LORD BALFOUR AND THE JEWS
By MRS. EDGAR DUGDALE
NEXT Monday, November znd, is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the so-called Balfour Declaration, which, incorporated and amplified later in the Mandate for Palestine, constitutes an inter- national as well as a British guarantee for the establishment of a Jewish National Home. I have written "so-called," because although In a sense it is extremely appropriate that this State document should bear the signature of one who approved so ardently of the policy it inaugurated, association with one particular British states- man—albeit the Foreign Secretary of the day—tends to obscure memory (.,f the fact that the Declaration was long and anxiously considered by the Government, and was the outcome of full Cabinet responsibility. And over what a Cabinet did Mr. Lloyd George preside in 1917! It included General Smuts, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon and Lord Balfour himself. A "notable band," indeed, as General Smuts said the other day. Among other men of outstanding ability there was Mr. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, who shared the resistance of certain sections of Western Jewry to the idea of Jewish nationhood, who fought his case in Cabinet to the last ditch short of resignation, and who had to admit defeat.
A parallel current of Jewish opinion, no less hostile to the Zionist movement, was also taken note of. It was strongly represented In American big business, where the Jewish magnates were almost to a man opposed to the ideals which so profoundly stirred the oppressed masses of their kindred in Eastern Europe. Lord Balfour was warned of this when he visited the United States in the spring of 1917 by Mr. Justice Brandeis, a Judge of the Supreme Court, himself a great Jew and a great Zionist. Of all the false Impressions which saboteurs of Jewish development in Palestine have put into circulation, none rings less true than the idea that the Bailout Declaration was part of a Largain between the British Government and the Wall Street Jews when America entered the war. The true facts were succinctly put by Mr. Harold Nicolson In the pages of The Spectator in May, 1939, when he wrote: "It was not of the strong Jews that we were thinking: it was of the millions of weak Jews who lived, not in Kensington Palace Gardens or in Riverside Drive, but at Cracow and Galatz."
I cut out Mr. Nicolson's article and kept it, not so much to re- inforce my own recollection, but because its author can give the first-hand evidence of one who took a share in the long process of drafting the Balfour Declaration (for Mr. Nicolson was a Foreign Office official at the time) and can help to dispel a more fantastic and, from the British point of view, a more serious charge than that of failure to give full weight to all sections of Jewish opinion. What about Arab opinion? Who could speak for it, and were their voices heard or heeded in Downing Street? In other words, did it ever occur to statesmen with the South African records of Smuts and Milner, to Balfour who had governed Ireland, to Curzon, once Viceroy of India, that the rights and feelings of the inhabitants of a country required some consideration? A young man who occupied the post of Colonial Secretary in later yeark seems to have had his doubts. At any rate, Mr. Malcolm Meet:I:maid, thinking a'nud in the House of Commons on November 24th, 1938, said : "I do some- times wonder whether all the authors of this great creative act were fully informed of the situation even at that time . . . I sometimes wonder whether they knew then that there were already living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean mere than 600,000 Arabs." Oddly enough, the point did not escape them. The figure is given in Lord Curzon's Memorandum to the Cabinet of October 26th, 1917. The Arabs have never lacked friends, champions or inter- preters among Englishmen for the last two hundred years, and no Eastern nation was ever better served in this respect than they were during the last war. The names of T. E. Lawrence and of Mark Sykes are woven into the texture of the early days of Arab national- ism rising against Ottoman rule—but they hold high place in Zionist history as well. For their vision of the future of the Middle East included a Palestine made strong and prosperous through Jewish work and enterprise. It was Lawrence who promoted the "treaty of friendship" Agned by the Emir Feisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann in 1919. For Sykes the idea of bringing together the two branches of the great Semitic race in the development of the cradle- lands of their might) past was more than a dream—it was a task for which he literally gave his life, for he died of overwork in pre- paration for the Paris Peace Conference. And when the Balfour Declaration was being hammered out, Sykes was Adviser to the Foreign Office on Middle Eastern affairs. Harold Nicolson speaks of the encouragement that flowed from his "dynamic optimism" in those days.
The Balfour Declaration can be described as an optimistic docu- ment, but I cannot suppose that any of the statesmen chiefly responsible for it would boggle at the adjective. For their aim was constructive, and in politics every architect of great things must combine vision with a certain degree of faith in the reasonableness and the goodwill of the human race. Buildings of every kind must be judged by their power to stand up against the stresses and strains to which they are bound to be subjected, and by their strength to withstand others that cannot be foreseen but may confidently be expected. It is not unfair after .43 quarter of a century to begin to apply this test to the policy of the Balfour Declaration, especially after such a twenty-five years as the woild in general, and the Jewish people in particular, have just passed through. For it must not be forgotten that the Declaration was first and foremost a decision to give the Jews the opportunity for which the Zignist leaders pleaded. The safeguarding of civil and religious rights of the Arabs was always provided for, but the specific pledges to the Jews in respect of facilitating immigration, land-purchase and so on were clauses of the Mandate of 1920, not of the Declaration of 1917 —they formed part, that is to say, of the international document on whose authority our control of Palestine is based today.
The departures by the Mandatory Power from the letter and the spirit of the Mandate, of which the White Paper was the climax, must be classed, among the blows to the policy of the Balfour Declaration which its authors could not be expected to take into calculation. In the light of our present knowledge, k appears that Arab hostility to Jewish colonisation was under-rated in 1917. But the friendly attitude of the then Arab leaders, exemplified by the Emir Feisal at the Peace Conference of' Paris, gave no warning of what was to come. The reasons why an extreme form of nationalism increased its hold later upon large sections of Arab opinion form
another story. Although some of its recent chapters lead straight to Berlin and Rome, it does not begin there. The Palestine Arab rebellion of 1936-39 was fostered, financed and inflamed by the Axis Powers, but certainly was not created by them. The proof of that is contained in the Report of the Royal Commission sent
out under the chairmanship of the late Lord Peel in the winter of 1936-37. This great State Paper will stand for all time as the most unbiassed history ot Palestine after the Balfour Declaration. Even those who demurred at its recommendations (and there were many such among both Jews and Arabs) do not dispute the accuracy of its facts. Its conclusions were that the feelings and aspirations of the two nations being what they are, British pledges to them could only now be carried out by territorial separation ensuring independ- ence and sovereignty to both and room for expansion through im- migration for the Jews. The Mandate was thus to be brought to an end and with it the Balfour Declaration would also fade into history.
The Mandate is impermanent by its very nature. Lord Balfour himself expected the National Home of the Jews in Palestine to be a stage towards a Jewish State. Partition is by no means the ideal way for any country to develop its independence, but statesman- ship largely consists in making the best of facts as they are. Mr. Lloyd George's Government deliberately planted a seed in fertile soil when it sanctioned the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. Only one of two things can happen to planted seeds—they grow or they rot. This one grows in spite of everything, and it is now true to say that the Balfour Declaration has done its work.
But not in the sense in which some people would fain engrave it as an epitaph on a mausoleum of Jewish national survival. The Chamberlain Government went back on its acceptance of the Royal Commission's Report, and substituted for a strong constructive policy a scheme which would set a limit even to the size of a Jewish minority in an Arab State. The Balfour Declaration opened Palestine to half a million Jews-they have made the country prosperous beyond anybody's wildest dreams (so prosperous indeed that Arab increase in the past twenty-five years has numerically exceeded their own) ; let them be content ; their minority rights would be safeguarded —new pledges givea for old.
The war averted the crisis into which this policy was plunging Palestine headlong. The problems of the Middle Eastern settlement as well as the problem of the Jewish future have taken new forms— in the case of the Jews, forms infinitely more terrible and of infinitely greater concern to the whole civilised world. This is not the time for discussion of the next steps. But the history of the Balfour Declaration has shown that any attempt to settle the political and economic future of the Middle East without taking account of Palestine as the Jews have made it would prove as futile as the attempt would be to settle the future of the surviving European Jewish minorities without taking account of the one and only country able and willing to absorb that living remnant of the People of the Book.
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