Balfour's Shadow

A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel

David Cronin

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745399430
• eBook ISBN: 9781786801081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the controversial history of the British government's involvement in the Zionist project, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the present day.

Written by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, the Declaration stated 'His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.' Its impact on history has been immense and still reverberates a century later, starting what has been referred to as a hundred years of war against the Palestinian people.

This history focuses on the devastating events which resulted from the Declaration, such as the Arab Revolt, the Nakba and establishment of the state, the 1956 and 1967 wars, the Cold War and the Oslo period. It also shines a light on controversial figures such as Tony Blair. In doing so, Balfour's Shadow provides a fascinating take on this much-contested, important history.

1

Laying the foundations

The foundations of Israel were laid in London.

In November 1917, Arthur James Balfour, then Britain’s foreign secretary, signed a letter that was just three sentences long. The brevity of the document did not detract from its impact.

Addressed to the aristocrat Walter Rothschild, it was a letter of support to the British Zionist Federation. It declared that the government viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ and promised assistance to realize that goal.

Through this declaration, Balfour set in train a process whereby colonisers would be treated as superior to the native population. A caveat – that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ – was really an insult. While Jews scattered across the world were accorded the status of belonging to a nation, Arabs living and farming on the land under discussion were merely described as ‘non-Jewish communities’. The idea that they could constitute a nation was not entertained.

The declaration was very much a product of its time. Currying favour with the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine was deemed advantageous to Britain’s strategy during the First World War. Balfour said as much during the war cabinet meetings at which the surrounding issues were discussed. In early October 1917, he inferred that Britain should try to win the sympathy of the Zionist movement before its enemy, Germany, did. At that meeting, he was given the go-ahead to take the ‘necessary action’.¹ The war cabinet returned to the theme on 31 October 1917; the minutes of that meeting record Balfour as claiming ‘it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made.’ Balfour is reported to have claimed:

The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.²

Rumours and conspiracy theories about Jewish influence were influential in that era. Mark Sykes, a politician and diplomat who was considered a leading expert on the Middle East, had contended that Britain could not win the war if what he called ‘great Jewry’ was against it.³ Robert Cecil, then the parliamentary secretary of state for foreign affairs, had remarked: ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews.’⁴

The declaration’s supporters have, however, long propagated the myth that Balfour was acting benevolently in offering a haven to persecuted Jews. Far from being a benevolent individual, Balfour was a man of imperial violence; that was proven by his stint as chief secretary in Ireland between 1887 and 1891. When a protest was held in Mitchelstown, County Cork, against the prosecution of the political leader William O’Brien, Balfour ordered police to open fire. Causing three deaths, the incident earned him the nickname ‘Bloody Balfour’.⁵

Balfour should not be regarded as a saviour of the Jewish people; arguably, he was an anti-Semite. As prime minister, he pushed for a tough anti-immigration law in 1905 for the express purpose of stopping Jews fleeing Russia’s pogroms from seeking refuge in Britain.⁶ The Aliens Bill of that year allowed Britain to refuse refugees entry if they were deemed ‘undesirable’. While the law was being debated, Balfour voiced fears about ‘an alien immigration that was largely Jewish’. It would ‘not be an advantage to the civilisation of the country,’ he contended, to ‘have an immense body of persons’ with a different religion to the majority and ‘who only intermarried among themselves’.⁷ It is not as if Balfour discarded his prejudices towards Jews as his connections to the Zionist movement got stronger. In 1917, the same year as his eponymous declaration, he claimed that the persecutors of Jews had a ‘case of their own’. Because a Jew ‘belonged to a distinct race’ that was ‘numbered in millions, one could perhaps understand the desire to keep him down,’ Balfour stated.⁸

Balfour’s backing of the movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine is not irreconcilable with his apparent anti-Semitism. Indeed, he dropped strong clues that his support for Jewish settlement in Palestine may have been motivated by a desire to see Europe emptied of Jews. In his introduction to a Nahum Sokolov book, Balfour praised Zionism as:

a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a body which is too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb.⁹

Rumours of Russia

The rumours of Jewish influence were taken especially seriously when they related to Russia. There was a perception that numerous Russian Jews were communist. The Times went even further by alleging that the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin and ‘several of his confederates are adventurers of German-Jewish blood and in German pay, whose sole objective is to exploit the ignorant masses in the interests of their employers in Berlin.’¹⁰ By siding with the Zionist movement, Britain’s elite felt it could win a majority of Russian Jews over to its side. A 1917 telegram from the Foreign Office to British envoys in Petrograd read:

We are advised that one of the best methods of counteracting Jewish pacifists and socialist propaganda in Russia would be to offer definite encouragement to Jewish nationalist aspirations in Palestine. [The] question of Zionism is full of difficulties but I request your views in the first instance as to whether declaration by the Entente of sympathy with Jewish nationalist aspirations would help or not insofar as concerns [the] internal and external situation of Russia.¹¹

Another senior figure in the Foreign Office, Ronald Graham, treated speculation as fact. In October 1917, he briefed Balfour about ‘the very important role the Jews are now playing in the Russian political situation.’ Although ‘these Jews are certainly against the Allies and for the Germans, almost every Jew in Russia is a Zionist,’ he claimed. If Britain convinced Russian Jews that the success of Zionism depended on ‘the support of the Allies and the expulsion of the Turks from Palestine, we shall enlist a most powerful element in our favour,’ Graham added.¹²

Earlier in 1917, Britain’s war cabinet had approved a memorandum detailing some of its key military objectives. One goal identified was to ensure ‘continuity of territory or of control both in East Africa and between Egypt and India.’¹³ Palestine was located close to the Suez Canal, which Britain relied on for shipping to and from many of its imperial ‘possessions’, as well as to coveted oil resources in Persia.

Chaim Weizmann was the leading Zionist in England at this time. Originally from Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire), he was a chemist, who taught at Manchester University and headed the British Admiralty Laboratories from 1917 to 1919. His scientific knowledge proved valuable to the British arms industry during the war. At a time when acetone (an important ingredient of cordite) was in short supply, Weizmann devised a method of manufacturing the solvent with maize. Rather than being paid for his breakthrough by the British government, he is reputed to have asked David Lloyd George, the then prime minister, for help in advancing the Zionist project.¹⁴

Weizmann was introduced to Lloyd George by C.P. Scott, editor of The Manchester Guardian. More a lobbyist than a journalist, Scott used the editorial section of his ‘liberal’ newspaper to support Zionism. Some of Scott’s comments about Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants verged on the racist. A 1917 leader described Palestinians as being ‘at a low stage of civilisation’ and containing ‘none of the elements of progress’. In turn, Lloyd George arranged for Weizmann to see Balfour (as it happened, Balfour had had a previous conversation with Weizmann during a 1906 visit to Manchester).¹⁵

The Balfour Declaration was the product of discussions between Weizmann, a few other Zionists and the British government. Weizmann had appeared certain that Britain would become the main sponsor of his movement for months, if not years, prior to the declaration being published. At a May 1917 Zionist gathering in London, he said:

Palestine will be protected by Great Britain. Protected by this power, the Jews will be able to develop and create an administrative organisation which, while safeguarding the interests of the non-Jew population, will permit us to realise the aims of Zionism. I am authorised to declare to this assembly that His Majesty’s government are ready to support our plans.¹⁶

Various drafts of the statement which Balfour eventually signed were considered by both sides. Scholars have pored over each draft, analysing, for example, how one advocated that Palestine be ‘reconstituted’ as the ‘national home’ of the Jewish people, whereas the final version merely envisaged a ‘national home’ being established in that country. Bearing in mind subsequent events, the differences between the various drafts appear less significant than they probably looked to those directly involved in the negotiations. Nahum Sokolov, one of the Zionists involved in the drafting, had his wish of having a declaration that would be ‘as pregnant as possible’ fulfilled. He wanted a statement that would be concise and express Britain’s ‘general approval’ of Zionist aspirations.¹⁷

Unknown in international law, the phrase ‘national home’ has been attributed to Max Nordau, a founder of the World Zionist Organization. At an 1897 conference in Basle, he advocated that Zionists find ‘a circumlocution that would express all we meant’ but avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of Palestine. Nordau proposed ‘national home’ – Heimstätte in German – as what he called a ‘synonym for “state”’.¹⁸ The minutes of the key war cabinet meeting on Halloween in 1917 also acknowledge as much, albeit in a circuitous fashion. Balfour is recorded as explaining that a ‘national home’ meant:

some form of British, American or other protectorate under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture and industry, a real centre of national culture and focus of national life.

Balfour added that ‘it did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish state.’ But he hinted that such a state could be formed ‘in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.’ Leonard Stein, a Zionist and Liberal Party politician who wrote a bulky tome on the declaration, has confirmed that ‘the conception of the eventual emergence of something in the nature of a Jewish state or commonwealth was, in fact, in the air when the declaration was published.’¹⁹

The golden key

The ambiguities in the declaration did not stop the Zionist movement from exploiting its potential. Weizmann stated as much when he wrote ‘we ought not to ask the British government if we will enter Palestine as masters or equals to the Arabs.’ In his words, ‘the declaration implies that we have been given the opportunity to become masters.’²⁰ Weizmann was far less coy than his friends in government. During a public event in London, he said that ‘a Jewish state will come about’ and called the Balfour Declaration ‘the golden key which unlocks the doors of Palestine.’²¹

Despite how it paid lip-service to civil rights, the declaration’s effect was to formalise an alliance between the British Empire and a movement motivated by a sense of supremacy. Weizmann summarised the outlook of Zionists by stating: ‘There is a fundamental difference in quality between Jew and native.’²² (Perhaps it should be remarked that some of the politicians he courted used language that was even more pejorative. Lloyd ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Timeline of key events
• Text of Balfour Declaration
• Introduction
• 1. Laying the foundations
• 2. Bringing in the Black and Tans
• 3. ‘We must shoot to kill’
• 4. Sowing the seeds of ethnic cleansing
• 5. Arming Israel (1953–1956)
• 6. Arming Israel (1957–1979)
• 7. Sidelining the PLO
• 8. The loyal lieutenant
• 9. Partners in crime
• Postscript: Israel’s greatest friend?
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index