The Balfour Declaration-- contrasting historical perspectives
Views of eight historians
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
April 29, 2006
B-1.
Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2001), pp. 68-83.
Smith's respect for the complexity of interests and events that led to the Balfour Declaration makes this the single most useful brief account. His key point is strongly emphasized-- the Dec.1916 shift from Asquith's floundering administration to a new wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George (a hands-on wartime leader) whose pro-Zionist policies decisively changed the terms of the postwar Middle East settlement.
Smith argues that Mark Sykes was implementing Lord Kitchener's Middle East strategy in his Jan. 1916 negotiations for the Sykes-Picot Agreement (officially ratified in May). Kitchener wanted a continuous French zone as a buffer between British and Russian territories, so Mosul initially was given to the French and Palestine was internationalized to balance British, French and Russian interests. The French were given the Levant and “indirect” control of the Syrian interior-- meaning, to be governed by “arrangement” with an Arab state. The Arabs, however, were to be deceived at every turn. Smith argues that McMahon duped Husayn in the famous correspondence that set up the Arab Revolt, promising land to the Arabs that was also promised to the French through Sykes-Picot. (In effect, Smith argues, the British used each agreement against the other.) Both before and (especially) after the war, the British and French issued promises and “reassurances” to the Arabs whenever it was expedient. “We have to tempt the Arab peoples into the right path,” McMahon wrote to Charles Hardinge in India. “It's “largely a matter of words.” (70).
Smith argues that Weizmann's effective lobbying was largely responsible for developing British willingness to issue the Balfour Declaration. However, “it would not have come about without the blending of Weizmann's arguments regarding the value of Zionism to British interests with the emergence of events that seemed to prove him right” (71).
The crucial event that led to the Balfour Declaration occurred in Dec. 1916, when the pro-Zionist David Lloyd George became PM and wanted world-wide Jewish support for the Entente, given the twin dangers of the Russians fading out of the war and the Americans not entering it soon enough to avoid defeat. His policy shift from internationalizing Palestine to insuring British control of it had many motives-- the stalemate on the Western Front that led to a new campaign in the East, the need to protect Suez (“Britain's imperial lifeline”), and the need to use Zionism to legitimate that goal while invading Palestine and Syria, since Wilson had announced an anti-annexationist policy (“peace without victory”) in Dec. 1916. Again, Smith stresses that at that stage of the war, Britain desperately needed to obtain active American support to avoid defeat (72-73).
Disagreements about the text of the Balfour Declaration delayed it, producing significant revisions, including a pull-back from the Zionists' original demand to turn Palestine into a Jewish state. In the last version, a clause was added protecting Arab rights (74). Finally, Smith places the false assurances given to the Arabs in the context of the shifting, contradictory wartime agreements among British, French, Arab and Zionist interests. Smith concludes that the postwar mandate policy, which the League of Nations created to promote the self-determination of formerly oppressed peoples, simply served as a tool for legitimating British and French control of “desired territories” (83).
B-2.
Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel (1976), pp. 92-103.
In many ways this is a “traditional” Zionist history of the Declaration, in contrast with Smith's emphasis on British duplicity. Its main interest lies in the details of Sachar's account of Weizmann's recruitment of Zionist supporters among British leaders, in a context of worldwide Zionist weakness (96). Sachar argues that the main British strategic interest in Palestine was to protect the Suez Canal, especially after Ottoman attacks were repulsed in Jan. 1915 and Aug. 1916. The British response was to negotiate with Sharif Husayn for an Arab Revolt, in concert with a British campaign in Palestine. In Sachar's account of the Sykes-Picot negotiations, held at the same time, he argues that the various British agreements were compatible (93), a judgment few contemporary historians would make. Incredibly, Sachar believes that “the British protected not only their own postwar interests but also those of France” (93). In effect, the British were forced to block French plans to control Palestine as part of Greater Syria had to be blocked, due to the perceived vulnerability of the Canal. An international condominium was thus arranged for Palestine through the Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916.
In 1917, Lloyd George, the new PM, shifted to a more aggressive policy-- if the British military campaign succeeded in Palestine, the British would not give up control. Given both American and Russian opposition to any annexation plans, an internationally acceptable justification was needed to claim Palestine. Surprisingly, Sachar claims that at this time (spring 1917) “Whitehall failed to grasp that such a rationale already existed” (96)-- meaning Zionism. He thus clears the stage for his discussion of Weizmann's success in linking Zionism with British interests. Later, however, Sachar remarks that Lloyd George, who took power in Dec. 1916, had envisioned “British rule over a Jewish Palestine” from the war's outset (99). It thus seems unlikely that Whitehall would have been entirely ignorant of the Zionist rationale.
Sachar's historical sketch of the immense influence of “the hoary myth of the power and wealth of international Jewry” (101) provides more details about it than does Tom Segev, who nevertheless sees it as the chief cause of the Balfour Declaration. As Sachar puts it, “nearly all the major belligerent governments shared this awe for the-- essentially legendary-- power of world Jewry” (102). The Balfour Declaration was organized during “the worst crisis of the war,” with Russia fading out of it and American forces still absent, and Jewish support was believed to have a greater strategic value than it turned out to have.
B-3.
Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914-1918 (1973), pp. 286-289.
Friedman foregrounds two issues that tend to be subordinated in other studies of the Balfour Declaration-- first (286-7), the fear that the Germans were themselves planning to sponsor a Jewish homeland in Palestine, before the terms of the Balfour Declaration could be finalized, and second (288-9), the effort to keep Russia in the war by using Zionism to appeal to Russian Jewish sentiment.
Not only was Palestine's geographic position of “great strategic importance” for the British, it was feared that “a Turco-German declaration would rally world Jewish opinion behind the Central Powers and strengthen their diplomatic position” (286). Since Germany was in control of millions of Jews and was committed by treaty to safeguard all territories of the Ottoman Empire, reports that it was about to rally the scattered Zionist movement behind a German-sponsored Palestinian homeland made the Balfour Declaration appear to be a strategic necessity.
In Russia, Kerensky's moderate government was under political attack by revolutionaries pushing for a separate peace with the Central Powers, and support for the war was fading fast. To counter Russian hostility to British imperialism, and to gain the support of Russia's Jews (wrongly assumed have a major influence on the revolutionary movement), the British hoped its support of a Zionist program in Palestine would help keep Russia in the war. However, the Russians stopped fighting the Germans in October, just before the revolution, allowing Germany to concentrate its forces on the Western front.
B-4.
Mayir Vereté, “The Balfour Declaration and its Makers” in Elie Kedourie and Sylvia Haim, eds., Palestine and Israel in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1982), pp. 60-63.
Vereté opposes all idealizing accounts of the Declaration. Zionist leaders argued that it was they who finally succeeded in convincing the British of “the righteousness of their ideal and claim,” after years of effort. But Vereté's conclusion, based on Leonard Stein's work and his own archival researches in England and Israel, is that the Balfour Declaration was strictly a matter of British strategic interests. “For years I have been saying to my students on this subject that had there been no Zionists in those days the British would have had to invent them” (62). Vereté stresses the importance of the de Bunsen report (May 1915) in establishing two basic policy goals-- the need for a continuous British-controlled zone from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf (for military transport and communications as well as to resist any Russian threat from the north) and the need to remove the French from proximity to the British sphere of interest “along the Canal, the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf” (63). The use of the Zionists to legitimate British control of Palestine was a strategic necessity to accomplish these aims.
B-5.
W. T. Mallison, “The Balfour Declaration: An Appraisal” in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. A. Lughod (1987), pp. 66-95.
Mallison charts the negotiations among three interest groups in accounting for changes in the text of the Balfour Declaration between June and November of 1917. British government leaders (Balfour and Lloyd George) were “desperately searching for support from all sources” after German submarine successes. Zionist leaders living in England (Weizmann and Sokolow) were seeking to exploit British wartime needs to somehow establish a Jewish nation in Palestine. Opposing them, an influential group of anti-Zionist Jews, led by Cabinet member Edwin Montagu (the new secretary of state for India), argued that the goal of a Zionist Palestine threatened the process of Jewish assimilation within English society.
Mallison foregrounds the antisemitism of Balfour and Lloyd George, despite their strategic support for the Zionist project. Balfour resented the tendency of British Jews to remain apart, refusing to intermarry. He also refused to challenge the Russian oppression of Jews, arguing that “the persecutors had a case of their own,” since the Jews were “a distinct race” holding onto a religion that was hated in Russia (68). Even Lloyd George, the Christian Zionist, had “a streak of ordinary vulgar anti-Semitism,” as the historian Leonard Stein reports.
Mallison describes six stages in drafting the text of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. The key moment was Lord Milner's August revision, followed by Montagu's effort to block the Declaration entirely, which led to the crucial limiting provisos at the close of the final text. Stage 1. The Foreign Office Preliminary Draft (June 1917)-- suggests that Palestine might be used as a “refuge” or “sanctuary” for Jewish victims of persecution (no reference to Zionist objectives). Stage 2. Zionist Preliminary Draft (July 1917)-- states that the British government “accepts the principle of recognising Palestine as the National Home of the Jewish people” with the right to develop its “national life” with autonomy and freedom of immigration, all to be safeguarded by guarantees of protection. Stage 3. Revised Zionist Draft (July 1917)-- states that Palestine is to be “reconstituted” as the national home of the Jewish people, as a legal right, and that the British government will work with the Zionist Organization to achieve this end. The so-called Balfour Draft (Aug. 1917) restates the basic terms of the Zionists' text, couching them in the foreign secretary's language of official approval. (I.e., it is not really a separate stage.) Stage 4. Milner's Draft (Aug. 1917)-- waters down the Zionist text for Cabinet approval by endorsing “a home” rather than “a national home” and by retreating from any suggestion that all of Palestine could be claimed by the Zionists. At this point, Edwin Montagu intervened on behalf of a powerful faction of anti-Zionist British Jews, arguing that any such declaration would provide a rallying point for anti-semitism, threatening the goal of assimilation. He argued that if Jews are allowed to dominate the indigenous population of Palestine, Arabs would be driven out and the Jews would be “taking all the best in the country” (75). Montagu's fierce opposition in the Cabinet forced Weizmann and the Zionists to retreat. In a September memo they renounced any form of state in Palestine, claiming only the wish to allow Jewish settlers to come as individuals (77).
Stage 5. The Milner-Amery Draft (Oct. 4). Lord Milner asked Leopold Amery (an asst. sec. of the Cabinet) to draft something that addressed both of the anti-Zionist objections-- the threat to the rights of Palestinian Arabs and the threat to assimilated Jews in their own countries. The result was the two crucial “safeguard clauses” that Amery inserted to conclude the Declaration, restricting the earlier “favor clauses” in ways that Weizmann feared would cripple the Zionists' political goals. Stage 6. The Final Text (Oct. 31, issued Nov. 2, 1917) emerged after Weizmann's last-ditch battle with the anti-Zionist Jews failed to produce substantial changes in the Milner-Amery version. The declaration was officially sent to Lord Walter Rothschild rather than to Weizmann, to exploit the prestige of the Rothschild name and to promote the “propaganda aspects” of the Declaration in obtaining Jewish support for the British government (83).
Mallison observes that later Zionist interpretations of the Declaration tended to ignore the “safeguards” (i.e., the Arab rights issue). They read “a National Home for the Jewish People” as an intended promise of a Jewish state if enough Jews settled in Palestine. Among the most significant disagreements with this reading was that of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (who had intervened to change the phrase “Jewish race” to “Jewish people” in the final text). Brandeis saw the Declaration as “the end of the political work of Zionism.” This caused an open break with Weizmann, for whom the Zionist enterprise was only beginning (86). Later, Ahad Ha'am challenged Weizmann's Zionist interpretation even more directly by arguing that it repudiated the ethical values of Judaism. From Mandate Palestine, Achad Ha'am led a movement of “spiritual” or “cultural” Zionism that “valued and sought to achieve individual rights and human dignity for all Palestinians including the Muslims and Christians” (87). In doing so he claimed that the final “watered down” version of the Declaration had repudiated the original hegemonic goals of Weizmann's Zionist group, and should be interpreted in those terms .
B-6
David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace (1989), pp. 266-275.
Fromkin explains the big political shift in Dec. 1916, which brought a pro-Zionist government into power, by foregrounding the huge impact of David Lloyd George when he took over the war effort and focused on the Eastern Front. Lloyd George is seen as fusing imperialist and Zionist goals. By promoting the military campaign in 1917 to take Palestine and Syria from the Ottomans, and by helping to put the Zionists in Palestine under British protection, he successfully thwarted French claims. Fromkin uses Lloyd George's secret peace offer to the Ottoman Empire to show his desire to establish de facto British protectorates in Palestine and Mesopotamia, and Arab autonomy in Syria, excluding the French. However, he was unable to undo the core of the Sykes-Picot agreement, which gave Syria to the French.
Fromkin emphasizes the Christian Zionist background of Lloyd George, which is traced back to a Protestant Evangelical tradition of expecting the Second Coming after the Jews return to the Promised Land. In the context of mid-19th century politics, this took the form of support for a British-sponsored Zionist “client” in Palestine, which gave Lord Palmerston an excuse for intervention. Fromkin stresses the continuity of the Christian beliefs linking Lloyd George back to Palmerston. (They are virtually the same as those prompting the U.S. Christian Right to support hard-line Israeli policies today.)
The latter sections of this reading sketch the emergence of Zionism out of the ethnically-based ideas of nationalism in the 19th century. In 1903, Herzl's political effort to secure a homeland for Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms led him to hire David Lloyd George as his lawyer for negotiations with the British government after the Uganda offer was made. Thus when Lloyd George came to power, he was already a knowledgeable supporter of Zionist goals.
B-7
Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (199), 33-41.
Segev, one of Israel's revisionist historians, argues that British leaders wanted the Balfour Declaration more because they feared Jewish power than for strategic reasons. Lloyd George was so convinced by the myth of the Jews' “hugely influential” political and financial power that (as his memoirs confirm in the 1930s) he felt their support might even decide the war's outcome (38). Segev shows Chaim Weizmann masterfully exploiting this widespread fantasy, deflecting its antisemitic subtext toward Zionist ends. Weizmann apparently endorsed the logic of “cultural antisemitism,” if only as a strategy to draw German Jews to their “true homeland” in Palestine (41). The ideological link between Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists like Lloyd George is emphasized at the outset with reference to Herbert Samuel's 1915 memo for the British annexation of Palestine-- which stressed restoring the Jews to the Promised Land in accordance with prophecies long emphasized by Protestant Evangelicals (34). Samuel (who became the first British high commissioner of Mandate Palestine) argued that the British would also be fulfilling their “historic calling” of bringing civilization to “primitive lands.” Thus in complementary ways, each of the three major figures Segev discusses-- Weizmann, Lloyd George and Herbert Samuel-- illustrates the priority of ideological over strategic interests. Segev also stresses the pervasive atmosphere of antisemitism, arguing that it actually played into the hands of the Zionists.
B-8
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000), pp. 4-11.
Avi Shlaim's left-revisionist account of the Balfour Declaration foregrounds the disregard of Palestinian Arab interests. Herzl's idea that Zionism, backed by some Great Power, would bring progress and prosperity to the “primitive and backward” inhabitants, was restated by Weizmann in terms of British imperial interests, downplaying the likelihood of Arab opposition (7). The Balfour Declaration “totally ignored their political rights,” since Britain had no sympathy with the idea that the Arabs of Palestine formed a distinct political “entity” (8). Under the mandate, Weizmann assumed the Arabs would remain politically passive, allowing all issues to be negotiated between Britain and the Jews (9). However, postwar Arab opposition forced the British “to begin a gradual retreat from the promise embodied in the Balfour Declaration,” reaching its climax in the White Paper of 1939. While Weizmann reacted by working with the mandatory power, strategically softening the Zionists' interpretation of what the Declaration entailed, Ze'ev Jabotinsky led a movement of anti-British and anti-Arab militancy inspired by the maximalist ideology of Revisionist Zionism.
