The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (37 page)

Notably, Sokolow did not mention that Arabs already resided on Palestinian land. At this moment they appear to have been as invisible to him as black Africans had been to Boers intending to move to Cape Town, and Native Americans to the French and English colonists on their way to Canada.

So at this moment the Arabs were invisible to Picot too.

Sokolow then came to the main point, indicating that the Zionists yearned above all for a British protectorate in Palestine. Picot demurred silkenly: “But Sir, you must know as a politician that this is an affair of the Entente.”
(Mais Monsieur, vous devez savoir, comme politician, que c’est l’affaire de l’Entente.)
The Jewish diplomat parried with great dexterity: “Mr. Sokolow agreed with this but said that the Entente could not govern Palestine.” Picot stuck to his guns: “Ninety-five per cent of the French people were strongly in favor of the annexation of Palestine by France.” The crucial disagreement was over which country, England or France, should have the predominant influence in Palestine; and the crucial dynamic for which Sykes had been maneuvering was for Zionism to make Britain’s case. But there was no rupture. Sokolow and Picot agreed to discuss matters further the following day. The Frenchman took his leave. Sykes could barely contain his glee. He “expressed to Mr. Sokolow his great pleasure in listening to the discussion. He said that he was very satisfied with the outcome of the meeting.”

Sykes would have been equally pleased next day, when Sokolow and
Picot met without him at the French embassy. This time butter would not melt in Sokolow’s mouth. “Zionists and Jews generally
¹⁷
had the greatest respect for and trust in France,” he assured Picot (reads the résumé of the meeting). They believed that France “was destined to play a great part in the East.” They “confidently looked forward to her influential moral and material support in their endeavors on behalf of the Jewish people.” Moreover, “Zionist aspirations would not prejudice French interests but were on the contrary in perfect harmony with the great traditions of France.” Picot, if he did not employ butter, employed honey: “He personally would see that the facts about Zionism were communicated to the proper quarters and he would do his best to win for the movement whatever sympathies were necessary to be won so far as compatible with the French standpoint on this question.” It is hard to imagine such an interchange between Picot and the tempestuous Gaster.

Thinking, no doubt, of the rights of Belgians trampled by Germany, and of Serbians trampled by Austria, Picot remarked at one point “In one respect France was specially disposed to take an interest in the Zionist movement. He referred to the cause of the small nationalities which, in France, had been taken up with greatest ardor and was inspiring every citizen to an extraordinary extent.” With these words Picot conceded the main Zionist point, that Jews constituted a nation and were not mere adherents of a belief system.

Sokolow pounced at once, justifying Weizmann’s faith in his diplomatic skills: “Mr. Sokolow thereon expressed his great satisfaction that the Jews were considered in France as one of the smaller nationalities which were now struggling for liberty. This would be a guarantee that their cause would be treated in the same spirit of justice and equity which France would show the other nationalities.”

Picot tried to backpedal. “This point was not yet quite established … he was afraid that if the Jewish question was put in this way, viz. as the case of a small nationality, it would meet with considerable opposition, more perhaps from French Jews than from true Jews.” Note that he thought French Jews—that is to say, Jews who had assimilated in France—were not “true Jews.” He had ceded the Zionist case, possibly without even realizing it.

Smoothly, courteously, Sokolow let him down nicely: “The question whether all the Jews accept the national standpoint was after all a theoretical one … when a good practical scheme for the colonization of Palestine by Jews was put forward all opposition would vanish, including the opposition of the French Jews.”

Now Picot did introduce the Arab question, “speaking,” he assured
Sokolow, “as a friend of the Jews.” If the “good practical scheme” to which Sokolow referred meant demanding “special privileges” for Jews in Palestine, then that would encourage the other peoples of the region to demand something similar. “This would almost certainly lead to grave complications which would prejudice the progress of Jewish colonization.”

It was like the meeting between Zionists and assimilationists at the rooms of Lucien Wolf all over again. Sokolow in his reply could fall back upon well-honed arguments: “The Zionists had considered every aspect of the problem and knew quite well that every great movement had inevitably to meet with opposition and difficulties of various kinds. The mere granting of equal rights to the [Jewish] inhabitants of Palestine was insufficient to build up a flourishing [Jewish] colony in that country.” But he revealed too a blind spot that almost all his fellow Zionists shared. Just as the peoples who lived already in South Africa and Canada had been invisible to the Dutch, British, and French colonists who intended to move to those places, so the Arabs of Palestine remained invisible to Sokolow: “The question of equal rights was rightly raised in a country already populated and settled, which was not the case with Palestine … Palestine was a country where the chief need was to attract capable and devoted settlers.”

As the meeting was drawing to a close, Picot suggested that Jews should do more to show their support for the Allies. Now Sokolow revealed just that bit of steel that distinguished Zionists from other Jews who wished to speak for Jewry. Assimilationists must always ask the great powers for recognition, for favors, for protection from anti-Semites. By contrast, Sokolow spoke as the representative of a power whose support the other powers needed: “To win the sympathies of all the Jews for the Entente the simplest way would be to show them clearly that the cause of Jewish liberty was intimately bound up with the success of the Entente.” Anyway, as he also pointed out, “it was not necessary for him to prove the devotion of the Jews to the Entente. The fact that three-quarters of a million Jews were fighting for Russia (in spite of their legal disabilities and sufferings) was the best proof.”

Sokolow’s had been a formidable performance—that has to have been Sykes’s conclusion when he learned of it. As he said next day, when Sokolow and Weizmann arrived at his house to report and to plan the next moves, “the result of the interview [Sokolow’s with Picot] would be satisfactory … it was a valuable thing that Mr. Picot had an opportunity of informing himself of the Zionist demands as approved at the conference held at the residence of Dr. Gaster on the 7th of February.” That was as much as Gaster had to do with it now; Sokolow and Weizmann pressed forward
without a backward glance. They wanted special facilities to communicate with Zionists in Russia and America. Sykes agreed to expedite the matter. The next day he telephoned to say he had done so. Sokolow and Weizmann must have realized that a corner had been turned: The British government recognized them as leaders of a movement worth facilitating.

A whirlwind of meetings had established the Weizmannite ascendancy in the mind of Sir Mark Sykes. On Sunday, February 11, a meeting of the English Zionist Federation confirmed the ascendancy of Weizmannites among British Zionists as a whole. Joseph Cowen was stepping down as president of the EZF, and there could be only one successor. No one even ran against Chaim Weizmann, who had previously arranged that “those friends of mine
¹⁸
with whom I have been in close cooperation all these years” should become members of the EZF council. He meant the Manchester contingent—Sieff, Marks, and Sacher—as well as London allies such as Leon Simon and Samuel Tolkowsky. Chosen by acclamation, his control of the EZF assured, Weizmann offered the delegates as clear a statement of his single-minded vision, and as clear an assessment of the current situation, as they could have wished for:

On the very next day, February 12, preliminary reports of a revolution in Russia reached London. The epochal, earth-shattering news was particularly welcome to British Zionists, not merely because it signified the end of the tsar’s hated anti-Semitic regime but also because under a new, more liberal Russian government, the job of emancipating Russia’s Jews would fall more clearly to Russian Jews than to British Jews or the British government. Moreover, Britain’s governors, ascribing enormous power to world Jewry, worried that Jews would determine whether their Russian ally stayed in the war against Germany or succumbed to pacifism and Bolshevism. This consideration made Zionism even more important to Britain’s rulers. Thus by mid-February 1917 the road stretching out before the delighted
eyes of Chaim Weizmann seemed clearer, and more hopeful, than it had ever been.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the followers of Chaim Weizmann constituted a monolithic bloc and that they all agreed about the next steps. In particular, some of the Zionists of Manchester, his closest friends and allies, his most devoted adherents, had ideas of their own.

Early in 1915 Harry Sacher had had “the curious experience
²⁰
of being dismissed from [the
Daily News
] because I was not sufficiently bellicose for a Quaker proprietor.” His refusal to join in the general enthusiasm for world war was a tip-off that he made up his own mind and plowed his own furrow. He was something of an iconoclast. So, of course, was his old employer who took him back at
The Manchester Guardian
, C. P. Scott (whose relationship with Chaim Weizmann we noticed earlier). And so was another journalist in Scott’s employ, Herbert Sidebotham. Called “Student of War,” Sidebotham had written brilliantly on the Boer War and on the Russo-Japanese War; his articles on the current conflict were, according to French general Ferdinand Foch, “the only thing of the
²¹
kind in the press worth reading.”

Sidebotham argued that Britain must protect her position in Egypt, and especially the Suez Canal, by taking not merely the Sinai Peninsula but also Palestine. Once the Turks were thrown out, Britain should permit no other power to occupy that country, not even France, whose long-standing Middle Eastern interests threatened Britain’s position there, if not presently, then prospectively. Sidebotham believed, however, that the Jews could control Palestine—not because it was their historical homeland, or because the world owed it to them to make up for past misdeeds (that would be part of his later position), but rather because the Jews, first under British protection but eventually as a Crown colony with dominion status, would constitute an outpost of progressive civilization in the region and a bastion of British support. They would guarantee the canal for Britain. Sidebotham wrote in his autobiography that he came to Zionism “on grounds of British
²²
interest and with the single idea of helping the victory of the Allies in the War.” But his employer, Scott, sided with the Zionists, and his colleague Sacher played a leading role in the Zionist movement. It would have been strange if the Zionists had not established close relations with so promising a recruit.

Shortly after returning to
The Manchester Guardian
, Harry Sacher married Miriam Marks, sister of Simon Marks. Marks had married the sister of his best friend, Israel Sieff; Sieff had married Marks’s other sister. Into this
close-knit little society, Sacher introduced Herbert Sidebotham. “He loved music
²³
as he loved fine literature … He had a taste for good wine and great liking for good company. He could listen as well as talk.” Perhaps over good food and drink the four friends discussed ways to turn Sidebotham’s expertise to Zionism’s advantage.

They consulted with Weizmann and others in London. Sidebotham agreed to write a memo for the Foreign Office outlining the strategic advantages that Britain would gain from supporting the Zionist claim to Palestine. It made no discernible impact. Then the four took the next logical step, forming a British Palestine Committee (BPC), of which they would be the nucleus. (It also contained some of the most important London Zionists in the Weizmann circle, including Weizmann himself, but this contingent rarely if ever attended committee meetings, which took place in Manchester.) The purpose of the committee was “to promote the ideal of an Anglo-Jewish Palestine which it is hoped the War will bring within reach.” They sent out a letter to likely supporters, asking them to lend their names as patrons:

The response was discouraging. Sidebotham writes, “I think we received
²⁴
about ten replies in all, of which half were purely formal acknowledgments. Of the remainder, two were opposed to us.” But two positive replies are worth noting: C. P. Scott lent his name immediately. And although Mark Sykes declined to become a patron (“As I am officially
²⁵
employed at the Committee of Imperial Defense, it would be impossible for me to accept the office of Patron of your Committee”), he was not unsympathetic: “I have always considered
²⁶
that Jewish Nationalism is inevitably destined to play a great part in the future.” And he added to his letter a postscript: “Could you send me 4 or 5 of your pamphlets?” At this time Sykes was still in closest contact with Moses Gaster, but he may already have been noting Gaster’s deficiencies and seeking alternative sources of information on Zionism.