Today marks the 70th anniversary of the declaration of the Jewish State of Israel in Palestine, despite the country being largely inhabited by Arabs. The realization started with the help of the British, in the form of the Balfour Declaration from 1917.
As the British government cabinet meeting on October 31, 1917, has concluded in the early afternoon, diplomat Mark Sykes elatedly enters the room where British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann is waiting tensely. Sykes greets him with the words, "Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!'
He is referring to the creation of a short letter that will go down in history as the Balfour Declaration. The letter is not addressed to Chaim Weizmann himself, but to one of the other leaders of British Zionism, the eccentric banker Sir Walter Rothschild. To this day, the content of this cat bell is highly controversial and the impact is still felt.
Pride or despair?
What were the motivations for the British government to come out with this message? Was the Balfour Declaration the product of otherworldly idealism or of brutal power politics? Were Prime Minister D. Lloyd George and his Secretary of State Balfour so sure that they would become the leading power in the Middle East after the war that they might as well promise some of it to those poor European Jews?
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Or were they so afraid of losing the war that they grabbed every tiny chance of turning things around for the better? And how did the British think they could reconcile their promise to the Jews with the secret agreements about sphere of influence they made with the French (in the Sykes-Picot treaty) and the promises T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Henry McMahon had done to the Arabs?
None of the above questions has an unequivocal answer. And the position one chooses is almost always related to the position one takes in the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But against these complicated questions is the simple statement that the British ultimately gained little benefit from their involvement in Palestine. They managed to get the mandate over Palestine with the consent of the League of Nations, but all their contradictory promises came back like a boomerang in their faces.
The Balfour Declaration brought a growing influx of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, leading to an increasingly fierce resistance from the Arab population. The British, now favoring one group and now another, left Palestine in 1948 with their tails between their legs, leaving the country in a conflict as bloody as it is unsolvable. Not adequate, therefore, this Balfour Declaration.
State or home
Yet the Balfour Declaration was certainly not the result of hasty diplomatic bungling. It didn't happen overnight. The final formulation has been the subject of lengthy consultations with senior figures within and outside the cabinet, including US President Wilson. For example, people deliberately spoke of 'a national home' instead of a national state.
This was in order not to antagonize the Arabs, although all those involved agreed afterwards that they had always had a state in mind. To keep the Arabs happy, it was also explicitly stated that the civil rights and religious interests of the existing non-Jewish communities should not be harmed.
It is precisely this addition that shows how little the British government ultimately cared about them. After all, 'non-Jewish communities' is a strange name for a population group that made up more than ninety percent of the population of Palestine at that time. Nor was there any mention of their political rights. Apparently they weren't necessary for Arabs.
That no 'infringement' should be made on the political status of the Jews elsewhere in the world was added at the instigation of E.S. Montagu, the minister for India, who was himself Jewish. Like many other anti-Zionists, he feared that the establishment of a Jewish state would be at the expense of the position of Jews in Europe.
Zebras
The question remains why the British explicitly supported a population group that had virtually no weight in England. As if the British didn't have enough problems. In the autumn of 1917 it was certainly not inconceivable that the Allies would lose the war. No progress was made in France. The Italians were on the brink of collapse at Caparetto. How the revolution would develop in Russia was completely unclear, and the American commitment was delayed.
The only bright spot was tentative progress in the Middle East as the English approached Jaffa and Jerusalem. Before long, southern Palestine would fall into British hands. The promulgation of the Balfour Declaration had to anticipate this.
It would provide the British with a moral basis to take Jerusalem from the Turks and then not surrender it. And there were more advantages:An Anglo-Jewish alliance was an excellent counterpart to the coalition between the French and the Christians in Lebanon. It provided the British with a wonderful strategic position between the Suez Canal and the rest of the Middle East.
It might also positively influence public opinion in the United States, and the declaration could play a decisive role in mobilizing Jewish support on the frontline between Russia and Germany. Finally, it could ease the frenetic search for war credits. It is not without reason that Balfour addresses his letter to the eccentric Jewish banker Rothschild – who caused a stir every day in the streets of London:he rode in a carriage with zebras in front.
Jews not English
Yet it was not just power politics that led the English to support Zionism. In the literature the story invariably crops up that Balfour wanted to thank Weizmann for his services to the British defence. The chemist Weizmann had played an important role in the manufacture of synthetic acetone, an indispensable raw material for dynamite. When they first met in 1906, Balfour is said to have asked what Weizmann wanted from him. "A national home for my people," replied Weizmann, which, according to tradition, made a deep impression on Balfour. However, we do not know whether the maintenance really went like this.
It is certain that Balfour and Lloyd George both had a warm heart for Zionism. A view that did not arise from the idea that Jews were also human beings, just like the English, but which sprang from the conviction that Jews and English were fundamentally different from each other. A Jew could therefore never be a real Englishman – and for that very reason he was entitled to his own homeland.