A History of Zionism (32 page)

When Djemal Pasha visited Berlin in August 1917, he told Hantke and Lichtheim that he was still hostile to the idea of a Jewish Palestine, since he had to take into account the feelings of the Arab population. He might reconsider his views one day but there would be no change in Turkish policy while the war was on.
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In a conversation with the German ambassador shortly before the Balfour Declaration, Djemal said he would be willing to concede a national home to the Jews, but for what purpose, since the Arabs would only kill them.
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The Turks would have greatly preferred not to make any concessions at all, but there was no doubt that if hard-pressed they would opt for the Arabs. This must have been clear to the Germans, who reached the conclusion that the goodwill of the Zionists was not worth a major crisis in their relations with the Turks.

Zionist policy in Germany thus failed to reach its objective. But ironically enough, the efforts to enlist German help had considerable indirect repercussions. The news about the talks between the German representatives and the Zionists was noted in London and Paris; so were the pro-Zionist articles in the German press. While Hantke, Blumenfeld and Lichtheim impressed on their Berlin contacts that England was about to make an important pro-Zionist declaration, Weizmann used the reverse argument in his dealings with the British cabinet and the Foreign Office: unless the British hurried the central powers would come out first and secure an important advantage. It is impossible to establish with absolute certainty whether Weizmann was misinformed or whether he deliberately exaggerated the threat of a German Balfour Declaration, knowing full well that it would not be forthcoming.
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Believers in the conspiracy theory of history will no doubt be inclined to search for the hidden hand, a Machiavellian plot between the Zionists in London and Berlin. But there was in fact no coordination. On the contrary, Weizmann kept his talks with British statesmen very much to himself. Frequently he did not inform even close friends, let alone the Copenhagen Bureau or Berlin. The German Zionists had made less headway, but they too had not reported to Weizmann about their moves. Each side, in brief, was in the dark in 1917 about the achievements and failures of the other.

The British government, at any rate, took the news seriously, and when the talks in the war cabinet dragged on, Balfour announced on 4 October 1917 that a decision had to be taken soon since the German government was making great efforts to gain the support of the Zionist movement.
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With the publication of the Balfour Declaration, London became the centre of the world Zionist movement even though parts of Palestine remained in Turkish hands until well into 1918. The Berlin executive fully realised that the initiative had now passed to the other side. It did not grudge Weizmann his success and welcomed the Declaration as an event of immense historical importance.
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It continued to press the German and Turkish governments for a statement similar to the Declaration which would open the gates of Palestine to large-scale immigration and provide political and cultural autonomy. Towards the end of the war the German Zionists won the support of the leading non-Zionist Jewish organisation for a scheme which provided less than a national home but which was more than any of them had dared to hope in 1914. But this was in 1918 and the whole issue had become academic, for Jerusalem, Jaffa, and the whole of southern Palestine were by that time in British hands. The occupation of the rest of the country was merely a question of time. If the German Zionists nevertheless continued to press their demands it was no doubt with an eye to the coming peace conference. Now that the Balfour Declaration had received the blessing of the other allied powers, their intention was to gain the support of the central powers as well so that there would be unanimity with regard to Palestine’s future.

The First World War was the watershed for America’s involvement in world affairs. It was also the breakthrough which made American Jewry the decisive factor in the councils of world Jewry. American Jews had taken an interest in the fate of their less fortunate co-religionists in Russia and Rumania even before 1914, but it was only during the war that, owing to America’s new might, the financial position of the Jewish community, and, during the early years of the war, America’s neutrality, that the Jews there assumed the leading role. During the war years Zionism made a spectacular advance. There had been only twelve thousand organised Zionists in America in 1914. They gained a mass following during the following years as the conviction grew that the war would bring in its wake a solution of the Jewish question and perhaps even result in the establishment of a Jewish state. Individuals as well as groups began to join the organisation, and there was a movement afoot to organise the entire Jewish community in support of Zionist demands.

Shortly after the outbreak of war the suggestion was made to establish a body to represent the whole of American Jewry, to represent its interests, with special reference to eastern Europe, and to state the Jewish cause at the peace conference. The proposal was strongly resisted by the American-Jewish establishment, united in the American Jewish Committee. Other anti-Zionist groups, such as the Bund, tried to take over the movement from the Zionists. But the response on the part of the masses was enormous and, fearing isolation, the opponents too eventually came to join the drive. Public opinion veered more and more towards Zionism. Leading members of the establishment, like Louis Marshall and Jacob Schiff, who only a few years earlier had dissociated themselves from Zionism, came to adopt a more positive attitude. A preparatory conference was held in 1916, and it became the declared policy of all American Jewish organisations not only to press for equal rights for east European Jewry but also to secure Jewish rights in Palestine.
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Brandeis, who was to play a decisive part in these activities, had appeared for the first time on a Zionist platform one year before the outbreak of war. After it started, he was elected chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs. It was at first expected that the executive would be transferred to the United States, but even though this did not take place, the new body was to play a role of considerable importance. The provisional committee helped to coordinate the rescue efforts for Palestinian Jewry, which, cut off from Europe, was facing economic ruin. America’s diplomatic representatives in Turkey - Jews by unwritten tradition - such as Morgenthau and Elkus - played a role second only to the Germans as protectors of the yishuv. They intervened countless times with the Porte against the deportation orders issued in Jerusalem and Jaffa.

Brandeis was almost sixty when he undertook his new role as Jewish statesman. He had been remote from Jewish affairs and he never failed to emphasise that he had come to Zionism wholly as an American. He saw no problem of divided loyalties. In the same way as every Irish-American who supported Home Rule was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice involved, he once wrote, every American Jew who helped to advance Jewish settlement in Palestine would likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.
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Brandeis was the first leader of American Zionism who was at the same time a figure of national prominence. An eminently successful and popular lawyer, a friend and consultant of leading politicians, he was in line for a leading position in the government when Woodrow Wilson formed his first administration in 1913, although the president encountered resistance because Brandeis, ‘the people’s attorney’, had made many enemies among the rich, and there was also still much anti-Jewish feeling. Wilson instead nominated him to the Supreme Court. After the nomination had gone through, he wrote to Morgenthau that he never signed any commission with such satisfaction.
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Brandeis’ prestige, his reputation as one of President Wilson’s close advisers, was an asset of which ‘full use was made by the Zionist leaders in London in their dealings with the British government’. London closely followed developments on the American domestic scene. Its aim was to induce America to join the war against the central powers as soon as possible. The British were aware that while most of the leaders of American Jewry were pro-British (with few exceptions, such as Magnes and Shmaryahu Levin), the Jewish masses were anti-Russian and welcomed Russian defeats while not necessarily rejoicing at German victories. A change in this respect began to set in only in 1916-17. The Jews of German descent who had supported the kaiser were antagonised by such events as the German sinking of the
Lusitania
, whereas the immigrants from eastern Europe were greatly cheered by the revolution of March 1917, which gave equal rights to Russian Jewry.

Balfour met Brandeis twice during his visit to Washington in April 1917, and American Jewry’s interest in Palestine was impressed on him. In September 1917 the war cabinet decided to find out whether President Wilson thought it advisable to issue a declaration of sympathy with the Zionist movement. Much to Weizmann’s surprise and chagrin, Wilson, acting apparently on the advice of Colonel House, answered that the time was not opportune for any definite statement, other than one of sympathy, and this only on condition that it could be made without implying any real commitment.
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Wilson may have been uneasy about an exclusive British declaration, but on the other hand he had no intention of committing America. Colonel House had told him that the English ‘naturally want the road to Egypt and India blocked and Lloyd George is not above using us to further his plan’.
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From the Zionist point of view this response was a disaster. Weizmann immediately mobilised his American friends, and after further discussion with Colonel House Brandeis could reassure him that the president could be relied upon to support a pro-Zionist declaration. By mid-October Wiseman, head of British intelligence in the United States, had informed the Foreign Office that Wilson had approved the formula decided upon by the British war cabinet. The Zionists had surmounted yet another major hurdle owing to the help received from American Jewry.

Weizmann and the Balfour Declaration

The main battleground, however, was London, not Washington, and it is to Zionist policy in the British capital that we must turn next. Weizmann had believed in a British victory since the beginning of the war, and the German victories during the early stages had not shaken him in his belief. While he detested the tsarist régime as much as any of his colleagues, unlike most of them he did not think much of Germany either. His own experiences as a student in Germany had been unfortunate. He seems to have been a confirmed Anglophile from the age often when he wrote to his teacher: ‘All have decided: the Jew must die, but England will nevertheless have mercy upon us.’
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Weizmann thought the decision to leave the executive in Berlin a grave mistake, and when his suggestion to move it to Holland (or the United States) was rejected, he ceased to correspond with his colleagues outside the
entente
countries and the United States. His activities from that moment on were as much in violation of the principle of Zionist neutrality as the policies of the German Zionists. But, unlike them, Weizmann was successful in the end.

When war broke out, Weizmann was on holiday with his family in Switzerland. He returned immediately to England, and talked to his friends of the great possibilities that had suddenly opened up even if there were no concrete plans at this stage: ‘There was an atmosphere of uncertainty and I went about with my hopes, waiting for my chances.’
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Two months later he was introduced to C.C. Scott, editor of the
Manchester Guardian.
Scott was won over to Zionism by Weizmann, who told him about the Jewish tragedy in eastern Europe and the messianic dreams for Palestine. Scott, a Bible-reading man who at one time had wanted to become a Unitarian minister, was attracted by the passionate religion of Zionism, its deep sense of continuity.
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He suggested a meeting with Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer, who in turn suggested a meeting with Herbert Samuel first. Weizmann went to the meeting with some trepidation. ‘For God’s sake, Mr Scott, let’s have nothing to do with that man’, he had exclaimed when the name was first mentioned. He thought that Samuel, like other leaders of Anglo-Jewry, was hostile to Zionism, and he was therefore dumbfounded when Samuel told him that his (Weizmann’s) demands were much too modest. Samuel advised him to ‘think big’, adding that the aims of Zionism were very much in the mind of his cabinet colleagues. Weizmann answered that if he were a religious Jew he would have thought that the time of the Messiah was near.
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In January 1915 Weizmann met Lloyd George, who had first come in contact with Zionism in Herzl’s days, when he had been consulted about El Arish and Uganda in his capacity as a lawyer. He had not gone on record during the intervening years with any statement in favour of Zionism, but he told Herbert Samuel a few days after Turkey’s declaration of war (November 1914) that he was very keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine. Asquith said of him that he did not give a damn for the Jews, their past or their future. But this was a misinterpretation of the man and his motives: ‘His elusive spirit never became enchained to Zionism but he knew it far better than his colleagues and he liked it very much.’
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Lloyd George had an instinctive sympathy for small nations, to one of which he himself belonged. He was, as Weizmann wrote, deeply religious. To him and to others of his contemporaries the return of the Jewish people to Palestine was not a dream, since they believed in the Bible, and Zionism represented to them a tradition for which they had enormous respect.
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