The Balfour Declaration And its Consequences
Avi Shlaim
in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, London, I. B. Tauris, 2005, pp. 251-270
Occasionally
there are topics that have been written about at such length that it helps to
clear the air, or to establish the vantage point from which I intend to
consider my subject. My aim therefore is to take a fresh look at the Balfour
Declaration in the light of recent scholarship. What I propose to do is to
focus on the Declaration itself, on the motives behind it, on the way it was
implemented, on the conflicts to which it gave rise, and on its consequences
for Britain’s
position as the paramount Western power in the Middle
East. I begin with a note on background.
British
imperialism in the Middle
East in
World War I was
intricate, to use a British understatement. In 1915 Britain
promised Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, that they would support an
independent
Arab kingdom under his rule in return for his mounting an Arab revolt
against
the Ottoman
Empire, Germany’s ally in the war. The promise was
contained in a letter dated October
24, 1915
from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, to
the Sharif of Mecca in what later became known as the McMahon-Hussein
correspondence. The Sharif of Mecca assumed that the promise included Palestine. In 1916 Britain
reached a secret agreement with France to
divide the Middle
East
into spheres of influence in the event of an allied victory. Under
the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Palestine was to be
placed under international control. In 1917 Britain
issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the establishment
of a
national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Thus, by a stroke of the imperial
pen, the Promised Land became twice-promised. Even by the standards of
Perfidious Albion, this was an extraordinary tale of double-dealing and
betrayal, a tale that continued to haunt
Britain
throughout the thirty years of its rule in
Palestine.
Of the three wartime pledges, the most curious, and certainly the most
controversial was the Balfour Declaration. Here, wrote Arthur Koestler,
was one
nation promising another nation the land of a third nation. Koestler
dismissed
the Declaration as an impossible notion, an unnatural graft, a
“white Negro.”
C. P. Scott, the ardently pro-Zionist editor of the
Manchester
Guardian,
played a significant part in persuading the British government to issue
the
Declaration. In an editorial article, Scott hailed the Declaration as
an act of
imaginative generosity. “It is at once the fulfilment of
aspiration, the
signpost of destiny.”
[1]
Elizabeth Monroe in
Britain’s Moment in the Middle
East conceded that to
the Jews who went to
Palestine,
the Declaration signified fulfilment and salvation. But she also notes
that to
the British the Declaration brought much ill will, and complications
that
sapped their strength. “Measured by British interests
alone,” argued
Monroe,
“it is one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial
history.”
[2]
On November 2, 1917, Arthur Balfour, Britain’s
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, addressed a letter to Lord
Rothschild,
one of the leaders of the British Jews, as follows:
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on
behalf of
His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of
sympathy which has been
submitted to and approved by the Cabinet: 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, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which
may
prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in
Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other
country.
The
statement was exceedingly brief, consisting of a mere sixty-seven
words, but
its consequences were both profound and pervasive, and its impact on
the
subsequent history of the Middle East
was nothing less than revolutionary. It completely transformed the
position of
the fledgling Zionist movement vis-à-vis
the Arabs of Palestine, and it
provided a protective umbrella that enabled the Zionists to proceed
steadily
towards their ultimate goal of establishing an independent Jewish state
in Palestine.
Rarely in the annals of the British
Empire has such a
short document produced such far-reaching
consequences.
In view of its political impact, it is not surprising that the Balfour Declaration has attracted so much attention from
historians of
the Middle East. Nor is it
surprising that, almost a century later, it remains such a contentious
and
controversial subject. There are several bones of contention in this
debate,
all of them revolving around the question of compatibility between the
three
war-time agreements. On the question of conflict between Britain’s
promise to Sharif Hussein and to the French the most definitive study
is by
Elie Kedourie. Kedourie was the first scholar to bring together all the
available evidence from British, French, and Arabic sources to
elucidate the
meaning of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence and to examine its impact
on
British policy between the wars. His principal conclusion is that the
Sykes-Picot agreement did not violate the commitments contained in the
McMahon-Hussein correspondence. The Balfour Declaration, however, is
only
mentioned by Kedourie in passing because it falls outside the scope of
his
study.[3]
In
1916 the Sharif of Mecca proclaimed himself “King of the Arab
Countries,” but
the Allies recognized him only as King of the Hijaz. On the
relationship
between
Britain’s
commitments to the Zionists and to King Hussein, the most recent study
is
Palestine: A
Twice-Promised Land? by
Isaiah Friedman.
[4]
Friedman’s answer to the question posed in the title is that
Palestine
was not twice-promised in as much as McMahon’s offer to
recognize and uphold
Arab independence after the war was conditional and non-binding and
that, in
any case, it did not include
Palestine.
Friedman argues not only that Sir Henry had definitely excluded
Palestine
from the prospective Arab kingdom but that this was understood by the
Hashemite
leader at the time. Hussein’s silence following the
publication of the Balfour
Declaration is seen by Friedman as indicative of his attitude. Another
piece of
evidence cited by Friedman comes from the famous book by George
Antonius, the
spokesman and chronicler of the Arab national movement. From Antonius
we learn
that King Hussein “ordered his sons to do what they could to
allay the
apprehensions caused by the Balfour Declaration among their followers
[and]
despatched an emissary to Faisal at Aqaba with similar
instructions.”
[5]
Friedman’s
conclusion is that the
charges of fraudulence and deception levelled against the British after
the war
were largely groundless. Groundless or not, these charges acquired the
status
of dogma not only in the eyes of Arab nationalists but, more
surprisingly, in
the eyes of most British officials as well. In the case of King Hussein
it is
necessary to distinguish much more clearly than Friedman does between
his
initial response to the Balfour Declaration and his subsequent
attitude. When
news of the Declaration reached Hussein he was greatly disturbed by it
and he
asked Britain to clarify its meaning. Whitehall met this
request by the despatch of Commander D. G. Hogarth, one of the
heads of
the Arab Bureau in Cairo, who arrived in Jedda in the first week of
January 1918 for a
series of interviews with King Hussein. “Hogarth’s
Message,” as it came to be
known, reaffirmed the Entente’s determination that
“the Arab race shall be
given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the
world.” So far as Palestine was
concerned, Britain was “determined that no people shall
be subject to another.” Britain
noted and supported the aspiration of the Jews to return to Palestine but only
in so far as this was compatible with “the freedom of the
existing population,
both economic and political.” Hussein voiced no disagreement
with this policy
though we may be sceptical of Hogarth’s report that he
“agreed
enthusiastically” with it.[6]
Hogarth’s
Message is crucial for
understanding King Hussein’s attitude to the Balfour
Declaration. Following the
meetings in Jedda, Hussein thought that he had Britain’s
assurance that the settlement of the Jews in Palestine would not
conflict with Arab independence in that country. This explains his
initial
silence in public and his private efforts to allay the anxieties of his
sons.
Hussein had great respect for the Jews, seeing them, following the
Koran, as
“the People of the Book,” meaning the Bible. He was
not opposed to the
settlement of Jews in Palestine and even welcomed it on religious and on
humanitarian grounds. He
was, however, emphatically opposed to a Zionist takeover of the
country.
Hogarth gave him a solemn pledge that Britain
would respect not only the economic but also the political freedom of
the Arab
population. When Britain subsequently refused to recognize Arab
independence in Palestine, Hussein
felt betrayed and accused Britain
of breach of faith.[7]
If
the disenchantment of Sharif
Hussein and his sons with Britain
was gradual, the hostility of the Arab nationalists towards Britain
on account of the Balfour Declaration was immediate and unremitting.
One
valuable Arabic source on this period is the diary of Auni Abd al-Hadi.
Abd
al-Hadi was a Palestinian politician who served as one of Amir
Faisal’s
secretaries at the Paris Peace Conference and during his short-lived
administration in Damascus in 1920. He then served Amir Abdullah,
Faisal’s elder brother, in Transjordan. In 1924 he
returned to Palestine and became one of the chief spokesmen of the
Palestinian national
movement. Abd Al-Hadi’s impression was that Faisal resented
the Zionist
intrusion into Palestine but was wary of upsetting the British. Faisal
was also influenced,
according to Abd al-Hadi, by the reassuring letters that he received
from his
father in the early months of 1918 in his camp in Aqaba on the subject
of the
Balfour Declaration.[8]
For
his part, Abd al-Hadi did not
believe in the possibility of co-operation with the Zionists in Palestine. He was
therefore very critical in his diary of Faisal for signing an agreement
on
Arab-Jewish co-operation with Dr. Chaim Weizmann at their meeting in
Aqaba on June 4, 1919. Abd al-Hadi notes that Faisal signed the
agreement without
understanding its implications because it was in English, a language he
did not
know. But he also notes that Faisal added a hand-written codicil making
the
implementation of the agreement conditional on his demands concerning
Arab
independence being fulfilled.[9]
As these
conditions were not fulfilled, the agreement became null and void.
There
are a number of other
references to the Balfour Declaration in Auni Abd al-Hadi’s
diary, all of them
highly critical of the British and of their Jewish
protégés. His basic view,
repeated on several occasions, was that the Declaration was made by an
English foreigner
who had no ownership of Palestine to a foreign Jew who had no right to it.[10]
Palestine thus
faced a double danger: from the British Mandate and from the Zionist
movement.
In December 1920 Abd al-Hadi participated in the Third Palestinian
Congress in Haifa. The Congress
denounced the actions of the British government and its plans for
realizing the
Zionist goals. It also rejected Balfour’s promise of a
national home for the
Jews in Palestine as a violation of international law, of
wartime Allied commitments,
and of the natural rights of the inhabitants of the country.[11]
In 1932
Abd al-Hadi founded the Palestinian branch of the Pan-Arab Independence
Party
whose manifesto called for the cancellation of the Mandate and of the
Balfour
Declaration.[12]
Arab hostility to the Balfour Declaration, as exemplified by Auni Abd
al-Hadi,
could have been predicted from the beginning. So why was the
Declaration
issued?
There
are two main schools of thought on the origins of the Balfour
Declaration, one
represented by Leonard Stein, the other by Mayir Vereté.
What later became the
conventional wisdom on the subject was first laid out by Leonard Stein
in 1961
in his masterly survey
The Balfour Declaration.
[13]
This
book provides a careful, detailed, and subtle account of the
decision-making
process that led
Britain to
issue the Declaration, but it does not reach any clear-cut conclusions.
The
conclusion implicit in the narrative, however, is that it was the
activity and
the skill of the Zionists, and in particular of Dr. Chaim Weizmann,
that
induced Britain to issue this famous statement of support for the
Zionist
cause.
Leonard Stein’s book was subjected
to an extended critique by Mayir Vereté of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem
in a notable article he published in 1970 on “The Balfour
Declaration and its
Makers.”
[14]
According to Vereté the Declaration was the work of
hard-headed pragmatists,
primarily motivated by British imperial interests in the
Middle East. Far from
the Zionists seeking British support, it was
British officials who took the initiative in approaching the Zionists.
The definition of British interests
in the Middle East began in
1915. This process led to the Sykes-Picot agreement which reconciled Britain’s
interests with those of France,
with a compromise over Palestine.
On further reflection, however, the British felt that control over Palestine
was necessary in order to keep France
and Russia
from the approaches to Egypt
and the Suez Canal. In
Vereté’s
account, it was the desire to exclude France
from Palestine,
rather than sympathy for the Zionist cause, that prompted Britain to
sponsor a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
It was also thought that a Declaration favorable to the ideals of
Zionism was
likely to enlist the support of the Jews of America and Russia
for the war effort against Germany.
Finally, rumor that Germany
was courting the Zionists accelerated the pace at which Britain
moved towards its dramatic overture. In contrast to Stein,
Vereté concludes
that Zionist lobbying played a negligible part in drawing Britain
towards Palestine.
A
similar though not identical argument was advanced by Jon Kimche in
The
Unromantics: The Great Powers and the Balfour Declaration. As
the title
suggests, the author believes that the driving force behind the
Declaration was
not sentimentality but hard-headed realism. Kimche, however, attributes
this
realism not only to the British but to the Zionists as well. Indeed, he
maintains that the interests of the two sides were identical, and that
by
working for a Jewish Palestine they were working at the same time for a
British
Palestine. The Declaration provided the stepping stones: each of the
partners
used the same stones but later each went his own way.
“This,” argues Kimche,
“was the basic realism with which Balfour and Weizmann
approached their
compact; they understood that they would have to go together part of
the way,
but that a time would come when they would have to part.”
[15]
What is
beyond question, as Kimche himself points out, is that there was little
room
for such sophistication in the heated politics of wartime
Britain
and post-war Zionism.
[16]
The historiography of the Balfour
Declaration took a step forward in 2000 with the publication of Tom
Segev’s
book on the British Mandate in
Palestine.
[17]
Segev’s
contribution lies in the revisionist interpretation he develops of the
origins
of British rule in
Palestine.
His “revisionist account” is based on new source
material as well as a new
synthesis of earlier studies on the subject. In Segev’s
account, the prime
movers behind
the Balfour
Declaration
were neither the Zionist leaders not the British imperial planners, but
Prime
Minister David Lloyd George. In his memoirs, written some twenty years
after
the event, Lloyd George explained his support for the Zionist movement
during
the First World War as an alliance with a hugely influential political
organization whose goodwill was worth paying for. The common wisdom in
Britain at
the time Lloyd George published his account was that the country had
erred in
supporting the Zionists and he was probably trying to justify his
wartime
policy.
Segev will have none of it. Lloyd
George’s support for Zionism, he argues, was based not on
British interests but
on ignorance and prejudice. In his own way Lloyd George despised the
Jews, but
he also feared them, and he proceeded on the basis of an absurdly
inflated
notion of the power and influence of the Zionists. In aligning Britain
with the Zionists, he acted in the mistaken—and
anti-Semitic—view that the Jews
turned the wheels of history. In fact, as Segev shows, the Jews were
helpless,
with nothing to offer—no influence other than the myth of
clandestine power. As
for the Zionists, they could not even speak in the name of world Jewry
for they
were a minority within a minority.
Lloyd George’s misconceptions about
the Jews were widely shared in the ruling class in
Britain,
as was his antipathy towards the French. In Segev’s summary,
the British
entered Palestine to defeat the Turks; they stayed there to keep it
from the
French; then they gave it to the Zionists because they loved
“the Jews” even as
they loathed them, at once admiring and despising them. The British
were not
guided by strategic considerations and there was no orderly
decision-making
process. The Balfour Declaration “was the product of neither
military nor
diplomatic interests but of prejudice, faith, and sleight of hand. The
men who
sired it were Christian and Zionist and, in many cases, anti-Semitic.
They
believed the Jews controlled the world.”
[18]
Britain’s
belief in the mystical power of “the Jews” overrode
reality, and it was on the
basis of such spurious considerations that
Britain
took the momentous decision to sponsor the Zionist cause.
[19]
On one point there is a broad
consensus among admirers as well as critics of the Balfour Declaration:
it was
a considered statement of policy, issued after prolonged deliberations,
painstaking drafting and redrafting, and careful wording. Before the
British
government gave the Declaration to the world, it closely examined every
word,
and incorporated in the text countless changes and corrections. All
these
efforts, however, did not result in a clear or coherent text. On the
contrary,
they compounded the opaqueness, ambiguity, and, worst of all, the
internal
contradictions.
The
greatest contradiction lay in supporting, however vaguely, a right to
national
self-determination of a minority of the inhabitants of Palestine,
while implicitly denying it to the majority. At the time that the
proposed
statement was under discussion in the War Cabinet, the population of Palestine
was in the neighborhood of 670,000. Of these, the Jews numbered some
60,000.
The Arabs thus constituted roughly 91 per cent of the population, while
the
Jews accounted for 9 per cent. The proviso that “nothing
shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities
in Palestine”
implied that, in British eyes, the Arab majority had no political
rights.
Part of the explanation for this
peculiar phraseology is that the majority of the ministers did not
recognize
the Palestinians as a people with legitimate national aspirations, but
viewed
them as a backward, Oriental, inert mass. Arthur Balfour was typical of
the
Gentile Zionists in this respect. “Zionism, be it right or
wrong, good or bad,”
he wrote in 1922, is “of far profounder import than the
desires and prejudices
of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
[20]
The
most charitable explanation that may be offered for this curious claim
is that
in an age of colonialism everyone was in some sense implicated in its
ideology.
Balfour may appear today like an extreme example of the colonial
mentality, but
he was not untypical of his era.
Yet Balfour’s specific proposal to
come out in favor of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in
Palestine
did not enjoy unanimous support round the Cabinet table. Edwin Montagu,
the
Secretary of State for
India
and the only Jewish member of the government, considered Zionism a
threat to
the Jews of Britain and other countries. He denounced Zionism as a
“mischievous
political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the
United
Kingdom.”
[21]
Montagu
rejected the idea of the Jews as a nation and argued that the demand
for
recognition as a separate nation put at risk their struggle to become
citizens
with equal rights in the countries in which they lived.
[22]
Lord Curzon, a member of the War
Cabinet, was more troubled by the implications of the proposed move for
the
rights of the Arabs of Palestine. “How was it
proposed,” he asked his Cabinet
colleagues, “to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman
inhabitants and
to introduce the Jews in their place?” In a paper to the
Cabinet he returned to
the theme:
What
is to become of the people of the country? . . . [The
Arabs] and
their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500
years,
and they own the soil. . . . They profess the
Mohammedan faith. They
will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or
to act
merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.
[23]
Montagu
and Curzon were overruled. The three most powerful men in the Cabinet,
Lloyd
George, Balfour, and Lord Milner, threw their weight behind the
proposal. At
the crucial meeting, on
October 31,
1917, the Cabinet approved the final
wording of the declaration of sympathy for a national home for the Jews
in
Palestine.
Curzon restated his misgivings and his pessimism about the future of
Palestine.
Largely in deference to his anxieties, the final version of the
Declaration
contained the caveat about protecting the civil and religious rights of
the
non-Jewish communities in
Palestine.
[24]
Chaim
Weizmann was waiting outside the room where the War Cabinet met. In the
early
afternoon, Sir Mark Sykes emerged, calling “Dr. Weizmann,
it’s a boy!”
While Chaim Weizmann’s part in
procuring the Balfour Declaration may have been exaggerated, his role
in
keeping
Britain to
her rash wartime promise was of critical importance. To the peace
conference
that convened at
Versailles in
January 1919, Weizmann went as the head of the Zionist delegation. His
aim was
to ensure that the British would remain in
Palestine.
At the conference he pleaded for the international ratification of the
Balfour
Declaration. But at the
San Remo
conference, in April 1920, the French representative objected to the
inclusion
of the language of the Balfour Declaration in the text of the mandate
over
Palestine.
It took strong British pressure to persuade the
League of
Nations to
incorporate the commitment to
establish a Jewish national home in the terms of
Britain’s
mandate to govern
Palestine.
[25]
Even before the international
ratification of the Balfour Declaration, violent protests broke out in
Palestine
against
Britain’s
pro-Zionist policy and against Zionist activities. The Arabs
emphatically
refused to recognize the Declaration and anything done in its name,
seeing it
as the thin end of the wedge of an Anglo-Jewish plot to take over their
country. Arab resentment towards the British and their
protégées culminated in
the Nebi Musa riots of April 1920. A court of inquiry appointed to
investigate
the riots noted that the Balfour Declaration “is undoubtedly
the starting point
of the whole trouble.” The court also reached the conclusion
that Arab fears
were not unfounded.
[26]
The
Nebi Musa riots were the first intrusion of mass violence into the
Arab-Jewish
conflict. The riots did nothing to advance the political aims of the
Arab
nationalists but they also bode ill for the Zionists’
expectation of achieving
their ends peacefully. The riots and their aftermath, in the words of
Bernard
Wasserstein, “created a gangrene of suspicion and mistrust in
the
British-Zionist relationship in
Palestine
which was to subsist throughout the three decades of British
rule.”
[27]
Throughout these three decades
Britain
was subjected to repeated criticism from Zionist quarters for reneging,
or at
least backsliding, on its wartime pledge to the Jews. In self-defense
the
British pointed out that the Balfour Declaration committed them to
support a
national home for the Jews in
Palestine,
not a Jewish state. Not all British officials, however, adhered to this
interpretation. Balfour and Lloyd George, for example, admitted in 1922
at a
meeting with Winston Churchill and Chaim Weizmann, that the Balfour
Declaration
“had always meant a Jewish State.”
[28]
The troubled and tangled history of
the British Mandate in
Palestine
has been told many times before, recently among others by Joshua
Sherman and
Naomi Shepherd.
[29]
Most historians of this period attribute to British policy a pro-Arab
bias.
Some Zionist writers go further: they accuse
Britain
not only of persistent partiality towards the Arabs, but of going back
on its
original promise to the Jews.
Tom Segev makes a major contribution
to the existing literature on this issue by putting Britain’s
record as a mandatory power under an uncompromising lens. His verdict
is that
British actions considerably favored the Zionist position and thus
helped to
ensure the establishment of a Jewish state. The evidence he presents of
British
support for the Zionist position is both rich and compelling. So is the
evidence he adduces for the proposition that once the Zionist movement
came to Palestine
with the intention of creating a Jewish state with a Jewish majority,
war was
inevitable. From the start there were only two possibilities: that the
Zionists
would defeat the Arabs or that the Arabs would defeat the Zionists.
British
actions tended to weaken the Arabs and to strengthen the Zionists as
the two
national movements moved inexorably towards the final showdown. The
Arab
nationalists in Palestine,
under the leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini, despaired of Britain
and eventually threw in their lot with Nazi Germany. The Zionists,
under the
leadership of Chaim Weizmann, hitched a lift with the British
Empire, advancing
under its sponsorship to the verge of
independence. The Zionists were not slow to grasp the importance for a
weak
national liberation movement of securing the sponsorship and support of
a great
power. Indeed, ensuring the support of the paramount Western power of
the day
remains to this day a basic tenet of Zionist foreign policy.
From the start, the central problem
facing British officials in
Palestine
was that of reconciling an angry and hostile Arab majority to the
implementation
of the pro-Zionist policy that was publicly proclaimed on
November 2,
1917.
In general, British officials in
Palestine
had much more sympathy for the Arabs than the policy-makers in
London.
Many of these officials had an uneasy conscience, even a feeling of
guilt, as a
result of the decision of their political masters to honor
Britain’s
wartime promise to the Jews while breaking its promise to the Arabs.
Some
suggested a revision of the policy because, in their opinion, it
involved an
injustice to the Arabs. But they constantly ran up against the argument
that
the Declaration constituted a binding commitment. Even Lord Curzon, who
had
originally opposed the Balfour Declaration, concluded in 1923 that the
commitment to the Zionists could not be ignored “without
substantial sacrifice
of consistency and self-respect, if not of honour.”
[30]
Arab resentment and riots in
Palestine
persuaded the Lloyd George government to replace the military
government with a
civil administration, but not to reverse its pro-Zionist policy. And
once the
government resolved to continue to support a Jewish homeland in
Palestine,
it could not have chosen a more suitable man for the post of High
Commissioner
than Sir Herbert Samuel. Samuel’s association with Zionism
was intimate and his
attachment to the Zionist cause was perhaps the one passionate
commitment of
his entire political career.
[31]
Samuel
was sent to
Palestine
not because of—or even despite—his Jewishness, but
because he was a Zionist.
The appointment pleased the Zionists but it destroyed the last vestiges
of Arab
faith in
Britain’s
integrity and impartiality. Before Samuel took over from the military
government, the chief administrative officer asked him to sign what
became one
of the most quoted documents in Zionist history: “Received
from Major General
Sir Louis Bols, KCB—One Palestine, complete.”
Samuel signed.
[32]
Traditional
British historians have tended to regard Herbert Samuel as an impartial
administrator in the emerging conflict between Palestinian Arabs and
Zionists.
Sahar Huneidi, an Arab scholar living in
London,
challenges this claim in a major revisionist study of the early period
of the
Mandate. She argues that most of the measures Samuel took during his
tenure in
Palestine—in the political, economic, and administrative
spheres—were designed
to prepare the ground not just for a Jewish national home but for a
fully-fledged Jewish state. Using a wide range of primary sources, both
English
and Arabic, Huneidi charts Samuel’s career in
Palestine
against the complex background of British policy in the region.
[33]
Huneidi argues convincingly that
during Samuel’s five years as High Commissioner in
Palestine,
from 1920 to 1925, he remained an ardent supporter of Zionism. But
under the
impact of fierce anti-Jewish riots, he began to doubt the practicality
of a
policy which seemed, as he put it, to be a recipe for “a
second
Ireland.”
He therefore devised endless schemes to draw the Arab notables into the
political community of
Palestine.
All these schemes, however, proved inadequate to the task of
reconciling the
Arabs of Palestine to Zionism.
[34]
The failure of his attempts to bring
together Arabs and Jews within a unified political framework led Samuel
to try
to satisfy each community separately. His preferred method was the
devolution
of power to the increasingly separate communal institutions of the
Arabs and
the Jews. This policy encouraged the trend towards the internal
partition of
Palestine.
Under Samuel’s successors this trend gathered further
momentum. While
alleviating the inter-communal conflict in the short run, this process
exacerbated the problem in the long run by driving Arabs and Jews
further and
further apart. As the two communities built up the institutional
strength
required for the struggle ahead, the Government of Palestine became
little more
than an umpire.
[35]
Isaiah Berlin,
an Anglo-Jewish supporter of Zionism and a prescient observer, was
moved to
compare the Palestine Mandate to a minor English public school:
There
was the headmaster, the high commissioner, trying to be firm and
impartial: but
the assistant masters favoured the sporting stupid boarders (Arabs)
against the
clever swot dayboys (Jews) who had the deplorable habit of writing home
to
their parents on the slightest provocation to complain about the
quality of the
teaching, the food, and so on.
[36]
The
role of umpire became increasingly difficult to sustain with the
passage of
time. High Commissioners came and went but their hands were tied by the
pledge
of
November 2, 1917. Shortly
after his arrival in
Palestine,
in December 1928, Sir John Chancellor reached the conclusion that the
Balfour
Declaration had been a “colossal blunder,” unfair
to the Arabs and detrimental
to the interests of the
British
Empire.
In January 1930 he sent a long memorandum to
London.
He wanted to extricate
Britain
from the Balfour Declaration and to deal a blow to Zionism. His ideas
were
given a respectful hearing in
London
and the King asked for a copy.
[37]
On
learning that the King would like to hear
from him directly about the state of affairs in Palestine,
Chancellor obliged with a 16-page letter explaining why, in
Chancellor’s view, Britain’s
national home policy in Palestine was misguided, unjust, and impossible to carry
out. It also
repeated his earlier proposals for restricting Jewish immigration and
land
purchases in Palestine. The Jews took the view that the Arabs of
Palestine were free to go
to any part of Arabia and that they should be induced to move to Transjordan. Chancellor was
strongly opposed to any such action on the grounds that it would be
inconsistent with the part of the Balfour Declaration which laid down
that in
the establishment of a Jewish national home, nothing should be done to
prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
Chancellor portrayed the Jews as an emotional people:
What makes them difficult to deal with is that
they are, regardless
of the rights and feelings of others, very exacting in pressing their
own
claims. Even as a minority of the population of Palestine the Jews
adopt towards the Arabs an attitude of arrogant superiority, which is
hotly
resented by the Arabs with their traditions of courtesy and good
manners.[38]
Nor did the
Jews cherish genuine sentiments of loyalty towards
Britain.
In spite of what they said on public occasions when it was in their
interest to
proclaim their devotion, “the bulk of the Jewish population
of
Palestine
have little feeling of gratitude or loyalty towards
Great Britain for what
she
has done for the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”
[39]
Having delivered his tirade against
the Jews, Chancellor returned to the basic problem facing Britain
and made a concrete proposal for dealing with it:
The facts of
the situation are that in
the dire straits of the war, the British Government made promises to
the Arabs
and promises to the Jews which are inconsistent with one another and
are
incapable of fulfilment.
The
honest course is to admit our difficulty and to say to the Jews that,
in
accordance with the Balfour Declaration, we
have
favoured the establishment
of a Jewish National Home in Palestine and that a Jewish National Home
in
Palestine has in fact been established and will be maintained and that,
without
violating the other part of the Balfour Declaration, without
prejudicing the
interests of the Arabs, we cannot do more than we have done.
[40]
Chancellor’s
memoranda, and a number of other reports that also underlined the
gravity of
the situation in
Palestine,
contributed to a reformulation of the official line in
London.
In October 1930, after several discussions in Cabinet, Colonial
Secretary Lord
Passfield issued a White Paper. The premise and the principal
innovation of the
White Paper was that the Balfour Declaration imposed on
Britain a
binary and equal obligation towards both Jews and Arabs. Accordingly,
Jewish
immigration to
Palestine
was linked to the Arab as well as the Jewish economy. In the past,
Jewish
immigration quotas were determined by the absorptive capacity of the
Palestine
economy. From this point on, Jews were to be allowed into the country
only at a
rate that would not put Arabs out of jobs. In the spirit of
Chancellor’s
proposals, the White Paper assumed that the Jews would remain a
minority.
Chancellor and his officials were pleased by this redefinition of
official
policy, but their success was short-lived. Dr. Weizmann succeeded in
getting
the new policy reversed within a few months. Once again the Zionists
had won
and the Arabs failed in
London.
[41]
As Chancellor had predicted,
unrestricted Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine
produced further unrest and periodic outbreaks of violence. The
fundamental
contradiction between Arab nationalist aspirations and Britain’s
1917 undertakings to the Jews continued to render the Mandate
inoperable. The
influx of German Jews to Palestine
following the Nazi rise to power in 1933 provoked deep anxieties among
the
Arabs. In 1936 the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike with
the aim
of halting Jewish immigration, banning the sale of land to Jews, and
establishing an independent national government. The general strike
snowballed
into a full-scale revolt that was to last three years. The British
government’s
belated response to the outbreak of the Arab Rebellion consisted of
appointing
a Royal Commission, with Earl Peel as chairman, to investigate the
underlying
causes of the disturbances. The Peel Commission’s report went
to the heart of
the problem:
Under
the stress of the World War the British Government made promises to
Arabs and
Jews in order to obtain their support. On the strength of those
promises both
parties formed certain expectations. . . .
An irrepressible
conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow
bounds
of one small country. . . . There is no
common ground between
them. . . . This conflict was inherent in
the situation from the
outset. . . . We cannot—in
Palestine as
it is now—both concede the Arab claim of self-government and
secure the
establishment of the Jewish National Home. . . . This
conflict
between the two obligations is all the more unfortunate because each of
them,
taken separately, accords with British sentiment and British interests.
[42]
The
Peel Commission proposed the partition of Palestine.
The logic behind partition was unassailable. It was the only solution
then and
it remains the only solution today to the tragic conflict between the
two
national movements. In 1937 the Jews accepted partition but the Arabs
rejected
it; so the conflict continued and the violence escalated.
The
Arab Rebellion of 1936–39 demonstrated once again that there
could be no
compromise between the two rival communities in Palestine:
only war could decide the issue. The Jewish community was militarily
weak and
vulnerable. It would have been easily defeated had Britain
not intervened to restore law and order. The Jewish national home, in
the last
resort, had to be defended by British bayonets.
In November 1938 Major General
Bernard Montgomery arrived in Palestine.
His task was to crush the revolt. “Monty” was a
short-tempered professional
soldier with no inclination to study the details of the conflict in Palestine.
He gave his men simple orders on how to handle the rebels: kill them.
This is
what his men did, and in the process they broke the backbone of the
Arab
national movement. When the struggle for Palestine
entered its most crucial phase, in the aftermath of World War II, the
Jews were
ready to do battle whereas the Arabs were still licking their wounds.
The costs of the British presence in
Palestine
were considerable and the benefits remained persistently elusive.
Palestine
was not a strategic asset: it was not a source of power but of
weakness. Field
Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the highest ranking British soldier in the
Middle East in the
early 1920s, kept repeating that the British had no
business being in
Palestine,
and the sooner they left, the better. “The problem of
Palestine is
exactly the same . . . as the problem of
Ireland,”
he wrote, “namely, two peoples living in a small country
hating each other like
hell.”
Wilson
castigated the civilians—he called them the
“frocks”—for failing to understand
that the Empire could not afford the luxury of spreading itself too
thin. Again
and again, he demanded that
Palestine,
or “Jewland” as he called it, be abandoned.
[43]
The logic of this position became
irresistible after
India’s
independence was declared in 1947. For if
India
was the jewel in the Empire’s crown,
Palestine
was hardly more than an anemone in the King’s buttonhole.
Economic
considerations reinforced the strategic arguments for withdrawal from
Palestine.
Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, deployed both arguments
in a
letter to Prime Minister Clement Attlee. “The present state
of affairs is not
only costly to us in manpower and money,” wrote Dalton,
“but is . . .
of no real value from the strategic point of view—you cannot
in any case have a
secure base on top of a wasps’ nest—and it is
exposing our young men, for no
good purpose, to abominable experiences and is breeding anti-Semites at
a most
shocking speed.”
[44]
In February 1947 the Labour
government decided to hand the Mandate over Palestine to
the United Nations, the League of
Nations’
successor. The Mandate was relinquished because it was unworkable. All
of Britain’s
attempts to find a formula for reconciling peacefully the rival claims
of Arabs
and Jews to the country had finally failed. On November 29, 1947 the UN
General
Assembly voted for the partition of mandatory Palestine into two
independent
states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Arabs of Palestine, the Arab
states, and
the Arab League, rejected partition as illegal, immoral, and
impractical. The
passage of the resolution was thus the signal for the outbreak of a
vicious
civil war between the two communities in Palestine, a
war which was to end in a Jewish triumph and an Arab tragedy.
Britain
refused to assume responsibility for implementing the UN partition
resolution.
It set a firm date for the end of the Mandate—May 14, 1948. As the
Mandate approached its inglorious end, both sides felt let down by the
British,
accusing them of duplicity and betrayal. The manner in which the
Mandate ended
was the worst blot on Britain’s
entire record as the mandatory power. Britain
left Palestine
without an orderly transfer of power to a legitimate government. In
this
respect, the end of the Palestine Mandate has the dubious distinction
of being
unique in the annals of the British
Empire.
The
consequences of the Balfour Declaration were not confined to Palestine.
The Declaration engendered anger towards Britain
throughout the Arab world and at all levels of Arab society from the
intellectual elites to the masses. Together with the Sykes-Picot
agreement,
Balfour’s Declaration became a central point of reference for
Arab
intellectuals after the First World War. Edward Said, for example, in The
Question of Palestine dwells at great length on the unspoken
assumptions
behind the Declaration. For him it is a prime example of the moral
epistemology
of imperialism. The Declaration, he writes, was made:
(a)
by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, (c) in flat
disregard
of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority resident in
the
territory, and (d) it took the form of a promise about this same
territory to
another foreign group, so that this foreign group might, quite
literally,
make
this territory a national home for the Jewish people.
[45]
At
the other end of the spectrum there were popular demonstrations against
the
Balfour Declaration in the inter-war period by people whose grasp of
its
meaning was tenuous at best. One amusing example was a demonstration
organized
in al-Karak by Sulayman An-Nabulsi, a schoolteacher who was later to
become
prime minister of Jordan:
On
the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, he led his class into the
streets,
with the cry: “
Falyasqut wa’d Balfour!”,
which, figuratively translated,
means:
“Down with the Balfour
Declaration!”. The crowd in the streets
was ignorant of its meaning, so started yelling: “
Falyasqut
Karkur!”
(“Down with Karkur!”). Karkur was a local Armenian
shoemaker and he ran out
into the crowd, crying, “Balfour, oh people,
Balfour”. Others yelled “
Falyasqut
wahid balkun!” (“Down with a
balcony!”) and “
Falyasqut wahid min fawq!”
(Down with one from the top!”).
[46]
In
Britain
itself opinions about the Balfour Declaration remained sharply divided
long
after the end of the Palestine Mandate. Richard Crossman argued
passionately
that Balfour, Lloyd George, and Milner all felt under an obligation, in
the
moment of Allied victory, to do something for oppressed world Jewry.
Strategic
calculations, Crossman believed, were at most secondary factors.
[47]
The
opposite interpretation was advanced with equal passion and
partisanship by
Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee believed that Balfour and his colleagues
understood the
consequences for the Arabs of fostering the equivalent of a white
settler
community but went ahead all the same for the sake of sustaining
British
influence in the eastern
Mediterranean.
[48]
“I will
say straight out,” Toynbee told an interviewer in 1973,
“Balfour was a wicked
man.” He was wicked because he used the
League of
Nations mandate to
rob the Arabs of their
right to self-determination. “The Arabs had no political
experience,” Toynbee
stated, “and they were thrown into the most subtle and
intricate political
situation you can imagine. They were clearly unprepared for it. This is
part of
the monstrosity of the whole affair.”
[49]
Britain’s
failure in Palestine
can be at least partly attributed to the Balfour Declaration for that
was the
original sin. In Arabic there is a saying that something that starts
crooked,
remains crooked. The Balfour Declaration was not just crooked; it was a
contradiction in terms. The national home it promised to the Jews was
never
clearly defined and there was no precedent for it in international law.
On the
other hand, it was arrogant, dismissive, and even racist, to refer to
90 per
cent of the population as “the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
And it was the worst kind of imperial double standard, implying that
there was
one law for the Jews, and one law for everybody else.
With
such a singularly inauspicious and murky beginning, British rule in Palestine
was predestined to fail, as in a Greek tragedy. It was not just a
policy
failure, but an egregious moral failure. Britain
had no moral right to promise national rights for a tiny Jewish
minority in a
predominantly Arab country. It did so not for altruistic reasons but
for
selfish, if misguided reasons. At no stage in this long saga did the
Jews feel
that they were getting from their great power sponsor the support to
which they
felt entitled by virtue of the Balfour Declaration, and the end of the
mandate
was accompanied by the most bitter recriminations. The Arabs were
violently
opposed to the Balfour Declaration from the start. They held Britain
responsible for the loss of their patrimony to the Jewish intruders. By
the end
of the mandate, there was no gratitude and no goodwill left towards Britain on
either side of the Arab-Jewish divide. I
can only
agree with Sir John Chancellor that the Balfour Declaration
was a colossal blunder-it has proved to be a catastrophe for the
Palestinians
and it gave rise to one of the most intense, bitter, and protracted
conflicts
of modern times.
[1]
Quoted in Daphna Baram, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel (London,
2004), p. 43.
[2] Elizabeth
Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East,
1914–71 (London,
1981), p. 43.
[3]
Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrith: The McMahon-Husayn
Correspondence
and its Interpretations, 1914–1939 (Cambridge,
1976).
[4]
Isaiah Friedman, Palestine: A
Twice-Promised Land: The British, the Arabs, and Zionism,
1915–1920 (New Brunswick, N.J.,
2000), Vol. 1.
[5]
Ibid., p. xlvii; George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The
Story of the Arab
National Movement (Beirut,
1938), p. 269.
[6]
Timothy J. Paris, Britain,
the Hashemites, and Arab Rule, 1920–1925: The Sherifian
Solution (London,
2003), p. 44.
[7]
Antonius, The Arab Awakening,
pp. 267–69 and 331–32.
[8]
Auni Abd al-Hadi, Mudhakkirat Auni Abd al-Hadi (The
Memoirs of Auni
Abd al-Hadi), Introduction and research by Khairieh Kasmieh (Beirut,
2002), pp. 56-57 and 292.
[9]
Ibid., p. 57.
[10]
Ibid., pp. 141 and 164.
[11]
Ibid., p. 139.
[12]
Ibid., p. 161.
[13]
Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London,
1961).
[14]
Mayir Vereté, “The Balfour Declaration and its
Makers,” Middle Eastern
Studies, 6, 1 (January 1970).
[15]
Jon Kimche, The Unromantics: The Great Powers and the Balfour
Declaration
(London,
1968), p. 69.
[16]
Ibid.
[17]
Tom Segev, One Palestine,
Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (London,
2000).
[18]
Ibid., p. 33.
[19]
Ibid., p. 43.
[20]
Ibid., p. 45.
[21]
Quoted in Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris
Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War
(London,
2001), p. 427.
[22]
Segev, One Palestine,
Complete, p. 47.
[23]
Quoted in David Gilmour, “The Unregarded Prophet: Lord Curzon
and the Palestine
Question,” Journal of Palestine
Studies, 25, 3 (Spring 1996), p. 64.
[24]
Ibid.
[25]
Segev, One Palestine,
Complete, pp. 116 and 142.
[26]
Ibid., p. 141.
[27]
Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine:
The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict,
1917–1929
(Oxford, 1991, 2nd edn.), p. 71.
[28]
Gilmour, “Unregarded Prophet.”
[29]
A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine,
1918–1948 (London,
1997); and Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine (London,
1999).
[30]
Wasserstein, The British in Palestine,
p. 16.
[31]
Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life
(Oxford,
1992), p. 204.
[32]
Segev, One Palestine,
Complete, p. 155.
[33]
Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and
the Palestinians,
1920–1925 (London,
2001).
[34]
Wasserstein, The British in Palestine,
pp. 16–17.
[35]
Ibid., p. 17.
[36]
Quoted in Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King
Abdullah, the
Zionists, and Palestine,
1921–1951 (Oxford,
1990), p. 54.
[37]
Segev, One Palestine,
Complete, pp. 334–35.
[38]
Sir John R. Chancellor to Lord Stamfordham, May 27, 1930, Middle
East
Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
[39]
Ibid.
[40]
Ibid.
[41]
Segev, One Palestine,
Complete, pp. 335–38.
[42] Palestine
Royal Commission, Report, Cmd. 5479,
p. 370.
[43]
Segev, One Palestine,
Complete, p. 147.
[44]
Ibid., p. 495.
[45]
Edward W. Said, The Palestine
Question (New York, 1979), pp. 15–16.
[46]
Peter Gubser, Politics and Change in Al-Karak, Jordan: A
Study of a Small Arab Town in
its District (London,
1973), p. 22.
[47]
Richard Crossman, A Nation Reborn: The Israel of
Weizmann, Bevin and Ben-Gurion (London,
1960), pp. 31–32.
[48]
Wm. Roger Louis, The British
Empire in the Middle East: Arab
Nationalism, The United States, and
Postwar
Imperialism, 1945–1951 (Oxford,
1984), p. 39.
[49] Arnold
Toynbee, “Arnold
Toynbee on the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine
Studies, 2, 3, (Spring 1973).
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