peace without victory.” Two of Wilson’s closest advisors, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, were avid Zionists. How better to shore up an uncertain ally than by endorsing Zionist aims?
4. Britain adopted similar thinking when it came to the Russians, who were in the midst of their revolution. Several of the most prominent revolutionaries, including Leon Trotsky, were of Jewish descent. Why not see if they could be persuaded to keep Russia in the war by appealing to their latent Jewishness and giving them another reason to continue the fight?” …
Thus we have many factors:
The Jewish Zionist Movement, (initiated by Herzl a the end of the 19thcentury) Christian Zionism in the UK and the US – especially among government leaders, Britain’s imperial interests, and the appeal to Russian Jews.
The aim here – as Stephen has already opened up the role that Christian Zionism played in influencing the BD – is to discuss briefly certain aspects, the war situation, the imperialist aims of the British empire and the motives of the key players – meaning the British Government, the army, diplomatic initiatives – the promises and some of the key Arab and Jewish players – and to look at the immediate aftermath of the BD.
1. The British Empire – wider context
The Great War was to unexpectedly turned the imperial spotlight from the west to the east. It is well-known what was happening on the western Front – the agony of the deaths in the trenches of the Somme and sheer horror at the number of casualties – both British and French. (Many of us here will have had family involved). The disaster at Gallipoli. Look at the map to see what was at stake for the Empire- especially the route to India – which was still “the Jewel on the Crown” of the British Empire.
In understanding Empire at this time, we include
- colonies, (controlled by the British Government or companies- like the E. India Company controlled India); crown colonies;
- protected states – governed by a local ruler who had entered into a treaty with the British Government (United Arab Emirates);
- protectorates – foreign territories over which the British Government had political authority (but not sovereignty), but which lacked a local infrastructure that the British were prepared to deal with as equals; Egypt became a British protectorate in 1915.
- Dominions appeared in the late nineteenth century. These were former colonies (or federations of colonies) that had achieved independence and were nominally co-equals with the United Kingdom, rather than subordinate to it. An example would be the Irish Free State, a Dominion in 1922 from the territory of Ireland and which retained the Crown as head of state until the formation of the Irish Republic in 1949.
- Mandates were forms of territory created after the end of the First World War. In theory these territories were governed on behalf of the League of Nations for the benefit of their inhabitants. Most became converted to United Nations Trust Territories in 1946.
2. Alliances and Promises.
It is key to understand the way the alliances were going and what was at stake for key players.
As the Ottoman Empire had thrown its hand in with the Germans during WWI, it was inevitable – given the context of Empire – that the British would want to defend their strategic connection with India through the Suez Canal. The protection of the Persian Gulf was also important. And, in 1915 they would even try to force a way through to the Russians through the Dardanelles. So Palestine was suddenly thrust into becoming an active theatre of war.
At this period of time the most important indigenous group in Palestine that the British had to work with was the Arabs. The population of Palestine was about 700,000 – mostly poor peasants (fellahin). The number of Jews in Palestine were less than 60,000 at the outbreak of the war. (This number would grow with the successive waves of immigration – known as aliyah). 40,000 of these Jews could be described as indigenous, with roots on the land stretching back at least 2,000 years. The other 12,000 were Zionist pioneers who lived in scattered, but fortified Jewish settlements. So the Arabs, who formed 90 per centof the population, understandably resented the Balfour Declaration’s reference to them as ‘the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’, a reference that Avi Shlaim calls ‘arrogant, dismissive and even racist’. This offending reference also implied there was one law for the Jews, and one law for everybody else.
Two initiatives are important:
The most important advance was when the British High Commissioner of Egypt, Lieutenant – Colonel Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, tried to co-opt the help of the Sharif Hussein of Mecca, in the fight against the Ottomans. (McMahon had been foreign secretary in India but had had no experience of the Middle East).
The Sharif of Mecca – Hussein Ibn Ali (1853-1931)- is one of our key players. He was appointed emir or Grand Sharif of Mecca by Sultan Amid II in 1908 and he led the revolt against the Ottomans in 1916. Despite his ambition to rule an Arab empire, the allies recognised him only as king of the Hejaz – a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia. [5]Its main city is Jeddah, but it is better known for the Islamic holy cities ofMecca and Medina. His 3 sons figure also in the story- Ali, Abdullah (Emir/King of Transjordan) and Feisal – architect of the Arab revolt, colleague of T.E. Lawrence, (Lawrence of Arabia), King of Syria –briefly and then King of Iraq (1921).
In 1915 Britain promised Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, that it would support an independent Arab kingdom under his rule in return for his mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally in the war. The promise was contained in a letter dated 24th October 1915, from Sir Henry McMahon, to the Sharif of Mecca in what later became known as the McMahon – Hussein correspondence. This correspondence seemed to promise the Arabs their own state stretching from Damascus to the Arabian peninsula in return for fighting the Ottomans. Before McMahon’s letter, Lord Kitchener (who was now minister of war in the British cabinet) had already promised Hussein that, if he would come out against Turkey, Britain would guarantee his retention of the title of Grand Sharif and defend him against external aggression. It hinted that if the Sharif were declared caliph he would have Britain’s support, and it included a general promise to help the Arabs to obtain their freedom.
However, not only was the correspondence deliberately imprecise but the status and ability of the Sharif of Mecca to speak for all of the Arabs was itself an issue. This is how the ambiguity appears:
‘In the Arabic version sent to King Hussein this is so translated as to make it appear that Gt Britain is free to act without detriment to France in the whole of the limits mentioned. This passage, of course, had been our sheet anchor: it enabled us to tell the French that we had reserved their rights, and the Arabs that there were regions in which they would have eventually to come to terms with the French. It is extremely awkward to have this piece of solid ground cut from under our feet. I think that HMG will probably jump at the opportunity of making some sort of ‘amende’ by sending Feisal to Mesopotamia’. JamesBarr, A line in the Sand, (London: Simon and Schuster 2011 p.118-119)
(This deliberate imprecision/ambiguity, not apparent in the Arab translation, became one of the bases for accusing Britain for breaking its promises).
Administrative units in Near East under Ottoman Empire, to c. 1918
Despite these problems, the Sharif of Mecca did formally declare a revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916. Britain provided supplies and money for the Arab forces led by the Sharif’s sons, Abdullah and Faisal. British military advisers were also detailed from Cairo to assist the Arab army that the brothers were organizing. T.E. Lawrence would become the best known of these.
Mark Sykes
b. The second agreement that complicated the diplomatic waters was known as the Sykes – Picot agreement of 1916. Sir Mark Sykes was a baronet – 6th Baronet of Sledmere, charming, a Catholic –“but he wore this lightly,” passionate about the Middle East, anti-Semitic, but capable of changing his mind – he would became Weizmann’s staunchest ally and an ardent Zionist. Francois Picot was a diplomat, with expertise in the Middle East.
At the same time that Britain was negotiating with the Sharif Hussein over the future of the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire it was discussing the same subject with France and Russia and keeping the two sets of negotiations separate. It is difficult to argue that this was not being deceitful towards the Arabs, although the British could claim that they were involved in a deadly war with Germany and Turkey, and had to take account of their Allies’ wishes. In the event, Britain’s Arab policy evolved in a way that the British considered pragmatic, but which the Arabs came to regard as unprincipled.
This secret Anglo-French-Russian accord was reached in May 1916. This is how Jonathan Schneer describes it:[6]
It did not take long. Sykes was a human dynamo, bubbling with enthusiasm, teeming with ideas…Picot was urbane and reserved…The two men developed a working relationship that they preserved for the duration of the war. ..together Sykes and Picot redrew the Middle Eastern map. We may picture them in the grand conference room in the Foreign Office, crayons in hand. They coloured blue the portions on the map they agreed to allocate to France, and they coloured red the portions they would allocate to Britain….Since both parties coveted Palestine, with its sites holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, they compromised and coloured the region brown, agreeing that this portion of the Middle East should be administered by an international condominium.
In fact the outcome was that the areas would become British and French spheres of influence – (The details were later modified) – but the agreement meant a clear decision to divide the whole of what is today’s Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and southern Turkey into spheres of British or French control or influence, leaving only Jerusalem and part of Palestine (on Russian insistence) to some form of international administration. Only the area comprising the present-day Saudi Arabia and the Yemen Arab Republic were to be left independent. For understandable reasons, Britain and France chose to keep this agreement secret. But as the war developed, Sharif Hussein became increasingly suspicious of the Allies’ intentions, and in early 1917, Sir Mark Sykes was sent to Jedda by the British Foreign Office to allay his fears. But although they discussed the question of French arms in Lebanon and the Syrian coastal regions, with Hussein maintaining the principle that these regions were as much Arab in character as the interior, Sykes did not inform him of the broader aspects of the Sykes-Picot agreement. Many of these clauses contradicted promises made to the Sharif. It would be the Turks who informed Hussein.
3. Who were the key players in the British Government involved in the BD?
First, Asquith – Herbert Asquith, Herbert Henry (First Earl of Oxford and Asquith) 1852 -1928 was a liberal politician: important as prime minster from 1908-1916 he led Britain into the First World War with France as ally. However following a Cabinet split on 25 May 1915, caused by the Shell Crisis (or sometimes dubbed ‘The Great Shell Shortage’) and the failed offensive at the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli, Asquith became head of a new coalition government, with David Lloyd George, bringing senior figures from the Opposition into the Cabinet.
At first the Coalition was seen as a political masterstroke, as the Conservative leader Bonar Law was given a relatively minor job (Secretary for the Colonies), whilst former Conservative leader Arthur Balfour was given the Admiralty, replacing Churchill. Lord Kitchener, popular with the public, was stripped of his powers over munitions (given to a new ministry under Lloyd George) and strategy (given to the General Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who was given the right to report directly to the Cabinet: Critics increasingly complained about Asquith’s lack of vigour over the conduct of the war. Lloyd George succeeded him as Prime Minister in December 1916.
The War Cabinet (WW1)
Lord Curzon
The creation of the War Cabinet undertook the supreme direction of the war effort. It was composed of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour now Foreign Secretary replacing Edward Grey, Andrew Bonar Law, Lord Nathaniel Curzon, Alfred Milner, Arthur Henderson and Sir Maurice Hankey (its Secretary). Mark Sykes and Leopold Amery were also secretaries.
Arthur Balfour
Edwin Montagu
Both Lord Curzon and Edwin Montaguwere against the declaration. Curzon, (First Marquess Curzon of Kedleston) 1859-1925, a conservative politician, formerly viceroy of India from 1898- 1905 joined Asquith’s government in 1915. Invited by Lloyd George to join his government in 1916 as well as the (select) War cabinet, he served as lord president of the council. After the war Curzon replaced Balfour as Foreign Secretary and served until the Labour victory in the general election of 1923.
His relevance for the Balfour Project is that Curzon was strongly opposed to Zionist aims in Palestine and argued that Jewish immigrants would not be able to establish a homeland there without expelling the indigenous Arabs. Although he managed to include a commitment to the ‘non-Jewish communities’ in the Balfour Declaration, he remained convinced that the policy was mistaken, ‘the worst’ of Britain’s Middle East commitments and ‘a striking contradiction of our publicly declared principles.’ [7]
Edwin Montagu (1879- 1924) was a Jewish anti-Zionist and liberal politician with close ties to Asquith. He earned the latter’s enmity by joining the Lloyd George coalition government and led the opposition in the Cabinet to the Balfour Declaration: his view was that he had spent his life as a British citizen and did not want to return to a “Jewish Ghetto”. But just before the Cabinet came to a final decision, he had to leave the country to take up a post as Secretary of State for India.
The Christian Zionist dimension among Cabinet members was strong and growing – especially Balfour himself and Lloyd George –but also Henderson, Barnes. Edward Carson (representing Ulster) was silent. Bonar Law’s views are unknown. Balfour was one of the oldest and most influential member of the Cabinet – and very influenced by Weizmann, whom he had met in 1906.The famous conversation between the two is worth retelling.
‘Mr Balfour , suppose I was to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’
‘But Dr Weizmann, we have London’, said Balfour.
‘True, but we had Jerusalem’, relied Weizmann, who knew that most Anglo-Jewish grandees scorned Zionism, “when London was a marsh”.
“Are there many Jews who think like you?”
“I speak the mind of millions of Jews.”[8]
Already in 1906 Balfour had written to a niece saying that he could see no political difficulty about obtaining Palestine, only economic ones. [9]
Later, after the start of the Great War in 1914, Weizmann was summoned by Winston Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty, who was keenly interested in his discovery of manufacturing acetone which could be used in the making or cordite explosives for the war effort. [10]It was at that point that Weizmann discovered an interest in Zionism in the Cabinet. It was Lloyd George, then minister of munitions, (who had earlier represented Zionists as a lawyer) who introduced him to Balfour. At this point Weizmann and Balfour began to meet regularly, “strolling around Whitehall at night and discussing how a Jewish homeland would serve, by the quirks of fate, the interests of historical justice and British power”. [11]
Tom Segev relates how, one night, Balfour and Weizmann walked backwards and forwards for two hours, after the latter had dined with Balfour:
The Zionist movement spoke, Weizmann said, with the vocabulary of modern statesmanship, but was fuelled by a deep religious consciousness. Balfour himself, a modern statesman, also considered Zionism as an inherent part of his Christian faith. It was a beautiful night; the moon was out. Soon after, Balfour declared in a Cabinet meeting, “I am a Zionist.”[12]
Added to the sincere Biblical motivation- the return of the Jews to their “origins” – was linked the sympathy for the plight of Russian Jews. Tsarist repression had intensified during the war. Both Balfour and Churchill had an almost mystical conviction of the giftedness of the Jewish race. In addition, American policy might be favourably influenced if returning the Jews to Palestine became part of British policy. Furthermore, the Germans were also considering a pro-Zionist declaration!
Many of these factors would come together in the signing of the Balfour declaration, when, at this juncture, the Asquith government fell (December 1916), and Lloyd George became prime minister.
I want to factor in 2 subjects- Allenby’s campaigns and Weizmann’s efforts:
Allenby entering Jerusalem
(Factor in now that Sir Edmund Allenby, (1861-1936)promoted to general for his distinguished record on the Western Front(WW1) was sent toEgypt to be made commander-in-chief of theEgyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) on 27 June 1917. His forces captured Gaza in October, Jerusalem in December and Damascus in October 1918. So the negotiations concerning the Balfour Declaration had as background Allenby’s conquests in Palestine.
Allenby needs mentioning for another reason: Why did Allenby remain silent on the declaration, censoring all mention of it as he launched his great offensive? The best answer to this question can be derived from Allenby’s biographer, General Wavell, who noted that:
‘… with the entry into Palestine and capture of Jerusalem political as well as military problems began to occupy Allenby. Palestine presented some very thorny and difficult questions. The awkwardness of reconciling our pledges to the Arabs, our undertakings to our Allies (the Sykes-Picot Agreement), and the Balfour Declaration to the Zionists was already becoming evident to those who knew of them … He refused to allow the Balfour Declaration to be published in Palestine.’
So it wasn’t – for another 3 years.
Weizmann and Einstein
Chaim Weizmann was born in Russia in 1874, in Motol, now Belarus, but then in the “Pale of Settlement”, that area of Russia to which the Jews had been confined since the time of Catherine the Great. From an early age he became interested in chemistry and managed to study in Berlin and then Freiburg in Switzerland. He met his future wife Vera Chatzman in Switzerland. He was the whole time seeking for ways to realise the Zionist dream. Theodor Herzl’s death was a huge blow to him and he left for England in 1904 where he became a biochemistry lecturer at the University of Manchester and soon became a leader among British Zionists. In fact he told his wife that the two passions of his life were Zionism and chemistry. Passions that endured to the end of his life.
After the famous conversation with Balfour in 1906 (cited) it was clear that it was the spiritual side of Zionism that appealed to Balfour. But it would be a further eight years before the two men met again. It was a frustrating time for Weizmann who travelled the country trying to promote unity in the Zionist cause. There was much opposition from the conservative Rabbinate who thought that to bring the Jews back to the Promised Land was a blasphemous anticipation of the biblical millennium. In 1907 he first visited Palestine which he considered “a dolorous country on the whole, and Jerusalem in particular he thought was a “miserable ghetto, derelict and without dignity.”
In 1914 Weizmann met Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The latter was not a Zionist but a great philanthropist and saw the value of Weizmann’s lifelong dream of a Hebrew University in Palestine.
In the next few years Weizmann would meet with influential people – like Herbert Samuel and C.P.Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian – and become aware of the opposition of others, like Edwin Montagu.
(Events become increasingly complex as two contradictory processes got underway. (Sykes-Picot and the McMahon Letter- not be published until 1939).
Although the Zionists were ignorant of both of these agreements until much later, their aspirations for Palestine were well-known to members of the British government – to Herbert Samuel, Edward Grey and Arthur Balfour, for example. Events moved forward when Sykes’ enthusiasm for Zionism grew – as did the involvement of American Jews. A legend has grown up because of what Lloyd George wrote in his autobiography, that the Balfour declaration was a reward for Weizmann’s work in biochemistry for the Admiralty. His most important discovery was the production of acetone on a large scale by bacterial fermentation: even though Weizmann was underpaid and his work never achieved the acclaim it deserved – or the chair in Manchester he hoped for- it at least brought him into contact with Lloyd George. Industrial scale production of acetone would begin in six British distilleries requisitioned for the purpose in early 1916. The effort produced 30,000 tonnes of acetone during the war, although a national collection of horse-chestnuts was required when supplies of maize were inadequate for the quantity of starch needed for fermentation![13]
But the suggestion that Palestine was his reward was a figment of Lloyd George’s imagination. As Weizmann commented:
I almost wish it had been as simple as that, and that I had never known the heartbreak, the drudgery which preceded the Declaration. But history does not deal in Aladdin’s lamps. [14]
By the time Lloyd George became Prime Minister he no longer had any doubts about Palestine. The end of 1916 and beginning of 1917 saw a sea change in attitudes, with a convergence of interest between British interest and Zionist opportunity: the change of government, the Russian Revolution, the United States entered the war, and Britain invaded Palestine – these were all key factors. Balfour had now moved from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office.
In 1917 Weizmann became president of the British Zionist Federation and the de-facto leader of World Zionism. Nahum Sokolow was his chief collaborator. At the suggestion of Mark Sykes with whom he worked closely, Sokolow travelled to France and Italy during the spring of1917 and gained support from those countries for Zionist objectives. He was intimately involved from the Zionist side with the discussions that produced the Balfour declaration.
A founder of so-called Synthetic Zionism, Weizmann supported grass-roots colonization efforts as well as high-level diplomatic activity. He was generally associated with the centrist General Zionists and later sided with neither Labour Zionism on the left norRevisionist Zionism on the right. In 1917, he expressed his view of Zionism in the following words:
We have [the Jewish people] never based the Zionist movement on Jewish suffering in Russia or in any other land. These sufferings have never been the mainspring of Zionism. The foundation of Zionism was, and continues to be to this day, the yearning of the Jewish people for its homeland, for a national center and a national life.
After a meeting on the 19th June, when Weizmann told Balfour firmly that the time had come for the Zionists to be given some definite encouragement, Balfour asked him to put together a proposal which he, Balfour, could put before the cabinet. Thus began Weizmann’s final effort to obtain the milestone Balfour Declaration. There were a still many obstacles – in particular the lack of unity among Jewish groups, especially the opposition of significant figures like Claude Montefiori and Lucien Wolf, and the efforts of Vladimir Jabotinsky – eventually unsuccessful – a Russian Jew and a friend of Weizmann to set up a Jewish battalion to fight in Palestine.
The drafting team- which included Mark Sykes and two officials – Leopold Amery and Harold Nicolson – sent a draft on the 18th July, but it was not considered until September 3rd. There was much opposition – especially a passionate and poignant plea from Edwin Montagu. The attitude of the American President, Wilson, was also crucial and a “favourable” letter from him was read out at the Cabinet meeting of October 4th, plus a sympathetic letter which Sokolow had obtained from the French government in June. (This French agreement is often omitted from official memory).
Balfour gave British Jewry a last chance to express their opinions and Weizmann engaged in furious activity, attempting to get hundreds of synagogues and Jewish groups to support the initiative. The Chief Rabbi contributed his spiritual authority. Despite the intervention of Lord Curzon, the continued opposition of Montagu , the Declaration was passed onNovember 2nd – 95 years ago exactly– and Balfour sent the historic letter to Lord Rothschild.
The Letter stated in part that the British government “views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … “. At no point had the situation of the Arab people been considered: nor had they been acknowledged as rightful owners of the land.
What happened has become the stuff of legend: Sykes rushed out to an antechamber, where Weizmann was waiting:
“Dr Weizmann, it’s a boy!” “Well,” wrote Weizmann afterward, “I did not like the boy at first. He was not the one I had expected. But I knew this was a great event. I telephoned my wife, and went to see Aha Ha’am.” [15]
This was the most significant achievement of Weizmann’s life.Though not his last achievement, history would judge the Balfour Declaration one the greatest obstacles to securing peace in Palestine – especially after events in 1948. For the rest of Weizmann’s long life, he played a leading role in World Zionism, in the developing state of Israel as its first President, and in the foundation of the Hebrew University of his dreams, to this day a highly respected Weizmann Institute of Science at Rekovot.
After the war, on 3 January 1919, Weizmann and Prince Faisal signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement attempting to establish favourable relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. At the end of the month, the Paris Peace Conference decided that the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire should be wholly separated and the newly conceived mandate-system applied to them.
Herbert Samuel
5. Another key character- especially after the BD -isHerbert Samuel:(- 1870-1963)
A Liberal politician who rose to become President of the Board of Trade and then Home Secretary in Asquith’s cabinet, he came from the “cousinhood” of wealthy, assimilated Jewish British. He had developed the Zionist position further in a talk with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward Grey, on 9 November 1914:
. ‘I spoke to Sir Edward Grey to-day about the future of Palestine. In the course of our talk I said that now that Turkey had thrown herself into the European War and that it was probable that their empire would be broken up, the question of the future of Palestine was likely to arise … Perhaps there might be an opportunity for the fulfilment of the ancient aspiration of the Jewish people and the restoration there of a Jewish State.’
Samuel went on to say: ‘If a Jewish State were established in Palestine, it might become the centre of a new culture. The Jewish brain is rather a remarkable thing, and, under national auspices, the State might become a fountain of enlightenment and a source of a great literature and art and development of science.’ Samuel continued that his note (for November 9th) proceeded as follows: ‘Grey said that the idea had always had a strong sentimental attraction for him. The historical appeal was very strong. He was quite favourable to the proposal and would be prepared to work for it if the opportunity arose.’[16] It seems that Grey, however, did not envision the creation of a political entity in Palestine, and considered such views from the angle of establishing a Jewish cultural centre. Grey’s views were said to have been conveyed by Weizmann, the chief Zionist negotiator, to the Zionist International.[17]
Samuel also reveals that before that date he had had no connection with the Zionist movement, but now, ‘suddenly, the conditions were entirely altered’. He went on to say:
‘As the first member of the Jewish community ever to sit in a British Cabinet— (Disraeli had left the community in boyhood and never rejoined)—I felt that, in the conditions that had arisen, there lay upon me a special obligation.’
In a speech later Herbert Samuel informed his audience that he had then made a study of Zionism and its achievements and knew all that there was to know about Palestine. Later he helped to bring Weizmann into contact with other important British officials. After the war he was Britain’s first High commissioner in Palestine.
6 Conclusion- a Broken Trust
1.According to Shlaim, by a stroke of the imperial pen, the Promised land [thus] became twice promised. Even by the standards of Perfidious Albion, this was an extraordinary tale of double-dealing and betrayal, a tale that continued to haunt Britain throughout the 30 years of its rule in Palestine.[18] The extraordinary fact is that no one was found who really remembered the motivation for the BD. Balfour when approached later had lost his memory. He said that Mark Sykes would have it at his finger tips- but he had already died in 1922 of Asian flu.
2. The ambiguity that was inherent in the wording of the declaration caused considerable confusion in the years immediately following its issuance. When a new Conservative government came to power at the end of 1922, at a time when British public support for the government’s pro-Zionist policy was rapidly declining, the British government came under pressure from members of parliament as well as the press to define the meaning of the Balfour Declaration. It was against this background that the British Colonial Office, responsible for Palestine since 1921, set out to give an official explanation of the Balfour Declaration. What resulted was the first ‘official interpretation’ by any British government of the declaration.
3. The debate was started when an Arab Palestinian delegation[19] to London published in the British press parts of the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915, in which the British promised Sherif Hussein independence. The Arab delegation drew the attention of the British public that the Balfour Declaration was in direct violation to these previous pledges, since Palestine was included in the area in which Arab independence was promised by McMahon to Hussein. In this atmosphere, the Colonial Office was compelled to look into the origins of the Balfour Declaration and its pro-Zionist policy, in order to come to an early decision on whether it should uphold or reverse this policy.
4. But, a journalist, M.N. Jeffries stated: Whatever is to be found in the Balfour Declaration was put into it deliberately. There are no accidents in that text. If there is any vagueness in it this is an intentional vagueness.’[20]
5. Also crucial: the lack of archival evidence as to what was said: – Although there is an overwhelming amount of literature on the events leading up to the Balfour Declaration (from April to November 1917), British archival sources reveal an alarming lack of documentary evidence on its earlier history. In this context, an important minute by the undersecretary for the Colonies in 1922, William Ormsby-Gore, describing from memory the events leading to the declaration, is crucial:
‘I think it is very important that the story of the negotiations which led up to the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2nd 1917 (before General Allenby’s first great advance) should be set out for the Secretary of State and possibly the Cabinet. The F.O. and Sir Maurice Hankey both have material. The matter was first broached by the late Sir Mark Sykes early in 1916, and he interviewed Dr Caster and Sir Herbert Samuel on his own initiative as a student of Jewish politics in the Near East. Dr Weizmann was then unknown. Sykes was furthered by General MacDunagh [sic], DMI [Director of Military Intelligence] as all the most useful and helpful intelligence from Palestine (then still occupied by the Turks) was got through and given with zeal by Zionist Jews who were from the first pro-British. Sir Ronald Graham took the matter up keenly from the Russian and East European point of view and early in 1917 important representations came from America. The form of the Declaration and the policy was debated more than once by the War Cabinet, and confidential correspondence (printed by Sir Maurice Hankey as a Cabinet paper) was entered into with leading Jews of different schools of thought. After the declaration, the utmost use was made of it by Lord Northcliffe’s propaganda department, and the value of the declaration received remarkable tribute from General Ludendorf. On the strength of it we recruited special battalions of foreign Jews in New York for the British army with the leave of the American government.
The S of S [Secretary of State] should have a statement showing similar declarations by other powers up to and including the recent one of the American Senate, and also a summary of what has been done by the Jews already in Palestine, i.e. 4 millions of money, schools etc. Some of the Zionist organizations [sic] election leaflets were really rather effective. The Balfour Declaration in its final form was actually drafted by Col. Amery and myself. I wrote an article on the question in the XIXth Century about 2 years ago which has some interesting data’.[21] WOG 24/12/1922
6. Balfour 1919:
In a secret memorandum to the British cabinet, Respecting Syria. Palestine and Mesopotamia, Balfour wrote in 1919:
‘… Take Syria first. Do we mean, in the case of Syria, to consult principally the wishes of the inhabitants? We mean nothing of the kind… So whatever the inhabitants may wish, it is France they will certainly have. They may freely choose; but it is Hobson’s choice after all … The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the ‘independent nation’ of Palestine… For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form for consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.’[22]
On 11 August 1919, Balfour had stated that the four Great Powers were committed to Zionism, and that ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land … ’[23]
A Broken Trust?
[1] Balfour 1848-1930. PM 1902-1905; Foreign Sec. 1916-1919.
[2] Leonard Stein (The Balfour Declaration, London, 1961)
[3] David Fromkin, A Peace to end all Peace, p.282.
[4] Shlaim, p. 10.
[5] Defined primarily by its western border on the Red Sea, it extends from Haql on theGulf of Aqaba to Jizan. As the site of Islam’s holy places the Hejaz has significance in theArab and Islamic historical and political landscape. The region is so called as it separates the land of Najd in the east from the land of Tihamah in the west).
[6] Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, (London: Bloomsbury 2010), p.79.
[7] Curzon to Bonar Law, 14 Dec 1922, Parl. Arch., Bonar Law MS 111/22/46).
[8] Simon Sebag Montefiori, Jerusalem: the Biography, p. 410.
[9] Cited by Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism- Roadmap to Armageddon, (Leicester: Inter-varsity Press 2004, p.63.
[10] The story was later invented by Lloyd George in his memoirs that the Balfour Declaration was given to Weizmann as a reward for his invention of maize-acetone. His invention was important for the war effort, but the link was invented. (Fromkin, op cit.,p.285).
[11] Montefiori 412.
[12] Segev, p.41. From The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann.
[13] Weizmann is considered to be the father of industrial fermentation. He used the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum (the Weizmann organism) to produce acetone. Acetone was used in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants critical to the Allied war effort (see Royal Navy Cordite Factory, Holton Heath). Weizmann transferred the rights to the manufacture of acetone to the Commercial Solvents Corporation in exchange for royalties.
[14] Weizmann, Trial and Error, (London: Hamish Hamilton 1949).
[15] Weizmann, Trial and Error, p.262.
[16] Ibid., pp.12-13.
[17] John and Hadawi, op. cit., pp. 60-61.
[18] Shlaim, p. 4.
[19] The Palestine Arab delegation spent one year in London, from mid-1921 to mid-1922, in the hope of persuading the British government to annul the Balfour Declaration. Although the delegation succeeded in cultivating the support of many British politicians as well as the British press to its cause, the Middle East Department, where the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was a regular visitor, was successful in thwarting such interaction. During the mandate years, (1920-48) the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration was received with loud Arab protests and demonstrations. The 2nd of November of each year was a day of ‘mourning’ in which black flags were flown from the windows of Arab shops and houses. Moreover, all Arab congresses since 1918 firmly rejected the Balfour Declaration.
[20] See Jeffries, J M N,Analysis of the Balfour Declaration, in Khalidi, Walid. From Haven to Conquest, (ed.) Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut 1971, pp. 173-4.
[21] CO 733/28. The last paragraph of Ormsby-Gore’s handwritten minute was omitted from the printed version of the above mentioned Cabinet Paper. Ormsby-Gore’s minute will be analysed in detail on pp. 72-121 below. (See Appendix A for original handwritten minute C0733/35). When Ormsby-Gore wrote this minute, he had just been appointed Under Secretary of State for the Colonies. It may be of interest to note that a writer in the Hebrew Doar Hayom wrote on 3 Nov 1922 expressing the view that he was optimistic about the future now that Ormsby-Gore was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, and that this was a very important gain for the Zionist cause.
[22] Khalidi, W, op. cit., see Introduction, also pp. 201-213.
[23] Memorandum by Balfour, August 11, 1919. See Khalidi W, ibid., p. 226.
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