Free The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Jonathan Schneer

Jews in Russia,” and a smaller Jewish community would be perceived as a lesser threat and therefore attract less persecution. Gaster added that “when the nations knew a Jew could go off to his own country they would persecute him less.” And Sokolow chimed in: “If Palestine was a British protectorate, and if England held it as a legally secured home for the Jews, England would be more interested in preventing the persecution of the Jews elsewhere and in obtaining rights for them.” But the Zionists insisted on the primacy of their own political program. Efforts to improve the Jewish lot, as noble and useful as they might be, “would and could never be the solution of the Jewish problem. That solution lay only in Zionism.”
    Wolf and his colleagues seem to have been unsurprised by the jettisoning of the cultural program, which greatly reduced the possibility of meaningful cooperation between the two groups. They asked their guests two pertinent questions: “How would Palestine become a Jewish country?” and of equal importance: Would “special rights … be asked for the Jews” once they had entered into it?
    The Zionists did not mince words in reply. Special rights would be asked for and would be necessary, Gaster explained, “till the Jews were so numerous, and in so large a minority, that they would predominate by weight of numbers.” As to how the Jews should enter Palestine, a Jewish Chartered Company with Britain’s backing “would take care that Jews should be the prevailing settlers.” Sokolow added that if Britain established some form of control over Palestine, “she would clearly and obviously take such necessary steps as to secure that the Jews should be the predominant people in Palestine [and] that it should be
their
country. The one point followed from the other.”
    It was an uncompromising performance, albeit politely delivered. The Conjoint Committee promised to consider it and to respond. Within days Wolf wrote a fourteen-page encapsulation of his own optimistic liberal creed:
    The whole tendency of the national life in Eastern Europe is necessarily towards a more enlightened and liberal policy … The present war, through the preponderance of Great Britain and France on the side of the Allies, must give a great impulse to liberal reforms in Russia … Sooner or later the statesmanship of the countries concerned will, for their own protection, deal with [the Jewish problem] in the way in which it has been successfully dealt with in Western Europe and America … There is no solid ground to despair of eventual success.
    Therefore, Wolf argued, the Conjoint Committee must reject the Zionist approach. Not even unrestricted Russian Jewish emigration to Palestine, he argued, would improve conditions for the majority who must stay behind; after all, the massive Russian Jewish migration to America had not done so. Moreover, far from improving things, the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would “at once relieve persecuting countries of much of their present incentive to pursue a policy of emancipation.” Like Edwin Montagu, Wolf believed that anti-Semitism would increase, not decrease, uponestablishment of a Jewish commonwealth. The Zionist approach ran “counter to all experience and probabilities, and is essentially reactionary.”
    So much for Zionist tactics; Wolf then dismissed the Zionists’ fundamental premise.
    The idea of a Jewish nationality, the talk of a Jew “going home” to Palestine if he is not content with his lot in the land of his birth, strikes at the root of all claim to Jewish citizenship in lands where Jewish disabilities still exist. It is the assertion not merely of a double nationality … but of the perpetual alienage of Jews everywhere outside Palestine.
    Thus political Zionism threatened to undermine even the most assimilated Jews. It threatened to make strangers of Jews like himself, and his colleagues on the Conjoint Committee, in the land of