The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (3 page)

On Kingsway, near the Strand, despite the rain and wind and generally awful war news, a steady stream of beaming men and women poured into the London Opera House. They filled the tiers of boxes, the auditorium, the saloons, lounges, and foyers, even the corridors. The handsome structure, designed to hold 2,700, was filled to capacity and more. People waited outside in the street under their umbrellas. They would not leave.

Inside about a dozen men gathered near the stage. Among them were a former Liberal cabinet minister, Herbert Samuel; the assistant foreign secretary, Robert Cecil; an assistant secretary to the War Cabinet, Sir Mark Sykes; the unofficial head of the British Jewish community, Lord Rothschild; and the two most important leaders of wartime British Zionism, Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow. They, and all the rest, beamed with pleasure. When finally the doors closed and the crowd settled, Lord Rothschild, hands in his pockets, spoke first to the breathless, happy audience. “We are met on the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last eighteen hundred years,” he began. “We are here to return thanks to His Majesty’s government for a declaration which marked an epoch … For the first time since the dispersion, the Jewish people have received their proper status by the declaration of one of the great Powers.”

He referred, of course, to the Balfour Declaration, which the War Cabinet had agreed to one month earlier and published on November 9. By this document the British government pledged “to use their best endeavors to … [establish] in Palestine … a national home for the Jewish people.”

One by one the men on the stage advanced to speak. One by one they offered thanks or congratulations and rosy predictions for the land to be freed, at long last, from the onerous Turkish yoke. Even an Arab spokesman, Sheikh Ismail Abdul al-Akki, foresaw the day when Palestine would again flow with milk and honey. Everyone said that the Declaration represented a historic gesture on the part of Britain and a historic achievement on the part of Zionism, the culmination of a joint effort that must lead to “Judea for the Jews,” as Robert Cecil put it. And because the Declaration also promised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” they predicted that Jews and Arabs would share the land in harmony.

That last prophecy proved wishful thinking, but events have largely borne out the rest. Today we consider the Balfour Declaration a great marker in Jewish history, not merely a Zionist victory but a foundation stone of modern Israel. Some of us may know a bit about it: We may have read about the enormous effort, planning, and vision, as well as the unlikely alliances, prejudices, intrigues, and double-dealing, that went into its making. Few if any, however, can know that on the very day that the joyful throng gathered to celebrate at the London Opera House, Britain’s prime minister and his agents were engaged in secret maneuverings to detach the Ottoman Empire from the Central Powers. They were offering, among other inducements, that the Turkish flag could continue to fly over Palestine. But the Zionists had long deemed Ottoman rule in Palestine to be one of their chief obstacles. Most of them viewed Turkish suzerainty, no matter how attenuated, as intolerable. Had the Turks accepted Lloyd George’s offer, most Zionists, and certainly their most important leaders, would have felt that the British government had compromised, perhaps fatally, its recent pledge. In which case, no one today would pay much attention to the Balfour Declaration at all.

Of those secret dealings, two (or possibly three) men standing on the Opera House stage were well aware. They disapproved because they knew what the Zionist reaction would be, but they did not tell. Everyone else at the celebration remained in ignorance. That disparity of knowledge between government officials and the human objects of policy, and its potential for betrayal, encapsulates in a single moment the tortuous process that had led to the Balfour Declaration—and nearly to its swift negation. The meeting at the London Opera House on December 2 crystallized a convoluted history that too often has been conceived as an irresistible forward march. This book will show that the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration was anything but a simple triumphal progress. And since intrigue and double-dealing as much as bravery and vision were of its essence, the Balfour Declaration resulted not merely in celebration and congratulation but soon enough in disillusionment, distrust, and resentment. Nearly a century later these bitter emotions remain; compounded over the years, they continue tragically, bloodily, to unwind.

THE LAND CALLED PALESTINE
gave no indication, early in the twentieth century, that it would become the world’s cockpit. Rather, if anything, the reverse. A century ago it was merely a strip of territory running along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The remote, sleepy, backward, sparsely populated southwestern bit of Syria was still home to foxes, jackals, hyenas, wildcats, wolves, even cheetahs and leopards in its most unsettled parts. Loosely governed from Jerusalem in the south and from Beirut in the north by agents of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine’s borders were vague. To the east it merged with the Jordanian plateau, to the south with the Arabian deserts, and to the north with the gray mountain masses of Lebanon. And it was small:
¹
Fewer than two hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, it was not much bigger than present-day Massachusetts (to put it in an American context) and about the size of Wales (to put it in the British).

The strip of land, resting mainly upon limestone, was devoid of coal, iron, copper, silver, or gold deposits and lacked oil, but it was happily porous (“calcareous,” the geologists said), meaning that it was capable of absorbing moisture whenever the heavens should open, which they might do, especially when the wind came from the north. When it came from the east, however, as it frequently did in May and October, the wind was a malign enervating force. It was a furnace-blast sirocco in hot weather and a numbing
chill in cold. The two mountain ranges that ran in rough parallel the length of the country from north to south could not block it. The western range, which includes “the Mount of the Amorites” of the Book of Deuteronomy, runs between the Jordan Valley (to its east) and the maritime plain (to its west). The eastern edge of this range is an escarpment that drops (precipitously in places) to the fabled Jordan River below. The second or eastern range of hills, which includes the mountains of Moab, Judea, and Galilee, is a continuation of a chain that begins in Lebanon and reaches southward into Jordan. To its west lies the river valley; to its east is a desert plateau. In the north of the country the mountains are quite tall: Mount Hermon rises more than 9,200 feet above sea level. (People ski there in winter now.) To the south the mountains are typically half as high, and the surrounding landscape is bleak, empty, and inhospitable.

For such a tiny land, Palestine contains extraordinary topographical contrasts. The Jordan River runs southward along a descending valley floor, passing some seventy miles from the clear waters of the Sea of Galilee, where the surrounding hills and fields are relatively green, welcoming, and fruitful. It empties into the brackish bitter Dead Sea, thirteen hundred feet below sea level, where the landscape is barren, freezing during winter, broiling in summer. In the Dead Sea area the Jordan Valley has never been cultivated, although at the turn of the twentieth century the wandering Bedouins might camp there. Even they, however, would move on during the hottest months, when temperatures scale 120 degrees Fahrenheit or higher and the land opens in cracks and fissures.

Elsewhere in Palestine, however, life flourished. “It drinketh of the rain of heaven,” Moses is supposed to have said of his “Promised Land,” and although it did not drink deep (rainfall averaged 28 to 32 inches annually, except in the south, where 6 inches marked a good year), and it rarely drank at all from March until November, nevertheless it drank sufficiently. Parts of the country were nearly luxuriant. In 1869 even that American innocent abroad, Samuel Clemens, whose wonderfully dyspeptic view of Palestine is legendary, could refer without irony to groves of lemon trees, “cool, shady, hung
²
with fruit,” by the village of Shunem near “Little Hermon,” and to “breezy glades of thorn and oak,” south of the Sea of Galilee near Mount Tabor. A horseman riding
³
the Hauran plateau, east of the eastern mountain range, could view unbroken wheat fields extending to the horizon on every side. A British visitor to the Circassian village of Gerasa was reminded “of a Scotch glen,
⁴
though the hills are not so high nor the land so barren.” Local markets sold a diverse range of fruits and vegetables, some of remarkable size. “We have cauliflowers that measure at least a foot across, and watermelons
hardly to be spanned by a grown person’s arms … grapes in clusters from three to four feet in length … We have in their season [also] … apricots, nectarines, plums, damsons, quince, mulberries, figs, lemons, oranges, prickly pear, pomegranates and many kinds of nuts.” In spring the countryside (some of it) ran riot with wildflowers: “anemones … hyacinths, ranunculus, narcissus, honeysuckle, daisies, buttercups, cistus.” The writer lists a dozen additional varieties and claims to have seen “many more whose names
⁵
elude me now.” Such reports may have been exaggerated—other European visitors
⁶
insisted the land was no cornucopia. But one hundred years ago the countryside was far from being wasteland.

As many as 700,000 people lived there then, although figures vary and are imprecise. Many were descended from the Canaanites or Philistines (who gave the land its name) or from the Arabs, even from the ancient Hebrews. They spoke Arabic, and most of them may be termed Arabs, although commonly only nomadic Bedouins were referred to as “pure” Arabs. The majority were Sunni Muslims, who accepted the caliphs as Muhammad’s legitimate successors, but some were Shiite Muslims, who believed that Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad, originated the true line of succession. There were as well Druze and other Christians, some of them European or of European descent, and Jews, some of whom were also European transplants or of European origin. Flocks of Christian tourists, thousands every year, came to visit the holy land, and even greater numbers of Muslim pilgrims passed through on their annual trek to Mecca.

Of the total permanent population, only a tiny fraction were rich. This fortunate minority derived their wealth in one way or another from ownership of land, but they resided in the largest towns; their well-appointed large brick houses were whitewashed with lime and built around courtyards. The middle class, composed of well-to-do bankers, merchants, and clerics, as well as a handful of professionals and local traders, lived more modestly in the towns and villages, in stone houses well adapted for keeping out the heat of the sun. The vast majority of the inhabitants, however, were poor. Many lived in tiny isolated villages, set on hilltops within high walls, a reminder of the times, not long past, when safety demanded such protection from Bedouin marauders. In northern and central Palestine the typical village home was a square mud-plastered, whitewashed hut one story high with a straw roof. In the south it was a rough straw shelter or, for the semi-nomads based there part of the year, merely a tent. Inside these dwellings one might see only a few mats, baskets, a sheepskin, and some earthenware and wooden vessels.

Most villagers were fellahin, peasants. Within the village walls they
sometimes worked in gardens or orchards or vineyards, for themselves or for their more wealthy neighbors; more commonly, they worked in the surrounding fields and pastures as sharecroppers for one of the great landowning families; or for the imperial Turkish state, which owned or controlled much Palestinian land; or for the villages themselves, since some villages owned land and periodically allocated it to residents for cultivation under a system called
musha
. Outsiders were impressed by the fellah’s industry. “He abominates absence from his fields,” observed one. And the fellah had a reputation for generosity, “such as his poverty
⁷
allows.”