The Balfour Declaration, Self-Determination and Arab Opposition
Introduction
When the British Cabinet began to discuss Palestine in detail the outcome of the World War was by no means predictable.1 The Central Powers and the Entente
Powers faced major challenges because of the shifting balance of forces between them and the questionable capacities of some of their respective allies.2 The year 1917
threw up a host of domestic and international predicaments which sharpened the rivalry between the imperial powers and saw the entry of the United States of America into the war and the withdrawal of Russia.3
In the previous chapter I analysed the significance of Palestine for British imperial strategy, its location providing a base from which to oversee their interests in the Near East and control the Suez Canal. The government decision in late 1917 to support the project for the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine was motivated by a self-interest which coalesced with the ambitions of the Zionist movement. The task was to integrate this project into the goal of sustaining the British Empire without appearing to replicate imperialist expansionism and
colonisation. The British government was conscious of French hopes to bring parts of the Ottoman Empire under its hegemony and consequently sought to avoid provoking a rupture with either its French allies or the anti-Ottoman Arab forces.
The chapter will explore how the British sought to advance their interests in a world in which anti-imperialism began to flourish stimulated by seismic events and the accelerating demand for self-determination in countries under imperial rule. In the midst of this maelstrom the interests of the British government found a congruence
1 CAB 23/35.
2 Chris Harman, A People’s History of the War (London: Verso, 2008), 411. “The first great eruption on the Western Front was in France in April 1917. An estimated 68 divisions, half the French army, refused to return to the front after an offensive which had cost 250,000 lives … 1917 also saw mutinies involving some 50,000 soldiers in Italy, and five days of bloody rebellion by up to 100,000 soldiers in the British base camp at Étaples, near Boulogne. The British generals ended the rebellion by making concessions and then executed its leaders, keeping the whole affair secret”. See also Niall Ferguson,
Empire, 328.
3 The USA declared war on Germany on 6th April 1917 and Russia declared a ceasefire on 15th December 1917.
with the aspirations of Zionism. Zionist settlement provided a convenient surrogate, effectively implementing colonisation under the guise of national reconstruction. Zionism developed from being a peripheral political movement even within the Jewish community into being an important adjunct of British imperialist strategy in the Near East. The apogee of Zionist political achievement was the adoption by the British Cabinet of the Balfour Declaration proposal for the creation of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. An analysis of the War Cabinet papers reveals the character of the discussion within the British government on the subject and the importance they attached to it.
This chapter will also examine the opposition to the proposal expressed both in Britain and by the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine. Opposition to Balfour’s promotion of the demands of the Zionist Organisation even came from within the Cabinet but were also present more broadly within the government and Parliament. In addition antagonism to the idea was expressed in the press and continued even after the allocation of the Mandate to the British.4 The most significant opposition was to
be found amongst the Arabs of the region who initially made some distinction between the British Mandate and the creation of a homeland for the Jews, to a certain extent tolerating the former whilst vehemently opposing the latter as a thinly veiled
declaration of intent to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.5 A large proportion of the
Palestinian political leadership came to recognise that the achievement of the Zionists’ goal was only possible because of the Mandate rule by the British. At the same time Arab political leaders saw that their ambitions for a Pan-Islamic, or even Pan-Arabist outcome were threatened by the countervailing imperialist forces. The hope for a Greater Syria was destroyed by the Anglo-French implementation of the Sykes-Picot agreement fracturing it into separate struggles for self-determination for Syria and for Palestine.
The war had brought added problems to the region. Daily life and the existing social and economic relationships were severely disrupted. The situation inside the country was one of great hardship for the Palestinian people because the countryside
4 J. M. N. Jeffries, The Palestine Deception 1915–1923: The McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, the
Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2014).
The book contains articles written in 1923 for the Daily Mail by Jeffries. 5 CAB 24/24
and the towns had been stripped of men and material by both the Ottoman rulers and the British army. Livestock, crops and trees had been appropriated by both armies and men taken from their work on the land. Furthermore in 1915 the land had been
devastated by a swarm of locusts reducing available crops.6 To the north in Lebanon,
an estimated one third of the population died as a consequence of famine which struck during the course of the conflict and the silk industry, an important source of income, had been virtually wiped out.7 Long term tectonic movements evident in the Ottoman
period intersected with punctual upheavals caused by the war and the arrival of the Zionist settlers. These sudden changes led to the uncoupling and dislocating of the more gradual developments in society creating a dynamic with new challenges the product of the imperialist war, nascent nationalism and colonisation.
At the end of the war Great Britain, France and the United States of America presided over the Paris Peace Conference which was intended to lay the basis for the post-war settlement. The British, as one of the principal military victors in the conflict, were able to dictate to the League of Nations the terms of the Mandate for Palestine, and thereby establish their dominant position in the country and the region. The Mandate, which eventually came into effect on 26th September 1923, confirming the terms of the British occupation of Palestine, was a product of the First World War and constituted the legitimisation of what was the de facto situation following Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem in 1917. The League of Nations Mandate gave international legitimacy to the new-imperialist agenda.
Zionism Before the Balfour Declaration
Long before the Balfour Declaration, a British Christian Zionist lobby existed within sections of the establishment and the Zionist Organisation had succeeded in establishing itself in Britain as a significant expression of Jewish opinion.8 According
to some, British public opinion was hostile to Jewish immigration into Britain and “felt that something should be done for east European Jewry if they were to be barred
6 Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine (London: John Murray, 1999), 27. 7 Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (London: I.B. Taurus, Reprinted 2009), p. 250. See also letter from Consul Fontana to Earl Curzon, 20th December 1920.
from entering England”.9 In 1903 Lloyd George had participated in an attempt to
draft an agreement between the Zionist Organisation and the government which was headed by the Conservative Party Prime Minister, Arthur James Balfour to allocate land for the establishment of Jewish homeland.10 Although in 1917 their positions of seniority in the government were reversed, there is clear political continuity between this earlier attempt to meet Zionist wishes and the subsequent adoption of the Balfour Declaration.
Theodor Herzl, widely recognised as one of the most important founders of modern Zionism, advocated the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine which, to succeed, he knew, required the support of an imperial sponsor which he went to extraordinary lengths to obtain. Following the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Herzl, travelling across Europe, contacted Kaiser Wilhem II, the Ottoman Sultan, the Pope (1903) and King Victor Emmanuel III (1903). In Britain he met Joseph Chamberlain (1902), the Colonial Secretary in the Government of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, and Lord Cromer, Consul-General of British-occupied Egypt. Evidence of the lengths to which he was prepared to go to win the support of the leading imperial powers of the day was his effort in 1902 to gain the backing of Vyacheslav von Plevhe, the anti- Semitic minister of the Interior in the Russian Czarist Government.11 Undoubtedly Herzl took the view that in the light of the rivalry between the powers seeking the support of all might, in the end, ensure the support of at least one.
In 1903 the agreement which the Zionist Organisation and the British
government had been working on aimed to establish a homeland for Jewish people in any location that could be provided and Cyprus and Uganda were actively discussed.12 Those prepared to accept any land to create a homeland for the Jews were called “Territorialist” and as such, were not dissimilar from other persecuted religious groups who sought refuge abroad.13 Although initially not repudiated by Theodor Herzl,
9 Lacqueur, The History of Zionism, 121.
10 Victor Kattan, From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the origins of the Arab-Israeli
Conflict, 1891–1949 (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 30-31.
11 Ibid.,97.
12 Theodor Herzl, The Diaries, 367, cited in Laqueur, The History of Zionism, 120.
13HC Deb 20 June 1904 vol 136 cc 561-79. According to Earl Percy in a debate in the House of
Commons on 20th June 1904 “… it was in the area situated between Lake Victoria and Lake Rudolf, in the Kisumu Province.”
before his death in 1904, support for the scheme fell out of favour and the
“Territorialist” current within the Zionist Organisation was defeated at the seventh congress in Basel in late July 1905.14 Even though they did not at this time have support from the government for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, they had won a hearing from some of its leading members and they continued to gather support in the following years. Amongst those who participated in the 1903 debate at the Zionist Congress in Basel, were some like Chaim Weizmann who supported the case for Palestine as the only place in which the Jewish homeland might be established. In 1904 Weizmann moved to Manchester, where he took a post at the university and began promoting the call for a Jewish homeland. The discussion of this aspiration and support for it was not restricted to Jewish members of the local community as non- Jewish figures such as Winston Churchill, then a local Member of Parliament, expressed his backing for the Zionist cause.15
Whilst Weizmann sought out and influenced key figures, his success was undoubtedly a consequence of their political and religious pre-disposition. In addition to the meetings mentioned above, in 1906 Weizmann met Arthur Balfour, then the Leader of the Opposition following his defeat as Prime Minister. He continued his lobbying activities and in early 1914 met Sir Herbert Samuel the Liberal Member of Parliament for Cleveland, who was to become Home Secretary in Asquith’s
government. Weizmann showed an appreciation for British imperial sensibilities by explaining the advantages that a Jewish homeland might have for Britain’s interests in the Near East. In 1914 he wrote to C. P. Scott the Editor of the Manchester Guardian that should Palestine fall within London’s sphere of interest and “should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there … we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back
civilisation to it, and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal”.16 In November
the same year, through his connections with C P Scott he met David Lloyd George, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, together with Sir Herbert Samuel.17 Samuel’s
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1904/jun/20/east-africa-aliex-
settlement#S4V0136P0_19040620_HOC_247 (accessed 27/01/2016) 14 Laqueur, The History of Zionism,131.
15 The Jewish Chronicle, 15 December 1905, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews.
16 Joan Comay, Who’s Who in Jewish History (London: Routledge, Third Edition, Revised by Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok, 2002), 376.
commitment to the Zionist cause was demonstrated by his submission in January 1915 of a memorandum on The Future of Palestine to the Cabinet outlining a proposal for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.18 “ I am assured,” he wrote, “ that the solution of the
problem of Palestine which would be much the most welcome to the leaders and supporters of the Zionist movement throughout the world would be the annexation of the country to the British Empire”.19 Samuel considered Weizmann’s demands too
modest.20 Weizmann’s task was not so much persuading these figures to support the
Zionists objectives but rather encouraging them to consider how those goals might be achieved. Some, though not all, of this discussion took place at the highest
parliamentary level and the subsequent progress of discussion as to how the government should formulate their position is recorded in the Cabinet papers. Through an analysis of these papers it is possible to gain an insight into the nature of the debate about the Declaration amongst the leading Cabinet ministers of the day and how they considered it as reconciling imperialist ambitions with Zionist colonisation.
Debating the Zionist project
Supporters of the Balfour Declaration
As I have noted above, links between highly placed government officials and the leadership of Zionism were well established. The ending of the Asquith
government in December 1916 and its replacement by the Lloyd George coalition saw three strong supporters of Zionism enter the Cabinet in the form of the new Prime Minister himself, the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and Lord Milner. Discussions took place on 7th February 1917 between Sir Mark Sykes, “advisor to the Foreign Office on Middle Eastern affairs, … Lord Rothschild, Chaim Weizmann president of the English Zionist Federation, and other Zionist leaders, in order to arrive at some understanding on the future of Palestine”.21 The Cabinet had further discussions in
April on a report by W. Ormsby-Gore on “Zionism and the suggested Jewish
Battalions for Egyptian Expeditionary Force” which reflected on the growing support
18 CAB 37/123/43. See also Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, 74. Jewish by heritage, Samuel himself was an atheist.
19 CAB 37/123/43.
20 Laqueur, The History of Zionism, 182
21 Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 10.
amongst Zionists for a “British Palestine or a Palestine under the United States”.22
These exchanges helped create the climate in which the formulation of the Declaration was to take place.
However between July 1917 and 31st October 1917 the document, which eventually became known as the “Balfour Declaration” was sent by Balfour to Lord Rothschild and went through a number of drafts.23 The text developed into its final version as the result of a process of private exchanges, between Balfour and
Rothschild, steering a course that would indicate support for the Zionist objective of creating a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, whilst seeking to avoid antagonising opponents in Britain of the Zionist Federation’s proposals at the same time as averting any information about the proposal being communicated to the people of Palestine itself. As with their handling of the “untried Irish prisoners” question in 1916, those on the government side responsible for putting the statement together were influenced both by domestic and international considerations.24 The “Balfour Declaration” was
published in its final form on 4th November 1917.25
Balfour faced opposition within his Cabinet and Rothschild faced opposition in the Jewish community including within the Board of Deputies of British Jews.26
Rothschild, wrote to Balfour on 18th July 1917 from his London home that “our opponents have commenced their campaign by a most reprehensible manoeuvre, namely to excite a disturbance by the cry of British Jews versus Foreign Jews, they commenced this last Sunday when at the Board of Deputies they challenged the new elected officers as to whether they were all of English birth (myself among them)”.27 Rothschild’s draft clearly expected the government to discuss directly with the Zionist Organisation the “necessary methods and means” to create “the National Home of the Jewish people”.28 For his part Balfour amended Rothschild’s imperative that the
Government “will discuss … with the Zionist Organisation” to the more equivocal
22CAB 24/10.
23 Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 102-103.
24CAB 24/10
25 Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 103.
26 Board of Deputies – the “parliament” of the Jewish community in Britain was founded in 1760. 27 CAB 24/24, G.T. 1803 item 1 Copy of a letter marked “Secret” from Lord Rothschild to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 18th July, 1917 and tabled for the War Cabinet.
phrasing that the Government “will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them”.29 The number
of drafts the document went through is clear testimony to the fact that all those contributing were striving to avoid formulations which were too specific and might provoke wider opposition. The ambiguities and vagueness of the document were deliberate.
What is significant in the first three known drafts: the “Zionist Draft, July 1917”30; the “Balfour Draft, August 1917”31 and the “Milner Draft, August 1917”32 is what they choose to include and what they omitted.33 The titles given to these drafts
by Charles D Smith in Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict are indicative of their sources: the “Zionist Draft” originating with Rothschild’s letter to Balfour; the “Balfour Draft” his response to the letter and the “Milner Draft” by Lord Milner, member of the War Cabinet.34 What is common to these texts and revealing is the status given to the Zionist Organisation as the arbiter of the “methods and means” to achieve the creation of the Jewish homeland. 35 For the Zionist Organisation and for many leading British politicians the Declaration was to take on the status of a quasi- treaty fulfilling Theodor Herzl’s objective, “to put it in terminology of international law, a State-creating power” which he foresaw in effect as the “creation of the State”.36
The Declaration constituted the culmination of an important phase of the Zionist movement’s strategy. The “Zionist Draft” in July 1917 had asserted the “principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people”.37 This initial text was unambiguous in its goal proposing that “His Majesty’s Government (would) use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this
29 Ibid. III “Draft reply to Lord Rothschild from Mr. Balfour. Foreign Office August 1917”. 30 Ibid. Item II Marked “Enclosure to (1). Draft Declaration.”
31 Ibid. Item III “Draft reply to Lord Rothschild from Mr. Balfour. Foreign Office August 1917”. 32 CAB 24/24, G.T. 1803. A. “Alternative, by Lord Milner, to Draft Declaration. See II of Paper G. T. 1803.”
33 Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, Ibid. 102-103.
34 CAB 24/24, G.T. 1803. Item 111 Marked “Enclosure to (1). Draft Reply to Lord Rothschild from Mr. Balfour.” August 1917.
35 CAB 24/24, G.T. 1803. Item 11 Marked “Enclosure to (1). Draft Declaration.”
36 Theodor Herzl, “The Jewish State” in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (Philadelphia: The Jewish