A bitter and bloody harvest
The Jews, who have made a contribution to our culture out of all proportion to their population and social conditions, were treated abominably by the Christian peoples of Europe for many centuries. Perhaps the first irony is that the Jews fared rather better under Islamic rule, especially but not only in the great civilisation of al-Andalus in Spain.
Waves of murderous pogroms in eastern Europe in the late 19th century persuaded some Jews that they would have no peace or security until they had a homeland of their own, and the political ideology of Zionism was born. Some Zionists began to build agricultural colonies in Palestine, the land from which the Roman empire had expelled the Jews almost two millennia earlier.
Palestine, however, was not an automatic choice for the Zionists, though Jews already formed 10% of the population there — and a majority in Jerusalem — when World War I broke out in 1914. At one point the Zionist leadership quite seriously considered a proposal to occupy land in Uganda.
Nor was Zionism an automatic political choice for Jews, far from it. Only 8,000 out of 300,000 British Jews were members of Zionist organisations in the pre-war period.
Indeed, very many of the most influential Jews in western Europe, who considered themselves well assimilated into their host societies, felt Zionism was a dangerous trend that would fan the flames of anti-semitism in countries where it barely smouldered at the time.
Having at last persuaded the British (or German or French) establishments that they were loyal and patriotic citizens, enjoying equal rights in business and politics, how would they be regarded, they wondered, if they started saying that their real homeland was in another country? For many of them, being Jewish was a religious and cultural characteristic, and not a national one.
World War I would dramatically change Zionist fortunes, as Jonathan Schneer’s vividly detailed and very readable book admirably demonstrates. He reveals a fascinating back-story. Anti-semitism of a discreet and genteel variety was quite common among leading British politicians and civil servants. This prejudice led many of them to believe the legend that Jews controlled international finance and therefore, potentially, the outcome of the war.
The Zionists knew, better than most, that this was not true, but they did not hesitate to play upon it. So they persuaded the Foreign Office that it was in Britain’s interests to grant their apparently quixotic demands in order that a non-existent ‘international Jewry’ would not side with Berlin.
This process would culminate in the declaration by Arthur James Balfour, foreign secretary in Lloyd George’s government, that Britain “views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use (its)... best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object”.
This short statement had a significant rider, often forgotten, which states 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”.
These non-Jewish communities, however, had not been consulted about whether they wanted the Zionists to build a ‘national home’ on their land. Indeed, as Schneer spells out repeatedly, the very same great power that issued the Balfour declaration had led Arab nationalists to believe it would help them achieve nationhood on exactly the same Palestinian territory. That is not the only cruel deception that Schneer nails to the door of No 10 Downing Street. Britain has never better merited the old sobriquet of Perfidious Albion than in its dealings in the Middle East.
At the time of the declaration, almost the entire region was part of Turkey’s Ottoman empire. Palestine was a sleepy southern region of its Syrian province. Arab fellahin, hard working but technologically backward and poorly financed farmers, formed the bulk of the population. They already resented the arrival of relatively rich and often arrogant Jewish settlers from Europe, though they had lived happily enough alongside Palestinian Jews for centuries.
As Schneer points out, if Turkey had not sided with Germany against Russia, France and Britain in the war, Palestine might have remained a fairly drowsy place in the 20th century. When Turkey declared war, Britain promptly annexed Egypt, where it had bases, though it was still nominally Ottoman, and had big interests all the way across the region to Baghdad (sound familiar?). The disastrous failure of Winston Churchill’s attack on Gallipoli showed the British could not conquer Turkey by frontal assault. So London sought local allies among the middle-eastern Arabs, who were chafing under Turkish rule despite their common Moslem heritage.
What followed was extremely complicated, and it is one of the pleasures of reading Schneer that he makes it remarkably clear, though at the cost of considerable repetition and recapitulation.
In essence, the British led the Arab sharif of Mecca, Hussein Ibn Ali, to believe he would be rewarded with control of Syria, including Palestine, in return for leading a very dangerous rebellion against the Ottomans.
At almost exactly the same time, Sir Mark Sykes was negotiating a deal with the French diplomat Francois Georges Picot, which carved up the Middle East between the two European allies.
Matters were further entwined when the Bolshevik victory in 1917 pulled Russia out of the war and opened up the option for Britain of a separate peace with Turkey. So British agents, including the mercenary arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff, engaged in a series of negotiations offering to maintain the Ottoman status quo in the region.
These talks failed, but they highlight the fact that British imperialists were offering the same pieces of land — in which they held no rights at all — to Zionists, Arabs, Turks and their French allies. All the while, they hoped to keep them under their own control.
My schoolteacher and mentor, John de Courcy Ireland, used to marvel at the way we use the phrase ‘the Great and Good’ to describe the power brokers of the ruling classes. Then as now, they were neither good nor, in any deep sense of the term, great.
So while the Zionists were negotiating for Palestine in London, the Arabs were shedding their blood to take it, and the rest of the Middle East, from the Turks, in the madly courageous campaigns orchestrated by TE Lawrence and popularised in the movie Lawrence of Arabia.
Schneer speculates that had the Arabs moved faster — though of course they were in blissful ignorance of the ascendance of Zionism in the British Foreign Office — and taken Damascus earlier, Balfour might never have made his declaration. And even after he signed his now historic letter to Lord Rothschild, Lloyd George was busy scheming to see if a Turkish deal could be done, which would have scuppered Zionists and Arabs alike.
The inter-war period would see the British continue to flirt alternately with Arabs and Zionists as they administered Palestine for themselves. But even then, many Jews felt, as some still do, that Zionism was a false messiah.
The rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, however, proved a terrible blow to the conviction that Jews could ever be secure as loyal citizens of a European state, for few Jews had felt more assimilated than those in Germany.
Zionism then triumphed with the foundation of Israel and Palestinians paid a grim price for wrongs done by Europeans over the centuries. They still pay it today, with terribly familiar consequences.
Schneer traces the fault lines that led to this tragedy with admirable scholarship, and pacey writing, illuminated by the colourful if often disreputable characters who people his narrative. If you want to understand more about the Palestinian disaster, this book is a good place to start.
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