Jerusalem: The Biography

1916–17

LAWRENCE AND THE SHERIF OF MECCA

Just before the Great War began, a young princeling from Mecca, Abdullah ibn Hussein, on his way back from Istanbul, visited Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the reigning British Agent in Cairo, to ask for military aid for his father.

Abdullah’s father was Hussein, the Sherif of Sherifs and the Amir of Mecca, the grandest potentate in Arabia, a Hashemite in direct descent from the Prophet. The family were traditionally amirs of Mecca but the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid had kept him in luxurious limbo in Istanbul for over fifteen years while appointing other members of the family. Then in 1908, the Young Turks, faced with a lack of other candidates, despatched him to Mecca (where his telephone number was Mecca 1). Faced with Enver Pasha’s aggressive Turkish nationalism and the rivalry of the Saudis and other Arabian chieftains, Hussein wished to prepare for either war in Arabia or revolt against Istanbul.

Abdullah proudly showed Kitchener a flesh wound gained fighting a southern Arabian sheikh, and Kitchener revealed his scars from the Sudan. ‘Your Lordship’, the squat Arabian told the towering Kitchener, ‘is a target that cannot be missed but, short as I am, a Bedouin hit me.’ Despite Abdullah’s charm, Kitchener refused to arm the Sherifians.

A few months later, the start of the Great War changed everything. Kitchener returned to London to serve as secretary of state for war – and to launch the steely-eyed recruiting poster that read ‘Your Country Needs You’ – but he remained Britain’s pre-eminent Eastern expert. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph declared jihad against the Allies, he remembered Hussein and proposed appointing him as Britain’s own caliph to launch an Arab revolt. He ordered Cairo to contact the Sherif.

At first there was no reply. Then suddenly, in August 1915, Sherif Hussein offered to lead an Arab revolt – in return for certain promises. The British, confronting the failure of their Gallipoli expedition, designed to break the Western Front stalemate by knocking the Ottomans out of the war, and the disastrous encirclement of an army at Kut in Iraq, were afraid that Jemal Pasha would conquer Egypt unless he was restrained by Arab unrest. London therefore ordered Sir Henry McMahon, high commissioner in Egypt, to agree whatever necessary to keep the Arabs on side without promising anything that clashed with French and of course British ambitions.

Sherif Hussein, now over sixty, was described by no less an observer than Lawrence of Arabia as ‘conceited to a degree, greedy and stupid’ and ‘pitifully unfit’ to rule a state, but nonetheless ‘such an old dear’ and at this point the British badly needed his help. Guided by his canny second son Abdullah, he now demanded a Hashemite^* empire of all of Arabia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq, an outrageously exorbitant gambit and an imperium on a scale that had not existed since the Abbasids. In return he would lead a revolt against the Ottomans not only in his native Arabia but also in Syria through the network of secret Arab nationalist societies such as al-Fatat and al-Ahd. None of this was quite true: he commanded only a few thousand warriors and did not even rule all of the Hejaz. Much of Arabia was controlled by rival chieftains like the Saudis and his position was precarious. The secret societies were tiny, with just a few hundred active members between them, and would soon be decimated by Jemal.

McMahon was unsure how much to concede to these ‘tragi-comic pretensions’, but, while he agonized, Hussein simultaneously offered the Three Pashas the chance to outbid the British, asking for hereditary possession of the Hejaz and an end to Jemal’s terror. The sherif sent his third son Faisal to negotiate with Jemal, but the tyrant forced him to attend the hangings of Arab nationalists.

The sherif had much more success with the British. London’s Eastern experts based in Cairo knew the contours of Palestine intimately through the espionage archaeology of the last century and Kitchener himself had photographed Jerusalem and mapped the country, sometimes in full Arab disguise. But many understood the clubs of Cairo better than the souks of Damascus: they were patronizing about the Arabs and prejudiced against the Jews whom they saw as behind every enemy conspiracy. While London ran one policy, negotiating with the sherif, the British viceroy of India ran his own quite different policy, backing the sherif’s enemy, the Saudis. Britain’s often amateurish experts found themselves living the real version of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle, adrift on the subtle, treacherous currents of Arab politics in the vast Ottoman sea.

Fortunately, McMahon had one officer who really did know Syria. The twenty-eight-year-old T. E. Lawrence, described by his fellow Arabist Gertrude Bell as ‘exceedingly intelligent’, was an eccentric outsider who hailed from the ambiguous heart of the British establishment and never quite reconciled his tormented allegiances to his two flawed masters – the empire and the Arabs. He was illegitimate: his father was Thomas Chapman, heir to a baronetcy who had left his wife to raise a new family with his mistress Sarah Lawrence and adopted her surname.

‘As a boy, TE always thought he was going to do great things, both active and reflective and determined to achieve both.’ He trained himself to improve his powers of physical endurance while writing his Oxford thesis on Crusader fortresses. Afterwards, he perfected his Arabic by travelling throughout Syria, and worked as an archaeologist at Hittite sites in Iraq, where his young Arab assistant Dahoum became his companion and perhaps the guiding passion of his life. His sexuality, like so much else about him, remains mysterious, but he mocked ‘our comic reproductive processes’ and his friend Ronald Storrs said, ‘He was not a misogynist though he’d have kept his composure if he’d suddenly been informed he’d never see a woman again.’ While in Iraq, he planned a book of ‘adventures’ on Jerusalem and six other Arab cities which he would call The Seven Pillars of Wisdom after a verse in Proverbs. He never published this, but he later used the title for another book.

‘A rather short, strongly built man with sandy complexion, a typical English face bronzed by the desert, remarkable blue eyes,’ as an American later described him, Lawrence stood 5 foot 5 inches – Gertrude Bell called him the Imp. ‘My brain’, he wrote, ‘was quick and silent as a wild cat.’ Super-sensitive to every human nuance, superb writer and keen observer, and abruptly rude to those he disliked, he suffered from ‘a craving to be famous’, he admitted, ‘and a horror of being known to like being known’. He did it all for ‘egotistical curiosity’. This believer in chivalry and justice was also a serpentine intriguer and self-mythologizer with what the journalist Lowell Thomas called ‘a genius for backing into the limelight’. Vanity competed with masochism: ‘I like the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downwards. There seemed a certainty in degradation.’

Now in Cairo, McMahon turned to this junior officer who became ‘a moving spirit in the negotiations with the sherif’. As Lawrence wrote his reports, he always found himself ‘thinking of Saladin and Abu Ubayda’, but he shared the view of many British Arabists that the desert Arabs were pure and noble – unlike those of Palestine. While he defined Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama as the Arab heartland of Syria, he did not recognize Jerusalem as really Arab – she was a ‘squalid town’, whose people, he wrote, ‘were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Questions of Arabs and their nationality are as far from them as bimetallism from the life of Texas.’ Such places as Jerusalem or Beirut were ‘shop-soiled – as representative of Syria as Soho of the Home Counties’.

On 24 October 1915, McMahon replied to Hussein. Laced with deliberate vagueness, the reply was designed to be read differently by both parties. McMahon agreed to Hussein’s empire, east of the Syrian cities specified by Lawrence, but excluded the fuzzy area to the west. Palestine was not mentioned and nor was Jerusalem. The sherif would be unlikely to accept Jerusalem’s exclusion but the British had their own interests there, so not mentioning the city sidestepped the problem. Besides, McMahon insisted that all French interests were excluded – and France had ancient claims on Jerusalem too. In fact, the high commissioner planned to place Jerusalem nominally under the Albanian dynasty of Egypt so that the Holy City would be Muslim but under British control.

Britain needed the Arab Revolt immediately so it made the necessary promises as unclearly as possible. Yet McMahon’s promises were not ambiguous enough, for they raised Arab expectations just before Britain and France began the real negotiation to divide up the Ottoman empire.

The British negotiator, Sir Mark Sykes, MP and Yorkshire baronet, was a creative and irrepressible amateur who had travelled in the East and therefore become a towering expert – though Lawrence called him ‘a bundle of prejudices, intuitions and half-sciences’. His real talent was an ambitious ebullience that was so attractive that his superiors happily allowed him to dabble in any eastern policies he chose. Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, who had served as consul in Beirut, agreed that France would receive Syria and Lebanon, Britain, Iraq and some of Palestine. There would be an Arab confederation, under British and French supervision – and Jerusalem would be internationalized under France, Britain and Russia.^* This all made sense to the three empires that had been striving to control Jerusalem for the last seventy years – and it allowed for an Arab state of sorts. But it was soon outdated because Britain secretly coveted Jerusalem and Palestine for itself.

On 5 June 1916, Sherif Hussein, oblivious to the secret of Sykes–Picot but aware that the Ottomans were about to overthrow him, raised his red banner in Mecca and launched his Arab Revolt. He declared himself ‘King of All the Arabs’, a title that alarmed the British, who persuaded him to downgrade it to ‘King of Hejaz’. This was just the beginning: few families in history would wear so many crowns in so many kingdoms in such a short time. King Hussein appointed each of his sons to command his small armies but the military results were disappointing and revolts in Syria never materialized. The British found it hard to work out whether the Sherifians could ever be effective. So, in October, Ronald Storrs, who would later govern Jerusalem, and his subordinate, Lawrence, arrived in Arabia.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA:

THE SHERIFIANS – ABDULLAH AND FAISAL

Lawrence had a good look at the king’s four sons in order to find the ideal Arab ruler, but he quickly realized that the second and third, Abdullah and Faisal, were the only ones that mattered. He dismissed Abdullah as ‘too clever’ and Abdullah dismissed Lawrence as ‘a strange creature’, but the moment Lawrence set eyes upon Prince Faisal, he almost swooned: ‘tall, graceful, vigorous, almost regal. Aged thirty-one, very quick and restless. Is clearskinned as a pure Circassian, with dark hair, vivid black eyes. Looks like a European and very like the monument of Richard I at Fontevraud. A popular idol.’ Lawrence gushed that he was ‘an absolute ripper!’ but Faisal was also ‘a brave, weak, ignorant spirit – I served him out of pity’.

The Arab Revolt was failing even in the Sherifian fiefdom of Hejaz and Lawrence saw that Faisal’s few thousand cameleers could be defeated by ‘one company of Turks’. Yet if they raided outposts and sabotaged the railways, they could tie down an entire Ottoman army. When he was posted to Faisal, Lawrence put this into practice and created the prototype of the modern insurgency. But it was Faisal who dressed the Lawrence of legend, ‘fitting me out in splendid, white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments’. As he wrote in his guide to Arab insurgency – required reading for American officers in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan – ‘If you wear Arab things, wear the best. Dress like a sherif.’ Lawrence had no military training and the spirit of an ascetic poet, but he understood that ‘the beginning and end of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies by listening and indirect inquiry.’ He learned to ride camels and to live like a Bedouin. But he never forgot that doling out vast sums of British gold was what kept his army together – ‘this is the fattest time the tribes have ever known’ – and even fifty years later they remembered him as ‘the man with the gold’.

The slaughter and grit of war both horrified and excited him. ‘I hope this sounds the fun it is,’ he wrote feverishly after one successful raid. ‘It’s the most amateurish, Buffalo-Bill sort of performance and the only people who did it well are the Bedouin.’ When one of his men murdered another, Lawrence had to execute the murderer himself, to avoid a blood feud. After a slaughter of Turks, he hoped ‘this nightmare ends when I’ll wake up and become alive again. This killing and killing of Turks is horrible.’

Lawrence knew the secret of the Sykes–Picot carve-up of the Middle East and it shamed him: ‘We are calling them to fight for us on a lie and I can’t stand it.’ There were times he risked his life in a fit of despair, ‘hoping to get killed on the way’. He described himself as ‘strongly pro-British and pro-Arab’, but he despised imperial conquest, preferring an independent Arabia as a dominion – but under British protection. ‘I presumed I would survive and be able to defeat not merely the Turk on the battlefield but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber.’

Lawrence confided the secret of Sykes–Picot to Faisal together with his plan to remedy it. If they were to avoid a French Syria, they had to liberate it themselves and they had to begin with a spectacular piece of military élan that would earn the Arabs the right to Syria: Lawrence led Faisal’s forces on a circular 300-mile escapade through the punishing Jordanian desert to seize the port of Aqaba.¹⁰

FALKENHAYN TAKES COMMAND: GERMAN JERUSALEM

After Jemal’s third offensive against Egypt had failed, the British counterattacked across Sinai. In spring 1917, they were twice severely defeated at Gaza by 16,000 Germans backed by Austro-Hungarian artillery. Jemal realized that they would attack again. Palestine now seethed with anti-Ottoman intrigue. The pasha’s secret police uncovered a pro-British Jewish spy-ring, NILI, whose members were tortured – their nails ripped out, their skulls squeezed in vices until they cracked – and then hanged. In Jerusalem, Jemal’s police were hunting down another Jewish spy, Alter Levine, a poet, businessman and fixer born in Russia, whom they claimed had set up a chain of brothels-cum-spy-nests. Levine turned up at the house of his friend, Khalil Sakakini, the respected teacher, in Jerusalem, who agreed to protect him. The Zionist spy-rings outraged the Slaughterman, who in April summoned the foreign consuls to a menacing soliloquy at the Augusta Victoria Fortress: he threatened to deport the entire population of Jerusalem – and after the dystopic Armenian ‘deportations’, that would mean the death of thousands.

‘We’ll find ourselves compelled to fight for Jerusalem,’ Jemal told Enver. They invited Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn, the former German Chief of Staff who had commanded the Verdun offensive, to come to Jerusalem and advise on how to defeat the British. But Enver went over Jemal’s head and placed the German in supreme command. ‘Falkenhayn’s Verdun was disastrous for Germany’, Jemal warned Enver, ‘and his Palestinian offensive will be disastrous for us.’

In June 1917, a crestfallen Jemal met Falkenhayn at Jerusalem station and they posed awkwardly together on the steps of the Dome of the Rock. Falkenhayn set up his headquarters in the kaiserine Augusta Victoria. The cafés of the city were filled with German soldiers of the Asienkorps and their officers took over the Fast Hotel. ‘We were in the Holy Land,’ wrote a typical young German soldier in the city, Rudolf Hoess.^* ‘The old familiar names from religious history and the stories of the saints were all around us. And how different from my youthful dreams!’ Austrian troops marched through the city; Jewish Austrian soldiers prayed at the Western Wall. Jemal Pasha left the city and governed his provinces from Damascus. The Kaiser finally controlled Jerusalem – but it was too late.

On 28 June, Sir Edmund Allenby arrived in Cairo as the new British commander. Just a week later, Lawrence and the Sherifians seized Aqaba. It took him just four days, riding camels, trains and ships, to reach Cairo and report his triumph to Allenby, who, despite being a bluffly conventional cavalryman, was immediately impressed by this gaunt Englishman dressed in Bedouin robes. Allenby ordered Lawrence and his Sherifian Camel Corps to serve as the maverick right wing of his army.

In Jerusalem, British aeroplanes bombed the Mount of Olives. Falkenhayn’s adjutant, Colonel Franz von Papen, arranged the defences and planned to counter-attack. The Germans underestimated Allenby and they were taken by surprise when on 31 October 1917, he launched his offensive to capture Jerusalem.¹¹

LLOYD GEORGE, BALFOUR AND WEIZMANN

As Allenby massed his 75,000 infantry, 17,000 cavalry and a handful of new tanks, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, was negotiating a new policy with a Russian-born scientist named Dr Chaim Weizmann. It is a remarkable story: a Russian immigrant, wandering around Whitehall and dropping into the offices of the most powerful statesmen in the world for romantic conversations on ancient Israel and the Bible, managed to win the backing of the British empire for a policy that would change Jerusalem as radically as any decision by Constantine or Saladin and define the Middle East to this day.

They had first met ten years earlier but their relationship was an unlikely one. Balfour was nicknamed Niminy Piminy and Pretty Fanny for his rosy cheeks and willowy limbs, but also Bloody Balfour for his harshness when chief secretary for Ireland. He was the scion of both Scottish mercantile wealth and English aristocracy – his mother being the sister of the Victorian prime minister, Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury. He had accompanied his uncle and Disraeli to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and when he succeeded Salisbury in 1902, wits coined the expression ‘Bob’s your uncle!’ A philosopher, poetaster and enthusiastic tennis-player, he was a foppish romantic who never married and a frivolous improviser whose favourite expression was ‘nothing matters much and very little matters at all’. David Lloyd George mused scathingly that history would remember Balfour ‘like the scent on a pocket-handkerchief’ while, in fact, he is most definitely remembered for his relationship with Weizmann and the Declaration that bears his name.

The two could not have come from more alien worlds. Weizmann was a timber merchant’s son from a tiny Jewish village near Pinsk who had embraced Zionism as a boy and escaped Russia to study science in Germany and Switzerland. When he was thirty, he moved to Manchester to teach chemistry at the university.

Weizmann was simultaneously ‘Bohemian and aristocratic, patriarchal and sardonic, with the caustic and self-mocking wit of a Russian intellectual’. He ‘was one of nature’s aristocrats who was at home with kings and prime ministers’ and managed to win the respect of men as different as Churchill, Lawrence and President Truman. His wife Vera, being the daughter of one of the few Jewish officers in the tsarist army, regarded most Russian Jews as plebeian, preferred the company of English nobility and made sure her ‘Chaimchik’ dressed like an Edwardian gentleman. Weizmann, this passionate Zionist, hater of tsarist Russia and despiser of anti-Zionist Jews, resembled ‘a well-nourished Lenin’ and was sometimes mistaken for him. A ‘brilliant talker’, his perfect English was always spiced with a Russian accent and his ‘almost feminine charm [was] combined with feline deadliness of attack, burning enthusiasm and prophetic vision’.

The Old Etonian and the graduate of Pinsk chever first met in 1906. Their chat was short but unforgettable. ‘I remember Balfour sat in his usual pose, legs stretched out, an imperturbable expression.’ It was Balfour, who as prime minister in 1903, had offered Uganda to the Zionists, but now he was out of power. Weizmann feared that his languid interest was just ‘a mask’, so he explained that if Moses had heard about Ugandaism ‘he would surely have broken the tablets again’. Balfour appeared bemused.

‘Mr Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’

‘But, Dr Weizmann, we have London,’ said Balfour.

‘True, but we had Jerusalem’, replied Weizmann, ‘when London was a marsh.’

‘Are there many Jews who think like you?’

‘I speak the mind of millions of Jews.’

Balfour was impressed but added, ‘Curious. The Jews I meet are quite different.’

‘Mr Balfour,’ answered Weizmann, who knew that most Anglo-Jewish grandees scorned Zionism, ‘you meet the wrong kind of Jews.’

This conversation led nowhere, but Weizmann had met his first imperial statesman. Balfour lost the general election and spent years out of power. Meanwhile, Weizmann campaigned to build a Hebrew university in Jerusalem, which he visited for the first time shortly after meeting Balfour. The dynamic Zionist farms in Palestine thrilled him, but Weizmann was horrified by Jerusalem, ‘a city living on charity, a miserable ghetto’, where ‘we hadn’t a single decent building – all the world had a foothold in Jerusalem except the Jews. It depressed me and I left the city before nightfall.’ Back in Manchester, Weizmann made his name as a chemist and became friends with C. P. Scott, editor – proprietor of the Manchester Guardian, a pro-Zionist who himself resembled a biblical prophet. ‘Now Dr Weizmann,’ Scott said in 1914, ‘tell me what you want me to do for you.’

At the start of the Great War, Weizmann was summoned to the Admiralty by the First Lord, ‘the brisk, fascinating, charming and energetic’ Winston Churchill, who said: ‘Well, Dr Weizmann, we need 30,000 tons of acetone.’ Weizmann had discovered a new formula to manufacture acetone, the solvent used in the making of cordite explosives. ‘Can you make it?’ asked Churchill. Weizmann could and did.

A few months later, in December 1914, C. P. Scott took Weizmann to a breakfast with Lloyd George, who was then chancellor of the exchequer, and his colleague Herbert Samuel. Weizmann noted how the ministers discussed the war with a flippant humour that concealed their deadly seriousness, but ‘I was terribly shy and suffered from suppressed excitement’. Weizmann was amazed to discover that the politicians were sympathetic to Zionism. Lloyd George admitted, ‘When Dr Weizmann was talking of Palestine, he kept bringing up place-names more familiar to me than those on the Western Front,’ and he offered to introduce him to Balfour – not realizing they had already met. Weizmann was wary of Samuel – an Anglo-Jewish banking scion related to the Rothschilds and Montefiores, and the first practising Jew to serve in a British cabinet – until he revealed that he was preparing a memorandum on the Jewish Return.

In January 1915, Samuel delivered his memorandum to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith: ‘There is already a stirring among the twelve million scattered,’ wrote Samuel. ‘[There is] widespread sympathy with the idea of restoring the Hebrew people to their land.’ Asquith mocked the idea that the Jews ‘could swarm back’ and sneered ‘what an attractive community’ they would be. As for Samuel, his memorandum ‘reads like a new edition of Tancred.^* I’m not attracted by the proposal but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favourite maxim that “race is everything” to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of HS.’ Asquith was even more surprised to discover that ‘curiously enough, the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George and he doesn’t give a damn for the Jews but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass into the possession of “agnostic and atheistic” France.’ Asquith was right that Lloyd George wanted Jerusalem for Britain but wrong about his attitude to the Jews.

Lloyd George, a blue-eyed Welsh Baptist schoolmaster’s son and reckless womanizer whose shock of raffishly long white hair made him more resemble an artist than a statesman, cared greatly about the Jews, and had represented the Zionists as a lawyer ten years earlier. ‘I was taught more in school about the history of the Jews than about my own land,’ said this silver-tongued orator and intuitive showman who had started as a radical reformer, anti-imperial pacifist and persecutor of dukes. Once the Great War had started, he mutated into a vigorous war minister and romantic imperialist, influenced by the Greek classics and the Bible.

Lloyd George reintroduced Weizmann to Balfour. ‘Weizmann needs no introduction,’ scribbled Balfour. ‘I still remember our conversation in 1906.’ He greeted the Zionist with, ‘Well, you haven’t changed much,’ and then mused, almost misty-eyed, ‘You know, when the guns stop firing, you may get your Jerusalem. It’s a great cause you’re working for. You must come again and again.’ They started to meet regularly, strolling around Whitehall by night and discussing how a Jewish homeland would serve, by the quirks of fate, the interests of historical justice and British power.

Science and Zionism overlapped even more because Balfour was now first lord of the Admiralty and Lloyd George was minister of munitions, the two portfolios most concerned with Weizmann’s work on explosives. He found himself ‘caught up in a maze of personal relations’ with the panjandrums of the world’s most expansive empire, prompting him to reflect on his humble background: ‘starting with nothing, I, Chaim Weizmann, a Yid from Motelle and only an almost professor at a provincial university!’ To the panjandrums themselves, he was what they thought a Jew should be: ‘Just like an Old Testament prophet,’ Churchill later remarked, though one dressed in a frock-coat and top hat. In his memoirs, Lloyd George frivolously claimed that his gratitude for Weizmann’s war work led to his support for the Jews, but actually there was strong Cabinet backing much earlier.

Once again, the Bible, Jerusalem’s book, influenced the city over two millennia after it was written. ‘Britain was a Biblical nation,’ wrote Weizmann. ‘Those British statesmen of the old school were genuinely religious. They understood as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and their faith.’ Along with America, ‘Bible-reading and Bible-thinking England,’ noted one of Lloyd George’s aides, ‘was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland’ was regarded ‘as a natural aspiration not to be denied.’

There was something more lurking in their attitude to the Jews: the British leaders were genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews, and tsarist repression had intensified during the war. The European upper classes had been dazzled by the fabulous wealth, exotic power and sumptuous palaces of Jewish plutocrats such as the Rothschilds. However this had confused them too, for they could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one of them a King David and a Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers. In an age of uninhibited theories of racial superiority, Balfour was convinced Jews were ‘the most gifted race mankind has known since fifth century bc Greece’ and Churchill thought them ‘the most formidable and gifted race’, yet simultaneously he called them a ‘mystic and mysterious race chosen for the supreme manifestations both of the divine and the diabolical’. Lloyd George privately criticized Herbert Samuel for having ‘the worst characteristics of his race’. Yet all three were genuine philo-Semites. Weizmann appreciated that the line between racist conspiracy-theory and Christian Hebraism was a thin one: ‘we hate equally anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. Both are degrading.’

Yet timing is everything in politics. In December 1916, Asquith’s government fell, Lloyd George became prime minister, and he appointed Balfour as foreign secretary. Lloyd George was described as the ‘greatest warleader since Chatham’ and he and Balfour would do whatever was necessary to win the war. At this vital moment in a long and terrible struggle against Germany, their peculiar attitudes to the Jews and the special concatenation of circumstances of 1917 merged to convince Lloyd George and Balfour that Zionism was essential to help Britain achieve victory.

‘IT’S A BOY, DR WEIZMANN’: THE DECLARATION

In the spring of 1917, America entered the war and the Russian Revolution overthrew Emperor Nicholas II. ‘It’s clear Her Majesty’s Government were mainly concerned how Russia was to be kept in the ranks of the Allies,’ explained one of the key British officials, and as for America, ‘it was supposed American opinion might be favourably influenced if the return of the Jews to Palestine became a purpose of British policy’. Balfour, about to visit America, told his colleagues that ‘the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America now appear favourable to Zionism.’ If Britain could make a pro-Zionist declaration, ‘we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America’.

If Russia and America were not urgent enough, the British learned that the Germans were considering a Zionist declaration of their own: after all, Zionism was a German-Austrian idea and until 1914, the Zionists had been based in Berlin. When Jemal Pasha, the tyrant of Jerusalem, visited Berlin in August 1917, he met the German Zionists, and the Ottoman grand vizier, Talaat Pasha, reluctantly agreed to promote ‘a Jewish national home’. Meanwhile, on the borders of Palestine, General Allenby was secretly preparing his offensive.

These, not Weizmann’s charm, were the real reasons that Britain embraced Zionism and now time was of the essence. ‘I’m a Zionist,’ declared Balfour and it may be that Zionism became the only true passion of his career. Lloyd George and Churchill, now munitions minister, became Zionists too and that effervescent gadfly, Sir Mark Sykes, now in the Cabinet Office, was suddenly convinced that Britain needed ‘the friendship of the Jews of the World’ because ‘with Great Jewry against us, there’s no possibility of getting the thing through’ – the thing being victory in the war.

Not everyone in the Cabinet agreed and battle was joined. ‘What is to become of the people of the country?’ asked Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. Lloyd George argued ‘the Jews might be able to render us more assistance than the Arabs’. The secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, tormented Jew, banking heir and cousin of Herbert Samuel, argued strongly that Zionism was likely to arouse more anti-Semitism. Many of Britain’s Jewish magnates agreed: Claude Goldsmith Montefiore, Sir Moses’ great-nephew, backed by some of the Rothschilds, led the campaign against Zionism and Weizmann complained he ‘considered nationalism beneath the religious level of Jews except as Englishmen’.

Montagu and Montefiore delayed the Declaration but Weizmann fought back and conquered the drawing-rooms and country houses of Jewish grandees and English aristocrats as he had the cabinet-rooms of Whitehall. He won the support of the twenty-year-old Dolly de Rothschild who introduced him to the Astors and Cecils. At one dinner-party, the Marchioness of Crewe was heard telling Lord Robert Cecil, ‘We all in this house are Weizmannites.’ The support of Walter, Lord Rothschild, uncrowned king of British Jewry, helped Weizmann to defeat his Jewish opponents. In Cabinet, Lloyd George and Balfour got their way. ‘I have asked Ld Rothschild and Professor Weizmann to submit a formula,’ minuted Balfour, putting Sykes in charge of the negotiations.

The French and then the Americans gave their approval, making way for the decision at the end of October: on the very day that General Allenby captured Beersheba, Sykes came out and spotted Weizmann waiting nervously in the anteroom of the Cabinet Office. ‘Dr Weizmann,’ cried Sykes, ‘it’s a boy.’

On 9 November, Balfour issued his Declaration, addressed to Lord Rothschild, which proclaimed: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.’ Britain was later accused by the Arabs of cynical betrayal – simultaneously promising Palestine to the sherif, the Zionists and the French, perfidy that became part of the mythology of the Great Arab Revolt. It was certainly cynical but the promises to the Arabs and the Jews were both the result of short-term, ill-considered and urgent political expediency in wartime and neither would have been proffered in other circumstances. Sykes cheerfully insisted ‘we’re pledged to Zionism, Armenian liberation and Arabian independence’, yet there were serious contradictions: Syria was specifically promised both to the Arabs and the French. As we saw, Palestine and Jerusalem had not been mentioned in the letters to the sherif nor was the city promised to the Jews. Sykes–Picot specified an international city and the Zionists agreed: ‘we wanted the Holy Places internationalised,’ wrote Weizmann.^*

The Declaration was designed to detach Russian Jews from Bolshevism but the very night before it was published, Lenin seized power in St Petersburg. Had Lenin moved a few days earlier, the Balfour Declaration may never have been issued. Ironically, Zionism, propelled by the energy of Russian Jews – from Weizmann in Whitehall to Ben-Gurion in Jerusalem – and Christian sympathy for their plight, was now cut off from Russian Jewry until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Declaration should really be named for Lloyd George, not Balfour. It was he who had already decided that Britain had to possess Palestine – ‘oh, we must grab that!’ he said – and this was the precondition for any Jewish homeland. He was not going to share it with France or anyone else but Jerusalem was his ultimate prize. As Allenby broke into Palestine, Lloyd George flamboyantly demanded the capture of Jerusalem ‘as a Christmas present for the British nation’.¹²