Chaim Weizmann

As someone keenly interested in Jewish history, I have a different angle on Balfour: the declaration marked the arrival of the Zionist lobby in international affairs. That amorphous coalition that is called the Israel lobby or the Jewish lobby announced its presence with the Balfour promise of 1917. It is the one element of the Balfour history that will not be anatomized in the press these days, because it so touches on a delicate issue, “Jewish influence,” which is widely thought to be an anti-Semitic idea. But no history of Balfour is complete without understanding Zionist agency in producing the colonial entitlement. And no effort to rectify Balfour will be possible without reckoning with the role of the lobby in our policy-making to this day.

The why’s and wherefore’s of the Balfour Declaration were extremely complicated. Britain was still a colonial power, and had colonial interests in the Middle East. And it was also a combatant in the Great War as one of the Allied Powers (France and Russia) against the Central Powers (Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire).

The Balfour Declaration emerged at the height of the war — it was negotiated over many months in 1917 — and must be seen first and foremost as a war-time instrument, an effort by the British to win American Jews to their side in the war. “[W]hen British officials made the case to skeptics [for the Balfour Declaration], they stressed the geopolitical benefit that Zionism would bring to the British Empire and to the current war effort,” John Judis writes in his history, Genesis.

“Every influence must be used now,” Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born Zionist who so effectively negotiated the declaration with British authorities, told the American Zionist Louis Brandeis in a cable about wartime schemes. “Jews have now [a] splendid opportunity [to] show their gratitude [to] England and America.”

Israeli historian Tom Segev says that Weizmann was bluffing. “In 1917, Weizmann had reason to conjure up the myth of Jewish power and influence, and he rose to the occasion admirably…. Britain’s belief in the mystical power of ‘the Jews’ overrode reality, and it was on the basis of such spurious considerations” that it issued the Balfour Declaration.
Segev and other historians maintain that Weizmann could not summon real power and influence, and the able statesmen of the British empire fell for his claims. I think these historians are wrong; Jewish power and influence was a real factor, if hardly the only one, and the British overlords were not hoodwinked but assessed the landscape as realistically as they could.

So if we blame the British for the Balfour Declaration, we ought to blame the Zionist lobby too.

Here are three members of that early Zionist lobby who demonstrate its influence.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
The leading opponent of the Balfour Declaration was a Jewish anti-Zionist member of the British cabinet, Edwin Montagu, who saw the British commitment as undermining Jewish citizenship in nations around the world, and argued eloquently on that score. In October of 1917 he convinced the cabinet that it should not issue the declaration without the OK of the American president, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson came out against the declaration, Tom Segev says in One Palestine, Complete, until Weizmann “lobbied his friend Brandeis, who in turn spoke with someone on Wilson’s staff, and the White House reversed its position.” Segev says the incident was just good p.r. work on the part of Weizmann and Brandeis, but it confirmed Prime Minister Lloyd George in “his conviction that the Jews controlled the White House.”

It is obviously specious to say that the Jews controlled the White House. But as I have shown, Louis Brandeis had converted to Zionism at 56 five years earlier because he needed to have a Jewish base in order to get a high position in the Wilson administration, and he got one by embracing a position popular among the new immigrants. Wilson wanted a “representative Jew,” who could help him win votes among the multitude of Russian Jews who had come to New York and other American cities. And the president closely heeded the views of the banker Jacob Schiff when he rejected Brandeis as Attorney General in 1913 for not being a “representative Jew,” and then when he elevated Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916. In that interval, Brandeis had become a hero to the Jews of the Lower East Side as a Zionist leader.

And as an “adviser to President Wilson and a man who moved comfortably in the upper echelons of WASP society, Brandeis put a seal of respectability and attractiveness on the American Zionist movement,” writes Naomi Cohen.

Dismissing Brandeis’s role as inconsequential, mere P.R., insults the record.

Jacob Schiff
Jacob Schiff was the most important Jewish banker of his age, and his ambivalence about Zionism and the allied war effort are significant to understanding the Balfour Declaration.

A Germany-loving German immigrant who hated Russia for its treatment of Jews, Schiff, 70, opposed American entry into the war on Russia’s side; and was thought to have helped the German war effort. The banker’s financial power was legendary. Enraged by the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in Russia, Schiff “exerted all of his influence to block Russian access to loans” during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, the historian Gary Dean Best writes. Japan’s victory in that war may be attributed to the “influence of the Jewish banking community in the United States and Europe.”

Hatred of Russia was the main reason that the Russian Jewish masses in the U.S. were generally against the U.S. entering the war or neutral. When historians say that the British were trying to get American Jewry on their side in the Great War– and when they note that the Germans were also making a play for Zionist support — they are describing Schiff’s playing field. As the historian Kenneth Ackerman writes, Schiff had international clout:
 

Schiff had openly used his wealth to pressure Russia into changing its anti-Semitic polices. Moreover, Schiff had refused to allow his bank to participate in American war loans to Britain or France as long as they allied themselves with Russia.

In March 1917, Schiff abandoned his neutrality. The Russian revolution had removed the czar and installed a government he approved of, and he supported American entry into the war “without reservation,” writes his biographer Naomi Cohen.

She says the British ascribed too much power to Schiff. “Just as the Germans inflated their expectations of Schiff, so did the English exaggerate his importance in their own struggle for American loans and goodwill. The myth of Jewish control of finance and of the press pervaded the British foreign office, and Schiff was regarded as the prime example of Jewish power.”

Cohen is yet another example of a historian arguing that the British didn’t understand the power map of their age. These masters of empire may have exaggerated the power of American Jews, but they didn’t get to “Rule Britannia” by not studying political realities; and it is undeniable that Schiff was an important figure. P.S. The U.S. entered the war a month after Schiff stopped being neutral.

Later in 1917, Schiff endorsed the Balfour Declaration because though a non-Zionist himself, he recognized the support for Zionism inside the American Jewish community, to which he felt great responsibility. His biographer writes that a crucial American Jewish Committee statement in support of the Balfour Declaration was written by Schiff himself, and then “cleared with Secretary of State [Robert] Lansing.”

We have to ask: If Zionism had the power to persuade assimilationists of Schiff and Brandeis’s status and acumen to get on board, how can anyone conclude that the British were fools to be catering to the Zionists? As Segev writes, the Declaration’s author, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, was motivated by a belief in “Jewish power. ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad,’ Balfour wrote, is ‘of far profounder impact than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

Chaim Weizmann
Books have been written about Weizmann’s tenacious role in bringing about the Balfour Declaration, and his ability to walk in and out of the British Foreign Office seemingly at will during the Great War, capped by the moment 100 years ago when Mark Sykes said, “It’s a boy,” in telling Weizmann that the declaration had been adopted.

Let me focus on one clear example of the chemist’s actual influence.

In June 1917, the United States undertook a bold and secretive move in the war effort. It sent Henry Morgenthau, the non-Zionist Jewish former ambassador to Turkey, to Europe in an effort to make a separate peace between the Allied Powers and the Ottoman Empire and help end the war. Weizmann was informed of the trip by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in a cable, and the move was extremely alarming to Zionists. If the allies made a deal with the Ottomans, the Ottomans would hold on to Palestine, and the whole dream of getting a British assurance of a Jewish “home” in Palestine was off the table. Weizmann flew into action. He was appointed as a British representative and was sent to Gibraltar to head off the trip. He succeeded in convincing Morgenthau not to go on, after lengthy discussions with Morgenthau and a French official who had come to negotiate as well.

In explaining why the British allowed Weizmann to negotiate on their behalf, against their own interest in exploring a separate peace with Turkey, Jonathan Schneer writes in his book The Balfour Declaration that the “Foreign Office had concluded that Britain needed the support of ‘international Jewry’ to win the war.” Weizmann, Schneer sneers, “shrewdly harped upon the power of this cosmopolitan cabal” with the Foreign Office.

Whether Weizmann shrewdly harped or inflated mystical powers, whether there was a cabal or not– let’s stop to consider the reality here. During its internal deliberations over the future of Palestine, the British Foreign Office is deputizing a keenly interested party to do wartime negotiations on its behalf that help to undermine a diplomatic initiative. That’s real power.

In fact, Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania later accused Weizmann of prolonging the war for two years by scuttling the Morgenthau Mission (as Weizmann relates in his autobiography). And of course, Weizmann served as Israel’s first president.

Anyone who diminishes the Zionist role in the creation of the colonial document must reckon with these real expressions of power, mostly behind-the-scenes. And while it is true that the Balfour Declaration was a colonial document, the British abandoned their colonial role in Palestine by 1947 when they found the Palestine mandate to be too much trouble to administer. The Zionists have been in control in Israel and Palestine since that time, demolishing the promise by the Foreign Secretary to protect the rights of the non-Jewish communities of the territory as they colonize hilltop after hilltop.

Edwin Montagu was an anti-Zionist. Henry Morgenthau was not a Zionist. Brandeis was not always a Zionist. Schiff was not always a Zionist. That is the key to understanding this history. Zionism is an ideology about Jewish safety based on separatism and nationalism that answered the long-debated Jewish question in Europe. Not all Jews accepted it. Unfortunately the American Jewish Committee, which gave lukewarm endorsement to the Balfour Declaration 100 years ago, is all in today, as is just about every other major Jewish organization.

They are the heart of the Israel lobby, and today they do Weizmann’s work on a grand scale: ensuring that there is no daylight between the U.S. government  and the Israeli government. When scholars have the temerity to point this out, they are branded as anti-Semites…

The misery in Palestine that was triggered by the Balfour Declaration will not end until the root cause of that suffering is identified and taken on aggressively. That root cause is Zionism. And we’re gonna need a whole lot of Jewish influence to break it down.

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.

Courtesy: http://mondoweiss.net

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Abdul Rahim Bisharat, a Bedouin chief who lives in al-Hadidiya, an encampment above the Jordan Valley (MEE), is interviewed by Peter Oborne. All rights reserved.

OCCUPIED WEST BANK – Exactly 100 years have passed since British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote his famous letter to Walter Rothschild, promising that Britain would help to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

Current prime minister Theresa May says that the Balfour Declaration was “one of the most important letters in history”. It led within barely three decades to the creation of the state of Israel. No wonder then that Benjamin Netanyahu flies to London next week to celebrate its anniversary.

It’s understandable Palestinian leaders weren’t invited. But they weren’t even consulted.

This is wrong. The Balfour Declaration not only promised to deliver a homeland for the Jews. It also promised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
Has this promise been kept?

I flew to Israel and the West Bank to find out. The treatment of the Palestinians I witnessed is not just physically degrading for them. It is also morally degrading for the Israelis as well.

Our thanks to the author and Middle East Eye for permission to run this piece originally published here,  29/10/ 2017.

Hebron: closed city for Palestinians

I drove to the West Bank city of Hebron, about an hour’s drive south of Jerusalem. When I typed “Hebron” into Waze (the local equivalent of Google Maps) a warning flashed up: “This destination is a high-risk area or is prohibited to Israelis by law.”

Israeli settlers, however, occupy an area of houses above the ancient market, where they are guarded by the Israeli army. These soldiers – I’d guess at least one per settler – stand idly by as the settlers harass, persecute and assault the local population.

Palestinians said that only that morning, a masked settler had attacked two children aged 10 and 11 in the streets. I was told the soldiers made no attempt to intervene.

Such incidents, locals said, are common. In October 2015, student Dania Ersheid from Hebron was shot dead at a checkpoint. She was 17.

According to Breaking the Silence – an NGO which publishes testimonies of Israeli army veterans who have served in occupied Palestine – close personal ties between settlers and the military, combined with the fact that as Israeli citizens settlers are legally answerable not to the army but the police, means that soldiers often do nothing to protect Palestinians from settler violence.

The Israeli army has created a ghost town in parts of Hebron’s Old City. In July, Unesco’s heritage committee gave heritage status to these areas, much to the anger of Israel.

The ancient markets are mainly closed because of “security reasons”. More than 1,000 houses have been shut up and more than 1,300 shops have been closed.

I walked through this desolate area. Slogans such as “Hevron Yehudit” – “Hebron is Jewish” – have been scrawled on the walls. The Star of David was sprayed on the doors of many shops. The names of the streets have been changed from Palestinian to Hebrew.

I reached the Ibrahimi Mosque, known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where it is thought that Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Jacob and Leah are buried.

This is one of the most significant religious sites in the world. It marks what Jews, Muslims and Christians have in common. All of us (I am a Christian) worship the God of Abraham.

If the magnificent teachings of these three great religions is to have any meaning, then all of us should come together at this site.

But there was an invisible line in the street outside which Palestinians may not cross. A Palestinian woman ventured too far along the road. A soldier asked her: “Are you Muslim?” 

Unequal in death as in life

Inside, the site is divided, as so often is the case in Israel and occupied Palestine. One third is set aside for Muslims and two thirds are set aside for Jews.

The partition was built after 1994, when an Israeli settler called Baruch Goldstein, who emigrated from the United States, entered with a machine gun and shot dead 29 Muslim worshippers in cold blood. More were killed outside the hospital by the Israeli army amid protests.

Not far away is a little museum. I went in. It was empty and unattended. I called out.

A lady came out of a back room and showed me around. The first room was dedicated to the ancient Jewish presence in Hebron. The second concentrated on the massacre of Jews by Arabs in 1929, part of wider tension over access to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. It contained horrifying and vivid contemporary photographs and testimony of the atrocity, during which 69 Jews were killed.

This museum helped me to understand the absolute moral and religious certainty felt by the settlers that Hebron belongs to them. For them it is Arabs, not Jews, who are the usurpers.

As I left, I told my guide how moved I had been by the testimony of the 1929 atrocity. Then I asked her why her museum didn’t also mark the 1994 murder of Arabs by Goldstein.

She replied that there was no comparison, because the murder of Jews in 1929 had been systematic, while, she said, Goldstein was a deranged individual acting on his own.

Afterwards I drove up to the nearby settlement of Qiryat Arba, where Goldstein is buried. A guard nodded me through the entrance gate.

Israeli authorities did destroy a shrine and prayer area that had been built after the Knesset passed a law prohibiting monuments to terrorists. The grave and plaque with the engraving, however, remained.

I found the grave behind a row of shops in a public park. Part of the Hebrew inscription read: “To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel.” Beside the grave, a glass container contained two candles and some spent matches. Mourners had also individually laid many small stones, part of the Jewish mourning tradition.

I walked back to the shops and tried to talk to settlers. Most worked in the military or the police. They courteously refused to answer my questions.

I found a woman who said she had known Goldstein. “He was my doctor,” she told me. “He was a wonderful man. He was an amazing person who took care of the Arabs and the Jews as well.”

She said that she had come from the United States to Qiryat Arba as a child and that she was “against violence on both sides”. As for Goldstein, she felt “there was something that pushed him over. There was a lot of violence on both sides at the time.”

But the woman insisted that there was nothing “symbolic” about Goldstein’s grave in Qiryat Arba. He was buried in the settlement, she said, because he could not be buried in nearby Hebron.

It needs little imagination to gauge how Israelis would react if a Palestinian who had shot dead 29 Jews in cold blood was given such a prominent resting place in a West Bank town or village.It needs little imagination to gauge how Israelis would react if a Palestinian who had shot dead 29 Jews in cold blood was given such a prominent resting place in a West Bank town or village.

Bear in mind many Palestinians killed in attacks on Israelis are buried in secret cemeteries with unnamed (but numbered) graves. This means that the families of the dead cannot visit their loved ones.

Yet the religious terrorist and mass murderer Goldstein rests in peace in an honoured place in the Israeli settlement where he lived. This is but one example of the dual system in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Palestinians are subject to military law. Settlers are Israeli citizens, with all the protections of civil law.

Schools, homes, hope crushed

When I visited Israel 10 years ago with the lobby group Conservative Friends of Israel, my guides portrayed settlers as wild men and women who act independently of government in pursuit of a special religious vision.

I have to admit that before last week’s trip, I had wholly failed to grasp the extent to which the settlers have become part of the basic apparatus of the Israeli state.

There is colossal investment in infrastructure, roads, services and security for settlers. Meanwhile basic amenities and rudimentary security are denied to the Palestinians or  – as the Balfour Declaration defines them – “the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

In the West Bank, these “non-Jewish communities” are vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and detention. Their houses get demolished without warning. They live Kafkaesque lives subject to the whim of inaccessible and largely hostile authorities, with none of the rights that come with citizenship.

Checkpoints make even small journeys laborious, unpredictable and often impossible. Their life is dedicated to clinging on by their fingernails to their land while the settlers desperately try to prise it away.

Bedouin children stand next to a demolished house in the village of Umm al-Hiran, southern Israel, Jan. 18, 2017. Xinhua/Press Association. All rights reserved.

Let’s meet Abdul Rahim Bisharat, a Bedouin chief who lives in al-Hadidiya, an isolated hillside encampment above the Jordan Valley.

Bisharat, 67, told me how the Israeli army had confiscated his livestock, shot his animals from jeeps and even helicopters, and repeatedly bulldozed his home.

At one stage they attacked his tents 32 times in just 16 days, he said.

As we spoke, Bisharat’s 10-year-old daughter Somood served us tea. Her name means “steadfastness” in Arab: she was born while Israeli bulldozers were demolishing the camp.

Somood’s education is a problem. Bisharat told me how he had built a school, only for it to be destroyed by the Israeli army. He tried to build a kindergarten. That was also destroyed.

In desperation the Bedouins decided to send their children to a school many kilometres away. This meant improving the track from the camp to the main road. But when they did this, the Israelis demolished their work.

The Israelis appear to be out to destroy the Bedouin way of life. That means driving them off their lands. It means the destruction of homes and livestock. It also means denying them access to water.

Traditionally the Jordan River has been their main source of water, but the Bedouin are denied access because the river is a military zone.

The Bedouin take water from streams. But the Israelis dig deep artesian wells to access the underground water supply, so the streams have mainly dried up. Now they have to buy water from the same Israelis who took it from them.

The sheikh said that when the occupation of the West Bank started in 1967, his camp had included some 300 families amounting to 2,000 people. Now, just 16 families are left, scarcely amounting to 100 people. 

“Some have sold their sheep and become workers in settlements,” he told me. “Others are unemployed. All the time we are chased and expelled from one area or another.”

How UK government still echoes Balfour

The Israelis want to relocate the Bedouin to what are are frequently called townships and end their ancient nomadic way of life.

There is a deep paradox lurking here. The Israelis impose their own arbitrary system of law on the West Bank. Yet the Israeli occupation is itself illegal under international law.

Yes, the Jews have the national homeland promised by the British a century ago. I wholeheartedly concur with a common British view that no other people have suffered as much as the Jews at the hands of persecutors throughout their extraordinary history.

That is why I have always supported the existence of an Israeli state.

But May’s exclusion of Palestinians from her celebration next week reflects with uncanny accuracy the exclusion of Palestinians from the Balfour Declaration 100 years ago.Theresa May’s exclusion of Palestinians from her celebration next week reflects with uncanny accuracy the exclusion of Palestinians from the Balfour Declaration 100 years ago.

The British treated the Palestinians as non-people then, and still treat them as non-people today. I believe this scornful neglect may be even more damaging for Israelis than it is for the Palestinians themselves because it is such a betrayal of the idealistic and humane vision that brought Israel into being.

Peter Oborne is the former chief political commentator of the Telegraph and reports for Channel 4’s Dispatches and Unreported World. He has written a number of books identifying the power structures that lurk behind political discourse, including The Triumph of the Political Class. He is a regular on BBC programmes Any Questions and Question Time and often presents Week in Westminster. He was voted Columnist of the Year at the Press Awards in 2013.

 

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