A Durable Peace (10 page)

It should be noted—again, contrary to present claims—that both the British and the League of Nations knew full well that some
of the local Palestinian Arabs were resisting the arrangement whereby a small part of the Middle East was to be excluded from
Arab sovereignty for the purpose of creating a Jewish home. Full civil rights had been guaranteed to them, and since Palestine
contained not much more than 5 percent of the millions of Arabs whom Britain had just liberated from the Ottoman Empire, Lord
Balfour insisted that a compromise such as Feisal’s was perfectly fair. To Balfour, Zionism was “rooted in age-old traditions,
in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit
that ancient land.”
⁶⁹
The Versailles signatories concurred, granting the Mandate over Palestine to Britain at the San Remo Conference in April
1920—
after
agitators from Damascus inspired violent outbreaks in Jerusalem, in which six Jews were beaten to death and hundreds more
were wounded. Significantly, the Palestinian Arab rioters demanded the incorporation of Palestine into an independent Syria.
⁷⁰

British policy clearly expressed the consensus that there were two peoples, Arab and Jewish, and that both would receive their
due. In December 1917, immediately after the signing of the Balfour Declaration, Assistant Foreign Secretary Lord Robert Cecil
had proclaimed his country’s policy simply: “Our wish is that Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians,
Judea for the Jews.”
⁷¹

Looking back on the results of Versailles years later, Lloyd George was outraged by the claim that the Arabs had somehow been
treated unfairly in Palestine and elsewhere:

No race has done better out of the fidelity with which the Allies redeemed their promises to the oppressed races than the
Arabs. Owing to the tremendous sacrifices of the Allied Nations, and more particularly of Britain and her Empire, the Arabs
have already won independence in Iraq, Arabia, Syria, and Trans-Jordania, although most of the Arab races fought throughout
the War for the Turkish oppressors…. [In particular] the Palestinian Arabs fought for Turkish rule.
⁷²

Similarly, the South African Jan Smuts, a member of the British War Cabinet who was actively involved in the discussions behind
the Balfour Declaration and the Versailles Treaty, recalled the views of the British Cabinet in deciding to favor a Jewish
homeland in Palestine:

It was naturally assumed that large-scale immigration of Jews into their historic homeland could not and would not be looked
upon as a hostile gesture to the highly favoured Arab people… [who,] largely as a result of British action, came better out
of the Great War than any other people.
⁷³

It therefore came as no surprise that Balfour formally wrote down these sentiments on November 2, 1917, in his letter to the
British Zionist Federation via Lord Rothschild: Britain favorably viewed Jewish aspirations for a Jewish National Home in
Palestine, aspirations that were commonly known to include the establishment of a Jewish majority there and the ultimate administration
of the country by the Jew. This letter became known as the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will
use their best endeavors 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.

As for the Arab inhabitants, the Balfour Declaration specifically stipulated that they should enjoy “civil and religious rights”
in Palestine. It was believed that there was nothing wrong with an Arab minority living among the Jews so long as their individual
rights were guaranteed, which is precisely what the declaration required.

When the League of Nations charged Britain with the Mandate for Palestine at the San Remo Conference in 1920, it did so based
on Britain’s pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration of 1917, which it incorporated into the language of the Mandate. Thus, the Mandate
dictated, “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions
as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” It also called for facilitating Jewish immigration and “close
settlement by Jews on the land.” (The full text of the Mandate can be found in Appendix C.)

Britain felt justified in making such an arrangement because it had just liberated the Arabs from four centuries of Turkish
rule and had given them immense lands for their national self-expression. It also felt that the Jews deserved special recognition
for their loyalty and service in World War I. Many Jews had fought in the Allied armies and thus had contributed to the liberation
from Ottoman rule of Arab and Jew alike. But the Arabs had done practically nothing to shake off the Turks (most Arabs and,
as Lloyd George noted, Palestinian Arabs in particular, had supported the Moslem Turks), with the exception of a few forays
against the Hejaz railroad line made by irregular bands led by T. E. Lawrence, who later did much to promote and inflate their
(and especially his) contribution to the war effort. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had served in the
Allied armies,
⁷⁴
the special Jewish Battalions formed by the Zionist leadership and led by Colonel John Henry Patterson made a tangible
contribution to the British campaigns against the Turks in Samaria, Galilee, and Transjordan.
^*

Thus, both as a reward for services rendered and as a recognition of historical Jewish national rights, British policy was
clearly committed to the historical Jewish claim to Palestine. It was British statesmen who introduced this Jewish right into
the wording of the Mandate at the League of Nations—not a difficult task, since this right was then widely recognized. In
fact, the wording of the League of Nations Mandate did not
give
the Jews the right to the land, but
recognized
a right understood to already exist, stating that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the
Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” It was possible to
extend such recognition only because educated men believed that the Jewish right to the land had been granted to the Jewish
people by history and by the unceasing yearning of the Jews to be restored to their national life.

The recognition of this right was most eloquently championed in 1921 by Lloyd George’s one-time protégé, Winston Churchill:

It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national centre and a national home to be re-united, and where
else but in Palestine, with which for three thousand years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it
will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British
Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine… they shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.

Churchill was a firm believer that the Jews could build their home in Palestine while benefiting the Arab residents. He told
Arabs who petitioned him to keep the Jews from buying land in Palestine and settling there, “No one has harmed you…. The Jews
have a far more difficult task than you. You only have to enjoy your own possession; but they have to create out of the wilderness,
out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they bring in.” Attacked in the House of Commons for granting the Jews
concessions for hydroelectric projects on the Jordan River, Churchill said:

I am told the Arabs would have done it for themselves. Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine
would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would
have been quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in the wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of
the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.
⁷⁵

As noted, these sympathetic attitudes toward Zionism were widely shared on both sides of the Atlantic. It therefore came as
no surprise that the United States soon recognized the Balfour Declaration. It was accepted in June 1922 by both Houses of
Congress, then in September by President Warren G. Harding, who signed a bill endorsing it.

So it was that in 1922, after decades of political activism, Zionism had reached a peak of international appeal. Its cause
was widely viewed as just, its leaders were admired and respected, and its basic goal of establishing a Jewish homeland on
both sides of the Jordan River was increasingly accepted worldwide. True, the home for the Jews was to be of modest proportions,
much of it
covered by swamp and sand and all of it exposed to an unforgiving sun. But it was empty and roomy enough, and it would do.
Had not their ancestors tilled the soil of Gilead east of the Jordan, built terraced vineyards in Judea in the west, fished
in the Sea of Galilee to the north, and set off to sea from Jaffa on the coast? Their descendants would do all that and more.
As Herzl had envisaged it in his novel
Altneuland
(“Old-New Land”), the Jewish state would revive ancient traditions alongside its thriving science and technology, creating,
precisely as George Eliot had foretold, a republic “carrying the culture and sympathy of every great nation in its bosom”
and bringing “the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotism of the East.” In 1922, despite the ominous clouds gathering
over the Jewish community of Europe, the creation of a safe haven and a home seemed imminent. The Jewish future had not seemed
brighter for two millennia.

2

B
ut it was not to be. Even before Britain was granted the Mandate to build a Jewish National Home at the San Remo Conference
in 1920, forces within the British imperial establishment had started working to dissolve Britain’s commitment to the promise
of Versailles. By the time the council of the League of Nations confirmed the Mandate in 1922, the will of British policymakers
to actually implement the Balfour Declaration had begun to evaporate.

Under its changed policy, Britain turned its back on the promises it had undertaken in the Balfour Declaration. What had been
regarded as obvious moral truths and obligations before the British had formally received the Mandate were now quickly discarded
as policies unsuited to the moment. Britain tore off Transjordan from the Jewish National Home in 1922: With one stroke of
the pen, it lopped off nearly 80 percent of the land promised the Jewish people, closing this area to Jews for the remainder
of the century (see
Map 4
). It sanctioned the entry into Palestine of Abdullah, the Hashemite chieftain from Mecca, titled
him emir, and created a new country called Transjordan (now Jordan), which to this day suffers from the artificiality of its
birth. At the end of the
1920s, claiming that the settlement of Jews had “provoked” anti-Jewish rioting, Britain issued a White Paper that severely
restricted Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by Jews. By the eve of World War II, after successive White Papers,
the British had choked off Jewish immigration almost entirely and had limited Jewish land purchase to a tiny fraction of the
country, prompting President Franklin Roosevelt to declare to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “I was at Versailles, and I
know that the British made no secret of the fact they promised Palestine to the Jews. Why are they now reneging on their promise?”
¹

Why, indeed? Where had this shift come from? What political forces were able to drive the most powerful nation on earth to
unilaterally abandon the commitment it had made to a national home for the Jewish people—leaving the Jews homeless and helpless
just as Hitler’s machine of destruction was rolling across Europe?