What We Thought of Balfour

One day later they had not read much since the preceding day. Given how tired they all felt, they were willing to give it a rest.

M: “Can you remember yesterday when I argued that the Jews may have had a reason to feel disappointed for getting less than all of Palestine?”

C: “One thing is certain: The Zionists certainly had expected more.”

M: “Here’s the thing: Back in Britain, where Zionism was a project discussed far away from Arab realities, I can assure you that the climate was a very different one. Here, I found a survey over newspapers from around 1910-1920. It takes the temperature before, during and after the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

A word of warning, though. I sense that the analysis is biased towards the Arab side. In other words, while the author can find examples of Zionist enthusiasm, it may not be a full coverage of the situation. Nevertheless it means instances of such enthusiasm existed in the highest ranks of British society.”

G: “Question: Are we saying that Zionism is a bad thing?”

C: “Are you for real?”

G: “I don’t care about who we condemn and who not. I am saying that the Zionism that Miranda is about to discuss may have been a completely different beast than the one that later manifested itself.”

C: “That is a strange excuse?”

M: “Excuses are for absolute norms. We are actors on a stage. When the character predestined to be the villain is threatened on his very existence, he wields a knife and commits a crime. When did he betray his character? Has he done a single thing that cannot be defended?”

C: “There’s the thing with the knife…”

M: “That makes the law a criminal too. We fight for survival and the law may either help us of be against us.”

G: “Imagine the Jews failed in having British support. Imagine they lost almost all their territory later in the war of 1948. What then? The poor Zionists who had to live a miserable life as refugees in their vain dream of a country?”

C: “I don’t mind relativism. I mind a lack of will to coexists.”

M: “What is at stake here is not a lack of will to coexists. We saw that yesterday. We want more than existence. We want justice, respect, our world view unassailable.

I suggest we take the temperature of Britain around the second decade of the 20th century. The essay I mentioned avows that the attitude in British circles was that Jews would ‘carry the Western yeast’.”

BALFOUR DECLARATION 1917 THROUGH THE ENGLISH PRESS

Max Nordau expressed the readiness of Zionism to fulfill its civilizing mission and fill the civilizational vacuum in the Near East by stating in 1907:

“We will do our utmost to achieve in the Near East what the English have achieved in India. By this, I mean cultural and civilizational activity, not control and domination. We intend to go to Palestine as a campaign of civilization and urbanization. Our mission is to expand moral boundaries until they reach the Euphrates" (Zureik, 1973, pp. 182-184).

M: “Or from the mouthes of the gentiles:”

Scott, editor of The Manchester Guardian and a supporter of the Zionist movement, commented, “The establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine will benefit Britain as it will protect the English Suez Canal from any external attack”

In 1917, the British magazine Bensons published a cartoon featuring the English Crusader King Richard I (1157-1199) saying, "At last my dream is fulfilled." Thus, Protestant religious myths and imperialist ambitions of seizing Jerusalem and Palestine were intertwined

M: “The Guardian too:”

In November 1915, the newspaper published an article by one of its editors, journalist Herbert Sidebotham, which considered the importance of having a friendly state adjacent to Egypt to protect British interests in the Suez Canal.

M: “These examples are not at all evil. Sure, again and again we start to realise that the British were trying to mould the Middle East into some kind of useful shape, and the Zionist knew they had to impress upon those responsible the idea that Britain would benefit from a Jewish state.”

G: “Je suis juif… We are all Jewish in the West, if by Jew you understand someone who can run a business. That must be remembered when we talk of prejudices: The business masters of the gentiles is so riddled with prejudices that he in the Jews see a proxy in his business life, a helping hand in his quest to transform the world to money.”

M: “I’m not too sure about that, but I’ll keep an open mind. What certainly matters is as Christina has pointed out, that they completely seem to have neglected the presence of others in the area.”

Shaftesbury later wrote an article for the newspapers, stating: “Syria, including Palestine, will be a particularly commercial country after its reconstruction. They are the greatest merchants in the world. Is there really a more suitable place and a blessed area where the Jew can display his qualifications? It will be a blow to England if any of its competitors possess Syria”

M: “The euphoria is closer to a prospector talking about a scoop of a purchase.”

G: “Best word to describe what is happening so far: Euphoria. When British politicians taunted the Jews in England with a possible future land in Palestine, they of course couldn’t help hearing it in the widest possible sense. The tides were finally turning.”

M: “Judging from their reaction to internal criticism, that sounds right. Max Nordau in a speech held all the way back in 1903 at the Sixth Zionist Congress said:”

"This assent of the Governments," we were ironically told again and again, "you will never, never obtain. The Sultan will and can never grant you Palestine, for even if he were disposed to do so – which will never be the case – he would encounter the opposition of Russia, and on your sweet behalf the Sultan will not pick a quarrel with his most powerful neighbour. Russia will never allow the ground which has been trodden by the founder of the Christian religion ever to become Jewish.” Our critics have once more tested the correctness and wisdom of the English saying “Never prophesy unless you know.”

[…]

Russia, whom we were told to recognise and fear as the insurmountable obstacle in our path, Russia declares in a friendly way that it has absolutely no objection to the occupation of Palestinian soil by Jews.

“What on earth do you imagine is going to happen? Do you expect the Powers are going to say to the Sultan: Now, then, just you give Palestine to the Jews or you’ll have us to reckon with!”? To this we reply with a seriousness which the objection hardly deserves: "That has never been our idea nor our desire."

M: “And then he continues to explain that all they hope for is a chance to talk to the Sultan. And if he rejects:”

[…] if his unbending will shut us out of Palestine, then, still solemnly asserting our undying historical claims to the land of our fathers, firmly and resolutely adhering to the Basle programme, we should have to be patient and wait. We can afford to wait.

C: “That’s a bit more humble than the later Zionists.”

G: “Zionism has undergone great chance as well as other political projects. Wouldn’t you and I do too? In your youth, you may dream of owning a certain plot of land. You are humble, as you feel you do not have any particular rights to it. But as your project materialises, you change yourself.”

C: “Entitlement sets in.”

G: “Call it that if you want to. But you change. You feel a promise was given and your plans of what to do with it has already taken shape.”

As the idea of establishing a national homeland for the Jews matured within the British government, a memorandum was issued in April 1917, which included the following key points: Britain agreed to recognize Palestine as a national home for the Jews and to grant the Jews of Palestine all rights, as well as to open the door for Jewish immigration to Palestine without restriction, and to establish a Jewish chartered company with priority rights to land acquisition (Khammar, June 1966, pp. 50-51).

The organization, led by Weizmann, began using the available facilities to achieve its goals and faced strong opposition from some British Jews (including a letter to The Times from David Alexander and Claude Montgomerie [Montefiore, ed]) who were against a national state.

C: “So it’s a business relation. But they ended up conquering the land using military means. In fact, they ended up fighting their British friends using terrorism. That’s the point of Irgun.

They start as a company purchasing land, and as that process develops, they stop viewing themselves as owners of many small plots and transform into owners of a fragmented country. Now it’s a country, they stand up and say, even though on paper it looks like a railway map.”

G: “It was always more than a business relation. Despite what I said earlier, I will contend that at the core Zionism didn’t really change all that much. Paraphrasing that: The disposition and tendencies of the leading underground people remains stable. Their strategies change as the circumstances change. Even as they directed more of their energy against the British in 1940s and especially after the war, it was the same people making new decisions. Real change is when it is no longer the same people driving the decisions.”

M: “I’d like to take the opportunity to look at the situation from a higher vantage point.

Around the change of the century, Zionism was driven by two major phenomena: The Dreyfus affair and the ensuing conclusion that people like Herzl arrived at: Jews will never be accepted in any Western society, no matter how hard they try. Not even in France, the cradle of Enlightenment and liberal revolution.

I would agree with Gerald that Zionism from before Israel’s independence and after are two things. Honestly? I would prefer to call post-1948 Zionism for nationalism or patriotism instead. Zionism is a political project to create a state. Once created, Zionism has obsoleted itself.

But I want to flesh out an even broader picture. That of the almost global shift from socialist and secular revolution to conservative ideas, often outright religious ideas. By the 1970s-1980s it was like the socialist revolutionary approach had used up its fuel. Perhaps it had proven itself futile, I don’t know.

But we notice a marked shift in Iran with the 1979 founding of the Islamic Republic. Egypt turns more nationalist after Nasser dies in 1970.

Israel’s Labour Party suffered a landslide defeat to Likud in 1977, and the 1973 surprise attack by Egypt and Syria probably had a lot to do with that. But even before that, the religiously driven settler groups who founded settlements beyond those zones deemed necessary for security, were initially at odds with the labour government. Things got easier once Likud arrived.

Iran is in a way also an example. While until 1979 the Shah kept the country on the same leash that America kept him in, we saw how the revolution in 1979 which started as a multifaceted phenomenon ended up being largely an Islamic one. Religion was more convincing as a key to change than speculative solidarity was.”

C: “Okay, let’s see a whole century at once. I remain unimpressed. Would you also say that it requires a change of generation for the picture to change? I’d say one bad experience would be enough to have people vote differently next time.”

G: “Yes, vote. But voting changes nothing. I am talking about revolutionary movements that change the underlying system.”

M: “I’m on the fence, Christine, and my apologies for over-generalising. I think a country can slide slowly over elections as well. Legislation can allow what was previously immoral or considered shameful. But revolutionary violence? I don’t know.”

G: “In that speech you brought up by Max Nordau, co-founder along with Theodor Herzl of the Zionist Organisation, he shows how much closer to the 1900 Jew he really is:”

The Jewish people was in a state of chaos; it was unorganised; it was a human swarm; it did not even know itself what it wanted; it had no representatives competent to speak in its name; and as it did not know itself what it wanted, it was only natural that the Governments remained in ignorance. To have altered all that appears little, but in reality it is very much. We had asked! We had asked that Palestine should be open to our occupation.

G: “Even asking for Palestine was a step towards playing with the ultimate toy: Reality. He realised the immensity of the very act. Going from assuming the dream cannot be reality to acknowledging that you actually need to want it, like you want food: With the intention of getting it.

Again, you feel the humility, but sadly also the lack of awareness that the Arabs might feel offended.”

M: “Of course they are aware, but the logic of the language they have chosen blots it out.”

G: “I know that it is easy to look at the word occupation and come away from all their Boy Scout discussions about their dream nation with the idea that they are expansionist occupiers. They are, but not because they say occupy. Look at how they have to work with their attitudes.”

It is strange, but literally true, that before the rise of Zionism we absolutely did not ask. Among ourselves we heaved deep sighs, expressed longing desires in prose and verse, pressed each other’s hands with significant looks, but we have never stood before the Powers, and in an unequivocal form openly and distinctly stated what we wanted.

G: “Only the slow change of momentum in countless confused political awareness strategies can bring them to a point of change. It takes leaders and followers steering each other for decades plus a handful of good opportunities to get to actual reality. And then you also have to be violent!”

M: “But that very political process may just as well be an instrument of self-deception:”

I claim it as a great service rendered by Zionism that it has put an end to the humbug about being happy and contented, and to the comedy of gratitude. From the very beginning we boldly and distinctly said, "We are not contented; we regard our situation as a very bad one; we consider our treatment as discreditable and undeserved;

[…] after the humiliating attempts we have made at assimilation with other peoples we have taken counsel with ourselves and we desire to live in our own way, in our own right, on our own soil."

M: “When a Zionist speaks like that, he is genuine and completely authentic.”

G: “Reform Judaism and liberal Jews actually wrote against Zionism. One could argue that we are authentic in basic reaction, but once we have been challenged, we are forced to think about our position. Can it be called authentic then? The prerequisite spontaneity has been lost. Now we are justified by a rationalisation, by an explanation.”

Following the publication of the famous letter by Claude Montefiore and David Alexander in The Times on May 24, 1917, criticizing plans for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the Zionists intensified their correspondence with The Times. The Chief Rabbi sent a letter criticizing the aforementioned letter and stated that, in his religious capacity as the head of the United Hebrew Congregation, he could not leave The Times’ readers in a state of confusion and announced that the letter did not represent the British Jewish community.

M: “I agree that we lose our spontaneity through defending our position. The very act of compromise begins by explaining. That only makes it more important that we preserve those original formulations that reveals the very impulse to act in the first place.”

Christine had mentally checked out long ago. Politics felt like a rudderless exercise in zero gravity locomotion, and she felt tired of swimming in the midst of levitating bodies.

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