MARGINAL COMMENT
NICOLSON By HAROLD I try to recapture the mood of 1917. In the autumn of that year I was attached to Sir Mark Sykes, who occupied a somewhat indeter- minate position as adviser to the Cabinet on Middle Eastern Affairs. We were accorded two small rooms in the basement of the Foreign Office. During the years of bombardment these rooms had been fitted up as an air-raid shelter for the Prime Minister, who would nip across from Downing Street when the Zeppelins approached. They had been repainted in vivid suffragette colours and furnished with armchairs, tables, a sofa, and a harmonium on which, it was said, Mr. Lloyd George would, when the bombs fell, play Welsh hymns. Sir Mark Sykes, Mr. Dunlop and I used to work in these rooms during the daylight hours. Sykes was a man of abundant energy, imagination, zest and knowledge ; he was not, however, a trained official. He did not possess for files and minutes that reverence which the British civil servant so easily acquires. He had a khaki-coloured fountain pen containing green ink: with this weapon he would write very rapidly—as a thought darted—and in- variably on the wrong side of the page. Nor was this all. Mark Sykes had a talent for scribbling caricatures and comic drawings which were accurate and quick ; his first reaction to any new idea was to illustrate it rapidly in his green ink ; he was apt to use official papers for this pastime, and some of these irreverent drawings appeared upon the files. On one occasion when Mr. Balfour was descending from the upper floor his lift stuck suspended between heaven and earth. Sykes illustrated this incident by a picture in which he represented himself upon a ladder, with Dr. Sokolow the Zionist waiting anxiously below, holding up the Declaration for Balfour to sign. I can still see him chuckling gaily as he scribbled these drawings with Mr. Dunlop and myself hovering anxiously behind.
* * * * The admiration and affection which I had for Mark Sykes has cast a glow of sentiment and happiness over those few weeks that I spent with him in the basement of the Foreign Office. Dr. Sokolow would visit us daily, slow, solemn, patriarchal, intense. My only function was to see that Sykes drafted his minutes and
THE proceedings of the twenty-second Zionis; Congress at Basle, which concluded its arduous and often heated labours on Christmas Eve, have not been such as to fill the British friends of Jewry with either satisfaction or hope. There seemed to be but slight good-will towards the Gentiles and little prospect of peace in that corner of the earth. But what is so sad for those of us who have been interested in the National Home from its inception, is to look backwards and to reflect how, in the last thirty years, the Palestine question has been poisoned by acrimony and distorted by false claims. The idea underlying the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was in its essence a simple idea. In the vast area of world recon- struction which was then impending, the Palestine problem did not in those days present itself as a problem ; it seemed in comparison with our other complexities an easy little field which could be cultivated calmly and with pleasure. Nobody foresaw the jungle of difficulties which would arise, or the thorns and thistles by which our every movement would be hampered and hurt. I try to dismiss from my mind the undergrowth of reports and commissions which have blurred the original design ; I try to see the field again as it seemed to us in those autumn months of 1917; I try to re- capture the certainty which then was ours. It is inevitable that today, looking back upon the event, we should regard the original Declaration as impulsive and ill-considered. It is inevitable that the critics of the Declaration should accuse its authors of ignorance or cifnicism. It is an easy thing to reproach Balfour fix having ignored the realities of Arab nationalism ; or even to question his motives by asserting that he was influenced by strategic considera- tions or anxious only, in that difficult year 1917, to win the support of Jewish opinion in America and elsewhere.
memoranda in proper form and that too many illustrations did not creep into the files. But to one fact I can certainly bear witness, namely that the Balfour Declaration was not some sudden opportunist
statement made at a time of difficulty ; it took weeks to draft, and every word was scrutinised with the greatest thought and fore-
thought. Since this Declaration, as read out in the House of Com- mons on Nov ember 2nd, 1917, represents our initiaj. statement of policy in the matter, and since it is the very basis of the contractual obligation into which we then entered with Jewry, it is important that its exact terms should once again be recalled:
" His Majesty's Government," said. Mr. Balfour, "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, it being clearly understood 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."
Such was the basis of the promises which we made to Zionism. Have we broken those promises? No sane person, reading the terms of the declaration, could say that we have. We never promised a Jewish State. All we promised was " a " National Home " in "
Palestine ; and that promise was explicitly conditional on the main- tenance of the rights of the Arabs. Nothing which has happened since can alter the terms of the contract into which we then entered.
It is evident that were the Balfour Declaration to be drafted to-day, when we have almost thirty years of bitter experience behind us, it would be drafted in far different terms. Certain developments which ought to have been foreseen were not foreseen. It was mYt foreseen that Arab nationalism would possess the force and unity which it has since acquired ; it was assumed that the Arabs regarded Palestine as little more than a remote Turkish vilayet. Clearly it would have been preferable, and at that date possible, to negotiate a detailed treaty with the Amir Feisal. It was not foreseen, as it ought to have been foreseen, that the second generation of Jewish immigrants would develop a mentality very different from that of Dr. Sokolow ; that they would come to regard Palestine, not as an asylum, a sanctuary or a "Home," but as a native country to be violently defended. And it was not foreseen that Great Britain, who regarded herself as the natural protector of the Jews, would in the course of time come to be regarded as the oppressor of Jewty, flouting, by her unwanted presence, the noble Zionist sympathies of the United States. These things ought to have been foreseen ; and they were not foreseen. But to accuse Mr Rations of cynicism, of opportunism, of imperialism, is incorrect. He was an aloof man in many ways, but on two things he felt passionately. The first was the need of maintaining friendship between the United States and ourselves. On that principle he never wavered. And the second was Zionism. In the service of that cause his heart as well as his mind was engaged.
"You see," he said to me once, "here is one of the most gifted races of mankind, which mankind has treated woefully. We can provide sanctuary for some of the most unfortunate ; and the Uni- versity of Jerusalem will become the very centre of their genius.
They will acquire dignity." That faith survived even his sad journey to Damascus. It may have been optimistic ; it was certainly not cynical. Even those of us who try to understand the younger Jewish mind, which Arthur Koestler has portrayed so vividly, must rub our eyes in astonishment when we hear the Mandate described at Basle as "the present oppressive regime" and learn that we are
accused of a "savage assault" upon the civil liberties of the Jewish population. How remote, how gay, how comfortable seems in retro-
spect that little basement room at the Foreign Office! Which serves to remind us that in human affairs optimism is as unsure a guide as anger.
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