So It Is Written, So Let It Be Done - Lord Rothschild Reads The Balfour Declaration

thenewyorker  |  Yet Britain, however formidable its power, did not conjure up the Jewish national home with magic words. Since the Ukrainian pogroms of 1881, about thirty-five thousand settlers had come to various colonies in Ottoman Palestine, most funded by Baron James de Rothschild, half of whom stayed. About ninety thousand acres of land had been purchased, and new winemaking towns were dotting the Palestinian landscape: Rishon LeZion, Zichron Ya’akov. The real reason Weizmann had rejected East Africa in 1905 was that a national home in Eretz Yisrael was, however embryonic, becoming an established fact. By the end of 1905, with the arrival of five thousand socialist cadres from Russia—the so-called Second Aliyah, or ascent—Labor Zionism had its ideology, the beginning of its revolutionary infrastructure, and its leadership, including David Ben-Gurion, who was later Israel’s first Prime Minister. In 1909, Tel Aviv, the first modern Hebrew-speaking city, had been founded just north of Jaffa. That same year, a Labor Zionist group inspired by Ben-Gurion’s hero, A. D. Gordon, founded the first of the kibbutzim near the Sea of Galilee. Weizmann’s mentor, Asher Ginsberg (known by his pen name, Achad Haam), visited a collective settlement in Palestine in 1911. He wrote in an essay for Zionist readers the next year, “So soon as the Jew from the Diaspora enters a Jewish colony in Palestine he feels that he is in a Hebrew national atmosphere . . . half-complete, extending only to children . . . but going on.” (Weizmann stayed at Ginsberg’s home in London—the latter made his living as the sales representative of Wissotzky tea—during the negotiations leading to the Declaration.)

The Declaration, then, only crystallized for the great powers what seemed a workable cultural transformation—of Jews, but also of a part of the Palestinian landscape. By the time of the Balfour Declaration, there were as many as fifty thousand Zionist settlers, whom the Turks had tried, and failed, to suppress. (The chaos of the Soviet Revolution was bringing thousands, and would bring tens of thousands more.) Indeed, the most prominent, or conspicuous, Arab leaders seemed somewhat reconciled, too. In 1918, Weizmann travelled to Aqaba to meet Feisal; neither yet knew the full extent of Britain’s intentions to take Palestine for itself. Weizmann supported a larger Hashemite federation, and Feisal, the Arabs’ champion, Jewish “closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil”—so long as “Arab peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights.” Feisal, meanwhile, told the Times of London that December, “Arabs are not jealous of Zionist Jews, and intend to give them fair play; and the Zionist Jews have assured the Nationalist Arabs of their intention to see that they too have fair play in their respective areas.” The socialist-Zionist method of settlement, so disdained by the British yet so suited for incubating Hebrew culture, was bound, however, to encroach upon “Arab peasant and tenant farmers,” known as fellaheen. (The riots of 1921 had been incited, in part, by the purchase of vast lands in the Jezreel Valley, which was accomplished in a manner that had displaced, and enraged, thousands of fellaheen.)

Putting the Balfour Declaration into practice—so the Colonial Office stated—presumed an “equality of obligation” to both sides. It was another matter to presume “fair play.” As Balfour admitted in a secret memorandum in August, 1919, “So far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.” The British were straight about one thing: the Declaration did not presume a Jewish state, which Weizmann himself could not yet envision. Building a novel Jewish nation was challenge enough; how this nation’s home might fit into larger Middle Eastern structures and machinations seemed a secondary consideration. But while the British occupation army still had the power to end Zionist colonization with brute force, it was too late to neatly nip it in the bud. By 1922, as Balfour addressed the Lords, the Jewish population had reached nearly eighty-five thousand.