The Balfour Declaration

Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine

Bernard Regan

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781786632470
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786632494
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

On November 2, 1917, the British government, represented by Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, declared that they were in favor of 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.' This short note would be one of the most controversial documents of its time. A hundred years after its signing, Bernard Regan recasts the history of the Balfour Declaration as one of the major events in the story of the Middle East. Offering new insights into the imperial rivalries between Britain, Germany and the Ottomans, Regan exposes British policy in the region as part of a larger geopolitical game. Yet, even then, the course of events was not straightforward and Regan charts the debates within the British government and the Zionist movement itself on the future of Palestine. The book also provides a revealing account of life in Palestinian society at the time, paying particular attention to the responses of Palestinian civil society to the imperial machinations that threatened their way of life. Not just a history of states and policies, Regan manages to brilliantly present both a history of people under colonialism and an account of the colonizers themselves.

1

War, Empire and Palestine

THE BRITISH AND WORLD WAR I

Between 1914 and 1918, Britain – the most powerful nation in the world, with the largest empire – was in the midst of a war involving the established and emerging great powers of the day. This war engulfed the whole of Europe and shaped the politics of the twentieth century.¹ As theatres of conflict developed in the Near East, parts of Africa and areas of the Far East, many British colonies and dominions were embroiled in the conflict. The fighting ultimately led to a redivision of political and economic spheres of influence, with global and historical repercussions.² By 1918 an estimated 70 per cent of the world’s population lived in countries under the influence of the Entente Powers and many of the remaining 30 per cent lived in countries associated with the Central Powers.³

The war threatened Britain’s economic and political preeminence in the world. Germany’s rapid economic expansion and desire to gain markets for its products, expanding its maritime and territorial influence, inevitably led to confrontation with the most powerful obstacle to achieving those ends: the British Empire. The German alliance with the Ottoman Empire offered the prospect of disrupting if not completely destabilising British links to its empire in Asia and access to the increasingly significant commodity of oil. In this endeavour, the German government sought to develop its Drang nach Osten policy, turning towards the East, seeking to utilise the Ottoman Empire’s geographical position and its status in the Muslim world to dislocate relationships between the British, its empire and especially Muslims within the Indian population.

From a British population of 46 million, around 5 million troops were sent abroad by the British government, approximately 705,000 of whom were killed and 1,700,000 wounded.⁴ Across its empire, military personnel were mobilised from the British dominions and colonies with nearly a million recruited from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. A further 1 million soldiers and non-combatants were recruited from India.⁵ No previous war had seen the mobilisation of human and material resources on this scale.

In Britain, during the course of the war, government spending rose from a pre-war figure of 8.1 per cent in 1913, to 38.7 per cent of GDP in 1917.⁶ Britain, along with other members of the Entente, was obliged to purchase food and munitions from the USA and to take out loans to pay for the war which they financed in part by the sales of overseas assets. Britain ended the war in debt to the USA and lost the commanding position which it had held prior to 1914.⁷ Other nations had to borrow to pay for their war efforts too. Italy needed financial backing from the Entente to play any part in the war, and this economic dependency had structural implications for the country as it did for others in a similar situation. Despite the £60 million credit which Italy obtained from Britain, following the 26 April 1915 Treaty of London the costs of the war forced the Italian government to continue to seek credits, pushing it further and further into debt to the USA.⁸ In the period immediately before the war the US economy was in recession, and on the day the war began the Wall Street Stock Exchange closed because of panic about the possible repercussions for the country. However, by the end of the war its economic position was transformed.

Britain turned to the empire to supply the personnel and to the USA to supply the material and financial resources. The war had substantial repercussions domestically, as a higher fatality rate than previous conflicts increased the demands to replace those killed and wounded. Female employment rose by about 50 per cent, increasing the numbers of women working in jobs from which they had been excluded. In Britain agricultural production declined in the first three years as the emphasis switched to manufacturing war material. As average prices increased during the war, the value of real wages declined.⁹ Moreover, the price of a range of goods doubled in the four-year period.¹⁰ By the end of the war British economic, and arguably political, power was diminished in comparison to the nineteenth century.¹¹

There were repercussions too in the political sphere. A year after the declaration of war on 4 August 1914, the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, who had been prime minister for eight years, was forced to restructure his government, creating a coalition with the Conservatives. In December 1916, following a Cabinet split, he was replaced by his fellow Liberal, David Lloyd George, who established a War Cabinet, which he chaired, to conduct the war.¹² The new prime minister convened an Imperial War Cabinet through which some of the countries of the empire were consulted.¹³ A typical meeting, such as that on 31 July 1918, was attended by the British prime minister and the prime ministers or representatives of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland alongside the secretary of state for war, Viscount Milner, chief of the imperial general staff, General Sir H.H. Wilson, and secretary of the War Cabinet, Sir M.P.A. Hankey. Lloyd George and the coalition government intended to engage the empire in backing their war drive.¹⁴

In December 1916 the members of the new Cabinet included Lord Curzon, president of the Council; Andrew Bonar Law, the chancellor of the exchequer; Viscount Milner; and the leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Henderson, MP. The majority of them had played leading roles in the empire and shared a common view of Britain’s role in the world.¹⁵ Curzon was a former viceroy of India from 1895 to 1906. Bonar Law was a staunch supporter of Sir Edward Carson, the opponent of Home Rule for Ireland. Alfred, Lord Milner, was an administrator with experience of conducting colonial wars, especially in South Africa. When the war was declared the Parliamentary Labour Party, in opposition to the view of its then chairman, Ramsey MacDonald, voted for the £100,000,000 war credits and elected the pro-war Arthur Henderson to replace him. In recognition of this pro-war stance, Lloyd George invited the Parliamentary Labour Party to nominate a member to the War Cabinet, who then acted as a conduit for government views and in turn kept the Cabinet informed of changing popular opinions, especially in the trade union movement.

THE HOME FRONT

The impact of the war was felt on the home front. In its day-to-day business the War Cabinet dealt with a considerable number of domestic and international concerns, analysing their significance, their implications for the conduct of the war and their consequences for British war aims.¹⁶ Having sufficient troops to fight the war was essential, and the Cabinet frequently discussed recruitment and the number of men eligible by age and fitness for conscription as difficulties arose, for example, out of the necessity to exempt certain groups of workers such as those in armaments production.¹⁷

A wide variety of domestic topics, such as the prices of staple commodities and levels of productivity, occupied the business of their meetings.¹⁸ Industrial disputes which might directly impact on the supply of materials for the war received particular attention. Meeting after meeting recorded discussions about labour problems, including strikes by sheet metal workers and plane makers in Coventry, the rates of bonuses to be paid to specific groups of workers and the settlement of industrial disputes. During the final year of the war, 1918, nearly 1 million British workers were on strike whilst in Germany the number was around 400,000 workers.¹⁹

The War Cabinet paid close attention to the mood of workers, especially amongst those involved in industrial action, scrutinising levels of productivity as a barometer of support for the war itself. They noted the reactions of workers to political developments elsewhere, especially following the 1917 Russian Revolution with the establishment of the Bolshevik government and their critical decision to withdraw from the war. At one stage the influence of the Bolsheviks was considered so alarming that Sir Edward Carson was charged with preventing the press statements of ‘Trotzki [sic] and Lenin’ being published.²⁰ The War Cabinet minutes record a report by the Labour Party member Mr Barnes, who, ‘stated that when he had mentioned the name of Trotzki [sic] at his meetings in Scotland during the past week, it had been received with cheers’.²¹ These domestic topics were prominent on the War Cabinet’s agenda, although the bulk of the items were concerned with details about the war itself, developments at the front, the availability of the means to continue fighting and crucially how to finance it.²² The Cabinet minutes of 9 December 1916 note that UK spending in the USA was running at $60 million a week and that a loan of $1,500 million would be needed by March 1917. From time to time developments threw up new challenges or posed old ones in new ways, resulting in the business of meetings being rearranged as newer pressing items came to the fore.²³ Discussion ranged from responsibilities on the disposition of the army at the fronts, problems of conscription, consequences of the actions of foes and allies on military developments, the availability of bread, meat and cheese, the price of milk and the provision of oats for horses racing in the winter.²⁴

IRISH INDEPENDENCE AND THE WAR

Ireland was considered by the British government as part of the Home Front: a domestic issue. This was not the view of Irish nationalists, who were of the opinion that the fight for independence was a struggle against British imperialism. During the war, Britain faced a sharpening struggle for Irish independence which had already wrought political damage to the fortunes of the Liberal Party. It remained an unresolvable problem before, during and after the war.

Troops could not be conscripted from Ireland, rebellion forced the deployment of soldiers to maintain order and the political ignominy of defeat at the hands of nationalists threatened to dent British credibility as a world power. If Ireland, then what of India, Egypt or other parts of the empire?²⁵ Domestically the struggle for Irish independence had threatened both a parliamentary and a constitutional crisis, and had exposed fissures within the British military. The Easter Rising in 1916, at the outset emblematic, nevertheless was indicative of the emergence of struggles for self-determination which, in the aftermath of the war, would develop elsewhere in the British Empire. The struggle by the oldest of Britain’s colonies for independence was a mark of the times, a further indication of the beginning of the end of the colonialist period of British imperialism.

The gravity of the impact on Britain of the intensification of the campaign for Irish independence was evidenced by the fact that it had precipitated a constitutional crisis in 1912 and caused an act of rebellion amongst pro-Unionist officers in the British army in Ireland in 1914.²⁶ It was in essence a struggle for self-determination, the outcome of which threatened to have national and international ramifications for the British government, jeopardising its credibility as a power capable of controlling its own empire. The Irish diaspora, in the USA and Australia for example, was a material factor in Cabinet decision making about the course of the war itself. The Cabinet was mindful that US opinion towards their decision making on Ireland might affect the latter’s enthusiasm to support the war effort.

The British government was antagonistic to Home Rule for Ireland and leading protagonists in the campaign against independence were members of the War Cabinet. Prominent in their ranks were figures like Sir Edward Carson, a Unionist leader of the parliamentary anti-Home Rule current. In 1912 Carson had been one of the initiators of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers whose members pledged to oppose by arms attempts by any government to grant Home Rule or to split the northern, predominantly Protestant, parts of Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom. Carson became a member of the Cabinet in December 1916 as First Lord of the Admiralty and joined the War Cabinet in July 1917.

Whilst the Home Rule Act had been passed on 18 September 1914, the government decided to postpone its implementation until the end of the ‘European War’, a move that angered those seeking independence.²⁷ Armed rebellion was a constant concern to the Cabinet, as reports increased of people across Ireland openly conducting military drills in preparation for an armed revolt. According to some estimates, ‘in August 1914, there were over a quarter of a million men enrolled in citizen militias in Ireland’.²⁸ In Dublin a banner proclaiming ‘Neither King nor Kaiser’ hung over Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and of the Irish Citizen Army, both led by James Connolly.

Even after the Easter Rising, industrial disputes in Ireland, such as a railway workers’ strike, were viewed as having the potential to become a focus for the struggle for independence. Under the heading ‘Irish Railways General Strike’, the minutes of the Cabinet meeting of 16 December 1916 record that ‘organised labour had joined hands with organised political force and it was evident that the Irish Nationalist party were ready to take charge of the railway trouble and use their political power to secure a settlement at their dictation’.²⁹ Although the Easter Rising was suppressed, the demands raised by the rebel forces resonated across Ireland. Whilst a law was passed in the British Parliament authorising conscription, prompted by a crisis of manpower on the Western Front in early 1918, it was never implemented.

The government’s handling of events in Ireland had repercussions well beyond Britain’s shores. The War Cabinet was sensitive to reactions to any measures they took and were concerned about the potential influence of Irish émigré communities, especially on the governments in the USA and Austra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. War, Empire and Palestine
• 2. The Balfour Declaration, Self-Determination and Palestinian Opposition
• 3. The Mandate and Palestinian Politics
• 4. Social, Economic and Political Features of Palestinian Resistance
• 5. British Responses to Palestinian Challenges
• 6. The Mandate in Context
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index