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

their birth, England.
    Wolf went on to reject the Zionist claim to special privileges for Jews once they had arrived in Palestine. Britain, the likely future suzerain power in Palestine, specifically barred special privileges based upon religion. Moreover “nothing could be more detrimental to the struggle for Jewish liberties all over the world,” than for Jews to claim special privileges anywhere. “How could we continue to ask that the Russian Government shall make no distinction between … Jews and Christians?” he asked.
    In sum, the Zionist scheme if implemented,
    would not only aggravate the difficulties of unemancipated, and imperil the liberties of emancipated Jews all over the world, but in Palestine itself it would make for a Jewish state based on civil and religious disabilities of the most mediaeval kind, a state, consequently which could not endure and which would bring lasting reproach on Jews and Judaism. Indeed it could not be otherwise with a political nationality based on religious and racial tests, and no other Jewish nationality is possible.
    The main lines of disagreement could hardly have been more clearly stated. The Zionists replied to Wolf on May 11, 1915; exactly one month later the Conjoint Committee wrote a rejoinder, ending with the pious hope “that the progress of events may lead to such an approximation of the views of the two parties as to render some useful scheme of cooperation yet possible.”
    It would not happen. On the crucial issue of Jewish nationality, neither side budged. Consultations and discussions would continue, and memorandawould be written from both sides, but the gulf remained unbridgeable. Henceforth their competition for the ear of the government would grow increasingly fierce. And although Wolf began from the better-established and therefore more advantageous position, Weizmann was an absolute master of the political game.

PART III

The Battle for the Ear of the Foreign Office

PART IV

The Road Not Taken

PART V

Climax and Anticlimax

Conclusion

CHAPTER 26

A Drawing Together of Threads
    “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM,” Jews avow at the conclusion of their annual Passover celebration. For nearly two thousand years the phrase could operate only as a metaphor, expressing an aspiration about Jewish collective destiny in the distant future. But after November 2, 1917, “Next year in Jerusalem” might be a practical plan of action for an individual Jew in the here and now, a genuinely possible sequence of events culminating soon in relocation to the Promised Land. On that second day in November during the third year of the most awful war in history up until then, Zionism formally gained a powerful ally. As a result, the greatest obstacles to realization of the metaphor had been, or were about to be, removed. Or at least so it seemed.
    The Balfour Declaration was the result of a process that some consider practically inevitable. Certainly it is true that conditions created by the war enabled Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues to work wonders. During 1914–17 they gained access to the elite among British Jews and converted many of them to Zionism. They defeated advocates of Jewish assimilation, such as Lucien Wolf of the Conjoint Committee, whose raison d’être, lobbying the Foreign Office on behalf of foreign Jews, especially Russian and Romanian, had been swept away by the war. They gained entrance toBritish governing circles and converted some of its most important members too.
    During this period Weizmann and those who worked with him acted as inspired opportunists. Finally they could argue convincingly that a community of interest linked Zionist aspirations with those of the Entente. Zionists wanted the Ottomans out of Palestine; Britain and France wanted them out of the Middle East altogether. Zionists wanted a British protectorate in Palestine; Britain did too (although initially Sir Mark Sykes had bargained it away in negotiations with Georges-Picot of