THE BALFOUR DECLARATION: 100 YEARS ON

My father was sixteen years old, just two shy of being conscripted for the trenches, when he – and the rest of Whitechapel – heard about the Balfour Declaration. The letter, sent by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter, Lord Rothschild, expressed the British government’s support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, but added the proviso, ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.

The initial response of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, when Sir Mark Sykes came bounding out of the Cabinet Office on 2 November 1917, holding the document and announcing, ‘It’s a boy’, was disappointment. ‘Well, I did not like that boy at first,’ he wrote in his memoir Trial and Error, ‘he was not the one I had expected.’ Weizmann had wanted ‘establishment’ to be altered to ‘re-establishment’, by which ‘the historical connection with the ancient tradition would be indicated and the whole matter put in its true light’. That true light was meant to shine on something nobler than an opportunistic transaction of imperial strategy.

Weizmann’s own misgivings quickly gave way to euphoria when what had been done sunk in. That evening he and his colleagues sang what were described as ‘Hasidic songs’ and danced in celebration. A week later, when the document was made public by the Zionist Federation, my father saw the same singing and dancing erupt in the streets of the East End, from Mile End to Whitechapel. Something propitious, something providential, had happened, but also something against the odds.

At the time of the declaration there were probably only about 5,000 members of the Zionist Federation across the country and the organisation’s offices were a few small rooms on Piccadilly. But equally there is no doubt that emotional support was much broader. If British Zionism did not make the declaration, not unaided anyway, there is no doubt at all that the declaration made British Zionism. A place the Jews could call their own swam into excited vision, and not a colony in east Africa but the birthplace they had never relinquished in memory, ritual, language.

That East End street party – ‘a kosher knees-up’, Dad called it, lots of fried fish, cake and shouting – was all instinct and no thought, but then sometimes instincts are the real story. Arthur remembered the ‘Hatikvah’ being sung outside a synagogue close to the family house. A month later the same song brought the crowd to their feet in the Royal Opera House. My father stood outside amid a huge throng beside sacks of the next day’s cabbages.

He knew all about the Jewish opposition: anti-Zionists, the grandees of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Conjoint Committee – Claude Montefiore and those Rothschilds, Leopold in particular – who were on the wrong side of the argument. He was especially horrified by the public accusation of Edwin Montagu, one of the two Jewish members of the Cabinet (the other was the pro-Zionist Herbert Samuel), that the Balfour Declaration was tantamount to being anti-Semitic, since in Montagu’s eyes it presupposed divided loyalties, especially heinous during the war. Others among the anti-Zionist lobby felt the same way, in particular the historian Lucien Wolf, who had actually been questioned about his true nationality by a policeman in 1915 and never quite got over it.

For my father, the defensiveness of the anti-Zionists was a symptom of the gulf dividing West End Jews from East End Jews. The declaration’s sixty-seven words, he thought, could be boiled down to one – the word ‘home’, bayit. It was all very well for the likes of Edwin Montagu to complain that their indivisible sense of a British home was now vulnerable to charges of divided allegiance, but Montagu’s home was manorial: avenues of oak and elm, game birds flushed from the bracken, dropping to Home Counties guns.

For my father, who had shul on Shabbes and Shakespeare on Sundays, it was perfectly possible to be indivisibly British and Jewish; British and Zionist. In fact his whole life and those of all his friends were built around that unproblematic possibility. The meeting of minds, as he supposed there had been, between Arthur Balfour and Chaim Weizmann, between the philosophical patrician politician and the ‘little yid’ from Motol, as Weizmann described himself, was not only possible, but somehow a historically predestined fit. Britain was, after all, a country in which a Jew, thinly disguised as a church-goer, had been twice prime minister, the towering figure of Victorian conservatism.

Everything turned then, as it still does, on that one emotively loaded word, ‘home’ – both for celebrants and mourners. For Jews it was as if the doors of the ancestral home where Hebrew and Judaism had been created had finally been opened after being barred and locked – most recently in the 1880s, when the Ottoman Empire put severe restrictions on immigration to Palestine. But for the Palestinian Arabs, the establishment of a Jewish national home already seemed an early notice of eviction. Whether or not that pessimism was justified at the time or whether it became a tragically self-fulfilling prophecy is still being argued. But in the midst of our unapologetic celebrations, we owe it to the moral case for the declaration to put ourselves in Palestinian shoes as well as our own.

For the poorer Jewish communities of London and the provinces, the terror of homelessness was not just a debating point. Many had come recently from the terror of pogroms in Russia and Romania, or had witnessed the rise of political anti-Semitism in cities like Vienna. They were altogether less sanguine about domicile being granted in any but a provisional and conditional way. Even in Britain there were reasons for apprehensiveness. There were anti-Semitic riots in Bethnal Green and Leeds in 1917. In the National Review there was always space for literary anti-Semites like Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton to vent their witty malice. The anti-immigrant demagoguery of organisations like the British Brothers’ League had pressured the Conservative government led by Balfour himself to enact an Aliens Act in 1905, imposing strict curbs exactly at the time when they would be most damaging. In 1914, the Aliens Restriction Act had made those controls even tighter.

The East End, too, had a good idea of what was unfolding on the Eastern Front of the war, where millions of Jews found themselves caught between the rolling military machines of the Austro-Hungarian army on the one side, the Russians on the other. No fewer than 600,000 were deported from territory in the war zones, especially in the Ukraine. These upheavals were accompanied by other merciless pogroms, especially murderous when the Russian army was in retreat. Estimates of the civilian Jewish dead range from 50,000 (the most conservative figure) to as high as 200,000. The Russian Revolution brought no respite; the opposite in fact. The civil war saw 1,300 separate pogroms perpetrated by the Whites, the anti-Bolshevik Volunteers and the Poles; 106 by units of the Red Army, in particular Budenny’s 1st Cavalry. When Red Army officers tried to stop the attacks they were either stabbed or shot. When Jewish fatalities from the two back-to-back wars are put together they could come to half a million.

So Jews could be forgiven for thinking there was no safe position for them to take and in extremis nowhere for them to go. Jews have not been the only people to have suffered uprooting. But they have been the only people in the world eternally unable to find a place where shelter would not be given on sufferance, conditionally, provisionally, liable always to be withdrawn, terminated along with many lives, at short notice. No one in countries inheriting the legacy of the expulsions and the doors shut against the desperate – as they were in Britain after the Aliens Act or as they were in the US after 1921 – is in a strong position to question Zionism’s legitimacy.

In 1915, the Yiddish writer S. Ansky, who had been one of the founders of the Social Revolutionary Party, went to see for himself the scale of the catastrophe, while trying to publicise the miseries and help organise relief for the multitudes of starving and homeless. He discovered whole towns in blackened, scorched devastation, often nothing left of the Jewish districts. In Brzostek he heard of a father and son taken out to be summarily hanged. The son was told his life would be spared if he personally hanged his father. He refused but the father begged him and, unhinged with distress, went through with it, while the soldiers sat around and laughed before stringing up the son anyway.

Ansky saw that these enormities were not just the result of disintegrating order in the country. Though other populations – ethnic Germans in particular – suffered deportation, the worst horrors were selectively perpetrated on Jews because of the grip of the most paranoid strains of anti-Semitism, intensified during wartime. The usual suspicions attached to ‘rootless’ Jews morphed into full-on accusations of treason. Yiddish was held to be synonymous with German, which then turned every Yiddish speaker into a potential or actual spy. A whole mythology of treason circulated throughout the war zone, shared not just among the ranks and the local country people but, as Ansky discovered, by the officer corps, even right up to some of the command itself.

So for Ansky and many others, being Jewish meant, sooner or later, being a homeless refugee or worse. This fate could befall even professionals and commercial Jews who had been permitted to reside in Moscow, beyond the Pale of Settlement. In 1891, much of that population was summarily expelled. Did this belated insight make Ansky a Zionist? Not exactly, or not immediately. For a while, he imagined the demonisation of the Jews would disappear with the dawning revolution of workers and peasants – until, that is, the Bolsheviks outlawed Hebrew and stigmatised Zionism as a reactionary crime.

And although the atrocities in the east seemed yet more evidence of the selective cruelty perennially meted out to Jews, their entrapment in permanent homelessness, that alone would never have ensured that the Zionist case would prevail with the British War Cabinet. As all historians have noted, imperial strategy had a great deal to do with the decision. The year 1916 had been a bad one for the Allies at Gallipoli and the Somme. The next year looked to be no better. Weizmann, who, as a chemist, had been engaged in producing acetone for munitions by Churchill, had shamelessly played up the role the Jews might have in persuading the US to enter the war.

But if there were compelling humanitarian and strategic reasons for the British government to support a Jewish national home, it was also true that the case for this to be planted in Palestine, notwithstanding simultaneous British encouragement of Arab nationalism, owed something to history and emotion. Weizmann won Balfour over in person because he persuaded him that such a national home would only take root if it grew from the millennia-long, unbroken connection of the Jews with the place where their identity had been created and their language formed. Alternatives that had been offered in east Africa and El Arish on the Sinai coast would indeed have been exercises in colonialism. But British enthusiasts of a Jewish return knew well that Jews were not only not absent from Palestine, but actually had constituted the majority of Jerusalem’s population for some time and were living in communities of thousands in the Galilean towns they had built in the sixteenth century like Tiberias and Safed.

But they were still vastly outnumbered by the Palestinian Arab population, who saw a Jewish national home in Palestine as an outrage. How, then, could the British persuade themselves that somehow the ambitions of both Jewish and Arab re-awakenings could be reconciled? The answer of course lay in that crucial proviso added to the declaration: ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. In all likelihood this was written not by Balfour but by the political secretary to the War Office, Leo Amery, himself a secret Jew who had belatedly discovered his mother’s true identity, and who wanted somehow to square the circle in such a way that it was conceivable to reconcile the aspirations of both national communities in Palestine. The other element of the declaration to which an optimistic reading could be attached was that crucial little word ‘in’, meaning a Jewish national presence in part but not the whole of the country: a shared place, then, not the monopoly of one or the other.

Most of the answers given by historians, shadowed by knowledge of how all this would play out during the Mandate, are bleakly pessimistic, if not downright cynical. But at the time, the possibility of two national awakenings coexisting side by side, and at the very least refraining from mutual destruction, was not out of the question. This is because, contrary to most polemical histories, at least some figures in either camp were paying attention to the other and not invariably from a stance of intransigent hostility. Weizmann’s friend Ahad Ha’am, the great seer of ‘cultural Zionism’, had warned in the 1890s after visiting Palestine that the future of the entire project would turn on Zionists understanding the sensibilities and rights of those who were already there. In 1905, at the seventh Zionist Congress, Yitzhak Epstein – who lived in one of the earliest Jewish villages in Galilee – called it the ‘one issue [that] outweighs them all’. He had seen first hand that the purchase of land from Arab landowners resulted in the dispossession of their tenant fellahin, so Epstein optimistically proposed that Jews bought only uncultivated land for their settlement and development. He also argued that Zionists should appreciate the Palestinian Arabs’ own sense of home and negotiate with them on that basis of mutual respect.

Weizmann tried to do just that when he went to see Emir Faisal, the son of Sharif Husain of Mecca, to whom the British had promised sovereignty over a great pan-Arabian state following the war. Travelling by boat, camel and foot in the broiling heat of June 1918, Weizmann spent two hours in discussion with Faisal at his encampment on the Jordanian plateau. With the help of T. E. Lawrence, who believed it could all somehow be managed, a document was produced in which Zionism and Arab nationalism were represented as complementary and mutually beneficial.

A similar understanding was reached at the Paris Peace Conference when the two men met again, although an essential rider was added that, should British promises of Faisal’s Arab kingdom in Syria not be realised, any such understanding would be null and void. Notoriously, of course, earlier secret negotiations dividing the region between French and British interests set those promises cynically aside, putting Syria and Lebanon under a French zone of influence and ultimately delivering the Palestinian Mandate to Britain, both with fateful consequences.

It was, then, the briefest honeymoon and 100 years on there seems always to have been a shadow cast over the declaration. The issue of whether or not the country from the Jordan to the sea is to be the home of one or two peoples, in one or two states, raised in vague outline in 1917, is still the essence of the matter in 2017. For Jews, what grew from the seed of the Balfour Declaration has been in so many ways an astounding miracle: for all its flaws and failings a vibrant, contentious, if embattled democracy and the retort in living humanity to the Nazi ambition to wipe out not just the bodies of all Jews but their culture and memory, too.

But as many Zionists have known and argued, the fulfilment of a national home will turn not just on power but on ethics, in which case the humanity of the other people of the land needs to be respected, too. This week brings another anniversary with it, one of equal solemnity: that of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, who was among the greatest of Israelis to come to that conclusion and who paid with his life for daring to put it into practice. A possible peace or even the retreat of hatred and violence may seem right now so remote as to be in the realm of miracles. But then that first dawning of a Jewish home a century ago was proof enough that sometimes, even in the field of fire that is the Middle East, such things may happen.